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• How to get sound on macbook pro 4,1

  - by Thomas

  I have just installed Xubuntu 12.04.2. My soundcard is detected: thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Everything is put to max in alsamixer and nothing is muted (all the sliders are on OO. My speakers do not work, but when I plug in a headphone I hear it very soft. When I connect my stereo and put the sound VERY loud (3-blocks-of-complaining-neighbours loud) I hear it on a normal level but crackling. I added options snd-hda-intel model=mbp5 amixer set IEC958 off to at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. When it's still not working I tried everything here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting 1 >>> list-sinks 1 sink(s) available. * index: 0 name: <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo> driver: <module-alsa-card.c> flags: HARDWARE HW_MUTE_CTRL HW_VOLUME_CTRL DECIBEL_VOLUME LATENCY DYNAMIC_LATENCY state: SUSPENDED suspend cause: IDLE priority: 9959 volume: 0: 100% 1: 100% 0: 0.00 dB 1: 0.00 dB balance 0.00 base volume: 100% 0.00 dB volume steps: 65537 muted: no current latency: 0.00 ms max request: 0 KiB max rewind: 0 KiB monitor source: 0 sample spec: s16le 2ch 44100Hz channel map: front-left,front-right Stereo used by: 0 linked by: 0 configured latency: 0.00 ms; range is 0.50 .. 371.52 ms card: 0 <alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1b.0> module: 4 properties: alsa.resolution_bits = "16" device.api = "alsa" device.class = "sound" alsa.class = "generic" alsa.subclass = "generic-mix" alsa.name = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.id = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.subdevice = "0" alsa.subdevice_name = "subdevice #0" alsa.device = "0" alsa.card = "0" alsa.card_name = "HDA Intel" alsa.long_card_name = "HDA Intel at 0x9b500000 irq 46" alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel" device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:1b.0" sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0" device.bus = "pci" device.vendor.id = "8086" device.vendor.name = "Intel Corporation" device.product.name = "82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller" device.form_factor = "internal" device.string = "front:0" device.buffering.buffer_size = "65536" device.buffering.fragment_size = "32768" device.access_mode = "mmap+timer" device.profile.name = "analog-stereo" device.profile.description = "Analog Stereo" device.description = "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" alsa.mixer_name = "Realtek ALC889A" alsa.components = "HDA:10ec0885,106b3a00,00100103" module-udev-detect.discovered = "1" device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci" ports: analog-output-speaker: Speakers (priority 10000, available: unknown) properties: analog-output-headphones: Headphones (priority 9000, available: no) properties: active port: <analog-output-speaker> 2 and 3: Doesn't seem an permission issue, the sound is very far away (See opening paragraph). 4 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 5 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-hwdep.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko [.. huge lists continues ..] /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/pdaudiocf/snd-pdaudiocf.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/vx/snd-vxpocket.ko thomas@thomas-pc:~$ 6 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00a4 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46 Memory at 9b500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 7 I guess it's supported. Linux mint and Xubuntu 13.04 had no trouble with sounds. Everything worked out of the box Thanks in advance Edit: alsa-info.sh output: WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' ALSA Information Script v 0.4.62 -------------------------------- This script visits the following commands/files to collect diagnostic information about your ALSA installation and sound related hardware. dmesg lspci lsmod aplay amixer alsactl /proc/asound/ /sys/class/sound/ ~/.asoundrc (etc.) See './alsa-info.sh --help' for command line options. WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' Automatically upload ALSA information to www.alsa-project.org? [y/N] : y Uploading information to www.alsa-project.org ... Done! Your ALSA information is located at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=6cffc584284d4c0b266eb53249824ef83d6c4e3e Please inform the person helping you. thomas@thomas-pc:~$

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• SQL SERVER – Planned and Unplanned Availablity Group Failovers – Notes from the Field #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Fields series. AlwaysOn is a very complex subject and not everyone knows many things about this. The matter of the fact is there is very little information available on this subject online and not everyone knows everything about this. This is why when a very common question related to AlwaysOn comes, people get confused. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert John Sterrett (Group Principal at Linchpin People) explains a very common issue DBAs and Developer faces in their career and is related to Planned and Unplanned Availablity Group Failovers. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of John in his own words. Whenever a disaster occurs it will be a stressful scenario regardless of how small or big the disaster is. This gets multiplied when it is your first time working with newer technology or the first time you are going through a disaster without a proper run book. Today, were going to help you establish a run book for creating a planned failover with availability groups. To make today’s session simple were going to have two instances of SQL Server 2012 included in an availability group and walk through the steps of doing an unplanned failover.  We will focus on using the user interface and T-SQL to complete the failovers. We are going to use a two replica Availability Group where each replica is in another location. Therefore, we will be covering Asynchronous (non automatic failover) the following is a breakdown of our availability group utilized today. Seeing the following screen might be scary the first time you come across an unplanned failover.  It looks like our test database used in this Availability Group is not functional and it currently isn’t. The database status is not synchronizing which makes sense because the primary replica went down so it couldn’t synchronize. With that said, we can still failover and make it functional while we troubleshoot why we lost our primary replica. To start we are going to right click on the availability group that needs to be restarted and select failover. This will bring up the following wizard, which will walk you through several steps needed to complete the failover using the graphical user interface provided with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). You are going to see warning messages simply because we are in Asynchronous commit mode and can not guarantee ‘no data loss’ when we do failover. Just incase you missed it; you get another screen warning you about potential data loss because we are in Asynchronous mode. Next we get to connect to the specific replica we want to become the primary replica after the failover occurs. In our case, we only have two replicas so this is trivial. In order to failover, it’s required to connect to the replica that will become primary.  The following screen shows that the connection has been made successfully. Next, you will see the final summary screen. Once again, this reminds you that the failover action will cause data loss as were using Asynchronous commit mode due to the distance between instances used for disaster recovery. Finally, once the failover is completed you will see the following screen. If you followed along this long you might be wondering what T-SQL scripts are generated for clicking through all the sections of the wizard. If you have used Database Mirroring in the past you might be surprised.  It’s not too different, which makes sense because the data is being replicated via SQL Server endpoints just like the good old database mirroring. Now were going to take a look at how to do a failover with just T-SQL. First, were going to need to open a new query window and run our query in SQLCMD mode. Just incase you haven’t used SQLCMD mode before we will show you how to enable it below. Now you can run the following statement. Notice, we connect to the replica we want to become primary after failover and specify to force failover to allow data loss. We can use the following script to failback over when our primary instance comes back online. -- YOU MUST EXECUTE THE FOLLOWING SCRIPT IN SQLCMD MODE. :Connect SQL2012PROD1 ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP [AGSQL2] FORCE_FAILOVER_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS; GO Are your servers running at optimal speed or are you facing any SQL Server Performance Problems? If you want to get started with the help of experts read more over here: Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL Definitions: CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is an XML based markup language used in Microsoft SharePoint technologies  Anonymous: A camel is a horse designed by committee  Dov Trietsch: A CAML is a HORS designed by Microsoft  I was advised against putting any Camel and Sphinx rhymes in here. Look it up in Google!  _____ Now that we have dispensed with the dromedary jokes (BTW, I have many more, but they are not fit to print!), here is an interesting problem and its solution.  We have built a list where the title must be kept unique so I needed to verify the existence (or absence) of a list item with a particular title. Two methods came to mind:  1: Span the list until the title is found (result = found) or until the list ends (result = not found). This is an algorithm of complexity O(N) and for long lists it is a performance sucker. 2: Use a CAML query instead. Here, for short list we’ll encounter some overhead, but because the query results in an SQL query on the content database, it is of complexity O(LogN), which is significantly better and scales perfectly. Obviously I decided to go with the latter and this is where the CAML s--t hit the fan.   A CAML query returns a SPListItemCollection and I simply checked its Count. If it was 0, the item did not already exist and it was safe to add a new item with the given title. Otherwise I cancelled the operation and warned the user. The trouble was that I always got a positive. Most of the time a false positive. The count was greater than 0 regardles of the title I checked (except when the list was empty, which happens only once). This was very disturbing indeed. To solve my immediate problem which was speedy delivery, I reverted to the “Span the list” approach, but the problem bugged me, so I wrote a little console app by which I tested and tweaked and tested, time and again, until I found the solution. Yes, one can pass the proverbial CAML thru the ey of the needle (e’s missing on purpose).  So here are my conclusions:  CAML that does not work:  Note: QT is my quote:  char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34); string titleQuery = "<Query>><Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where></Query>"; titleQuery += "<ViewFields><FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/></ViewFields>";  Why? Even though U2U generates it, the <Query> and </Query> tags do not belong in the query that you pass. Start your query with the <Where> clause.  Also the <ViewFiels> clause does not belong. I used this clause to limit the returned collection to a single column, and I still wish to do it. I’ll show how this is done a bit later.   When you use the <Query> </Query> tags in you query, it’s as if you did not specify the query at all. What you get is the all inclusive default query for the list. It returns evey column and every item. It is expensive for both server and network because it does all the extra processing and eats plenty of bandwidth.   Now, here is the CAML that works  string titleQuery = "<Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where>";  You’ll also notice that inside the unusable <ViewFields> clause above, we have a <FieldRef> clause. This is what we pass to the SPQuery object. Here is how:  SPQuery query = new SPQuery(); query.Query = titleQuery; query.ViewFields = "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; query.RowLimit = 1; SPListItemCollection col = masterList.GetItems(query);  Two thing to note: we enter the view fields into the SPQuery object and we also limited the number of rows that the query returns. The latter is not always done, but in an existence test, there is no point in returning hundreds of rows. The query will now return one item or none, which is all we need in order to verify the existence (or non-existence) of items. Limiting the number of columns and the number of rows is a great performance enhancer. That’s all folks!!

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• 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards - Part 2

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Moazzam Chaudry Continuing from Friday's blog on 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards, this blog (Part 2) will provide more details around the customers. It was a tremendous honor to be in single room of winners. We only wish we could have had more time to share stories from all the winners.  We received great insight from all the innovative solutions that our customers deploy and would like to share them broadly, so that others can benefit from best practices. There was a customer panel session joined by Ingersoll Rand, Nike and Motability and here is what was discussed: Barry Bonar, Enterprise Architect from Ingersoll Rand shared details around their solution, comprised of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite. This combined solutoin enabled their business transformation to increase decision-making, speed and efficiency, resulting in 40% reduced IT spend, 41X Faster response time and huge cost savings. Ashok Balakrishnan, Architect from Nike shared how they leveraged Oracle Coherence to analyze their digital "footprint" of activities. This helps them compete, collaborate and compare athletic data over time. Lastly, Ashley Doodly, Head of IT from Motability shared details around their solution compromised of Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, ADF, Coherence, BO and E-Business Suite. This solution helped Motability achieve 100% ROI within the first few months, performance in seconds vs. 10's of minutes and tremendous improvement in throughput that increased up to 50%.  This year's winners by category are: Oracle Exalogic Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Netshoes ATG on Exalogic: 6X Reduced H/W foot print, 6.2X increased throughput and 3 weeks time to market Claro Part of America Movil, running mission critical Java Application on Exalogic with 35X Faster Java response time, 5X Throughput Underwriters Laboratories Exalogic as an Apps Consolidation platform to power tremendous growth Ingersoll Rand EBS on Exalogic: Up to 40% Reduction in overall IT budget, 3x reduced foot print Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  Mazda Motor Corporation Tuxedo ART Batch runtime environment to migrate their batch apps on new open environment and reduce main frame cost. HOTELBEDS Technology Open Source to WebLogic transformation Globalia Corporation Introduced Oracle Coherence to fully reengineer DTH system and provide multiple business and technical benefits Nike Nike+, digital sports platform, has 8M users and is expecting an 5X increase in users, many of who will carry multiple devices that frequently sync data with the Digital Sport platform Comcast Corporation The solution is expected to increase availability, continuity, performance, and simplify and make the code at the application layer more flexible. Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM Customer Results using Fusion Middleware NTT Docomo Network traffic solution based on Oracle event processing and coherence - massive in scale: 12M users (50M in future) - 800,000 events/sec. Schneider National, Inc. SOA/B2B/ADF/Data Integration to orchestrate key order processes across Siebel, OTM & EBS.  Platform runs 60M trans/day and  50 million composite SOA instances per day across 10G and 11G Amadeus Oracle BPM solution: Business Rules and processes vary across local (80), regional (~10) and corporate approval process. Up to 10 levels of approval. Plans to deploy across 20+ markets Navitar SOA solution integrates a fully non-Oracle legacy application/ERP environment using Oracle’s SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Motability Uses SOA Suite to synchronize data across the systems and to manage the vehicle remarketing process Oracle WebCenter Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  News Limited Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers University of Louisville “Facebook for Medicine”: Oracle Webcenter platform and Oracle BIEE to analyze patient test data and uncover potential health issues. Expecting annualized ROI of 277% China Mobile Jiangsu Company portal (25k users) to drive collaboration & productivity Life Technologies Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments LA Dept. of Water & Power Oracle WebCenter Portal to power ladwp.com on desktop and mobile for 1.6million users Oracle Identity Management Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Education Testing Service Identity Management platform for provisioning & SSO of 6 million GRE, GMAT, TOEFL customers Avea Oracle Identity Manager allowing call center personnel to quickly change Identity Profile to handle varying call loads based on a user self service interface. Decreased Admin Cost by 30% Oracle Data Integration Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Raymond James Near real-time integration for improved systems (throughput & performance) and enhanced operational flexibility in a 24 X 7 environment Wm Morrison Supermarkets Electronic Point of Sale integration handling over 80 million transactions a day in near real time (15 min intervals) Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Qualcomm Incorporated Solution providing  immediate business value enabling a self-service model necessary for growing the new customer base, an increase in customer satisfaction, reduced “time-to-deliver” Micros Systems, Inc. ADF, SOA Suite, WebCenter  enables services that include managing distribution of hotel rooms availability and rates to channels such as Hotel Web-site, Expedia, etc. Marfin Egnatia Bank A new web 2.0 UI provides a much richer experience through the ADF solution with the end result being one of boosting end-user productivity    Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM, Oracle Exalytics) Customer Results using Fusion Middleware INC Research Self-service customer portal delivering 5–10% of the overall revenue - expected to grow fast with the BI solution Experian Reduction in Time to Complete the Financial Close Process Hologic Inc Solution, saving months of decision-making uncertainty! We look forward to seeing many more innovative nominations. The nominatation process for 2013 begins in April 2013.    Additional Information: Blog: Oracle WebCenter Award Winners Blog: Oracle Identity Management Winners Blog: Oracle Exalogic Winners Blog: SOA, BPM and Data Integration will be will feature award winners in its respective areas this week Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

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• HTML5 and Visual Studio 2010

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  All of us work with Visual Studio (or the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition) for developing web applications targeting ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC or Silverlight etc.,  Over the years, Visual Studio has grown to a great extent.  From being a simple limited functionality tool in VS.NET 2002 to the multi-faceted, MEF driven Visual Studio 2010, it has come a long way.  And as much as Visual Studio supports rapid web development by generating HTML mark up, it also added intellisense for some of the HTML specifications that one has otherwise monotonously type every time.  Ex.- In Visual Studio 2010, one can just type the angular bracket “<” and then the first keyword “h” or “x” for html or xhtml respectively and then press tab twice and it would render the entire markup required for XHTML or HTML 1.0/1.1 strict/transitional and the fully qualified W3C URL. The same holds good for specifying HTML type declaration.  Now, the difference between HTML and XHTML has been discussed in detail already, though, if you are interested to know, you can read it from http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp But, the industry trend or the buzz around is HTML5.  With browsers like IE9 Beta, Google Chrome, Firefox 4 etc., supporting HTML5 standards big time, everyone wants to start developing HTML5 based websites. VS developers (like me) often get the question around when would VS start supporting HTML5.  VS 2010 was released last year and HTML5 is still specifications under development.  Clearly, with the timelines we started developing Visual Studio (way back in 2008), HTML5 specs were almost non-existent.  Even today, the HTML5 body recommends not to fully depend on the entire mark up set as they are still under development specs and might change in the future. However, with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta, there is quite a bit of support for HTML5 based web development.  In fact, one of my colleagues pointed out that SP1 beta’s major enhancement is its ability to support HTML5 tags and even add server mode to them. Lets look at the existing validation schema available in Visual Studio (Tools – Options – Validation) This is before installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta.  Clearly, the validation options are restricted to HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 transitional and below. Also, lets consider using some of the new HTML5 input type elements.  (I found out this, just today from my friend, also an, ASP.NET team member) <input type=”email”> is one of the new input type elements according to the HTML5 specification.  Now, this works well if you type it as is  in Visual Studio and the page renders without any issue (since the default behaviour is, if there is an “undefined” type specified to input tag, it would fall back on the default mode, which is text. The moment you add <input type=”email” runat=”server” >, you get an error Naturally you don’t get intellisense support as well for these new tags.  Once you install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta from here (it takes a while so you need to be patient for the installation to complete), you will start getting additional Validation templates for HTML5, as below:- Once you set this, you can start using HTML5 elements in your web page without getting errors/warnings.  Look at the screen shot below, for the new “video” tag which is showing up in intellisense (video is a part of the new HTML5 specifications)     note that, you still need to hook up the <!DOCTYPE html /> on the top manually as it doesn’t change automatically  (from the default XHTML 1.0 strict) when you create a new page. Also, the new input type tags in HTML5 are also supported One, can also use the <asp:TextBox type=”email” which would in turn generate the <input type=”email”> markup when the page is rendered.  In fact, as of SP1 beta, this is the only way to put the new input type tags with the runat=”server” attribute (otherwise you will get the parser error mentioned above.  This issue would be fixed by the final release of SP1 beta) Going further, there may be more support for having server tags for some of the common HTML5 elements, but this is work in progress currently. So, other than not having runat=”server” support for the new HTML5  input tags, you can pretty much build and target HTML5 websites with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta, today.  For those who are running Visual Studio 2008, you also have the “HTML5 intellisense for Visual Studio 2010 and 2008” available for download, from http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d771cbc8-d60a-40b0-a1d8-f19fc393127d/ Note that, if you are running Visual Studio 2010, the recommended approach is to install the SP1 beta which would be the way forward for HTML5 support in Visual Studio. Of course, you need to test these on a browser supporting HTML5 such as IE9 Beta or Chrome or FireFox 4.  You can download IE9 Beta from here You can also follow the Visual Web Developer Team Blog for more updates on the stuff they are building. Cheers !!!

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• Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can

  - by cabhilash

  Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can unlock it. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18486) SQL server has local password policies. If policy is enabled which locks down the account after X number of failed attempts then the account is automatically locked down.This error with 'sa' account is very common. sa is default administartor login available with SQL server. So there are chances that an ousider has tried to bruteforce your system. (This can cause even if a legitimate tries to access the account with wrong password.Sometimes a user would have changed the password without informing others. So the other users would try to lo) You can unlock the account with the following options (use another admin account or connect via windows authentication) Alter account & unlock ALTER LOGIN sa WITH PASSWORD='password' UNLOCK Use another account Almost everyone is aware of the sa account. This can be the potential security risk. Even if you provide strong password hackers can lock the account by providing the wrong password. ( You can provide extra security by installing firewall or changing the default port but these measures are not always practical). As a best practice you can disable the sa account and use another account with same privileges.ALTER LOGIN sa DISABLE You can edit the lock-ot options using gpedit.msc( in command prompt type gpedit.msc and press enter). Navigate to Account Lokout policy as shown in the figure The Following options are available Account lockout threshold This security setting determines the number of failed logon attempts that causes a user account to be locked out. A locked-out account cannot be used until it is reset by an administrator or until the lockout duration for the account has expired. You can set a value between 0 and 999 failed logon attempts. If you set the value to 0, the account will never be locked out. Failed password attempts against workstations or member servers that have been locked using either CTRL+ALT+DELETE or password-protected screen savers count as failed logon attempts. Account lockout duration This security setting determines the number of minutes a locked-out account remains locked out before automatically becoming unlocked. The available range is from 0 minutes through 99,999 minutes. If you set the account lockout duration to 0, the account will be locked out until an administrator explicitly unlocks it. If an account lockout threshold is defined, the account lockout duration must be greater than or equal to the reset time. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified. Reset account lockout counter after This security setting determines the number of minutes that must elapse after a failed logon attempt before the failed logon attempt counter is reset to 0 bad logon attempts. The available range is 1 minute to 99,999 minutes. If an account lockout threshold is defined, this reset time must be less than or equal to the Account lockout duration. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified.When creating SQL user you can set CHECK_POLICY=on which will enforce the windows password policy on the account. The following policies will be applied Define the Enforce password history policy setting so that several previous passwords are remembered. With this policy setting, users cannot use the same password when their password expires.  Define the Maximum password age policy setting so that passwords expire as often as necessary for your environment, typically, every 30 to 90 days. With this policy setting, if an attacker cracks a password, the attacker only has access to the network until the password expires.  Define the Minimum password age policy setting so that passwords cannot be changed until they are more than a certain number of days old. This policy setting works in combination with the Enforce password historypolicy setting. If a minimum password age is defined, users cannot repeatedly change their passwords to get around the Enforce password history policy setting and then use their original password. Users must wait the specified number of days to change their passwords.  Define a Minimum password length policy setting so that passwords must consist of at least a specified number of characters. Long passwords--seven or more characters--are usually stronger than short ones. With this policy setting, users cannot use blank passwords, and they have to create passwords that are a certain number of characters long.  Enable the Password must meet complexity requirements policy setting. This policy setting checks all new passwords to ensure that they meet basic strong password requirements.  Password must meet the following complexity requirement, when they are changed or created: Not contain the user's entire Account Name or entire Full Name. The Account Name and Full Name are parsed for delimiters: commas, periods, dashes or hyphens, underscores, spaces, pound signs, and tabs. If any of these delimiters are found, the Account Name or Full Name are split and all sections are verified not to be included in the password. There is no check for any character or any three characters in succession. Contain characters from three of the following five categories:  English uppercase characters (A through Z) English lowercase characters (a through z) Base 10 digits (0 through 9) Non-alphabetic characters (for example, !, $, #, %) A catch-all category of any Unicode character that does not fall under the previous four categories. This fifth category can be regionally specific.

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• Oracle Linux and Oracle VM pricing guide

  - by wcoekaer

  A few days ago someone showed me a pricing guide from a Linux vendor and I was a bit surprised at the complexity of it. Especially when you look at larger servers (4 or 8 sockets) and when adding virtual machine use into the mix. I think we have a very compelling and simple pricing model for both Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. Let me see if I can explain it in 1 page, not 10 pages. This pricing information is publicly available on the Oracle store, I am using the current public list prices. Also keep in mind that this is for customers using non-oracle x86 servers. When a customer purchases an Oracle x86 server, the annual systems support includes full use (all you can eat) of Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle Solaris (no matter how many VMs you run on that server, in case you deploy guests on a hypervisor). This support level is the equivalent of premier support in the list below. Let's start with Oracle VM (x86) : Oracle VM support subscriptions are per physical server on which you deploy the Oracle VM Server product. (1) Oracle VM Premier Limited - 1- or 2 socket server : $599 per server per year (2) Oracle VM Premier - more than 2 socket server (4, or 8 or whatever more) : $1199 per server per year The above includes the use of Oracle VM Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control's Virtualization management pack (including self service cloud portal, etc..) 24x7 support, access to bugfixes, updates and new releases. It also includes all options, live migrate, dynamic resource scheduling, high availability, dynamic power management, etc If you want to play with the product, or even use the product without access to support services, the product is freely downloadable from edelivery. Next, Oracle Linux : Oracle Linux support subscriptions are per physical server. If you plan to run Oracle Linux as a guest on Oracle VM, VMWare or Hyper-v, you only have to pay for a single subscription per system, we do not charge per guest or per number of guests. In other words, you can run any number of Oracle Linux guests per physical server and count it as just a single subscription. (1) Oracle Linux Network Support - any number of sockets per server : $119 per server per year Network support does not offer support services. It provides access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and also offers full indemnification for Oracle Linux. (2) Oracle Linux Basic Limited Support - 1- or 2 socket servers : $499 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management. It includes ocfs2 as a clustered filesystem. (3) Oracle Linux Basic Support - more than 2 socket server (4, or 8 or more) : $1199 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management. It includes ocfs2 as a clustered filesystem (4) Oracle Linux Premier Limited Support - 1- or 2 socket servers : $1399 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management, XFS filesystem support. It also offers Oracle Lifetime support, backporting of patches for critical customers in previous versions of package and ksplice zero-downtime updates. (5) Oracle Linux Premier Support - more than 2 socket servers : $2299 per server per year This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management, XFS filesystem support. It also offers Oracle Lifetime support, backporting of patches for critical customers in previous versions of package and ksplice zero-downtime updates. (6) Freely available Oracle Linux - any number of sockets You can freely download Oracle Linux, install it on any number of servers and use it for any reason, without support, without right to use of these extra features like Oracle Clusterware or ksplice, without indemnification. However, you do have full access to all errata as well. Need support? then use options (1)..(5) So that's it. Count number of 2 socket boxes, more than 2 socket boxes, decide on basic or premier support level and you are done. You don't have to worry about different levels based on how many virtual instance you deploy or want to deploy. A very simple menu of choices. We offer, inclusive, Linux OS clusterware, Linux OS Management, provisioning and monitoring, cluster filesystem (ocfs), high performance filesystem (xfs), dtrace, ksplice, ofed (infiniband stack for high performance networking). No separate add-on menus. NOTE : socket/cpu can have any number of cores. So whether you have a 4,6,8,10 or 12 core CPU doesn't matter, we count the number of physical CPUs.

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• Oracle’s Web Experience Management

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Today’s guest post on Oracle’s Web Experience Management comes from a member of our WebCenter Evangelist team, Noël Jaffré, a Principal Technologist based in France.Oracle’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution enables organizations to optimize the online channel for driving marketing and customer experience management success. It empowers business users to manage the web presence and create rich and engaging online experiences for customers and prospects. Oracle's WEM platform provides a framework to simplify the integration of Oracle, third-party and custom-built applications. This framework essentially allows the creation and integration of applications using one single business interface called the WEM interface. It includes the following: Single sign-on access control for all integrated applications using the Central Authentication Service (CAS) component. A single centralized administration window for user, role, and native applications management including site management. Community server management, gadget server management as well as management for partner integrated technologies. A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing WebCenter Sites data. REST services are supported on both Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Satellite Server to leverage the satellite server cache. All REST requests are cached for web consuming applications as well for the high performance delivery of native applications on the mobile channel. Oracle WebCenter Sites’ Web Experience Management environment enables organizations to deliver a compelling online experience to customers by simplifying the deployment and management of sophisticated and engaging websites. The WebCenter Sites platform automates the entire process of managing web content including: Authoring:  Business users can easily contribute and manage web content in real-time, with intuitive interfaces and drag-and-drop content authoring and layout capabilities designed for the non-technical user. Contextual Content Targeting: Marketers are empowered to create and manage targeted campaigns with relevant recommendations and promotions based on the context of the session of the visitor such as his or her navigation history, user profile, language, location or other information shared during the visitor session. Content Publishing and Deployment: It offers advanced multi-site management capabilities for departmental or regional sites, as well as strong multi-lingual and multi-locale content management. The remote satellite server caching infrastructure provides high-performance, distributed caching, tuned to deliver high-volume, targeted and multi-lingual sites. Analytics and Optimization: Business users and marketers have the ability to measure the effectiveness of their online content and campaigns at a granular level. Editors and marketers can immediately determine whether a given article or promotion is relevant to a particular customer segment. User-generated Content: Marketers can enable blogs, comments, rating and reviews on the website.  All comments and reviews posted to the website can be moderated from the administrator interface either manually or automatically using filters, whitelists, blacklists or community based moderation. Personalized Gadget Dashboards:  Site managers can deploy gadgets, small applications using web content, individually or as part of dashboards containing multiple gadgets.  These gadget dashboards enable site visitors to create their own “MyPage” on a given site where they can select and customize the gadgets that the site administrator has made available.  Any gadget that conforms to the iGoogle/OpenSocial standard can be made available to site visitors, or they can be created within the WEM interface. Oracle's WEM platform also provides a unique environment for the delivery of a rich, multichannel online experience for site visitors through its advanced management modules for mobile. With Oracle’s WEM solution, it’s easy to control branding and deliver a consistent message while repurposing web content for publication to mobile devices, kiosks and much more. This distinctive approach provides: HTML5 Delivery: HTML5 delivery which includes native support for adaptive design that responds to the user’s computer screen resolution and orientation. The approach is less driven by the particular hardware and more driven by the user’s interactions with the device. In other words, this approach takes both the screen interactions (either cursor or touch) and screen sizes and orientation into consideration. A Unique Native Mobile Extension Environment for Contributors: From the WEM interface, a contributor can directly manage their mobile channel, using the tooling already in place for driving the traditional web presence. This includes the mobile presentation, as well as mobile insite editing, drag and drop page layout, and in-context recommendations and personalization. Optimized REST APIs for High Performance Content Delivery on Native Mobile Device Applications: WebCenter Sites’ REST API uses the underlying HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to interact with resources. Resources support two types of input and output formats -- XML and JSON. REST calls are customizable to optimize the interactions between the content repositories and the client applications. Caching is essential to decrease network loads and improve overall reliability and usability of the applications and user interactions. REST results are cached through the highly efficient Oracle WebCenter Sites caching architecture.

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• MVVM Light V4 preview 2 (BL0015) #mvvmlight

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Over the past few weeks, I have worked hard on a few new features for MVVM Light V4. Here is a second early preview (consider this pre-alpha if you wish). The features are unit-tested, but I am now looking for feedback and there might be bugs! Bug correction: Messenger.CleanupList is now thread safe This was an annoying bug that is now corrected: In some circumstances, an exception could be thrown when the Messenger’s recipients list was cleaned up (i.e. the “dead” instances were removed). The method is called now and then and the exception was thrown apparently at random. In fact it was really a multi-threading issue, which is now corrected. Bug correction: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers prevents EventToCommand to work This is a particularly annoying regression bug that was introduced in BL0014. In order to allow MVVM Light to work in XBAPs too, I added the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute to the assemblies. However, we just found out that this causes issues when using EventToCommand. In order to allow EventToCommand to continue working, I reverted to the previous state by removing the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute for now. I will work with my friends at Microsoft to try and find a solution. Stay tuned. Bug correction: XML documentation file is now generated in Release configuration The XML documentation file was not generated for the Release configuration. This was a simple flag in the project file that I had forgotten to set. This is corrected now. Applying EventToCommand to non-FrameworkElements This feature has been requested in order to be able to execute a command when a Storyboard is completed. I implemented this, but unfortunately found out that EventToCommand can only be added to Storyboards in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not in WPF or in Windows Phone 7. This obviously limits the usefulness of this change, but I decided to publish it anyway, because it is pretty damn useful in Silverlight… Why not in WPF? In WPF, Storyboards added to a resource dictionary are frozen. This is a feature of WPF which allows to optimize certain objects for performance: By freezing them, it is a contract where we say “this object will not be modified anymore, so do your perf optimization on them without worrying too much”. Unfortunately, adding a Trigger (such as EventTrigger) to an object in resources does not work if this object is frozen… and unfortunately, there is no way to tell WPF not to freeze the Storyboard in the resources… so there is no way around that (at least none I can see. In Silverlight, objects are not frozen, so an EventTrigger can be added without problems. Why not in WP7? In Windows Phone 7, there is a totally different issue: Adding a Trigger can only be done to a FrameworkElement, which Storyboard is not. Here I think that we might see a change in a future version of the framework, so maybe this small trick will work in the future. Workaround? Since you cannot use the EventToCommand on a Storyboard in WPF and in WP7, the workaround is pretty obvious: Handle the Completed event in the code behind, and call the Command from there on the ViewModel. This object can be obtained by casting the DataContext to the ViewModel type. This means that the View needs to know about the ViewModel, but I never had issues with that anyway. New class: NotifyPropertyChanged Sometimes when you implement a model object (for example Customer), you would like to have it implement INotifyPropertyChanged, but without having all the frills of a ViewModelBase. A new class named NotifyPropertyChanged allows you to do that. This class is a simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChaned (with all the overloads of RaisePropertyChanged that were implemented in BL0014). In fact, ViewModelBase inherits NotifyPropertyChanged. ViewModelBase does not implement IDisposable anymore The IDisposable interface and the Dispose method had been marked obsolete in the ViewModelBase class already in V3. Now they have been removed. Note: By this, I do not mean that IDisposable is a bad interface, or that it shouldn’t be used on viewmodels. In the contrary, I know that this interface is very useful in certain circumstances. However, I think that having it by default on every instance of ViewModelBase was sending a wrong message. This interface has a strong meaning in .NET: After Dispose has been executed, the instance should not be used anymore, and should be ready for garbage collection. What I really wanted to have on ViewModelBase was rather a simple cleanup method, something that can be executed now and then during runtime. This is fulfilled by the ICleanup interface and its Cleanup method. If your ViewModels need IDisposable, you can still use it! You will just have to implement the interface on the class itself, because it is not available on ViewModelBase anymore. What’s next? I have a couple exciting new features implemented already but that need more testing before they go live… Just stay tuned and by MIX11 (12-14 April 2011), we should see at least a major addition to MVVM Light Toolkit, as well as another smaller feature which is pretty cool nonetheless More about this later! Happy Coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Red Gate does Byte Night 2012

  - by red(at)work

  On the 5th of October 2012, a team of nine plucky Red Gaters braved the howling wind and the driving rain to sleep outside. No tents or mattresses were allowed – all we took for protection were sleeping bags, groundsheets, plastic sacks and Colin’s enormous fishing umbrella (a godsend in umbrella-y disguise). Why would we do such a thing? For Byte Night, an annual tech sector sleepout in support of Action for Children, who tackle the causes as well as the consequences of youth homelessness. Byte Night encourages technology professionals to do for one night a year what thousands of young people have to do every night – sleep rough.  We signed up for Byte Night in the warm, heady midst of the British summer, thinking it couldn’t possibly be all that bad. Even on the night itself – before the rain began to fall, sat in the comfort and warmth of a company canteen, drinking wine and eating chill and preparing to win the pub quiz – we were excited and optimistic about the night that lay ahead of us. All of that changed as soon as we stepped out into one of the worst rainstorms of the year. Brian, the team’s birthday boy, describes it best: Picture the scene: it’s 3 am on a Friday. I’m lying outside, fully clothed in a sleeping bag, wearing a raincoat, trussed up inside a large plastic pocket, on a ground sheet beneath a giant umbrella, wedged so tightly between two of my colleagues that I can’t move my arms. I’m wide awake, staring up at the grey sky beyond the edge of the umbrella; a limp, flickering white glow hints at a moon somewhere behind the drifting clouds. I haven’t slept since we first moved outside at 11 pm. Outside. Did I mention we were outside? I’m hung over. I need the loo. But there is no way on earth that I’m getting out of this sleeping bag. It’s cold. It’s raining. Not just raining, but chucking it down. It’s been doing this non-stop since 10pm. The rain sounds like a hyperactive drummer on the fishing umbrella, and the noise is loud and relentless. Puddles of water are forming all over the groundsheet, and, despite being ensconced inside the plastic pouch, I am wet. The fishing umbrella is protecting me from the worst of the driving rain, but not all of me is under it, and five hours of rain is no match for it. Everything is wet. My left side has become horribly damp. My trainers, which I placed next to my sleeping bag, are now completely soaked through. Mmm. That’ll be fun in the morning. My head is next to Colin’s head on one side, and a multi-pack of McCoy’s cheddar and onion crisps on the other. Don’t ask about the tub of hummus. That’s somewhere down by my ankles, abandoned to the night. Jess, who is lying next to me, rolls over onto her side. A mini waterfall cascades from her rain-pouch onto my face. Bah. I continue to stare into the heavens, willing the dawn to hurry up. Something lands on my face. It’s a mosquito. Great. Midnight, when this still seemed like fun – when we opened some champagne and my colleagues presented me with a caterpillar birthday cake, when everyone was drunk and jolly and full of stoic resolve – feels like a long time ago. Did I mention that today is my birthday? The remains of the caterpillar cake endure the same fate as the hummus, left out in the rain like a metaphor for sadness. It’s getting colder. I can see my breath. Silence has descended on the group, apart from the rustle of plastic. And the rain, obviously. Someone snores, and I envy whoever it is the sweet escape of sleep. I try to wriggle a bit further down inside my sleeping bag, but it doesn’t want to be wriggled into. Only 3 hours till dawn. 180 minutes. I begin to count them off, one at a time.  All nine of us got to go home in the morning, but thousands of children across the UK don’t have that luxury. If you’d like to sponsor the Red Gate Byte Night team, our JustGiving page can be found here.   Chris, before the outside bit actually happened. More photos from Byte Night Cambridge 2012 can be found here.

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• How to Buy an SD Card: Speed Classes, Sizes, and Capacities Explained

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Memory cards are used in digital cameras, music players, smartphones, tablets, and even laptops. But not all SD cards are created equal — there are different speed classes, physical sizes, and capacities to consider. Different devices require different types of SD cards. Here are the differences you’ll need to keep in mind when picking out the right SD card for your device. Speed Class In a nutshell, not all SD cards offer the same speeds. This matters for some tasks more than it matters for others. For example, if you’re a professional photographer taking photos in rapid succession on a DSLR camera saving them in high-resolution RAW format, you’ll want a fast SD card so your camera can save them as fast as possible. A fast SD card is also important if you want to record high-resolution video and save it directly to the SD card. If you’re just taking a few photos on a typical consumer camera or you’re just using an SD card to store some media files on your smartphone, the speed isn’t as important. Manufacturers use “speed classes” to measure an SD card’s speed. The SD Association that defines the SD card standard doesn’t actually define the exact speeds associated with these classes, but they do provide guidelines. There are four different speed classes — 10, 8, 4, and 2. 10 is the fastest, while 2 is the slowest. Class 2 is suitable for standard definition video recording, while classes 4 and 6 are suitable for high-definition video recording. Class 10 is suitable for “full HD video recording” and “HD still consecutive recording.” There are also two Ultra High Speed (UHS) speed classes, but they’re more expensive and are designed for professional use. UHS cards are designed for devices that support UHS. Here are the associated logos, in order from slowest to fastest:       You’ll probably be okay with a class 4 or 6 card for typical use in a digital camera, smartphone, or tablet. Class 10 cards are ideal if you’re shooting high-resolution videos or RAW photos. Class 2 cards are a bit on the slow side these days, so you may want to avoid them for all but the cheapest digital cameras. Even a cheap smartphone can record HD video, after all. An SD card’s speed class is identified on the SD card itself. You’ll also see the speed class on the online store listing or on the card’s packaging when purchasing it. For example, in the below photo, the middle SD card is speed class 4, while the two other cards are speed class 6. If you see no speed class symbol, you have a class 0 SD card. These cards were designed and produced before the speed class rating system was introduced. They may be slower than even a class 2 card. Physical Size Different devices use different sizes of SD cards. You’ll find standard-size CD cards, miniSD cards, and microSD cards. Standard SD cards are the largest, although they’re still very small. They measure 32x24x2.1 mm and weigh just two grams. Most consumer digital cameras for sale today still use standard SD cards. They have the standard “cut corner”  design. miniSD cards are smaller than standard SD cards, measuring 21.5x20x1.4 mm and weighing about 0.8 grams. This is the least common size today. miniSD cards were designed to be especially small for mobile phones, but we now have a smaller size. microSD cards are the smallest size of SD card, measuring 15x11x1 mm and weighing just 0.25 grams. These cards are used in most cell phones and smartphones that support SD cards. They’re also used in many other devices, such as tablets. SD cards will only fit into marching slots. You can’t plug a microSD card into a standard SD card slot — it won’t fit. However, you can purchase an adapter that allows you to plug a smaller SD card into a larger SD card’s form and fit it into the appropriate slot. Capacity Like USB flash drives, hard drives, solid-state drives, and other storage media, different SD cards can have different amounts of storage. But the differences between SD card capacities don’t stop there. Standard SDSC (SD) cards are 1 MB to 2 GB in size, or perhaps 4 GB in size — although 4 GB is non-standard. The SDHC standard was created later, and allows cards 2 GB to 32 GB in size. SDXC is a more recent standard that allows cards 32 GB to 2 TB in size. You’ll need a device that supports SDHC or SDXC cards to use them. At this point, the vast majority of devices should support SDHC. In fact, the SD cards you have are probably SDHC cards. SDXC is newer and less common. When buying an SD card, you’ll need to buy the right speed class, size, and capacity for your needs. Be sure to check what your device supports and consider what speed and capacity you’ll actually need. Image Credit: Ryosuke SEKIDO on Flickr, Clive Darra on Flickr, Steven Depolo on Flickr

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• Design a T-shirt for .NET Reflector Pro

  - by Laila

  Win a .NET Reflector Pro license, a box of Red Gate goodies, and a t-shirt printed with your design! Red Gate likes t-shirts. Each of our teams has one. In fact, each individual person has one, numbered according to when they joined the company: Red Gate's 1st, 2nd, and so on right up to Red Gate's 170th, with the slogan "More than just a number". Those t-shirts are important, chiefly because they remind the people wearing them that they are important. But that isn't enough. What really makes us great are the people who choose to use our tools. So we'd like to extend our tradition of t-shirts to include you and put the design of our next shirt entirely in your hands. We'd like you to come up with a witty slogan or create an inventive or simply beautiful t-shirt design for .NET Reflector Pro, our add-in for Visual Studio, which allows you to step into decompiled assemblies whilst debugging in Visual Studio. When you're done, post your masterpiece to Twitter with the hash tag #reflectortees, and @redgate will take a look! We'll pick the best design, and the winner will get a licensed copy of .NET Reflector Pro and a box of Red Gate goodies - not to mention a copy of their t-shirt. The winning design will go into production and be worn and given out at tradeshows, conferences, and user group events across the world, proudly bearing the name of their designer. We'll also pick three runners-up who will receive licenses for .NET Reflector Pro. Red Gate goodie box Interested? If you're up for the challenge, then we've got some resources to get you started. Inside the .zip file you'll find high-quality versions of the following: T-shirt templates: don't forget to design the front and the back! Different versions of the .NET Reflector Pro logo and Red Gate logo. Colour sheets to give you an easy reference to the Red Gate colours, including hex and RGB values. You can create and send us as many designs as you like, and each of them will be considered for the prize. To submit your designs, simply tweet including the competition hash tag, #reflectortees, and a link to somewhere we can see your design: either an image hosting site such as Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa, or a personal blog. You will need to create a Twitter account (which is free), if you don't already have one. You only have three limits: The background colour of the t-shirt should be one of our brand colours (red, light/dark grey or black), though you're welcome to use other colours in the rest of the design. You need to make use of either the .NET Reflector Pro logo OR the Red Gate logo (please keep them as they are) If you include any text or slogan, stick with just one or two colors for it. Apart from that, go wild. Go and do whatever it is you do when you get creative: whether you walk barefoot on the grass with a pencil and paper, sit cross-legged on a pile of cushions with a laptop, or simply close your eyes and float through a mist of ideas, now is your chance. Make sure you enjoy it. We're looking forward to seeing your creations. Terms and conditions 1. The closing date for entries is June 11th, 2010 (4 p.m. UK time). Red Gate Software Ltd reserves the right to extend the competition deadline at its discretion. If there is a revision, the revised date will be published on this blog and the date for announcing the results will be postponed accordingly. 2. The winning designer will be notified on June 14th, 2010 through Twitter. The winner must claim his/her prize by sending us a high-resolution image of their design via email (i.e. Illustrator EPS files or appropriate format, ideally at 300dpi). If the winner does not come forward within 3 days of the announcement, they will forfeit their prize and another winner will be selected from the runners-up. The names of the winner and runners-up will be posted on this blog by June 18th.  3. Entry is completed on the designer posting a link to their entry in a tweet with the correct hash tag, #reflectortees. 4. Red Gate Software needs to hold the rights to using the winning design in order to put the t-shirt into production. We will make sure that this is fine with the winner before we do so, but if you do not want us holding the rights to your design, please do not submit your designs. We reserve the right to slightly alter or adjust any artwork we decide to use (mainly to make it easier to print), but we will make sure we contact the winner for approval first. The winner will also need to allow us the use of his/her name for purposes of promoting your design. 5. Entries must be entirely your own original work and must not breach any copyright or third party rights. Red Gate Software Ltd will not be made partially or fully liable for any non-original work submitted by you. 6. This competition is free: you do not need to buy anything or be an existing customer to enter. 7. This competition is not open to employees of Red Gate Software Ltd, their families, or any other company directly connected with the administration of this promotion.

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• Create a Social Community of Trust Along With Your Federal Digital Services Governance

  - by TedMcLaughlan

  The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services. Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations" While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations of the public, social media ecosystem (people AND machines)? A rigid governance framework, controlling by rules, policies and roles the creation and dissemination of digital services may meet the expectations of direct end-users and most stakeholders - including the agency information stewards and security officers. All others who may share comments about the services, write about them, swap or review extracts, repackage, visualize or otherwise repurpose the output for use in entirely unanticipated, social ways - these "stakeholders" will not be governed, but may observe guidance generated by a "Trusted Community". As recognized members of the trusted community, these stakeholders may ultimately define the right scope and detail of governance that all other users might observe, promoting and refining the usefulness of the government product as the social ecosystem expects. So, as part of an agency-centric governance framework, it's advised that a flexible governance model be created for stewarding a "Community of Trust" around the digital services. The first steps follow the approach outlined in the Recommendations: Step 1: Gather a Core Team In addition to the roles and responsibilities described, perhaps a set of characteristics and responsibilities can be developed for the "Trusted Community Steward/Advocate" - i.e. a person or team who (a) are entirely cognizant of and respected within the external social media communities, and (b) are trusted both within the agency and outside as practical, responsible, non-partisan communicators of useful information. The may seem like a standard Agency PR/Outreach team role - but often an agency or stakeholder subject matter expert with a public, active social persona works even better. Step 2: Assess What You Have In addition to existing, agency or stakeholder decision-making bodies and assets, it's important to take a PR/Marketing view of the social ecosystem. How visible are the services across the social channels utilized by current or desired constituents of your agency? What's the online reputation of your agency and perhaps the service(s)? Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a facet of external communications/publishing lifecycles? Who are the public champions, instigators, value-adders for the digital services, or perhaps just influential "communicators" (i.e. with no stake in the game)? You're essentially assessing your market and social presence, and identifying the actors (including your own agency employees) in the existing community of trust. Step 3: Determine What You Want The evolving Community of Trust will most readily absorb, support and provide feedback regarding "Core Principles" (Element B of the "six essential elements of a digital services governance structure") shared by your Agency, and obviously play a large, though probably very unstructured part in Element D "Stakeholder Input and Participation". Plan for this, and seek input from the social media community with respect to performance metrics - these should be geared around the outcome and growth of the trusted communities actions. How big and active is this community? What's the influential reach of this community with respect to particular messaging or campaigns generated by the Agency? What's the referral rate TO your digital services, FROM channels owned or operated by members of this community? (this requires governance with respect to content generation inclusive of "markers" or "tags"). At this point, while your Agency proceeds with steps 4 ("Build/Validate the Governance Structure") and 5 ("Share, Review, Upgrade"), the Community of Trust might as well just get going, and start adding value and usefulness to the existing conversations, existing data services - loosely though directionally-stewarded by your trusted advocate(s). Why is this an "Enterprise Architecture" topic? Because it's increasingly apparent that a Public Service "Enterprise" is not wholly contained within Agency facilities, firewalls and job titles - it's also manifested in actual, perceived or representative forms outside the walls, on the social Internet. An Agency's EA model and resulting investments both facilitate and are impacted by the "Social Enterprise". At Oracle, we're very active both within our Enterprise and outside, helping foster social architectures that enable truly useful public services, digital or otherwise.

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• Code Structure / Level Design: Plants vs Zombies game level dissection

  - by lalan

  Hi Friends, I am interested in learning the class structure of Plants vs Zombies, particularly level design; for those who haven't played it - this video contains nice play-through: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89DfdOIJ4xw. How would I go ahead and design the code, mostly structure & classes, which allows for maximum flexibility & clean development? I am familiar with data driven design concepts, and would use events to handle most of dynamic behavior. Dissection at macro level: (Once every Level) Load tilemap, props, etc -- basically build the map (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) Show Enemies you'll face during present level (Once every Level) Unit Selection Window/Panel - selection of defensive plants (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) HUD Creation - based on unit selection (Level Loop) Enemy creation - based on types of zombies allowed (Level Loop) Sun/Resource generation (Level Loop) Show messages like 'huge wave of zombies coming', 'final wave' (Level Loop) Other unique events - Spawn gifts, money, tombstones, etc (Once every Level) Unlock new plant Potential game scripts: a) Level definitions: Level_1_1.xml, Level_1_2.xml, etc. Level_1_1.xml :: Sample script <map> <tilemap>tilemapFrontLawn</tilemap> <SpawnPoints> tiles where particular type of zombies (land vs water) may spawn</spawnPoints> <props> position, entity array -- lawnmower, </props> </map> <zombies> <... list of zombies who gonna attack by ids...> </zombies> <plants> <... list by plants which are available for defense by ids...> </plants> <progression> <ZombieWave name='first wave' spawnScript='zombieLightWave.lua' unlock='null'> <startMessages time=1.5>Ready</startMessages> <endMessages time=1.5>Huge wave of zombies incoming</endMessages> </ZombieWave> </progression> b) Entities definitions: .xmls containing zombies, plants, sun, lawnmower, coins, etc description. Potential classes: //LevelManager - Based on the level under play, it will load level script. Few of the // functions it may have: class LevelManager { public: bool load(string levelFileName); bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); private: LevelData* mLevelData; } // LevelData - Contains the details of level loaded by LevelManager. class LevelData { private: string file; // array of camera,dialog,attackwaves, etc in active level LevelCutSceneCamera** mArrayCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog** mArrayCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave** mArrayAttackWave; .... // which camera,dialog,attackwave is active in level uint mCursorCutSceneCamera; uint mCursorCutSceneDialog; uint mCursorAttackWave; public: // based on cursor, get the next camera,dialog,attackwave,etc in active level // return false/true based on failure/success bool nextCutSceneCamera(LevelCutSceneCamera**); bool nextCutSceneDialog(LevelCutSceneDialog**); } // LevelUnderPlay- LevelManager class LevelUnderPlay { private: LevelCutSceneCamera* mCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog* mCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave* mAttackWave; Entities** mSelectedPlants; Entities** mAllowedZombies; bool isCutSceneCameraActive; public: bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); } I am totally confused.. :( Does it make sense of using class composition (have flat class hierarchy) for managing levels. Is it a good idea to just add/remove/update sprites (or any drawable stuff) to current scene from LevelManager or LevelUnderPlay? If I want to make non-linear level design, how should I go ahead? Perhaps I would need a LevelProgression class, which would decide what to do based on decision tree. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much. Thank for your time, lalan

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• Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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• Dlink DWA-556 Access point fails to start on 2.6.35-25 while 2.6.35-24 works. How can I do this with >2.6.35-24?

  - by Azendale

  I'm using hostapd to run an access point with a Dlink DWA-556 wireless N card. However, I can no longer get it to start when I use kernels greater than 2.6.35-24. Here's a log where I ran the uname -a&&hostapd -c <configfile> on the different kernel versions. Linux erikbandersen 2.6.35-24-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 2 02:41:37 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux Configuration file: hostapd.conf ctrl_interface_group=0 Opening raw packet socket for ifindex 248 BSS count 1, BSSID mask ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (0 bits) SIOCGIWRANGE: WE(compiled)=22 WE(source)=21 enc_capa=0xf nl80211: Added 802.11b mode based on 802.11g information HT40: control channel: 2 secondary channel: 6 RATE[0] rate=10 flags=0x2 RATE[1] rate=20 flags=0x6 RATE[2] rate=55 flags=0x6 RATE[3] rate=110 flags=0x6 RATE[4] rate=60 flags=0x0 RATE[5] rate=90 flags=0x0 RATE[6] rate=120 flags=0x0 RATE[7] rate=180 flags=0x0 RATE[8] rate=240 flags=0x0 RATE[9] rate=360 flags=0x0 RATE[10] rate=480 flags=0x0 RATE[11] rate=540 flags=0x0 Passive scanning not supported Mode: IEEE 802.11g Channel: 2 Frequency: 2417 MHz Flushing old station entries Deauthenticate all stations Using interface wlan1 with hwaddr 1c:bd:b9:d5:e8:3c and ssid 'erikbandersen.com/freewifi' wlan1: Setup of interface done. MGMT (TX callback) ACK Malformed netlink message: len=436 left=256 plen=420 256 extra bytes in the end of netlink message MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb mgmt::auth authentication: STA=3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f auth_alg=0 auth_transaction=1 status_code=0 wep=0 New STA wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: authentication OK (open system) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-AUTHENTICATE.indication(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f, OPEN_SYSTEM) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DELETEKEYS.request(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) authentication reply: STA=3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f auth_alg=0 auth_transaction=2 resp=0 (IE len=0) MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::auth cb wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: authenticated mgmt::assoc_req association request: STA=3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f capab_info=0x421 listen_interval=10 Validating WMM IE: OUI 00:50:f2 OUI type 2 OUI sub-type 0 version 1 QoS info 0x0 HT: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f HT Capabilities Info: 0x102c handle_assoc STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f - no greenfield, num of non-gf stations 1 handle_assoc STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f - 20 MHz HT, num of 20MHz HT STAs 1 hostapd_ht_operation_update current operation mode=0x0 hostapd_ht_operation_update new operation mode=0x7 changes=2 new AID 1 wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: association OK (aid 1) MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::assoc_resp cb wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: associated (aid 1) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-ASSOCIATE.indication(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DELETEKEYS.request(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f RADIUS: starting accounting session 4DAC8224-00000000 MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::action cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb Signal 2 received - terminating wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DEAUTHENTICATE.indication(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f, 1) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DELETEKEYS.request(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) Removing station 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f hostapd_ht_operation_update current operation mode=0x7 hostapd_ht_operation_update new operation mode=0x0 changes=2 Flushing old station entries Deauthenticate all stations . Linux erikbandersen 2.6.35-25-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 21 17:40:44 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux Configuration file: hostapd.conf ctrl_interface_group=0 Opening raw packet socket for ifindex 248 BSS count 1, BSSID mask ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (0 bits) SIOCGIWRANGE: WE(compiled)=22 WE(source)=21 enc_capa=0xf nl80211: Added 802.11b mode based on 802.11g information Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=1 freq=2412 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=2 freq=2417 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=3 freq=2422 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=4 freq=2427 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=5 freq=2432 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=6 freq=2437 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=7 freq=2442 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=8 freq=2447 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=9 freq=2452 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=10 freq=2457 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=11 freq=2462 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=1 freq=2412 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=2 freq=2417 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=3 freq=2422 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=4 freq=2427 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=5 freq=2432 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=6 freq=2437 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=7 freq=2442 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=8 freq=2447 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=9 freq=2452 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=10 freq=2457 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=11 freq=2462 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm HT40: control channel: 2 secondary channel: 6 RATE[0] rate=10 flags=0x2 RATE[1] rate=20 flags=0x6 RATE[2] rate=55 flags=0x6 RATE[3] rate=110 flags=0x6 RATE[4] rate=60 flags=0x0 RATE[5] rate=90 flags=0x0 RATE[6] rate=120 flags=0x0 RATE[7] rate=180 flags=0x0 RATE[8] rate=240 flags=0x0 RATE[9] rate=360 flags=0x0 RATE[10] rate=480 flags=0x0 RATE[11] rate=540 flags=0x0 Passive scanning not supported Mode: IEEE 802.11g Channel: 2 Frequency: 2417 MHz Could not set channel for kernel driver wlan1: Unable to setup interface. My wireless card is listed as 02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5008 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) by lspci. Am I doing it wrong and there's a new way of doing it? I'm holding off upgrading to Natty because of this. What changed between the versions that would cause this? Should I report it as a bug?

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• Towards an F# .NET Reflector add-in

  - by CliveT

  When I had the opportunity to spent some time during Red Gate's recent "down tools" week on a project of my choice, the obvious project was an F# add-in for Reflector . To be honest, this was a bit of a misnomer as the amount of time in the designated week for coding was really less than three days, so it was always unlikely that very much progress would be made in such a small amount of time (and that certainly proved to be the case), but I did learn some things from the experiment. Like lots of problems, one useful technique is to take examples, get them to work, and then generalise to get something that works across the board. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to do the last stage. The obvious first step is to take a few function definitions, starting with the obvious hello world, moving on to a non-recursive function and finishing with the ubiquitous recursive Fibonacci function. let rec printMessage message  =     printfn  message let foo x  =    (x + 1) let rec fib x  =     if (x >= 2) then (fib (x - 1) + fib (x - 2)) else 1 The major problem in decompiling these simple functions is that Reflector has an in-memory object model that is designed to support object-oriented languages. In particular it has a return statement that allows function bodies to finish early. I used some of the in-built functionality to take the IL and produce an in-memory object model for the language, but then needed to write a transformer to push the return statements to the top of the tree to make it easy to render the code into a functional language. This tree transform works in some scenarios, but not in others where we simply regenerate code that looks more like CPS style. The next thing to get working was library level bindings of values where these values are calculated at runtime. let x = [1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4] let y = List.map  (fun x -> foo x) x The way that this is translated into a set of classes for the underlying platform means that the code needs to follow references around, from the property exposing the calculated value to the class in which the code for generating the value is embedded. One of the strongest selling points of functional languages is the algebraic datatypes, which allow definitions via standard mathematical-style inductive definitions across the union cases. type Foo =     | Something of int     | Nothing type 'a Foo2 =     | Something2 of 'a     | Nothing2 Such a definition is compiled into a number of classes for the cases of the union, which all inherit from a class representing the type itself. It wasn't too hard to get such a de-compilation happening in the cases I tried. What did I learn from this? Firstly, that there are various bits of functionality inside Reflector that it would be useful for us to allow add-in writers to access. In particular, there are various implementations of the Visitor pattern which implement algorithms such as calculating the number of references for particular variables, and which perform various substitutions which could be more generally useful to add-in writers. I hope to do something about this at some point in the future. Secondly, when you transform a functional language into something that runs on top of an object-based platform, you lose some fidelity in the representation. The F# compiler leaves attributes in place so that tools can tell which classes represent classes from the source program and which are there for purposes of the implementation, allowing the decompiler to regenerate these constructs again. However, decompilation technology is a long way from being able to take unannotated IL and transform it into a program in a different language. For a simple function definition, like Fibonacci, I could write a simple static function and have it come out in F# as the same function, but it would be practically impossible to take a mass of class definitions and have a decompiler translate it automatically into an F# algebraic data type. What have we got out of this? Some data on the feasibility of implementing an F# decompiler inside Reflector, though it's hard at the moment to say how long this would take to do. The work we did is included the 6.5 EAP for Reflector that you can get from the EAP forum. All things considered though, it was a useful way to gain more familiarity with the process of writing an add-in and understand difficulties other add-in authors might experience. If you'd like to check out a video of Down Tools Week, click here.

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• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

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• Windows 8 Live Accounts and the actual Windows Account

  - by Rick Strahl

  As if Windows Security wasn't confusing enough, in Windows 8 we get thrown yet another curve ball with Windows Live accounts to logon. When I set up my Windows 8 machine I originally set it up with a 'real', non-live account that I always use on my Windows machines. I did this mainly so I have a matching account for resources around my home and intranet network so I could log on to network resources properly. At some point later I decided to set up Windows Live security just to see how changes things. Windows wants you to use Windows Live Windows 8 logins are required in order for the Windows RT account info to work. Not that I care - since installing Windows 8 I've maybe spent 10 minutes with Windows RT because - well it's pretty freaking sucky on the desktop. From shitty apps to mis-managed screen real estate I can't say that there's anything compelling there to date, but then I haven't looked that hard either. Anyway… I set up the Windows Live account to see if that changes things. It does - I do get all my live logins to work from Live Account so that Twitter and Facebook posts and pictures and calendars all show up on live tiles on the start screen and in the actual apps. That's nice-ish, but hardly that exciting given that all of the apps tied to those live tiles are average at best. And it would have been nice if all of this could be done without being forced into running with a Windows Live User Account - this all feels like strong-arming you into moving into Microsofts walled garden… and that's probably what it's meant to do. Who am I? The real problem to me though is that these Windows Live and raw Windows User accounts are a bit unpredictable especially when it comes to developer information about the account and which credentials to use. So for example Windows reports folder security like this: Notice it's showing my Windows Live account. Now if I go to Edit and try to add my Windows user account (rstrahl) it'll just automatically show up as the live account. On the other hand though the underlying system sees everything as my real Windows account. After I switched to a Windows Live login account and I have to login to Windows with my Live account, what do you suppose this returns?Console.WriteLine(Environment.UserName); It returns my raw Windows user account (rstrahl). All my permissions, all my actual settings and the desktop console altogether run under that account. If I look in TaskManager (or Process Explorer for me) I see: Everything running on the desktop shell with my login running under my Windows user account. I suppose it makes sense, but where is that association happening? When I switched to a Windows Live account, nowhere did I associate my real account with the Live account - it just happened. And looking through the account configuration dialogs I can't find any reference to the raw Windows account. Other than switching back I see no mention anywhere of the raw Windows account - everything refers to the Live account. Right then, clear as potato soup! So this is who you really are! The problem is that in some situations this schizophrenic account behavior gets a bit weird. Today I was running a local Web application in IIS that uses Windows Authentication - I tried to log-in with my real Windows account login because that's what I'm used to using with WINDOWS freaking Authentication through IIS. But… it failed. I checked my IIS settings, my apps login settings and I just could not for the life of me get into the site with my Windows username. That is until I finally realized that I should try using my Windows Live credentials instead. And that worked. So now in this Windows Authentication dialog I had to type in my Live ID and password, which is - just weird. Then in IIS if I look at a Trace page (or in my case my app's Status page) I see that the logged on account is - my Windows user account. What's really annoying about this is that in some places it uses the live account in other places it uses my Windows account. If I remote desktop into my Web server online - I have to use the local authentication dialog but I have to put in my real Windows credentials not the Live account. Oh yes, it's all so terribly intuitive and logical… So in summary, when you log on with a Live account you are actually mapped to an underlying Windows user. In any application if you check the user name it'll be the underlying user account (not sure what happens in a Windows RT app or even what mechanism is used there to get the user name info).  When logging on to local machine resource with user name and password you have to use your Live IDs even if the permissions on the resources are mapped to your underlying Windows account. Easy enough I suppose, but still not exactly intuitive behavior…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database

  - by Jane Story

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When working with a Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Standard Costing application, there can often be a requirement to check data or allocated results using reporting tools e.g Smartview. To do this, you are retrieving data directly from the Essbase databases related to your HPCM model. For information, running reports is covered in Chapter 9 of the HPCM User documentation. The aim of this blog is to provide a quick guide to finding this data for reporting in the HPCM generated Essbase database in v11.1.2.2.x of HPCM. In order to retrieve data from an HPCM generated Essbase database, it is important to understand each of the following dimensions in the Essbase database and where data is located within them: Measures dimension – identifies Measures AllocationType dimension – identifies Direct Allocation Data or Genealogy Allocation data Point Of View (POV) dimensions – there must be at least one, maximum of four. Business dimensions: Stage Business dimensions – these will be identified by the Stage prefix. Intra-Stage dimension – these will be identified by the _Intra suffix. Essbase outlines and reporting is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s02.html For additional details on reporting measures, please review this section of the documentation:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/apas03.html Reporting requirements in HPCM quite often start with identifying non balanced items in the Stage Balancing report. The following documentation link provides help with identifying some of the items within the Stage Balancing report:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/generatestagebalancing.html The following are some types of data upon which you may want to report: Stage Data: Direct Input Assigned Input Data Assigned Output Data Idle Cost/Revenue Unassigned Cost/Revenue Over Driven Cost/Revenue Direct Allocation Data Genealogy Allocation Data Stage Data Stage Data consists of: Direct Input i.e. input data, the starting point of your allocation e.g. in Stage 1 Assigned Input Data i.e. the cost/revenue received from a prior stage (i.e. stage 2 and higher). Assigned Output Data i.e. for each stage, the data that will be assigned forward is assigned post stage data. Reporting on this data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s03.html Dimension Selection Measures Direct Input: CostInput RevenueInput Assigned Input (from previous stages): CostReceivedPriorStage RevenueReceivedPriorStage Assigned Output (to subsequent stages): CostAssignedPostStage RevenueAssignedPostStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the stage business dimensions for the stage you wish to see the Stage data for. All other Dimensions NoMember Idle/Unassigned/OverDriven To view Idle, Unassigned or Overdriven Costs/Revenue, first select which stage for which you want to view this data. If multiple Stages have unassigned/idle, resolve the earliest first and re-run the calculation as differences in early stages will create unassigned/idle in later stages. Dimension Selection Measures Idle: IdleCost IdleRevenue Unassigned: UnAssignedCost UnAssignedRevenue Overdriven: OverDrivenCost OverDrivenRevenue AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/ Idle/OverDriven Cost All the Stage Business dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/Idle/Overdriven. Zoom in on each dimension to find the individual members to find which members have Unassigned/Idle/OverDriven data. All other Dimensions NoMember Direct Allocation Data Direct allocation data shows the data received by a destination intersection from a source intersection where a direct assignment(s) exists. Reporting on direct allocation data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s04.html You would select the following to report direct allocation data Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the SOURCE stage business dimensions and the DESTINATION stage business dimensions for the direct allocations for the stage you wish to report on. All other Dimensions NoMember Genealogy Allocation Data Genealogy allocation data shows the indirect data relationships between stages. Genealogy calculations run in the HPCM Reporting database only. Reporting on genealogy data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s05.html Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType GenealogyAllocation (IndirectAllocation in 11.1.2.1 and prior versions) POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any stage business dimension members from the STARTING stage in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the INTERMEDIATE stage(s) in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the ENDING stage in Genealogy All other Dimensions NoMember Notes If you still don’t see data after checking the above, please check the following Check the calculation has been run. Here are couple of indicators that might help them with that. Note the size of essbase cube before and after calculations ensure that a calculation was run against the database you are examing. Export the essbase data to a text file to confirm that some data exists. Examine the date and time on task area to see when, if any, calculations were run and what choices were used (e.g. Genealogy choices) If data does not exist in places where they are expecting, it could be that No calculations/genealogy were run No calculations were successfully run The model/data at feeder location were either absent or incompatible, resulting in no allocation e.g no driver data. Smartview Invocation from HPCM From version 11.1.2.2.350 of HPCM (this version will be GA shortly), it is possible to directly invoke Smartview from HPCM. There is guided navigation before the Smartview invocation and it is then possible to see the selected value(s) in SmartView. Click to Download HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database (Right click or option-click the link and choose "Save As..." to download this pdf file)

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• New Replication, Optimizer and High Availability features in MySQL 5.6.5!

  - by Rob Young

  As the Product Manager for the MySQL database it is always great to announce when the MySQL Engineering team delivers another great product release.  As a field DBA and developer it is even better when that release contains improvements and innovation that I know will help those currently using MySQL for apps that range from modest intranet sites to the most highly trafficked web sites on the web.  That said, it is my pleasure to take my hat off to MySQL Engineering for today's release of the MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release ("DMR"). The new highlighted features in MySQL 5.6.5 are discussed here: New Self-Healing Replication ClustersThe 5.6.5 DMR improves MySQL Replication by adding Global Transaction Ids and automated utilities for self-healing Replication clusters.  Prior to 5.6.5 this has been somewhat of a pain point for MySQL users with most developing custom solutions or looking to costly, complex third-party solutions for these capabilities.  With 5.6.5 these shackles are all but removed by a solution that is included with the GPL version of the database and supporting GPL tools.  You can learn all about the details of the great, problem solving Replication features in MySQL 5.6 in Mat Keep's Developer Zone article.  New Replication Administration and Failover UtilitiesAs mentioned above, the new Replication features, Global Transaction Ids specifically, are now supported by a set of automated GPL utilities that leverage the new GTIDs to provide administration and manual or auto failover to the most up to date slave (that is the default, but user configurable if needed) in the event of a master failure. The new utilities, along with links to Engineering related blogs, are discussed in detail in the DevZone Article noted above. Better Query Optimization and ThroughputThe MySQL Optimizer team continues to amaze with the latest round of improvements in 5.6.5. Along with much refactoring of the legacy code base, the Optimizer team has improved complex query optimization and throughput by adding these functional improvements: Subquery Optimizations - Subqueries are now included in the Optimizer path for runtime optimization.  Better throughput of nested queries enables application developers to simplify and consolidate multiple queries and result sets into a single unit or work. Optimizer now uses CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as default for DATETIME columns - For simplification, this eliminates the need for application developers to assign this value when a column of this type is blank by default. Optimizations for Range based queries - Optimizer now uses ready statistics vs Index based scans for queries with multiple range values. Optimizations for queries using filesort and ORDER BY.  Optimization criteria/decision on execution method is done now at optimization vs parsing stage. Print EXPLAIN in JSON format for hierarchical readability and Enterprise tool consumption. You can learn the details about these new features as well all of the Optimizer based improvements in MySQL 5.6 by following the Optimizer team blog. You can download and try the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR here. (look under "Development Releases")  Please let us know what you think!  The new HA utilities for Replication Administration and Failover are available as part of the MySQL Workbench Community Edition, which you can download here .Also New in MySQL LabsAs has become our tradition when announcing DMRs we also like to provide "Early Access" development features to the MySQL Community via the MySQL Labs.  Today is no exception as we are also releasing the following to Labs for you to download, try and let us know your thoughts on where we need to improve:InnoDB Online OperationsMySQL 5.6 now provides Online ADD Index, FK Drop and Online Column RENAME.  These operations are non-blocking and will continue to evolve in future DMRs.  You can learn the grainy details by following John Russell's blog.InnoDB data access via Memcached API ("NotOnlySQL") - Improved refresh of an earlier feature releaseSimilar to Cluster 7.2, MySQL 5.6 provides direct NotOnlySQL access to InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. This provides the ultimate in flexibility for developers who need fast, simple key/value access and complex query support commingled within their applications.Improved Transactional Performance, ScaleThe InnoDB Engineering team has once again under promised and over delivered in the area of improved performance and scale.  These improvements are also included in the aggregated Spring 2012 labs release:InnoDB CPU cache performance improvements for modern, multi-core/CPU systems show great promise with internal tests showing:    2x throughput improvement for read only activity 6x throughput improvement for SELECT range Read/Write benchmarks are in progress More details on the above are available here. You can download all of the above in an aggregated "InnoDB 2012 Spring Labs Release" binary from the MySQL Labs. You can also learn more about these improvements and about related fixes to mysys mutex and hash sort by checking out the InnoDB team blog.MySQL 5.6.5 is another installment in what we believe will be the best release of the MySQL database ever.  It also serves as a shining example of how the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle leads in MySQL innovation.You can get the overall Oracle message on the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR and Early Access labs features here. As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL, the #1 open source database on the planet!

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• Man pages not finding entry

  - by Mike

  So, I'm not sure what is going on with my system (ubuntu 12.04), but my man pages do not seem to be working. I try man gcc and get the following response No manual entry for gcc See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available. However I see the man entry in /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz Here is what my /etc/manpath.config file looks like # manpath.config # # This file is used by the man-db package to configure the man and cat paths. # It is also used to provide a manpath for those without one by examining # their PATH environment variable. For details see the manpath(5) man page. # # Lines beginning with `#' are comments and are ignored. Any combination of # tabs or spaces may be used as `whitespace' separators. # # There are three mappings allowed in this file: # -------------------------------------------------------- # MANDATORY_MANPATH manpath_element # MANPATH_MAP path_element manpath_element # MANDB_MAP global_manpath [relative_catpath] #--------------------------------------------------------- # every automatically generated MANPATH includes these fields # #MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/src/pvm3/man # MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/man MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/share/man MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/local/share/man #--------------------------------------------------------- # set up PATH to MANPATH mapping # ie. what man tree holds man pages for what binary directory. # # *PATH* -> *MANPATH* # MANPATH_MAP /bin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/bin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /sbin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/sbin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/bin /usr/local/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/bin /usr/local/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/X11R6/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/bin/X11 /usr/X11R6/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/games /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /opt/bin /opt/man MANPATH_MAP /opt/sbin /opt/man #--------------------------------------------------------- # For a manpath element to be treated as a system manpath (as most of those # above should normally be), it must be mentioned below. Each line may have # an optional extra string indicating the catpath associated with the # manpath. If no catpath string is used, the catpath will default to the # given manpath. # # You *must* provide all system manpaths, including manpaths for alternate # operating systems, locale specific manpaths, and combinations of both, if # they exist, otherwise the permissions of the user running man/mandb will # be used to manipulate the manual pages. Also, mandb will not initialise # the database cache for any manpaths not mentioned below unless explicitly # requested to do so. # # In a per-user configuration file, this directive only controls the # location of catpaths and the creation of database caches; it has no effect # on privileges. # # Any manpaths that are subdirectories of other manpaths must be mentioned # *before* the containing manpath. E.g. /usr/man/preformat must be listed # before /usr/man. # # *MANPATH* -> *CATPATH* # MANDB_MAP /usr/man /var/cache/man/fsstnd MANDB_MAP /usr/share/man /var/cache/man MANDB_MAP /usr/local/man /var/cache/man/oldlocal MANDB_MAP /usr/local/share/man /var/cache/man/local MANDB_MAP /usr/X11R6/man /var/cache/man/X11R6 MANDB_MAP /opt/man /var/cache/man/opt # #--------------------------------------------------------- # Program definitions. These are commented out by default as the value # of the definition is already the default. To change: uncomment a # definition and modify it. # #DEFINE pager pager -s #DEFINE cat cat #DEFINE tr tr '\255\267\264\327' '\055\157\047\170' #DEFINE grep grep #DEFINE troff groff -mandoc #DEFINE nroff nroff -mandoc #DEFINE eqn eqn #DEFINE neqn neqn #DEFINE tbl tbl #DEFINE col col #DEFINE vgrind vgrind #DEFINE refer refer #DEFINE grap grap #DEFINE pic pic -S # #DEFINE compressor gzip -c7 #--------------------------------------------------------- # Misc definitions: same as program definitions above. # #DEFINE whatis_grep_flags -i #DEFINE apropos_grep_flags -iEw #DEFINE apropos_regex_grep_flags -iE #--------------------------------------------------------- # Section names. Manual sections will be searched in the order listed here; # the default is 1, n, l, 8, 3, 0, 2, 5, 4, 9, 6, 7. Multiple SECTION # directives may be given for clarity, and will be concatenated together in # the expected way. # If a particular extension is not in this list (say, 1mh), it will be # displayed with the rest of the section it belongs to. The effect of this # is that you only need to explicitly list extensions if you want to force a # particular order. Sections with extensions should usually be adjacent to # their main section (e.g. "1 1mh 8 ..."). # SECTION 1 n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7 # #--------------------------------------------------------- # Range of terminal widths permitted when displaying cat pages. If the # terminal falls outside this range, cat pages will not be created (if # missing) or displayed. # #MINCATWIDTH 80 #MAXCATWIDTH 80 # # If CATWIDTH is set to a non-zero number, cat pages will always be # formatted for a terminal of the given width, regardless of the width of # the terminal actually being used. This should generally be within the # range set by MINCATWIDTH and MAXCATWIDTH. # #CATWIDTH 0 # #--------------------------------------------------------- # Flags. # NOCACHE keeps man from creating cat pages. #NOCACHE Thanks for any help (p.s. even 'man man' fails) Edit: When I run ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/gcc* I get the following output lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 May 27 15:41 /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz -> gcc-4.6.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 217776 Apr 15 17:34 /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.6.1.gz

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• Basic shadow mapping fails on NVIDIA card?

  - by James

  Recently I switched from an AMD Radeon HD 6870 card to an (MSI) NVIDIA GTX 670 for performance reasons. I found however that my implementation of shadow mapping in all my applications failed. In a very simple shadow POC project the problem appears to be that the scene being drawn never results in a draw to the depth map and as a result the entire depth map is just infinity, 1.0 (Reading directly from the depth component after draw (glReadPixels) shows every pixel is infinity (1.0), replacing the depth comparison in the shader with a comparison of the depth from the shadow map with 1.0 shadows the entire scene, and writing random values to the depth map and then not calling glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT) results in a random noisy pattern on the scene elements - from which we can infer that the uploading of the depth texture and comparison within the shader are functioning perfectly.) Since the problem appears almost certainly to be in the depth render, this is the code for that: const int s_res = 1024; GLuint shadowMap_tex; GLuint shadowMap_prog; GLint sm_attr_coord3d; GLint sm_uniform_mvp; GLuint fbo_handle; GLuint renderBuffer; bool isMappingShad = false; //The scene consists of a plane with box above it GLfloat scene[] = { -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 1.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, -10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.5, 0.5, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, ... }; //Initialize the stuff used by the shadow map generator int initShadowMap() { //Initialize the shadowMap shader program if (create_program("shadow.v.glsl", "shadow.f.glsl", shadowMap_prog) != 1) return -1; const char* attribute_name = "coord3d"; sm_attr_coord3d = glGetAttribLocation(shadowMap_prog, attribute_name); if (sm_attr_coord3d == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind attribute %s\n", attribute_name); return 0; } const char* uniform_name = "mvp"; sm_uniform_mvp = glGetUniformLocation(shadowMap_prog, uniform_name); if (sm_uniform_mvp == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind uniform %s\n", uniform_name); return 0; } //Create a framebuffer glGenFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); //Create render buffer glGenRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); //Setup the shadow texture glGenTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, s_res, s_res, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, NULL); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); return 0; } //Delete stuff void dnitShadowMap() { //Delete everything glDeleteFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glDeleteRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glDeleteTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glDeleteProgram(shadowMap_prog); } int loadSMap() { //Bind MVP stuff glm::mat4 view = glm::lookAt(glm::vec3(10.0, 10.0, 5.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 1.0, 0.0)); glm::mat4 projection = glm::ortho<float>(-10,10,-8,8,-10,40); glm::mat4 mvp = projection * view; glm::mat4 biasMatrix( 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0 ); glm::mat4 lsMVP = biasMatrix * mvp; //Upload light source matrix to the main shader programs glUniformMatrix4fv(uniform_ls_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(lsMVP)); glUseProgram(shadowMap_prog); glUniformMatrix4fv(sm_uniform_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(mvp)); //Draw to the framebuffer (with depth buffer only draw) glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex, 0); glDrawBuffer(GL_NONE); glReadBuffer(GL_NONE); GLenum result = glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER); if (GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE != result) { printf("ERROR: Framebuffer is not complete.\n"); return -1; } //Draw shadow scene printf("Creating shadow buffers..\n"); int ticks = SDL_GetTicks(); glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); //Wipe the depth buffer glViewport(0, 0, s_res, s_res); isMappingShad = true; //DRAW glEnableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); glVertexAttribPointer(sm_attr_coord3d, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 5*4, scene); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 14*3); glDisableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); isMappingShad = false; glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); printf("Render Sbuf in %dms (GLerr: %d)\n", SDL_GetTicks() - ticks, glGetError()); return 0; } This is the full code for the POC shadow mapping project (C++) (Requires SDL 1.2, SDL-image 1.2, GLEW (1.5) and GLM development headers.) initShadowMap is called, followed by loadSMap, the scene is drawn from the camera POV and then dnitShadowMap is called. I followed this tutorial originally (Along with another more comprehensive tutorial which has disappeared as this guy re-configured his site but used to be here (404).) I've ensured that the scene is visible (as can be seen within the full project) to the light source (which uses an orthogonal projection matrix.) Shader utilities function fine in non-shadow-mapped projects. I should also note that at no point is the GL error state set. What am I doing wrong here and why did this not cause problems on my AMD card? (System: Ubuntu 12.04, Linux 3.2.0-49-generic, 64 bit, with the nvidia-experimental-310 driver package. All other games are functioning fine so it's most likely not a card/driver issue.)

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 3): Ghost Objects

  - by Simon Cooper

  In the previous blog post, I covered how we solved the problem of dependencies between objects and between schemas. However, that isn’t the end of the issue. The dependencies algorithm I described works when you’re querying live databases and you can get dependencies for a particular schema direct from the server, and that’s all well and good. To throw a (rather large) spanner in the works, Schema Compare also has the concept of a snapshot, which is a read-only compressed XML representation of a selection of schemas that can be compared in the same way as a live database. This can be useful for keeping historical records or a baseline of a database schema, or comparing a schema on a computer that doesn’t have direct access to the database. So, how do snapshots interact with dependencies? Inter-database dependencies don't pose an issue as we store the dependencies in the snapshot. However, comparing a snapshot to a live database with cross-schema dependencies does cause a problem; what if the live database has a dependency to an object that does not exist in the snapshot? Take a basic example schema, where you’re only populating SchemaA: SOURCE   TARGET (using snapshot) CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1(col1));   CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER PRIMARY KEY);   CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); In this case, we want to generate a sync script to synchronize SchemaA.Table1 on the database represented by the snapshot. When taking a snapshot, database dependencies are followed, but because you’re not comparing it to anything at the time, the comparison dependencies algorithm described in my last post cannot be used. So, as you only take a snapshot of SchemaA on the target database, SchemaB.Table1 will not be in the snapshot. If this snapshot is then used to compare against the above source schema, SchemaB.Table1 will be included in the source, but the object will not be found in the target snapshot. This is the same problem that was solved with comparison dependencies, but here we cannot use the comparison dependencies algorithm as the snapshot has not got any information on SchemaB! We've now hit quite a big problem - we’re trying to include SchemaB.Table1 in the target, but we simply do not know the status of this object on the database the snapshot was taken from; whether it exists in the database at all, whether it’s the same as the target, whether it’s different... What can we do about this sorry state of affairs? Well, not a lot, it would seem. We can’t query the original database, as it may not be accessible, and we cannot assume any default state as it could be wrong and break the script (and we currently do not have a roll-back mechanism for failed synchronizes). The only way to fix this properly is for the user to go right back to the start and re-create the snapshot, explicitly including the schemas of these 'ghost' objects. So, the only thing we can do is flag up dependent ghost objects in the UI, and ask the user what we should do with it – assume it doesn’t exist, assume it’s the same as the target, or specify a definition for it. Unfortunately, such functionality didn’t make the cut for v1 of Schema Compare (as this is very much an edge case for a non-critical piece of functionality), so we simply flag the ghost objects up in the sync wizard as unsyncable, and let the user sort out what’s going on and edit the sync script as appropriate. There are some things that we do do to alleviate somewhat this rather unhappy situation; if a user creates a snapshot from the source or target of a database comparison, we include all the objects registered from the database, not just the ones in the schemas originally selected for comparison. This includes any extra dependent objects registered through the comparison dependencies algorithm. If the user then compares the resulting snapshot against the same database they were comparing against when it was created, the extra dependencies will be included in the snapshot as required and everything will be good. Fortunately, this problem will come up quite rarely, and only when the user uses snapshots and tries to sync objects with unknown cross-schema dependencies. However, the solution is not an easy one, and lead to some difficult architecture and design decisions within the product. And all this pain follows from the simple decision to allow schema pre-filtering! Next: why adding a column to a table isn't as easy as you would think...

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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