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• Scripting Language Sessions at Oracle OpenWorld and MySQL Connect, 2012

  - by cj

  This posts highlights some great scripting language sessions coming up at the Oracle OpenWorld and MySQL Connect conferences. These events are happening in San Francisco from the end of September. You can search for other interesting conference sessions in the Content Catalog. Also check out what is happening at JavaOne in that event's Content Catalog (I haven't included sessions from it in this post.) To find the timeslots and locations of each session, click their respective link and check the "Session Schedule" box on the top right. GEN8431 - General Session: What’s New in Oracle Database Application Development This general session takes a look at what’s been new in the last year in Oracle Database application development tools using the latest generation of database technology. Topics range from Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle Application Express to Java and PHP. (Thomas Kyte - Architect, Oracle) BOF9858 - Meet the Developers of Database Access Services (OCI, ODBC, DRCP, PHP, Python) This session is your opportunity to meet in person the Oracle developers who have built Oracle Database access tools and products such as the Oracle Call Interface (OCI), Oracle C++ Call Interface (OCCI), and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers; Transparent Application Failover (TAF); Oracle Database Instant Client; Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP); Oracle Net Services, and so on. The team also works with those who develop the PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl adapters for Oracle Database. Come discuss with them the features you like, your pains, and new product enhancements in the latest database technology. CON8506 - Syndication and Consolidation: Oracle Database Driver for MySQL Applications This technical session presents a new Oracle Database driver that enables you to run MySQL applications (written in PHP, Perl, C, C++, and so on) against Oracle Database with almost no code change. Use cases for such a driver include application syndication such as interoperability across a relationship database management system, application migration, and database consolidation. In addition, the session covers enhancements in database technology that enable and simplify the migration of third-party databases and applications to and consolidation with Oracle Database. Attend this session to learn more and see a live demo. (Srinath Krishnaswamy - Director, Software Development, Oracle. Kuassi Mensah - Director Product Management, Oracle. Mohammad Lari - Principal Technical Staff, Oracle ) CON9167 - Current State of PHP and MySQL Together, PHP and MySQL power large parts of the Web. The developers of both technologies continue to enhance their software to ensure that developers can be satisfied despite all their changing and growing needs. This session presents an overview of changes in PHP 5.4, which was released earlier this year and shows you various new MySQL-related features available for PHP, from transparent client-side caching to direct support for scaling and high-availability needs. (Johannes Schlüter - SoftwareDeveloper, Oracle) CON8983 - Sharding with PHP and MySQL In deploying MySQL, scale-out techniques can be used to scale out reads, but for scaling out writes, other techniques have to be used. To distribute writes over a cluster, it is necessary to shard the database and store the shards on separate servers. This session provides a brief introduction to traditional MySQL scale-out techniques in preparation for a discussion on the different sharding techniques that can be used with MySQL server and how they can be implemented with PHP. You will learn about static and dynamic sharding schemes, their advantages and drawbacks, techniques for locating and moving shards, and techniques for resharding. (Mats Kindahl - Senior Principal Software Developer, Oracle) CON9268 - Developing Python Applications with MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python This session discusses MySQL Connector/Python and the MySQL Utilities component of MySQL Workbench and explains how to write MySQL applications in Python. It includes in-depth explanations of the features of MySQL Connector/Python and the MySQL Utilities library, along with example code to illustrate the concepts. Those interested in learning how to expand or build their own utilities and connector features will benefit from the tips and tricks from the experts. This session also provides an opportunity to meet directly with the engineers and provide feedback on your issues and priorities. You can learn what exists today and influence future developments. (Geert Vanderkelen - Software Developer, Oracle) BOF9141 - MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python: Python Developers, Unite! Come to this lively discussion of the MySQL Utilities component of MySQL Workbench and MySQL Connector/Python. It includes in-depth explanations of the features and dives into the code for those interested in learning how to expand or build their own utilities and connector features. This is an audience-driven session, so put on your best Python shirt and let’s talk about MySQL Utilities and MySQL Connector/Python. (Geert Vanderkelen - Software Developer, Oracle. Charles Bell - Senior Software Developer, Oracle) CON3290 - Integrating Oracle Database with a Social Network Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps. There are many social network sites, each with their own APIs for sharing data with them. Most developers do not realize that Oracle Database has base tools for communicating with these sites, enabling all manner of information, including multimedia, to be passed back and forth between the sites. This technical presentation goes through the methods in PL/SQL for connecting to, and then sending and retrieving, all types of data between these sites. (Marcelle Kratochvil - CTO, Piction) CON3291 - Storing and Tuning Unstructured Data and Multimedia in Oracle Database Database administrators need to learn new skills and techniques when the decision is made in their organization to let Oracle Database manage its unstructured data. They will face new scalability challenges. A single row in a table can become larger than a whole database. This presentation covers the techniques a DBA needs for managing the large volume of data in a standard Oracle Database instance. (Marcelle Kratochvil - CTO, Piction) CON3292 - Using PHP, Perl, Visual Basic, Ruby, and Python for Multimedia in Oracle Database These five programming languages are just some of the most popular ones in use at the moment in the marketplace. This presentation details how you can use them to access and retrieve multimedia from Oracle Database. It covers programming techniques and methods for achieving faster development against Oracle Database. (Marcelle Kratochvil - CTO, Piction) UGF5181 - Building Real-World Oracle DBA Tools in Perl Perl is not normally associated with building mission-critical application or DBA tools. Learn why Perl could be a good choice for building your next killer DBA app. This session draws on real-world experience of building DBA tools in Perl, showing the framework and architecture needed to deal with portability, efficiency, and maintainability. Topics include Perl frameworks; Which Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) modules are good to use; Perl and CPAN module licensing; Perl and Oracle connectivity; Compiling and deploying your app; An example of what is possible with Perl. (Arjen Visser - CEO & CTO, Dbvisit Software Limited) CON3153 - Perl: A DBA’s and Developer’s Best (Forgotten) Friend This session reintroduces Perl as a language of choice for many solutions for DBAs and developers. Discover what makes Perl so successful and why it is so versatile in our day-to-day lives. Perl can automate all those manual tasks and is truly platform-independent. Perl may not be in the limelight the way other languages are, but it is a remarkable language, it is still very current with ongoing development, and it has amazing online resources. Learn what makes Perl so great (including CPAN), get an introduction to Perl language syntax, find out what you can use Perl for, hear how Oracle uses Perl, discover the best way to learn Perl, and take away a small Perl project challenge. (Arjen Visser - CEO & CTO, Dbvisit Software Limited) CON10332 - Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service’s Connect PHP API: Intro, What’s New, and Roadmap Connect PHP is a public API that enables developers to build solutions with the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service platform. This API is used primarily by developers working within the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Cloud Service framework who are looking to gain access to data and services hosted by the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service platform through a backward-compatible API. Connect for PHP leverages the same data model and services as the Connect Web Services for SOAP API. Come to this session to get an introduction and learn what’s new and what’s coming up. (Mark Rhoads - Senior Principal Applications Engineer, Oracle. Mark Ericson - Sr. Principle Product Manager, Oracle) CON10330 - Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service APIs and Frameworks Overview Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service APIs are available in the following areas: desktop UI, Web services, customer portal, PHP, and knowledge. These frameworks provide access to Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service’s Connect Common Object Model and custom objects. This session provides a broad overview of capabilities in all these areas. (Mark Ericson - Sr. Principle Product Manager, Oracle)

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• Parent Objects

  - by Ali Bahrami

  Support for Parent Objects was added in Solaris 11 Update 1. The following material is adapted from the PSARC arc case, and the Solaris Linker and Libraries Manual. A "plugin" is a shared object, usually loaded via dlopen(), that is used by a program in order to allow the end user to add functionality to the program. Examples of plugins include those used by web browsers (flash, acrobat, etc), as well as mdb and elfedit modules. The object that loads the plugin at runtime is called the "parent object". Unlike most object dependencies, the parent is not identified by name, but by its status as the object doing the load. Historically, building a good plugin is has been more complicated than it should be: A parent and its plugin usually share a 2-way dependency: The plugin provides one or more routines for the parent to call, and the parent supplies support routines for use by the plugin for things like memory allocation and error reporting. It is a best practice to build all objects, including plugins, with the -z defs option, in order to ensure that the object specifies all of its dependencies, and is self contained. However: The parent is usually an executable, which cannot be linked to via the usual library mechanisms provided by the link editor. Even if the parent is a shared object, which could be a normal library dependency to the plugin, it may be desirable to build plugins that can be used by more than one parent, in which case embedding a dependency NEEDED entry for one of the parents is undesirable. The usual way to build a high quality plugin with -z defs uses a special mapfile provided by the parent. This mapfile defines the parent routines, specifying the PARENT attribute (see example below). This works, but is inconvenient, and error prone. The symbol table in the parent already describes what it makes available to plugins — ideally the plugin would obtain that information directly rather than from a separate mapfile. The new -z parent option to ld allows a plugin to link to the parent and access the parent symbol table. This differs from a typical dependency: No NEEDED record is created. The relationship is recorded as a logical connection to the parent, rather than as an explicit object name However, it operates in the same manner as any other dependency in terms of making symbols available to the plugin. When the -z parent option is used, the link-editor records the basename of the parent object in the dynamic section, using the new tag DT_SUNW_PARENT. This is an informational tag, which is not used by the runtime linker to locate the parent, but which is available for diagnostic purposes. The ld(1) manpage documentation for the -z parent option is: -z parent=object Specifies a "parent object", which can be an executable or shared object, against which to link the output object. This option is typically used when creating "plugin" shared objects intended to be loaded by an executable at runtime via the dlopen() function. The symbol table from the parent object is used to satisfy references from the plugin object. The use of the -z parent option makes symbols from the object calling dlopen() available to the plugin. Example For this example, we use a main program, and a plugin. The parent provides a function named parent_callback() for the plugin to call. The plugin provides a function named plugin_func() to the parent: % cat main.c #include <stdio.h> #include <dlfcn.h> #include <link.h> void parent_callback(void) { printf("plugin_func() has called parent_callback()\n"); } int main(int argc, char **argv) { typedef void plugin_func_t(void); void *hdl; plugin_func_t *plugin_func; if (argc != 2) { fprintf(stderr, "usage: main plugin\n"); return (1); } if ((hdl = dlopen(argv[1], RTLD_LAZY)) == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "unable to load plugin: %s\n", dlerror()); return (1); } plugin_func = (plugin_func_t *) dlsym(hdl, "plugin_func"); if (plugin_func == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "unable to find plugin_func: %s\n", dlerror()); return (1); } (*plugin_func)(); return (0); } % cat plugin.c #include <stdio.h> extern void parent_callback(void); void plugin_func(void) { printf("parent has called plugin_func() from plugin.so\n"); parent_callback(); } Building this in the traditional manner, without -zdefs: % cc -o main main.c % cc -G -o plugin.so plugin.c % ./main ./plugin.so parent has called plugin_func() from plugin.so plugin_func() has called parent_callback() As noted above, when building any shared object, the -z defs option is recommended, in order to ensure that the object is self contained and specifies all of its dependencies. However, the use of -z defs prevents the plugin object from linking due to the unsatisfied symbol from the parent object: % cc -zdefs -G -o plugin.so plugin.c Undefined first referenced symbol in file parent_callback plugin.o ld: fatal: symbol referencing errors. No output written to plugin.so A mapfile can be used to specify to ld that the parent_callback symbol is supplied by the parent object. % cat plugin.mapfile $mapfile_version 2 SYMBOL_SCOPE { global: parent_callback { FLAGS = PARENT }; }; % cc -zdefs -Mplugin.mapfile -G -o plugin.so plugin.c However, the -z parent option to ld is the most direct solution to this problem, allowing the plugin to actually link against the parent object, and obtain the available symbols from it. An added benefit of using -z parent instead of a mapfile, is that the name of the parent object is recorded in the dynamic section of the plugin, and can be displayed by the file utility: % cc -zdefs -zparent=main -G -o plugin.so plugin.c % elfdump -d plugin.so | grep PARENT [0] SUNW_PARENT 0xcc main % file plugin.so plugin.so: ELF 32-bit LSB dynamic lib 80386 Version 1, parent main, dynamically linked, not stripped % ./main ./plugin.so parent has called plugin_func() from plugin.so plugin_func() has called parent_callback() We can also observe this in elfedit plugins on Solaris systems running Solaris 11 Update 1 or newer: % file /usr/lib/elfedit/dyn.so /usr/lib/elfedit/dyn.so: ELF 32-bit LSB dynamic lib 80386 Version 1, parent elfedit, dynamically linked, not stripped, no debugging information available Related Other Work The GNU ld has an option named --just-symbols that can be used in a similar manner: --just-symbols=filename Read symbol names and their addresses from filename, but do not relocate it or include it in the output. This allows your output file to refer symbolically to absolute locations of memory defined in other programs. You may use this option more than once. -z parent is a higher level operation aimed specifically at simplifying the construction of high quality plugins. Although it employs the same operation, it differs from --just symbols in 2 significant ways: There can only be one parent. The parent is recorded in the created object, and can be displayed by 'file', or other similar tools.

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• Try a sample: Using the counter predicate for event sampling

  - by extended_events

  Extended Events offers a rich filtering mechanism, called predicates, that allows you to reduce the number of events you collect by specifying criteria that will be applied during event collection. (You can find more information about predicates in Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events (by Jonathan Kehayias)) By evaluating predicates early in the event firing sequence we can reduce the performance impact of collecting events by stopping event collection when the criteria are not met. You can specify predicates on both event fields and on a special object called a predicate source. Predicate sources are similar to action in that they typically are related to some type of global information available from the server. You will find that many of the actions available in Extended Events have equivalent predicate sources, but actions and predicates sources are not the same thing. Applying predicates, whether on a field or predicate source, is very similar to what you are used to in T-SQL in terms of how they work; you pick some field/source and compare it to a value, for example, session_id = 52. There is one predicate source that merits special attention though, not just for its special use, but for how the order of predicate evaluation impacts the behavior you see. I’m referring to the counter predicate source. The counter predicate source gives you a way to sample a subset of events that otherwise meet the criteria of the predicate; for example you could collect every other event, or only every tenth event. Simple CountingThe counter predicate source works by creating an in memory counter that increments every time the predicate statement is evaluated. Here is a simple example with my favorite event, sql_statement_completed, that only collects the second statement that is run. (OK, that’s not much of a sample, but this is for demonstration purposes. Here is the session definition: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.counter = 2)ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS) You can find general information about the session DDL syntax in BOL and from Pedro’s post Introduction to Extended Events. The important part here is the WHERE statement that defines that I only what the event where package0.count = 2; in other words, only the second instance of the event. Notice that I need to provide the package name along with the predicate source. You don’t need to provide the package name if you’re using event fields, only for predicate sources. Let’s say I run the following test queries: -- Run three statements to test the sessionSELECT 'This is the first statement'GOSELECT 'This is the second statement'GOSELECT 'This is the third statement';GO Once you return the event data from the ring buffer and parse the XML (see my earlier post on reading event data) you should see something like this: event_name sql_text sql_statement_completed SELECT ‘This is the second statement’ You can see that only the second statement from the test was actually collected. (Feel free to try this yourself. Check out what happens if you remove the WHERE statement from your session. Go ahead, I’ll wait.) Percentage Sampling OK, so that wasn’t particularly interesting, but you can probably see that this could be interesting, for example, lets say I need a 25% sample of the statements executed on my server for some type of QA analysis, that might be more interesting than just the second statement. All comparisons of predicates are handled using an object called a predicate comparator; the simple comparisons such as equals, greater than, etc. are mapped to the common mathematical symbols you know and love (eg. = and >), but to do the less common comparisons you will need to use the predicate comparators directly. You would probably look to the MOD operation to do this type sampling; we would too, but we don’t call it MOD, we call it divides_by_uint64. This comparator evaluates whether one number is divisible by another with no remainder. The general syntax for using a predicate comparator is pred_comp(field, value), field is always first and value is always second. So lets take a look at how the session changes to answer our new question of 25% sampling: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test_25 ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.divides_by_uint64(package0.counter,4))ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS)GO Here I’ve replaced the simple equivalency check with the divides_by_uint64 comparator to check if the counter is evenly divisible by 4, which gives us back every fourth record. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to test this session. Why order matters I indicated at the start of this post that order matters when it comes to the counter predicate – it does. Like most other predicate systems, Extended Events evaluates the predicate statement from left to right; as soon as the predicate statement is proven false we abandon evaluation of the remainder of the statement. The counter predicate source is only incremented when it is evaluated so whether or not the counter is incremented will depend on where it is in the predicate statement and whether a previous criteria made the predicate false or not. Here is a generic example: Pred1: (WHERE statement_1 AND package0.counter = 2)Pred2: (WHERE package0.counter = 2 AND statement_1) Let’s say I cause a number of events as follows and examine what happens to the counter predicate source. Iteration Statement Pred1 Counter Pred2 Counter A Not statement_1 0 1 B statement_1 1 2 C Not statement_1 1 3 D statement_1 2 4 As you can see, in the case of Pred1, statement_1 is evaluated first, when it fails (A & C) predicate evaluation is stopped and the counter is not incremented. With Pred2 the counter is evaluated first, so it is incremented on every iteration of the event and the remaining parts of the predicate are then evaluated. In this example, Pred1 would return an event for D while Pred2 would return an event for B. But wait, there is an interesting side-effect here; consider Pred2 if I had run my statements in the following order: Not statement_1 Not statement_1 statement_1 statement_1 In this case I would never get an event back from the system because the point at which counter=2, the rest of the predicate evaluates as false so the event is not returned. If you’re using the counter target for sampling and you’re not getting the expected events, or any events, check the order of the predicate criteria. As a general rule I’d suggest that the counter criteria should be the last element of your predicate statement since that will assure that your sampling rate will apply to the set of event records defined by the rest of your predicate. Aside: I’m interested in hearing about uses for putting the counter predicate criteria earlier in the predicate statement. If you have one, post it in a comment to share with the class. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Integrating Coherence & Java EE 6 Applications using ActiveCache

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  OK, so you are a developer and are starting a new Java EE 6 application using the most wonderful features of the Java EE platform like Enterprise JavaBeans, JavaServer Faces, CDI, JPA e another cool stuff technologies. And your architecture need to hold piece of data into distributed caches to improve application's performance, scalability and reliability? If this is your current facing scenario, maybe you should look closely in the solutions provided by Oracle WebLogic Server. Oracle had integrated WebLogic Server and its champion data caching technology called Oracle Coherence. This seamless integration between this two products provides a comprehensive environment to develop applications without the complexity of extra Java code to manage cache as a dependency, since Oracle provides an DI ("Dependency Injection") mechanism for Coherence, the same DI mechanism available in standard Java EE applications. This feature is called ActiveCache. In this article, I will show you how to configure ActiveCache in WebLogic and at your Java EE application. Configuring WebLogic to manage Coherence Before you start changing your application to use Coherence, you need to configure your Coherence distributed cache. The good news is, you can manage all this stuff without writing a single line of code of XML or even Java. This configuration can be done entirely in the WebLogic administration console. The first thing to do is the setup of a Coherence cluster. A Coherence cluster is a set of Coherence JVMs configured to form one single view of the cache. This means that you can insert or remove members of the cluster without the client application (the application that generates or consume data from the cache) knows about the changes. This concept allows your solution to scale-out without changing the application server JVMs. You can growth your application only in the data grid layer. To start the configuration, you need to configure an machine that points to the server in which you want to execute the Coherence JVMs. WebLogic Server allows you to do this very easily using the Administration Console. In this example, I will call the machine as "coherence-server". Remember that in order to the machine concept works, you need to ensure that the NodeManager are being executed in the target server that the machine points to. The NodeManager executable can be found in <WLS_HOME>/server/bin/startNodeManager.sh. The next thing to do is to configure a Coherence cluster. In the WebLogic administration console, go to Environment > Coherence Clusters and click in "New". Call this Coherence cluster of "my-coherence-cluster". Click in next. Specify a valid cluster address and port. The Coherence members will communicate with each other through this address and port. Our Coherence cluster are now configured. Now it is time to configure the Coherence members and add them to this cluster. In the WebLogic administration console, go to Environment > Coherence Servers and click in "New". In the field "Name" set to "coh-server-1". In the field "Machine", associate this Coherence server to the machine "coherence-server". In the field "Cluster", associate this Coherence server to the cluster named "my-coherence-cluster". Click in "Finish". Start the Coherence server using the "Control" tab of WebLogic administration console. This will instruct WebLogic to start a new JVM of Coherence in the target machine that should join the pre-defined Coherence cluster. Configuring your Java EE Application to Access Coherence Now lets pass to the funny part of the configuration. The first thing to do is to inform your Java EE application which Coherence cluster to join. Oracle had updated WebLogic server deployment descriptors so you will not have to change your code or the containers deployment descriptors like application.xml, ejb-jar.xml or web.xml. In this example, I will show you how to enable DI ("Dependency Injection") to a Coherence cache from a Servlet 3.0 component. In the WEB-INF/weblogic.xml deployment descriptor, put the following metadata information: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <wls:weblogic-web-app xmlns:wls="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app/1.4/weblogic-web-app.xsd"> <wls:context-root>myWebApp</wls:context-root> <wls:coherence-cluster-ref> <wls:coherence-cluster-name>my-coherence-cluster</wls:coherence-cluster-name> </wls:coherence-cluster-ref> </wls:weblogic-web-app> As you can see, using the "coherence-cluster-name" tag, we are informing our Java EE application that it should join the "my-coherence-cluster" when it loads in the web container. Without this information, the application will not be able to access the predefined Coherence cluster. It will form its own Coherence cluster without any members. So never forget to put this information. Now put the coherence.jar and active-cache-1.0.jar dependencies at your WEB-INF/lib application classpath. You need to deploy this dependencies so ActiveCache can automatically take care of the Coherence cluster join phase. This dependencies can be found in the following locations: - <WLS_HOME>/common/deployable-libraries/active-cache-1.0.jar - <COHERENCE_HOME>/lib/coherence.jar Finally, you need to write down the access code to the Coherence cache at your Servlet. In the following example, we have a Servlet 3.0 component that access a Coherence cache named "transactions" and prints into the browser output the content (the ammount property) of one specific transaction. package com.oracle.coherence.demo.activecache; import java.io.IOException; import javax.annotation.Resource; import javax.servlet.ServletException; import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; import com.tangosol.net.NamedCache; @WebServlet("/demo/specificTransaction") public class TransactionServletExample extends HttpServlet { @Resource(mappedName = "transactions") NamedCache transactions; protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { int transId = Integer.parseInt(request.getParameter("transId")); Transaction transaction = (Transaction) transactions.get(transId); response.getWriter().println("<center>" + transaction.getAmmount() + "</center>"); } } Thats it! No more configuration is necessary and you have all set to start producing and getting data to/from Coherence. As you can see in the example code, the Coherence cache are treated as a normal dependency in the Java EE container. The magic happens behind the scenes when the ActiveCache allows your application to join the defined Coherence cluster. The most interesting thing about this approach is, no matter which type of Coherence cache your are using (Distributed, Partitioned, Replicated, WAN-Remote) for the client application, it is just a simple attribute member of com.tangosol.net.NamedCache type. And its all managed by the Java EE container as an dependency. This means that if you inject the same dependency (the Coherence cache named "transactions") in another Java EE component (JSF managed-bean, Stateless EJB) the cache will be the same. Cool isn't it? Thanks to the CDI technology, we can extend the same support for non-Java EE standards components like simple POJOs. This means that you are not forced to only use Servlets, EJBs or JSF in order to inject Coherence caches. You can do the same approach for regular POJOs created for you and managed by lightweight containers like Spring or Seam.

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• The Shift: how Orchard painlessly shifted to document storage, and how it’ll affect you

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  We’ve known it all along. The storage for Orchard content items would be much more efficient using a document database than a relational one. Orchard content items are composed of parts that serialize naturally into infoset kinds of documents. Storing them as relational data like we’ve done so far was unnatural and requires the data for a single item to span multiple tables, related through 1-1 relationships. This means lots of joins in queries, and a great potential for Select N+1 problems. Document databases, unfortunately, are still a tough sell in many places that prefer the more familiar relational model. Being able to x-copy Orchard to hosters has also been a basic constraint in the design of Orchard. Combine those with the necessity at the time to run in medium trust, and with license compatibility issues, and you’ll find yourself with very few reasonable choices. So we went, a little reluctantly, for relational SQL stores, with the dream of one day transitioning to document storage. We have played for a while with the idea of building our own document storage on top of SQL databases, and Sébastien implemented something more than decent along those lines, but we had a better way all along that we didn’t notice until recently… In Orchard, there are fields, which are named properties that you can add dynamically to a content part. Because they are so dynamic, we have been storing them as XML into a column on the main content item table. This infoset storage and its associated API are fairly generic, but were only used for fields. The breakthrough was when Sébastien realized how this existing storage could give us the advantages of document storage with minimal changes, while continuing to use relational databases as the substrate. public bool CommercialPrices { get { return this.Retrieve(p => p.CommercialPrices); } set { this.Store(p => p.CommercialPrices, value); } } This code is very compact and efficient because the API can infer from the expression what the type and name of the property are. It is then able to do the proper conversions for you. For this code to work in a content part, there is no need for a record at all. This is particularly nice for site settings: one query on one table and you get everything you need. This shows how the existing infoset solves the data storage problem, but you still need to query. Well, for those properties that need to be filtered and sorted on, you can still use the current record-based relational system. This of course continues to work. We do however provide APIs that make it trivial to store into both record properties and the infoset storage in one operation: public double Price { get { return Retrieve(r => r.Price); } set { Store(r => r.Price, value); } } This code looks strikingly similar to the non-record case above. The difference is that it will manage both the infoset and the record-based storages. The call to the Store method will send the data in both places, keeping them in sync. The call to the Retrieve method does something even cooler: if the property you’re looking for exists in the infoset, it will return it, but if it doesn’t, it will automatically look into the record for it. And if that wasn’t cool enough, it will take that value from the record and store it into the infoset for the next time it’s required. This means that your data will start automagically migrating to infoset storage just by virtue of using the code above instead of the usual: public double Price { get { return Record.Price; } set { Record.Price = value; } } As your users browse the site, it will get faster and faster as Select N+1 issues will optimize themselves away. If you preferred, you could still have explicit migration code, but it really shouldn’t be necessary most of the time. If you do already have code using QueryHints to mitigate Select N+1 issues, you might want to reconsider those, as with the new system, you’ll want to avoid joins that you don’t need for filtering or sorting, further optimizing your queries. There are some rare cases where the storage of the property must be handled differently. Check out this string[] property on SearchSettingsPart for example: public string[] SearchedFields { get { return (Retrieve<string>("SearchedFields") ?? "") .Split(new[] {',', ' '}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); } set { Store("SearchedFields", String.Join(", ", value)); } } The array of strings is transformed by the property accessors into and from a comma-separated list stored in a string. The Retrieve and Store overloads used in this case are lower-level versions that explicitly specify the type and name of the attribute to retrieve or store. You may be wondering what this means for code or operations that look directly at the database tables instead of going through the new infoset APIs. Even if there is a record, the infoset version of the property will win if it exists, so it is necessary to keep the infoset up-to-date. It’s not very complicated, but definitely something to keep in mind. Here is what a product record looks like in Nwazet.Commerce for example: And here is the same data in the infoset: The infoset is stored in Orchard_Framework_ContentItemRecord or Orchard_Framework_ContentItemVersionRecord, depending on whether the content type is versionable or not. A good way to find what you’re looking for is to inspect the record table first, as it’s usually easier to read, and then get the item record of the same id. Here is the detailed XML document for this product: <Data> <ProductPart Inventory="40" Price="18" Sku="pi-camera-box" OutOfStockMessage="" AllowBackOrder="false" Weight="0.2" Size="" ShippingCost="null" IsDigital="false" /> <ProductAttributesPart Attributes="" /> <AutoroutePart DisplayAlias="camera-box" /> <TitlePart Title="Nwazet Pi Camera Box" /> <BodyPart Text="[...]" /> <CommonPart CreatedUtc="2013-09-10T00:39:00Z" PublishedUtc="2013-09-14T01:07:47Z" /> </Data> The data is neatly organized under each part. It is easy to see how that document is all you need to know about that content item, all in one table. If you want to modify that data directly in the database, you should be careful to do it in both the record table and the infoset in the content item record. In this configuration, the record is now nothing more than an index, and will only be used for sorting and filtering. Of course, it’s perfectly fine to mix record-backed properties and record-less properties on the same part. It really depends what you think must be sorted and filtered on. In turn, this potentially simplifies migrations considerably. So here it is, the great shift of Orchard to document storage, something that Orchard has been designed for all along, and that we were able to implement with a satisfying and surprising economy of resources. Expect this code to make its way into the 1.8 version of Orchard when that’s available.

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• Slick2d/Nifty-gui input

  - by eerongal

  I'm trying to get input from slick2d into nifty gui. Ive searched online, and I've seen a few examples, but I can't seem to get it working right. i've tried the example on here but I can't seem to get everything working. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong. I've also looked at examples using the JMonkeyEngine to help point me in the right direction, but still having issues with input. I can get everything else working like i need. Here's the code for my element controller: package gui; import java.util.Properties; import de.lessvoid.nifty.Nifty; import de.lessvoid.nifty.controls.Controller; import de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element; import de.lessvoid.nifty.input.NiftyInputEvent; import de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen; import de.lessvoid.xml.xpp3.Attributes; public class BaseElementController implements Controller { private Element element; public void bind(Nifty arg0, Screen arg1, Element arg2, Properties arg3, Attributes arg4) { this.element = element; } public void init(Properties arg0, Attributes arg1) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public boolean inputEvent(NiftyInputEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } public void onFocus(boolean arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void onStartScreen() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void test() { System.out.println("test"); } public void bam() { System.out.println("bam"); } } Here's my XML file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <nifty> <useStyles filename="nifty-default-styles.xml"/> <useControls filename="nifty-default-controls.xml"/> <screen id="screen2" controller="gui.BaseScreenController"> <layer backgroundColor="#fff0" childLayout="absolute" id="layer4" controller="gui.BaseElementController"> <panel childLayout="center" height="30%" id="panel1" style="nifty-panel-simple" width="50%" x="282" y="334" controller="gui.BaseElementController"> <control id="checkbox1" name="checkbox"/> <control childLayout="center" id="button2" label="button2" name="button" x="381" y="224" visibleToMouse="true" controller="gui.BaseElementController"> <interact onClick="bam()"/> </control> </panel> <text text="${CALL.getPlayerName()}" style="nifty-label" width="100%" height="100%" x="0" y="10" /> </layer> </screen> </nifty> Here's how I'm trying to bind the controller: public void init(GameContainer gc) throws SlickException { Input input = gc.getInput(); inputSystem = new PlainSlickInputSystem(); inputSystem.setInput(input); gui = new Gui(); gui.init(gc, inputSystem, "gui/tset.xml", "screen2"); input.removeListener(this); input.removeListener(inputSystem); input.addListener(inputSystem); } Essentially, all that happens right now is the screen loads up and displays, and it grabs the variable correctly in the label, but none of the input seems to be getting forwarded to Nifty from slick. I assume there's something I'm missing, but I can't seem to figure out what that is. In so far as what I have tried, I attempted to define a custom input listener to pick up events and assign that to my game in order to pick up input, which did not work, so i dropped that implementation, at current i'm trying to take the default inputs and bind then with a PlainSlickInputSystem and assigning that to the input (as shown in the first example link). On code execution, all the code is hit, and i've put several system.out.println's to get ouput of what is happening (the code above has been cleaned for presentation), and i even see the elements getting bound to the controller, yet it doesn't pick up controller events. As far as EXACTLY what's wrong, that I don't know, because I've followed all implementations i can find of this, and none of them seem to do anything it's like the input is just getting thrown out. None of the objects from niftyGui appear to be recognizing any input. Here is the binding from my objects at run time: ******INITIALIZED SCREEN: de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen@4a1ab1c1 ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: button2 (de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element@1e8c1be9) ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: focusable => true, width => 100px {nifty-button#panel}, backgroundImage => button/button.png {nifty-button#panel}, label => button2, paddingLeft => 7px {nifty-button#panel}, imageMode => sprite-resize:100,23,0,2,96,2,2,2,96,2,19,2,96,2,2 {nifty-button#panel}, paddingRight => 7px {nifty-button#panel}, id => button2, visibleToMouse => true, height => 23px {nifty-button#panel}, style => nifty-button, name => button, inputMapping => de.lessvoid.nifty.input.mapping.MenuInputMapping, childLayout => center, controller => gui.BaseElementController, y => 224, x => 381 ******INITIALIZED SCREEN: de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen@4a1ab1c1 ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: panel1 (de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element@373ec894) ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: id => panel1, height => 30%, style => nifty-panel-simple, width => 50%, backgroundImage => panel/nifty-panel-simple.png {nifty-panel-simple}, controller => gui.BaseElementController, childLayout => center, padding => 5px {nifty-panel-simple}, imageMode => resize:9,2,9,9,9,2,9,2,9,2,9,9 {nifty-panel-simple}, y => 334, x => 282 ******INITIALIZED SCREEN: de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen@4a1ab1c1 ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: layer4 (de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element@6427d489) ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: id => layer4, backgroundColor => #fff0, controller => gui.BaseElementController, childLayout => absolute the button2 object is getting bound to my BaseElementController, but i can't seem to get it into the defined "onClick" call.

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• Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

  - by DavidWimbush

  I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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• Sliding collision response

  - by dbostream

  I have been reading plenty of tutorials about sliding collision responses yet I am not able to implement it properly in my project. What I want to do is make a puck slide along the rounded corner boards of a hockey rink. In my latest attempt the puck does slide along the boards but there are some strange velocity behaviors. First of all the puck slows down a lot pretty much right away and then it slides for awhile and stops before exiting the corner. Even if I double the speed I get a similar behavior and the puck does not make it out of the corner. I used some ideas from this document http://www.peroxide.dk/papers/collision/collision.pdf. This is what I have: Update method called from the game loop when it is time to update the puck (I removed some irrelevant parts). I use two states (current, previous) which are used to interpolate the position during rendering. public override void Update(double fixedTimeStep) { /* Acceleration is set to 0 for now. */ Acceleration.Zero(); PreviousState = CurrentState; _collisionRecursionDepth = 0; CurrentState.Position = SlidingCollision(CurrentState.Position, CurrentState.Velocity * fixedTimeStep + 0.5 * Acceleration * fixedTimeStep * fixedTimeStep); /* Should not this be affected by a sliding collision? and not only the position. */ CurrentState.Velocity = CurrentState.Velocity + Acceleration * fixedTimeStep; Heading = Vector2.NormalizeRet(CurrentState.Velocity); } private Vector2 SlidingCollision(Vector2 position, Vector2 velocity) { if(_collisionRecursionDepth > 5) return position; bool collisionFound = false; Vector2 futurePosition = position + velocity; Vector2 intersectionPoint = new Vector2(); Vector2 intersectionPointNormal = new Vector2(); /* I did not include the collision detection code, if a collision is detected the intersection point and normal in that point is returned. */ if(!collisionFound) return futurePosition; /* If no collision was detected it is safe to move to the future position. */ /* It is not exactly the intersection point, but slightly before. */ Vector2 newPosition = intersectionPoint; /* oldVelocity is set to the distance from the newPosition(intersection point) to the position it had moved to had it not collided. */ Vector2 oldVelocity = futurePosition - newPosition; /* Project the distance left to move along the intersection normal. */ Vector2 newVelocity = oldVelocity - intersectionPointNormal * oldVelocity.DotProduct(intersectionPointNormal); if(newVelocity.LengthSq() < 0.001) return newPosition; /* If almost no speed, no need to continue. */ _collisionRecursionDepth++; return SlidingCollision(newPosition, newVelocity); } What am I doing wrong with the velocity? I have been staring at this for very long so I have gone blind. I have tried different values of recursion depth but it does not seem to make it better. Let me know if you need more information. I appreciate any help. EDIT: A combination of Patrick Hughes' and teodron's answers solved the velocity problem (I think), thanks a lot! This is the new code: I decided to use a separate recursion method now too since I don't want to recalculate the acceleration in each recursion. public override void Update(double fixedTimeStep) { Acceleration.Zero();// = CalculateAcceleration(fixedTimeStep); PreviousState = new MovingEntityState(CurrentState.Position, CurrentState.Velocity); CurrentState = SlidingCollision(CurrentState, fixedTimeStep); Heading = Vector2.NormalizeRet(CurrentState.Velocity); } private MovingEntityState SlidingCollision(MovingEntityState state, double timeStep) { bool collisionFound = false; /* Calculate the next position given no detected collision. */ Vector2 futurePosition = state.Position + state.Velocity * timeStep; Vector2 intersectionPoint = new Vector2(); Vector2 intersectionPointNormal = new Vector2(); /* I did not include the collision detection code, if a collision is detected the intersection point and normal in that point is returned. */ /* If no collision was detected it is safe to move to the future position. */ if (!collisionFound) return new MovingEntityState(futurePosition, state.Velocity); /* Set new position to the intersection point (slightly before). */ Vector2 newPosition = intersectionPoint; /* Project the new velocity along the intersection normal. */ Vector2 newVelocity = state.Velocity - 1.90 * intersectionPointNormal * state.Velocity.DotProduct(intersectionPointNormal); /* Calculate the time of collision. */ double timeOfCollision = Math.Sqrt((newPosition - state.Position).LengthSq() / (futurePosition - state.Position).LengthSq()); /* Calculate new time step, remaining time of full step after the collision * current time step. */ double newTimeStep = timeStep * (1 - timeOfCollision); return SlidingCollision(new MovingEntityState(newPosition, newVelocity), newTimeStep); } Even though the code above seems to slide the puck correctly please have a look at it. I have a few questions, if I don't multiply by 1.90 in the newVelocity calculation it doesn't work (I get a stack overflow when the puck enters the corner because the timeStep decreases very slowly - a collision is found early in every recursion), why is that? what does 1.90 really do and why 1.90? Also I have a new problem, the puck does not move parallell to the short side after exiting the curve; to be more exact it moves outside the rink (I am not checking for any collisions with the short side at the moment). When I perform the collision detection I first check that the puck is in the correct quadrant. For example bottom-right corner is quadrant four i.e. circleCenter.X < puck.X && circleCenter.Y puck.Y is this a problem? or should the short side of the rink be the one to make the puck go parallell to it and not the last collision in the corner? EDIT2: This is the code I use for collision detection, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I can't make the puck slide (-1.0) but only reflect (-2.0): /* Point is the current position (not the predicted one) and quadrant is 4 for the bottom-right corner for example. */ if (GeometryHelper.PointInCircleQuadrant(circleCenter, circleRadius, state.Position, quadrant)) { /* The line is: from = state.Position, to = futurePosition. So a collision is detected when from is inside the circle and to is outside. */ if (GeometryHelper.LineCircleIntersection2d(state.Position, futurePosition, circleCenter, circleRadius, intersectionPoint, quadrant)) { collisionFound = true; /* Set the intersection point to slightly before the real intersection point (I read somewhere this was good to do because of floting point precision, not sure exactly how much though). */ intersectionPoint = intersectionPoint - Vector2.NormalizeRet(state.Velocity) * 0.001; /* Normal at the intersection point. */ intersectionPointNormal = Vector2.NormalizeRet(circleCenter - intersectionPoint) } } When I set the intersection point, if I for example use 0.1 instead of 0.001 the puck travels further before it gets stuck, but for all values I have tried (including 0 - the real intersection point) it gets stuck somewhere (but I necessarily not get a stack overflow). Can something in this part be the cause of my problem? I can see why I get the stack overflow when using -1.0 when calculating the new velocity vector; but not how to solve it. I traced the time steps used in the recursion (initial time step is always 1/60 ~ 0.01666): Recursion depth Time step next recursive call [Start recursion, time step ~ 0.016666] 0 0,000985806527246773 [No collision, stop recursion] [Start recursion, time step ~ 0.016666] 0 0,0149596704364629 1 0,0144883449376379 2 0,0143155612984837 3 0,014224925727213 4 0,0141673917461608 5 0,0141265435314026 6 0,0140953966184117 7 0,0140704653746625 ...and so on. As you can see the collision is detected early in every recursive call which means the next time step decreases very slowly thus the recursion depth gets very big - stack overflow.

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• Pet Peeves with the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

  - by Bil Simser

  Have you ever noticed how something things just gnaw at your very being. This is the case with the WP7 marketplace, the Zune software, and the things that drive me batshit crazy with a side of fries. To go. I wanted to share. XBox Live is Not the Centre of the Universe Okay, it’s fine that the Zune software has an XBox live tag for games so can see them clearly but do we really need to have it shoved down our throats. On every click? Click on Games in the marketplace: The first thing that it defaults to on the filters on the right is XBox Live: Okay. Fine. However if you change it (say to Paid) then click onto a title when you come back from that title is the filter still set to Paid? No. It’s back to XBox Live again. Really? Give us a break. If you change to any filter on any other genre then click on the selected title, it doesn’t revert back to anything. It stays on the selection you picked. Let’s be fair here. The Games genre should behave just like every other one. If I pick Paid then when I come back to the list please remember that. Double Dipping On the subject of XBox Live titles, Microsoft (and developers who have an agreement with Microsoft to produce Live titles, which generally rules out indie game developers) is double dipping with regards to exposure of their titles. Here’s the Puzzle and Trivia Game section on the Marketplace for XBox Live titles: And here’s the same category filtered on Paid titles: See the problem? Two indie titles while the rest are XBox Live ones. So while XBL has it’s filter, they also get to showcase their wares in the Paid and Free filters as well. If you’re going to have an XBox Live filter then use it and stop pushing down indie titles until they’re off the screen (on some genres this is already the case). Free and Paid titles should be just that and not include XBox Live ones. If you’re really stoked that people can’t find the Free XBox Live titles vs. the paid ones, then create a Free XBox Live filter and a Paid XBox Live filter. I don’t think we would mind much. Whose Trial is it Anyways? You might notice apps in the marketplace with titles like “My Fart App Professional Lite” or “Silicon Lamb Spleen Builder Free”. When you submit and app to the marketplace it can either be free or paid. If it’s a paid app you also have the option to submit it with Trial capabilities. It’s up to you to decide what you offer in the trial version but trial versions can be purchased from within the app so after someone trys out your app (for free) and wants to unlock the Super Secret Obama Spy Ring Level, they can just go to the marketplace from your app (if you built that functionality in) and upgrade to the paid version. However it creates a rift of sorts when it comes to visibility. Some developers go the route of the paid app with a trial version, others decide to submit *two* apps instead of one. One app is the “Free” or “Lite” verions and the other is the paid version. Why go to the hassle of submitting two apps when you can just create a trial version in the same app? Again, visibility. There’s no way to tell Paid apps with Trial versions and ones without (it’s an option, you don’t have to provide trial versions, although I think it’s a good idea). However there is a way to see the Free apps from the Paid ones so some submit the two apps and have the Free version have links to buy the paid one (again through the Marketplace tasks in the API). What we as developers need for visibility is a new filter. Trial. That’s it. It would simply filter on Paid apps that have trial capabilities and surface up those apps just like the free ones. If Microsoft added this filter to the marketplace, it would eliminate the need for people to submit their “Free” and “Lite” versions and make it easier for the developer not to have to maintain two systems. I mean, is it really that hard? Can’t be any more difficult than the XBox Live Filter that’s already there. Location is Everything The last thing on my bucket list is about location. When I launch Zune I’m running in my native location setting, Canada. What’s great is that I navigate to the Travel Tools section where I have one of my apps and behold the splendour that I see: There are my apps in the number 1 and number 4 slot for top selling in that category. I show it to my wife to make up for the sleepless nights writing this stuff and we dance around and celebrate. Then I change my location on my operation system to United States and re-launch Zune. WTF? My flight app has slipped to the 10th spot (I’m only showing 4 across here out of the 7 in Zune) and my border check app that was #1 is now in the 32nd spot! End of celebration. Not only is relevance being looked at here, I value the comments people make on may apps as do most developers. I want to respond to them and show them that I’m listening. The next version of my border app will provide multiple camera angles. However when I’m running in my native Canada location, I only see two reviews. Changing over to United States I see fourteen! While there are tools out there to provide with you a unified view, I shouldn’t have to rely on them. My own Zune desktop software should allow me to see everything. I realize that some developers will submit an app and only target it for some locations and that’s their choice. However I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see what apps are ahead of mine, or see people comments and ratings. Another proposal. Either unify the marketplace (i.e. when I’m looking at it show me everything combined) or let me choose a filter. I think the first option might be difficult as you’re trying to average out top selling apps across all markets and have to deal with some apps that have been omitted from some markets. Although I think you could come up with a set of use cases that would handle that, maybe that’s too much work. At the very least, let us developers view the markets in a drop down or something from within the Zune desktop. Having to shut down Zune, change our location, and re-launch Zune to see other perspectives is just too onerous. A Call to Action These are just one mans opinion. Do you agree? Disagree? Feel hungry for a bacon sandwich? Let everyone know via the comments below. Perhaps someone from Microsoft will be reading and take some of these ideas under advisement. Maybe not, but at least let’s get the word out that we really want to see some change. Egypt can do it, why not WP7 developers!

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• Nashorn, the rhino in the room

  - by costlow

  Nashorn is a new runtime within JDK 8 that allows developers to run code written in JavaScript and call back and forth with Java. One advantage to the Nashorn scripting engine is that is allows for quick prototyping of functionality or basic shell scripts that use Java libraries. The previous JavaScript runtime, named Rhino, was introduced in JDK 6 (released 2006, end of public updates Feb 2013). Keeping tradition amongst the global developer community, "Nashorn" is the German word for rhino. The Java platform and runtime is an intentional home to many languages beyond the Java language itself. OpenJDK’s Da Vinci Machine helps coordinate work amongst language developers and tool designers and has helped different languages by introducing the Invoke Dynamic instruction in Java 7 (2011), which resulted in two major benefits: speeding up execution of dynamic code, and providing the groundwork for Java 8’s lambda executions. Many of these improvements are discussed at the JVM Language Summit, where language and tool designers get together to discuss experiences and issues related to building these complex components. There are a number of benefits to running JavaScript applications on JDK 8’s Nashorn technology beyond writing scripts quickly: Interoperability with Java and JavaScript libraries. Scripts do not need to be compiled. Fast execution and multi-threading of JavaScript running in Java’s JRE. The ability to remotely debug applications using an IDE like NetBeans, Eclipse, or IntelliJ (instructions on the Nashorn blog). Automatic integration with Java monitoring tools, such as performance, health, and SIEM. In the remainder of this blog post, I will explain how to use Nashorn and the benefit from those features. Nashorn execution environment The Nashorn scripting engine is included in all versions of Java SE 8, both the JDK and the JRE. Unlike Java code, scripts written in nashorn are interpreted and do not need to be compiled before execution. Developers and users can access it in two ways: Users running JavaScript applications can call the binary directly:jre8/bin/jjs This mechanism can also be used in shell scripts by specifying a shebang like #!/usr/bin/jjs Developers can use the API and obtain a ScriptEngine through:ScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngineManager().getEngineByName("nashorn"); When using a ScriptEngine, please understand that they execute code. Avoid running untrusted scripts or passing in untrusted/unvalidated inputs. During compilation, consider isolating access to the ScriptEngine and using Type Annotations to only allow @Untainted String arguments. One noteworthy difference between JavaScript executed in or outside of a web browser is that certain objects will not be available. For example when run outside a browser, there is no access to a document object or DOM tree. Other than that, all syntax, semantics, and capabilities are present. Examples of Java and JavaScript The Nashorn script engine allows developers of all experience levels the ability to write and run code that takes advantage of both languages. The specific dialect is ECMAScript 5.1 as identified by the User Guide and its standards definition through ECMA international. In addition to the example below, Benjamin Winterberg has a very well written Java 8 Nashorn Tutorial that provides a large number of code samples in both languages. Basic Operations A basic Hello World application written to run on Nashorn would look like this: #!/usr/bin/jjs print("Hello World"); The first line is a standard script indication, so that Linux or Unix systems can run the script through Nashorn. On Windows where scripts are not as common, you would run the script like: jjs helloWorld.js. Receiving Arguments In order to receive program arguments your jjs invocation needs to use the -scripting flag and a double-dash to separate which arguments are for jjs and which are for the script itself:jjs -scripting print.js -- "This will print" #!/usr/bin/jjs var whatYouSaid = $ARG.length==0 ? "You did not say anything" : $ARG[0] print(whatYouSaid); Interoperability with Java libraries (including 3rd party dependencies) Another goal of Nashorn was to allow for quick scriptable prototypes, allowing access into Java types and any libraries. Resources operate in the context of the script (either in-line with the script or as separate threads) so if you open network sockets and your script terminates, those sockets will be released and available for your next run. Your code can access Java types the same as regular Java classes. The “import statements” are written somewhat differently to accommodate for language. There is a choice of two styles: For standard classes, just name the class: var ServerSocket = java.net.ServerSocket For arrays or other items, use Java.type: var ByteArray = Java.type("byte[]")You could technically do this for all. The same technique will allow your script to use Java types from any library or 3rd party component and quickly prototype items. Building a user interface One major difference between JavaScript inside and outside of a web browser is the availability of a DOM object for rendering views. When run outside of the browser, JavaScript has full control to construct the entire user interface with pre-fabricated UI controls, charts, or components. The example below is a variation from the Nashorn and JavaFX guide to show how items work together. Nashorn has a -fx flag to make the user interface components available. With the example script below, just specify: jjs -fx -scripting fx.js -- "My title" #!/usr/bin/jjs -fx var Button = javafx.scene.control.Button; var StackPane = javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; var Scene = javafx.scene.Scene; var clickCounter=0; $STAGE.title = $ARG.length>0 ? $ARG[0] : "You didn't provide a title"; var button = new Button(); button.text = "Say 'Hello World'"; button.onAction = myFunctionForButtonClicking; var root = new StackPane(); root.children.add(button); $STAGE.scene = new Scene(root, 300, 250); $STAGE.show(); function myFunctionForButtonClicking(){   var text = "Click Counter: " + clickCounter;   button.setText(text);   clickCounter++;   print(text); } For a more advanced post on using Nashorn to build a high-performing UI, see JavaFX with Nashorn Canvas example. Interoperable with frameworks like Node, Backbone, or Facebook React The major benefit of any language is the interoperability gained by people and systems that can read, write, and use it for interactions. Because Nashorn is built for the ECMAScript specification, developers familiar with JavaScript frameworks can write their code and then have system administrators deploy and monitor the applications the same as any other Java application. A number of projects are also running Node applications on Nashorn through Project Avatar and the supported modules. In addition to the previously mentioned Nashorn tutorial, Benjamin has also written a post about Using Backbone.js with Nashorn. To show the multi-language power of the Java Runtime, there is another interesting example that unites Facebook React and Clojure on JDK 8’s Nashorn. Summary Nashorn provides a simple and fast way of executing JavaScript applications and bridging between the best of each language. By making the full range of Java libraries to JavaScript applications, and the quick prototyping style of JavaScript to Java applications, developers are free to work as they see fit. Software Architects and System Administrators can take advantage of one runtime and leverage any work that they have done to tune, monitor, and certify their systems. Additional information is available within: The Nashorn Users’ Guide Java Magazine’s article "Next Generation JavaScript Engine for the JVM." The Nashorn team’s primary blog or a very helpful collection of Nashorn links.

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• tile_static, tile_barrier, and tiled matrix multiplication with C++ AMP

  - by Daniel Moth

  We ended the previous post with a mechanical transformation of the C++ AMP matrix multiplication example to the tiled model and in the process introduced tiled_index and tiled_grid. This is part 2. tile_static memory You all know that in regular CPU code, static variables have the same value regardless of which thread accesses the static variable. This is in contrast with non-static local variables, where each thread has its own copy. Back to C++ AMP, the same rules apply and each thread has its own value for local variables in your lambda, whereas all threads see the same global memory, which is the data they have access to via the array and array_view. In addition, on an accelerator like the GPU, there is a programmable cache, a third kind of memory type if you'd like to think of it that way (some call it shared memory, others call it scratchpad memory). Variables stored in that memory share the same value for every thread in the same tile. So, when you use the tiled model, you can have variables where each thread in the same tile sees the same value for that variable, that threads from other tiles do not. The new storage class for local variables introduced for this purpose is called tile_static. You can only use tile_static in restrict(direct3d) functions, and only when explicitly using the tiled model. What this looks like in code should be no surprise, but here is a snippet to confirm your mental image, using a good old regular C array // each tile of threads has its own copy of locA, // shared among the threads of the tile tile_static float locA[16][16]; Note that tile_static variables are scoped and have the lifetime of the tile, and they cannot have constructors or destructors. tile_barrier In amp.h one of the types introduced is tile_barrier. You cannot construct this object yourself (although if you had one, you could use a copy constructor to create another one). So how do you get one of these? You get it, from a tiled_index object. Beyond the 4 properties returning index objects, tiled_index has another property, barrier, that returns a tile_barrier object. The tile_barrier class exposes a single member, the method wait. 15: // Given a tiled_index object named t_idx 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: // more code …in the code above, all threads in the tile will reach line 16 before a single one progresses to line 17. Note that all threads must be able to reach the barrier, i.e. if you had branchy code in such a way which meant that there is a chance that not all threads could reach line 16, then the code above would be illegal. Tiled Matrix Multiplication Example – part 2 So now that we added to our understanding the concepts of tile_static and tile_barrier, let me obfuscate rewrite the matrix multiplication code so that it takes advantage of tiling. Before you start reading this, I suggest you get a cup of your favorite non-alcoholic beverage to enjoy while you try to fully understand the code. 01: void MatrixMultiplyTiled(vector<float>& vC, const vector<float>& vA, const vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 02: { 03: static const int TS = 16; 04: array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 05: array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 06: array_view<writeonly<float>,2> c(M,N,vC); 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid.tile< TS, TS >(), 08: [=] (tiled_index< TS, TS> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) 09: { 10: int row = t_idx.local[0]; int col = t_idx.local[1]; 11: float sum = 0.0f; 12: for (int i = 0; i < W; i += TS) { 13: tile_static float locA[TS][TS], locB[TS][TS]; 14: locA[row][col] = a(t_idx.global[0], col + i); 15: locB[row][col] = b(row + i, t_idx.global[1]); 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: for (int k = 0; k < TS; k++) 18: sum += locA[row][k] * locB[k][col]; 19: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 20: } 21: c[t_idx.global] = sum; 22: }); 23: } Notice that all the code up to line 9 is the same as per the changes we made in part 1 of tiling introduction. If you squint, the body of the lambda itself preserves the original algorithm on lines 10, 11, and 17, 18, and 21. The difference being that those lines use new indexing and the tile_static arrays; the tile_static arrays are declared and initialized on the brand new lines 13-15. On those lines we copy from the global memory represented by the array_view objects (a and b), to the tile_static vanilla arrays (locA and locB) – we are copying enough to fit a tile. Because in the code that follows on line 18 we expect the data for this tile to be in the tile_static storage, we need to synchronize the threads within each tile with a barrier, which we do on line 16 (to avoid accessing uninitialized memory on line 18). We also need to synchronize the threads within a tile on line 19, again to avoid the race between lines 14, 15 (retrieving the next set of data for each tile and overwriting the previous set) and line 18 (not being done processing the previous set of data). Luckily, as part of the awesome C++ AMP debugger in Visual Studio there is an option that helps you find such races, but that is a story for another blog post another time. May I suggest reading the next section, and then coming back to re-read and walk through this code with pen and paper to really grok what is going on, if you haven't already? Cool. Why would I introduce this tiling complexity into my code? Funny you should ask that, I was just about to tell you. There is only one reason we tiled our extent, had to deal with finding a good tile size, ensure the number of threads we schedule are correctly divisible with the tile size, had to use a tiled_index instead of a normal index, and had to understand tile_barrier and to figure out where we need to use it, and double the size of our lambda in terms of lines of code: the reason is to be able to use tile_static memory. Why do we want to use tile_static memory? Because accessing tile_static memory is around 10 times faster than accessing the global memory on an accelerator like the GPU, e.g. in the code above, if you can get 150GB/second accessing data from the array_view a, you can get 1500GB/second accessing the tile_static array locA. And since by definition you are dealing with really large data sets, the savings really pay off. We have seen tiled implementations being twice as fast as their non-tiled counterparts. Now, some algorithms will not have performance benefits from tiling (and in fact may deteriorate), e.g. algorithms that require you to go only once to global memory will not benefit from tiling, since with tiling you already have to fetch the data once from global memory! Other algorithms may benefit, but you may decide that you are happy with your code being 150 times faster than the serial-version you had, and you do not need to invest to make it 250 times faster. Also algorithms with more than 3 dimensions, which C++ AMP supports in the non-tiled model, cannot be tiled. Also note that in future releases, we may invest in making the non-tiled model, which already uses tiling under the covers, go the extra step and use tile_static memory on your behalf, but it is obviously way to early to commit to anything like that, and we certainly don't do any of that today. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Grow Your Business with Security

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Author: Kevin Moulton Kevin Moulton has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East EnterpriseSecurity Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. It happened again! There I was, reading something interesting online, and realizing that a friend might find it interesting too. I clicked on the little email link, thinking that I could easily forward this to my friend, but no! Instead, a new screen popped up where I was asked to create an account. I was expected to create a User ID and password, not to mention providing some personally identifiable information, just for the privilege of helping that website spread their word. Of course, I didn’t want to have to remember a new account and password, I didn’t want to provide the requisite information, and I didn’t want to waste my time. I gave up, closed the web page, and moved on to something else. I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, and my friend might never find her way to this interesting website. If you were this content provider, would this be the outcome you were looking for? A few days later, I had a similar experience, but this one went a little differently. I was surfing the web, when I happened upon some little chotcke that I just had to have. I added it to my cart. When I went to buy the item, I was again brought to a page to create account. Groan! But wait! On this page, I also had the option to sign in with my OpenID account, my Facebook account, my Yahoo account, or my Google Account. I have all of those! No new account to create, no new password to remember, and no personally identifiable information to be given to someone else (I’ve already given it all to those other guys, after all). In this case, the vendor was easy to deal with, and I happily completed the transaction. That pleasant experience will bring me back again. This is where security can grow your business. It’s a differentiator. You’ve got to have a presence on the web, and that presence has to take into account all the smart phones everyone’s carrying, and the tablets that took over cyber Monday this year. If you are a company that a customer can deal with securely, and do so easily, then you are a company customers will come back to again and again. I recently had a need to open a new bank account. Every bank has a web presence now, but they are certainly not all the same. I wanted one that I could deal with easily using my laptop, but I also wanted 2-factor authentication in case I had to login from a shared machine, and I wanted an app for my iPad. I found a bank with all three, and that’s who I am doing business with. Let’s say, for example, that I’m in a regular Texas Hold-em game on Friday nights, so I move a couple of hundred bucks from checking to savings on Friday afternoons. I move a similar amount each week and I do it from the same machine. The bank trusts me, and they trust my machine. Most importantly, they trust my behavior. This is adaptive authentication. There should be no reason for my bank to make this transaction difficult for me. Now let's say that I login from a Starbucks in Uzbekistan, and I transfer $2,500. What should my bank do now? Should they stop the transaction? Should they call my home number? (My former bank did exactly this once when I was taking money out of an ATM on a business trip, when I had provided my cell phone number as my primary contact. When I asked them why they called my home number rather than my cell, they told me that their “policy” is to call the home number. If I'm on the road, what exactly is the use of trying to reach me at home to verify my transaction?) But, back to Uzbekistan… Should my bank assume that I am happily at home in New Jersey, and someone is trying to hack into my account? Perhaps they think they are protecting me, but I wouldn’t be very happy if I happened to be traveling on business in Central Asia. What if my bank were to automatically analyze my behavior and calculate a risk score? Clearly, this scenario would be outside of my typical behavior, so my risk score would necessitate something more than a simple login and password. Perhaps, in this case, a one-time password to my cell phone would prove that this is not just some hacker half way around the world. But, what if you're not a bank? Do you need this level of security? If you want to be a business that is easy to deal with while also protecting your customers, then of course you do. You want your customers to trust you, but you also want them to enjoy doing business with you. Make it easy for them to do business with you, and they’ll come back, and perhaps even Tweet about it, or Like you, and then their friends will follow. How can Oracle help? Oracle has the technology and expertise to help you to grown your business with security. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager will help you to prevent fraud while making it easier for your customers to do business with you by providing the risk analysis I discussed above, step-up authentication, and much more. Oracle Mobile and Social Access Service will help you to secure mobile access to applications by expanding on your existing back-end identity management infrastructure, and allowing your customers to transact business with you using the social media accounts they already know. You also have device fingerprinting and metrics to help you to grow your business securely. Security is not just a cost anymore. It’s a way to set your business apart. With Oracle’s help, you can be the business that everyone’s tweeting about. Image courtesy of Flickr user shareski

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• Big Visible Charts

  - by Robert May

  An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow charts. I’ve included a copy of the spreadsheet that I used to create the charts, and if you don’t have a tool that creates them for you, you can use this spreadsheet to do so. Our preferred tool for managing Scrum projects is Rally. Rally creates all of these charts for you, saving you quite a bit of time. The Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow Charts This is the main chart that teams use. Although less useful to stakeholders, this chart is critical to the team and provides quite a bit of information to the team about how their iteration is going. Most charts are a combination of the charts below, so you may need to combine aspects of each section to understand what is happening in your iterations. Ideal Ah, isn’t that a pretty picture? Unfortunately, it’s also very unrealistic. I’ve seen iterations that come close to ideal, but never that match perfectly. If your iteration matches perfectly, chances are, someone is playing with the numbers. Reality is just too difficult to have a burndown chart that matches this exactly. Late Planning Iteration started, but the team didn’t. You can tell this by the fact that the real number of estimated hours didn’t appear until day two. In the cumulative flow, you can also see that nothing was defined in Day one and two. You want to avoid situations like this. You’ll note that the team had to burn faster than is ideal to meet the iteration because of the late planning. This often results in long weeks and days. Testing Starved Determining whether or not testing is starved is difficult without the cumulative flow. The pattern in the burndown could be nothing more that developers not completing stories early enough or could be caused by stories being too big. With the cumulative flow, however, you see that only small bites are in progress and stories were completed early, but testing didn’t start testing until the end of the iteration, and didn’t complete testing all stories in the iteration. When this happens, question whether or not your testing resources are sufficient for your team and whether or not acceptance is adequately defined. No Testing With this one, both graphs show the same thing; the team needs testers and testing! Without testing, what was completed cannot be verified to make sure that it is acceptable to the business. If you find yourself in this situation, review your testing practices and acceptance testing process and make changes today. Late Development With this situation, both graphs tell a story. In the top graph, you can see that the hours failed to burn down as quickly as the team expected. This could be caused by the team not correctly estimating their hours or the team could have had illness or some other issue that affected them. Often, when teams are tackling something that is more unknown, they’ll run into technical barriers that cause the burn down to happen slower than expected. In the cumulative flow graph, you can see that not much was completed in the first few days. This could be because of illness or technical barriers or simply poor estimation. Testing was able to keep up with everything that was completed, however. No Tool Updating When you see graphs that look like this, you can be assured that it’s because the team is not updating the tool that generates the graphs. Review your policy for when they are to update. On the teams that I run, I require that each team member updates the tool at least once daily. You should also check to see how well the team is breaking down stories into tasks. If they’re creating few large tasks, graphs can look similar to this. As a general rule, I never allow tasks, other than Unit Testing and Uncertainty, to be greater than eight hours in duration. Scope Increase I always encourage team members to enter in however much time they think they have left on a task, even if that means increasing the total amount of time left to do. You get a much better and more realistic picture this way. Increasing time remaining could explain the burndown graph, but by looking at the cumulative flow graph, we can see that stories were added to the iteration and scope was increased. Since planning should consume all of the hours in the iteration, this is almost always a bad thing. If the scope change happened late in the iteration and the hours remaining were well below the ideal burn, then increasing scope is probably o.k., but estimation needs to get better. However, with the charts above, that’s clearly not what happened and the team was required to do extra work to make the iteration. If you find this happening, your product owner and ScrumMasters need training. The team also needs to learn to say no. Scope Decrease Scope decreases are just as bad as scope increases. Usually, graphs above show that the team did a poor job of estimating their stories and part way through had to reduce scope to change the iteration. This will happen once in a while, but if you find it’s a pattern on your team, you need to re-evaluate planning. Some teams are hopelessly optimistic. In those cases, I’ll introduce a task I call “Uncertainty.” With Uncertainty, the team estimates how many hours they might need if things don’t go well with the tasks they’ve defined. They try to estimate things that could go poorly and increase the time appropriately. Having an Uncertainty task allows them to have a low and high estimate. Uncertainty should not just be an arbitrary buffer. It must correlate to real uncertainty in the tasks that have been defined. Stories are too Big Often, we see graphs like the ones above. Note that the burndown looks fairly good, other than the chunky acceptance of stories. However, when you look at cumulative flow, you can see that at one point, everything is in progress. This is a bad thing. When you see graphs like this, you’re in one of two states. You may just have a very small team and can only handle one or two stories in your iteration. If you have more than one or two people, then the most likely problem is that your stories are far too big. To combat this, break large high hour stories into smaller pieces that can be completed independently and accepted independently. If you don’t, you’ll likely be requiring your testers to do heroic things to complete testing on the last day of the iteration and you’re much more likely to have the entire iteration fail, because of the limited amount of things that can be completed. Summary There are other charts that can be useful when doing scrum. If you don’t have any big visible charts, you really need to evaluate your process and change. These charts can provide the team a wealth of information and help you write better software. If you have any questions about charts that you’re seeing on your team, contact me with a screen capture of the charts and I’ll tell you what I’m seeing in those charts. I always want this information to be useful, so please let me know if you have other questions. Technorati Tags: Agile

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• BRE (Business Rules Engine) Data Services is out...!!!

  - by Vishal

  A few months ago we at Tellago had open sourced the BizTalk Data Services. We were meanwhile working on other artifacts which comes along with BizTalk Server like the “Business Rules Engine”.  We are happy to announce the first version of BRE Data Services. BRE Data Services is a same concept which we covered through BTS Data Services, providing a RESTFul OData – based API to interact with the Business Rules Engine via HTTP using ATOM Publishing Protocol or JSON as the encoding mechanism.   In the first version release, we mainly focused on the browsing, querying and searching BRE artifacts via a RESTFul interface. Also along with that we provide the functionality to execute Business Rules by inserting the Facts for policies via the IUpdatable implementation of WCF Data Services.   The BRE Data Services API provides a lightweight interface for managing Business Rules Engine artifacts such as Policies, Rules, Vocabularies, Conditions, Actions, Facts etc. The following are some examples which details some of the available features in the current version of the API.   Basic Querying: Querying BRE Policies http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies Querying BRE Rules http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules Querying BRE Vocabularies http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Vocabularies   Navigation: The BRE Data Services API also leverages WCF Data Services to enable navigation across related different BRE objects. Querying a specific Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies(‘PolicyName’) Querying a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules(‘RuleName’) Querying all Rules under a Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies('PolicyName')/Rules Querying all Facts under a Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies('PolicyName')/Facts Querying all Actions for a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules('RuleName')/Actions Querying all Conditions for a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules('RuleName')/Actions Querying a specific Vocabulary: http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Vocabularies('VocabName')   Implementation: With the BRE Data Services, we also provide the functionality of executing a particular policy via HTTP. There are couple of ways you can do that though the API.   Ø First is though Service Operations feature of WCF Data Services in which you can execute the Facts by passing them in the URL itself. This is a very simple implementations of the executing the policies due to the limitations & restrictions (only primitive types of input parameters which can be passed) currently of the Service Operations of the WCF Data Services. Below is a code sample.                Below is a traced Request/Response message.                                 Ø Second is through the IUpdatable Interface of WCF Data Services. In this method, you can first query the rule which you want to execute and then inserts Facts for that particular Rules and finally when you perform the SaveChanges() call for the IUpdatable Interface API, it executes the policy with the facts which you inserted at runtime. Below is a sample of client side code. Due to the limitations of current version of WCF Data Services where there is no way you can return back the updates happening on the service side back to the client via the SaveChanges() method. Here we are executing the rule passing a serialized XML as Facts and there is no changes made to any data where we can query back to fetch the changes. This is overcome though the first way to executing the policies which is by executing it as a Service Operation call.     This actually generates a AtomPub message shown as below:   POST /Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/$batch HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services DataServiceVersion: 1.0;NetFx MaxDataServiceVersion: 2.0;NetFx Accept: application/atom+xml,application/xml Accept-Charset: UTF-8 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7 Host: localhost:8080 Content-Length: 1481 Expect: 100-continue   --batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf   --changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf Content-Type: application/http Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary   MERGE http://localhost:8080/Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/Facts('TestPolicy') HTTP/1.1 Content-ID: 4 Content-Type: application/atom+xml;type=entry Content-Length: 927   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> <entry xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" font-size: x-small"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">   <category scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" term="Tellago.BRE.REST.Resources.Fact" />   <title />   <author>     <name />   </author>   <updated>2011-01-31T20:09:15.0023982Z</updated>   <id>http://localhost:8080/Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/Facts('TestPolicy')</id>   <content type="application/xml">     <m:properties>       <d:FactInstance>&lt;ns0:LoanStatus xmlns:ns0="http://tellago.com"&gt;&lt;Age&gt;10&lt;/Age&gt;&lt;Status&gt;true&lt;/Status&gt;&lt;/ns0:LoanStatus&gt;</d:FactInstance>       <d:FactType>TestSchema</d:FactType>       <d:ID>TestPolicy</d:ID>     </m:properties>   </content> </entry> --changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf-- --batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7—     Installation: The installation of the BRE Data Services is pretty straight forward. ·         Create a new IIS website say BREDataServices. ·         Download the SourceCode from TellagoCodeplex and copy the content from Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost to the physical location of the above created website.     ·         The appPool account running the website should have admin access to the BizTalkRuleEngineDb database. ·         TheRight click the BREManagementService.svc in the IIS ContentView for the website and wala..     Conclusion: The BRE Data Services API is an experiment intended to bring the capabilities of RESTful/OData based services to the Traditional BTS/BRE Solutions. The future releases will target on technologies like BAM, ESB Toolkit. This version has been tested with various version of BizTalk Server and we have uploaded the source code to our Tellago's DevLabs workspace at Codeplex. I hope you guys enjoy this release. Keep an eye on our new releases @ Tellago Codeplex. We are working on various other Biztalk Artifacts like BAM, ESB Toolkit.     Till than happy BizzRuling…!!!     Thanks,   Vishal Mody

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• The Sensemaking Spectrum for Business Analytics: Translating from Data to Business Through Analysis

  - by Joe Lamantia

  One of the most compelling outcomes of our strategic research efforts over the past several years is a growing vocabulary that articulates our cumulative understanding of the deep structure of the domains of discovery and business analytics. Modes are one example of the deep structure we’ve found.  After looking at discovery activities across a very wide range of industries, question types, business needs, and problem solving approaches, we've identified distinct and recurring kinds of sensemaking activity, independent of context.  We label these activities Modes: Explore, compare, and comprehend are three of the nine recognizable modes.  Modes describe *how* people go about realizing insights.  (Read more about the programmatic research and formal academic grounding and discussion of the modes here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971352_A_Taxonomy_of_Enterprise_Search_and_Discovery) By analogy to languages, modes are the 'verbs' of discovery activity.  When applied to the practical questions of product strategy and development, the modes of discovery allow one to identify what kinds of analytical activity a product, platform, or solution needs to support across a spread of usage scenarios, and then make concrete and well-informed decisions about every aspect of the solution, from high-level capabilities, to which specific types of information visualizations better enable these scenarios for the types of data users will analyze. The modes are a powerful generative tool for product making, but if you've spent time with young children, or had a really bad hangover (or both at the same time...), you understand the difficult of communicating using only verbs.  So I'm happy to share that we've found traction on another facet of the deep structure of discovery and business analytics.  Continuing the language analogy, we've identified some of the ‘nouns’ in the language of discovery: specifically, the consistently recurring aspects of a business that people are looking for insight into.  We call these discovery Subjects, since they identify *what* people focus on during discovery efforts, rather than *how* they go about discovery as with the Modes. Defining the collection of Subjects people repeatedly focus on allows us to understand and articulate sense making needs and activity in more specific, consistent, and complete fashion.  In combination with the Modes, we can use Subjects to concretely identify and define scenarios that describe people’s analytical needs and goals.  For example, a scenario such as ‘Explore [a Mode] the attrition rates [a Measure, one type of Subject] of our largest customers [Entities, another type of Subject] clearly captures the nature of the activity — exploration of trends vs. deep analysis of underlying factors — and the central focus — attrition rates for customers above a certain set of size criteria — from which follow many of the specifics needed to address this scenario in terms of data, analytical tools, and methods. We can also use Subjects to translate effectively between the different perspectives that shape discovery efforts, reducing ambiguity and increasing impact on both sides the perspective divide.  For example, from the language of business, which often motivates analytical work by asking questions in business terms, to the perspective of analysis.  The question posed to a Data Scientist or analyst may be something like “Why are sales of our new kinds of potato chips to our largest customers fluctuating unexpectedly this year?” or “Where can innovate, by expanding our product portfolio to meet unmet needs?”.  Analysts translate questions and beliefs like these into one or more empirical discovery efforts that more formally and granularly indicate the plan, methods, tools, and desired outcomes of analysis.  From the perspective of analysis this second question might become, “Which customer needs of type ‘A', identified and measured in terms of ‘B’, that are not directly or indirectly addressed by any of our current products, offer 'X' potential for ‘Y' positive return on the investment ‘Z' required to launch a new offering, in time frame ‘W’?  And how do these compare to each other?”.  Translation also happens from the perspective of analysis to the perspective of data; in terms of availability, quality, completeness, format, volume, etc. By implication, we are proposing that most working organizations — small and large, for profit and non-profit, domestic and international, and in the majority of industries — can be described for analytical purposes using this collection of Subjects.  This is a bold claim, but simplified articulation of complexity is one of the primary goals of sensemaking frameworks such as this one.  (And, yes, this is in fact a framework for making sense of sensemaking as a category of activity - but we’re not considering the recursive aspects of this exercise at the moment.) Compellingly, we can place the collection of subjects on a single continuum — we call it the Sensemaking Spectrum — that simply and coherently illustrates some of the most important relationships between the different types of Subjects, and also illuminates several of the fundamental dynamics shaping business analytics as a domain.  As a corollary, the Sensemaking Spectrum also suggests innovation opportunities for products and services related to business analytics. The first illustration below shows Subjects arrayed along the Sensemaking Spectrum; the second illustration presents examples of each kind of Subject.  Subjects appear in colors ranging from blue to reddish-orange, reflecting their place along the Spectrum, which indicates whether a Subject addresses more the viewpoint of systems and data (Data centric and blue), or people (User centric and orange).  This axis is shown explicitly above the Spectrum.  Annotations suggest how Subjects align with the three significant perspectives of Data, Analysis, and Business that shape business analytics activity.  This rendering makes explicit the translation and bridging function of Analysts as a role, and analysis as an activity. Subjects are best understood as fuzzy categories [http://georgelakoff.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hedges-a-study-in-meaning-criteria-and-the-logic-of-fuzzy-concepts-journal-of-philosophical-logic-2-lakoff-19731.pdf], rather than tightly defined buckets.  For each Subject, we suggest some of the most common examples: Entities may be physical things such as named products, or locations (a building, or a city); they could be Concepts, such as satisfaction; or they could be Relationships between entities, such as the variety of possible connections that define linkage in social networks.  Likewise, Events may indicate a time and place in the dictionary sense; or they may be Transactions involving named entities; or take the form of Signals, such as ‘some Measure had some value at some time’ - what many enterprises understand as alerts.   The central story of the Spectrum is that though consumers of analytical insights (represented here by the Business perspective) need to work in terms of Subjects that are directly meaningful to their perspective — such as Themes, Plans, and Goals — the working realities of data (condition, structure, availability, completeness, cost) and the changing nature of most discovery efforts make direct engagement with source data in this fashion impossible.  Accordingly, business analytics as a domain is structured around the fundamental assumption that sense making depends on analytical transformation of data.  Analytical activity incrementally synthesizes more complex and larger scope Subjects from data in its starting condition, accumulating insight (and value) by moving through a progression of stages in which increasingly meaningful Subjects are iteratively synthesized from the data, and recombined with other Subjects.  The end goal of  ‘laddering’ successive transformations is to enable sense making from the business perspective, rather than the analytical perspective.Synthesis through laddering is typically accomplished by specialized Analysts using dedicated tools and methods. Beginning with some motivating question such as seeking opportunities to increase the efficiency (a Theme) of fulfillment processes to reach some level of profitability by the end of the year (Plan), Analysts will iteratively wrangle and transform source data Records, Values and Attributes into recognizable Entities, such as Products, that can be combined with Measures or other data into the Events (shipment of orders) that indicate the workings of the business.  More complex Subjects (to the right of the Spectrum) are composed of or make reference to less complex Subjects: a business Process such as Fulfillment will include Activities such as confirming, packing, and then shipping orders.  These Activities occur within or are conducted by organizational units such as teams of staff or partner firms (Networks), composed of Entities which are structured via Relationships, such as supplier and buyer.  The fulfillment process will involve other types of Entities, such as the products or services the business provides.  The success of the fulfillment process overall may be judged according to a sophisticated operating efficiency Model, which includes tiered Measures of business activity and health for the transactions and activities included.  All of this may be interpreted through an understanding of the operational domain of the businesses supply chain (a Domain).   We'll discuss the Spectrum in more depth in succeeding posts.

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• Open GL stars are not rendering

  - by Darestium

  I doing Nehe's Open GL Lesson 9. I'm using SFML for windowing, the strange thing is no stars are rendering. #include <SFML/System.hpp> #include <SFML/Window.hpp> #include <SFML/Graphics.hpp> #include <iostream> void processEvents(sf::Window *app); void processInput(sf::Window *app); void renderGlScene(sf::Window *app); void init(); int loadResources(); const int NUM_OF_STARS = 50; float triRot = 0.0f; float quadRot = 0.0f; bool twinkle = false; bool tKey = false; float zoom = 15.0f; float tilt = 90.0f; float spin = 0.0f; unsigned int loop; unsigned int texture_handle[1]; typedef struct { int r, g, b; float distance; float angle; } stars; stars star[NUM_OF_STARS]; int main() { sf::Window app(sf::VideoMode(800, 600, 32), "Nehe Lesson 9"); app.UseVerticalSync(false); init(); if (loadResources() == -1) { return EXIT_FAILURE; } while (app.IsOpened()) { processEvents(&app); processInput(&app); renderGlScene(&app); app.Display(); } return EXIT_SUCCESS; } int loadResources() { sf::Image img_data; // Load Texture if (!img_data.LoadFromFile("data/images/star.bmp")) { std::cout << "Could not load data/images/star.bmp"; return -1; } // Generate 1 texture glGenTextures(1, &texture_handle[0]); // Linear filtering glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_handle[0]); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, img_data.GetWidth(), img_data.GetHeight(), 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, img_data.GetPixelsPtr()); return 0; } void processInput(sf::Window *app) { const sf::Input& input = app->GetInput(); if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::T) && !tKey) { tKey = true; twinkle = !twinkle; } if (!input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::T)) { tKey = false; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Up)) { tilt -= 0.05f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Down)) { tilt += 0.05f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::PageUp)) { zoom -= 0.02f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Up)) { zoom += 0.02f; } } void init() { glClearDepth(1.f); glClearColor(0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f); // Enable texturing glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); //glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); // Setup a perpective projection glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); gluPerspective(45.f, 1.f, 1.f, 500.f); glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE); glEnable(GL_BLEND); for (loop = 0; loop < NUM_OF_STARS; loop++) { star[loop].distance = (float)loop / NUM_OF_STARS * 5.0f; // Calculate distance from the centre // Give stars random rgb value star[loop].r = rand() % 256; star[loop].g = rand() % 256; star[loop].b = rand() % 256; } } void processEvents(sf::Window *app) { sf::Event event; while (app->GetEvent(event)) { if (event.Type == sf::Event::Closed) { app->Close(); } if (event.Type == sf::Event::KeyPressed && event.Key.Code == sf::Key::Escape) { app->Close(); } } } void renderGlScene(sf::Window *app) { app->SetActive(); // Clear color depth buffer glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // Apply some transformations glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // Select texture glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_handle[0]); for (loop = 0; loop < NUM_OF_STARS; loop++) { glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The View Before We Draw Each Star glTranslatef(0.0f, 0.0f, zoom); // Zoom Into The Screen (Using The Value In 'zoom') glRotatef(tilt, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Tilt The View (Using The Value In 'tilt') glRotatef(star[loop].angle, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Rotate To The Current Stars Angle glTranslatef(star[loop].distance, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Move Forward On The X Plane glRotatef(-star[loop].angle,0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Cancel The Current Stars Angle glRotatef(-tilt,1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Cancel The Screen Tilt if (twinkle) { glColor4ub(star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop) - 1].r, star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop)-1].g, star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop) - 1].b, 255); glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Begin Drawing The Textured Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glEnd(); // Done Drawing The Textured Quad } glRotatef(spin,0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Rotate The Star On The Z Axis // Assign A Color Using Bytes glColor4ub(star[loop].r, star[loop].g, star[loop].b, 255); glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Begin Drawing The Textured Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glEnd(); // Done Drawing The Textured Quad spin += 0.01f; // Used To Spin The Stars star[loop].angle += (float)loop / NUM_OF_STARS; // Changes The Angle Of A Star star[loop].distance -= 0.01f; // Changes The Distance Of A Star if (star[loop].distance < 0.0f) { star[loop].distance += 5.0f; // Move The Star 5 Units From The Center star[loop].r = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Red Value star[loop].g = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Green Value star[loop].b = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Blue Value } } } I've looked over the code atleast 10 times now and I can't figure out the problem. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• How to access GNU Xnee

  - by Gaurav Butola

  I have installed GNU Xnee (Gnee an OS X automator alternative) from the Software Centre but now I cant find it anywhere in the menus. Here is the output when I run gnee in the terminal gaurav@gaurav-HCL-ME-Laptop:~$ gnee (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated (gnee:6864): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated *** glibc detected *** gnee: free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x08afb638 *** ======= Backtrace: ========= /lib/libc.so.6(+0x6c501)[0x53de501] /lib/libc.so.6(+0x6dd70)[0x53dfd70] /lib/libc.so.6(cfree+0x6d)[0x53e2e5d] gnee[0x804c9f5] /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe7)[0x5388ce7] gnee[0x804c571] ======= Memory map: ======== 00110000-00112000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755679 /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2600.0 00112000-00113000 r--p 00002000 08:01 2755679 /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2600.0 00113000-00114000 rw-p 00003000 08:01 2755679 /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2600.0 00116000-0011a000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755370 /usr/lib/libXtst.so.6.1.0 0011a000-0011b000 r--p 00003000 08:01 2755370 /usr/lib/libXtst.so.6.1.0 0011b000-0011c000 rw-p 00004000 08:01 2755370 /usr/lib/libXtst.so.6.1.0 0011c000-00176000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755432 /usr/lib/libbonoboui-2.so.0.0.0 00176000-00177000 r--p 00059000 08:01 2755432 /usr/lib/libbonoboui-2.so.0.0.0 00177000-00179000 rw-p 0005a000 08:01 2755432 /usr/lib/libbonoboui-2.so.0.0.0 00179000-001c8000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755428 /usr/lib/libbonobo-2.so.0.0.0 001c8000-001c9000 ---p 0004f000 08:01 2755428 /usr/lib/libbonobo-2.so.0.0.0 001c9000-001cc000 r--p 0004f000 08:01 2755428 /usr/lib/libbonobo-2.so.0.0.0 001cc000-001d3000 rw-p 00052000 08:01 2755428 /usr/lib/libbonobo-2.so.0.0.0 001d3000-00200000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2754521 /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4.1.5 00200000-00201000 ---p 0002d000 08:01 2754521 /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4.1.5 00201000-00202000 r--p 0002d000 08:01 2754521 /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4.1.5 00202000-00204000 rw-p 0002e000 08:01 2754521 /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4.1.5 00204000-0021c000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755405 /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0.3209.1 0021c000-0021d000 ---p 00018000 08:01 2755405 /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0.3209.1 0021d000-0021e000 r--p 00018000 08:01 2755405 /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0.3209.1 0021e000-0021f000 rw-p 00019000 08:01 2755405 /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0.3209.1 0021f000-00243000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2756035 /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0.2800.1 00243000-00244000 r--p 00023000 08:01 2756035 /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0.2800.1 00244000-00245000 rw-p 00024000 08:01 2756035 /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0.2800.1 00245000-00248000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 393403 /lib/libuuid.so.1.3.0 00248000-00249000 r--p 00002000 08:01 393403 /lib/libuuid.so.1.3.0 00249000-0024a000 rw-p 00003000 08:01 393403 /lib/libuuid.so.1.3.0 0024a000-0024c000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755415 /usr/lib/libavahi-glib.so.1.0.2 0024c000-0024d000 r--p 00001000 08:01 2755415 /usr/lib/libavahi-glib.so.1.0.2 0024d000-0024e000 rw-p 00002000 08:01 2755415 /usr/lib/libavahi-glib.so.1.0.2 0024e000-00250000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 393661 /lib/libutil-2.12.1.so 00250000-00251000 r--p 00001000 08:01 393661 /lib/libutil-2.12.1.so 00251000-00252000 rw-p 00002000 08:01 393661 /lib/libutil-2.12.1.so 00254000-00255000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0 [vdso] 00255000-0026c000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755647 /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0.2200.0 0026c000-0026d000 r--p 00017000 08:01 2755647 /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0.2200.0 0026d000-0026e000 rw-p 00018000 08:01 2755647 /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0.2200.0 0026e000-002ad000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2756031 /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0.2800.1 002ad000-002ae000 ---p 0003f000 08:01 2756031 /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0.2800.1 002ae000-002af000 r--p 0003f000 08:01 2756031 /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0.2800.1 002af000-002b0000 rw-p 00040000 08:01 2756031 /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0.2800.1 002b0000-002be000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755342 /usr/lib/libXext.so.6.4.0 002be000-002bf000 r--p 0000d000 08:01 2755342 /usr/lib/libXext.so.6.4.0 002bf000-002c0000 rw-p 0000e000 08:01 2755342 /usr/lib/libXext.so.6.4.0 002c0000-002c4000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755317 /usr/lib/libORBitCosNaming-2.so.0.1.0 002c4000-002c5000 r--p 00003000 08:01 2755317 /usr/lib/libORBitCosNaming-2.so.0.1.0 002c5000-002c6000 rw-p 00004000 08:01 2755317 /usr/lib/libORBitCosNaming-2.so.0.1.0 002c7000-002d9000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755430 /usr/lib/libbonobo-activation.so.4.0.0 002d9000-002da000 r--p 00012000 08:01 2755430 /usr/lib/libbonobo-activation.so.4.0.0 002da000-002db000 rw-p 00013000 08:01 2755430 /usr/lib/libbonobo-activation.so.4.0.0 002db000-002dc000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 002dc000-00370000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755645 /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0.2200.0 00370000-00372000 r--p 00094000 08:01 2755645 /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0.2200.0 00372000-00373000 rw-p 00096000 08:01 2755645 /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0.2200.0 00373000-0038d000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755689 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1 0038d000-0038e000 r--p 00019000 08:01 2755689 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1 0038e000-0038f000 rw-p 0001a000 08:01 2755689 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1 0038f000-00395000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755619 /usr/lib/libgailutil.so.18.0.1 00395000-00396000 r--p 00005000 08:01 2755619 /usr/lib/libgailutil.so.18.0.1 00396000-00397000 rw-p 00006000 08:01 2755619 /usr/lib/libgailutil.so.18.0.1 00397000-003ac000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755300 /usr/lib/libICE.so.6.3.0 003ac000-003ad000 r--p 00014000 08:01 2755300 /usr/lib/libICE.so.6.3.0 003ad000-003ae000 rw-p 00015000 08:01 2755300 /usr/lib/libICE.so.6.3.0 003ae000-003b0000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 003b0000-003f0000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755715 /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.2600.0 003f0000-003f1000 r--p 00040000 08:01 2755715 /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.2600.0 003f1000-003f2000 rw-p 00041000 08:01 2755715 /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.2600.0 003f2000-0040f000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755524 /usr/lib/libdbus-glib-1.so.2.1.0 0040f000-00410000 r--p 0001c000 08:01 2755524 /usr/lib/libdbus-glib-1.so.2.1.0 00410000-00411000 rw-p 0001d000 08:01 2755524 /usr/lib/libdbus-glib-1.so.2.1.0 00411000-00413000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755352 /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0 00413000-00414000 r--p 00001000 08:01 2755352 /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0 00414000-00415000 rw-p 00002000 08:01 2755352 /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0 00416000-0045f000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755313 /usr/lib/libORBit-2.so.0.1.0 0045f000-00467000 r--p 00049000 08:01 2755313 /usr/lib/libORBit-2.so.0.1.0 00467000-00469000 rw-p 00051000 08:01 2755313 /usr/lib/libORBit-2.so.0.1.0 00469000-00551000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2755661 /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0.2600.0 00551000-00553000 r--p 000e7000 08:01 2755661 /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0.2600.0 00553000-00554000 rw-p 000e9000 08:01 2755661 /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0.2600.0 00554000-00555000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 00555000-00578000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 393365 /lib/libpng12.so.0.44.0 00578000-00579000 r--p 00022000 08:01 393365 /lib/libpng12.so.0.44.0 00579000-0057a000 rw-p 00023000 08:01 393365 /lib/libpng12.so.0.44.0 0057d000-0057f000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 393656 /lib/libdl-2.12.1.so 0057f000-00580000 r--p 00001000 08:01 393656 /lib/libdl-2.12.1.soAborted

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• Pathfinding results in false path costs that are too high

  - by user2144536

  I'm trying to implement pathfinding in a game I'm programming using this method. I'm implementing it with recursion but some of the values after the immediate circle of tiles around the player are way off. For some reason I cannot find the problem with it. This is a screen cap of the problem: The pathfinding values are displayed in the center of every tile. Clipped blocks are displayed with the value of 'c' because the values were too high and were covering up the next value. The red circle is the first value that is incorrect. The code below is the recursive method. //tileX is the coordinates of the current tile, val is the current pathfinding value, used[][] is a boolean //array to keep track of which tiles' values have already been assigned public void pathFind(int tileX, int tileY, int val, boolean[][] used) { //increment pathfinding value int curVal = val + 1; //set current tile to true if it hasn't been already used[tileX][tileY] = true; //booleans to know which tiles the recursive call needs to be used on boolean topLeftUsed = false, topUsed = false, topRightUsed = false, leftUsed = false, rightUsed = false, botomLeftUsed = false, botomUsed = false, botomRightUsed = false; //set value of top left tile if necessary if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY - 1 >= 0) { //isClipped(int x, int y) returns true if the coordinates givin are in a tile that can't be walked through (IE walls) //occupied[][] is an array that keeps track of which tiles have an enemy in them // //if the tile is not clipped and not occupied set the pathfinding value if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = curVal; topLeftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = true; } //if it is occupied set it to an arbitrary high number so enemies find alternate routes if the best is clogged if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; //if it is clipped set it to an arbitrary higher number so enemies don't travel through walls if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //top middle if(tileY - 1 >= 0 ) { if(isClipped(tileX * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = curVal; topUsed = true; used[tileX][tileY - 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped(tileX * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //top right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY - 1 >= 0) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = curVal; topRightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //left if(tileX - 1 >= 0) { if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = curVal; leftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY] = true; } if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = 2000000000; } //right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = curVal; rightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = 2000000000; } //botom left if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomLeftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //botom middle if(tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomUsed = true; used[tileX][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //botom right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomRightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //call the method on the tiles that need it if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY - 1 >= 0 && topLeftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileY - 1 >= 0 && topUsed) pathFind(tileX , tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY - 1 >= 0 && topRightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && leftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && rightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY, curVal, used); if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomLeftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY + 1, curVal, used); if(tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomUsed) pathFind(tileX, tileY + 1, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomRightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY + 1, curVal, used); }

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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• Combining Shared Secret and Username Token – Azure Service Bus

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also flow through a username token so that in your listening WCF service you will be able to identify who sent the message. This could either be in the form of an application or a user depending on how you want to use your token. Prerequisites Before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our username token like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element. Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the username token bits in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use userNameAuthentication and you can see that I have created my own custom username token validator.   This setup means that WCF will hand off to my class for validating the username token details. I have also added the serviceSecurityAudit element to give me a simple auditing of access capability. My UsernamePassword Validator The below picture shows you the details of the username password validator class I have implemented. WCF will hand off to this class when validating the token and give me a nice way to check the token credentials against an on-premise store. You have all of the validation features with a non-service bus WCF implementation available such as validating the username password against active directory or ASP.net membership features or as in my case above something much simpler.   The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a username token over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding. Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the username token with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This is the normal configuration to use a shared secret for accessing a Service Bus endpoint.   Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF service but this time we have also set the ClientCredentials to use the appropriate username and password which will be flown through the service bus and to our service which will validate them.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and username token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.zip

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• Checking who is connected to your server, with PowerShell.

  - by Fatherjack

  There are many occasions when, as a DBA, you want to see who is connected to your SQL Server, along with how they are connecting and what sort of activities they are carrying out. I’m going to look at a couple of ways of getting this information and compare the effort required and the results achieved of each. SQL Server comes with a couple of stored procedures to help with this sort of task – sp_who and its undocumented counterpart sp_who2. There is also the pumped up version of these called sp_whoisactive, written by Adam Machanic which does way more than these procedures. I wholly recommend you try it out if you don’t already know how it works. When it comes to serious interrogation of your SQL Server activity then it is absolutely indispensable. Anyway, back to the point of this blog, we are going to look at getting the information from sp_who2 for a remote server. I wrote this Powershell script a week or so ago and was quietly happy with it for a while. I’m relatively new to Powershell so forgive both my rather low threshold for entertainment and the fact that something so simple is a moderate achievement for me. $Server = 'SERVERNAME' $SMOServer = New-Object Microsoft.SQLServer.Management.SMO.Server $Server # connection and query stuff         $ConnectionStr = "Server=$Server;Database=Master;Integrated Security=True" $Query = "EXEC sp_who2" $Connection = new-object system.Data.SQLClient.SQLConnection $Table = new-object "System.Data.DataTable" $Connection.connectionstring = $ConnectionStr try{ $Connection.open() $Command = $Connection.CreateCommand() $Command.commandtext = $Query $result = $Command.ExecuteReader() $Table.Load($result) } catch{ # Show error $error[0] | format-list -Force } $Title = "Data access processes (" + $Table.Rows.Count + ")" $Table | Out-GridView -Title $Title $Connection.close() So this is pretty straightforward, create an SMO object that represents our chosen server, define a connection to the database and a table object for the results when we get them, execute our query over the connection, load the results into our table object and then, if everything is error free display these results to the PowerShell grid viewer. The query simply gets the results of ‘EXEC sp_who2′ for us. Depending on how many connections there are will influence how long the query runs. The grid viewer lets me sort and search the results so it can be a pretty handy way to locate troublesome connections. Like I say, I was quite pleased with this, it seems a pretty simple script and was working well for me, I have added a few parameters to control the output and give me more specific details but then I see a script that uses the $SMOServer object itself to provide the process information and saves having to define the connection object and query specifications. $Server = 'SERVERNAME' $SMOServer = New-Object Microsoft.SQLServer.Management.SMO.Server $Server $Processes = $SMOServer.EnumProcesses() $Title = "SMO processes (" + $Processes.Rows.Count + ")" $Processes | Out-GridView -Title $Title Create the SMO object of our server and then call the EnumProcesses method to get all the process information from the server. Staggeringly simple! The results are a little different though. Some columns are the same and we can see the same basic information so my first thought was to which runs faster – so that I can get my results more quickly and also so that I place less stress on my server(s). PowerShell comes with a great way of testing this – the Measure-Command function. All you have to do is wrap your piece of code in Measure-Command {[your code here]} and it will spit out the time taken to execute the code. So, I placed both of the above methods of getting SQL Server process connections in two Measure-Command wrappers and pressed F5! The Powershell console goes blank for a while as the code is executed internally when Measure-Command is used but the grid viewer windows appear and the console shows this. You can take the output from Measure-Command and format it for easier reading but in a simple comparison like this we can simply cross refer the TotalMilliseconds values from the two result sets to see how the two methods performed. The query execution method (running EXEC sp_who2 ) is the first set of timings and the SMO EnumProcesses is the second. I have run these on a variety of servers and while the results vary from execution to execution I have never seen the SMO version slower than the other. The difference has varied and the time for both has ranged from sub-second as we see above to almost 5 seconds on other systems. This difference, I would suggest is partly due to the cost overhead of having to construct the data connection and so on where as the SMO EnumProcesses method has the connection to the server already in place and just needs to call back the process information. There is also the difference in the data sets to consider. Let’s take a look at what we get and where the two methods differ Query execution method (sp_who2) SMO EnumProcesses Description - Urn What looks like an XML or JSON representation of the server name and the process ID SPID Spid The process ID Status Status The status of the process Login Login The login name of the user executing the command HostName Host The name of the computer where the  process originated BlkBy BlockingSpid The SPID of a process that is blocking this one DBName Database The database that this process is connected to Command Command The type of command that is executing CPUTime Cpu The CPU activity related to this process DiskIO - The Disk IO activity related to this process LastBatch - The time the last batch was executed from this process. ProgramName Program The application that is facilitating the process connection to the SQL Server. SPID1 - In my experience this is always the same value as SPID. REQUESTID - In my experience this is always 0 - Name In my experience this is always the same value as SPID and so could be seen as analogous to SPID1 from sp_who2 - MemUsage An indication of the memory used by this process but I don’t know what it is measured in (bytes, Kb, Mb…) - IsSystem True or False depending on whether the process is internal to the SQL Server instance or has been created by an external connection requesting data. - ExecutionContextID In my experience this is always 0 so could be analogous to REQUESTID from sp_who2. Please note, these are my own very brief descriptions of these columns, detail can be found from MSDN for columns in the sp_who results here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/ms174313.aspx. Where the columns are common then I would use that description, in other cases then the information returned is purely for interpretation by the reader. Rather annoyingly both result sets have useful information that the other doesn’t. sp_who2 returns Disk IO and LastBatch information which is really useful but the SMO processes method give you IsSystem and MemUsage which have their place in fault diagnosis methods too. So which is better? On reflection I think I prefer to use the sp_who2 method primarily but knowing that the SMO Enumprocesses method is there when I need it is really useful and I’m sure I’ll use it regularly. I’m OK with the fact that it is the slower method because Measure-Command has shown me how close it is to the other option and that it really isn’t a large enough margin to matter.

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• Following my passion

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} What makes you go the extra mile? What makes you move forward and be ambitious? My name is Alin Gheorghe and I am currently working as a Contracts Administrator in the Shared Service Centre in Bucharest, Romania. I have graduated from the Political Science Faculty of the National School of Political and Administrative Studies here in Bucharest and I am currently undergoing a Master Program on Security and Diplomacy at the same university. Although I have been working a full time job here at Oracle since January 2011 and also going to school after work, I am going to tell you how I spend my spare time and about my passion. I always thought that if one doesn’t have something that he would consider a passion it’s always just a matter of time until he would discover one. Looking back, I can tell you that I discovered mine when I was 14 years old and I remember watching a football game when suddenly I became fascinated by the “man in black” that all football players obeyed during the match. That year I attended and promoted a referee course within my local referee committee and about 6 months later I was delegated to my first official game at youth tournament. Almost 10 years have passed since then and I can tell you that I very much love and appreciate this activity that I have spent doing, each and every weekend, 9 months every year, acquiring more than 600 official games until now. And even if not having a real free weekend or holiday might be sound very consuming, I can say that having something I am passionate about helps me to keep myself balanced and happy while giving me an option to channel any stress or anxiety I may feel. I think it’s important to have something of your own besides work that you spend time and effort on. Whether it’s painting, writing or a sport, having a passion can only have a positive effect on your life. And as every extra thing, it’s not always easy to follow your passion, but is it worth it? Speaking from my own experience I am sure it is, and here are some tips and tricks I constantly use not to give up on my passion: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language:RO;} No matter how much time you spend at work and how much credit you get for that, it will always be the passion related achievements that will comfort you more and boost your self esteem and nothing compares to that feeling you get. I always try to keep this in mind so that each time I think about giving up I get even more ambitious to move forward. Everybody can just do what they are paid to do or what they are requested to do at work but not everybody can go that extra mile when it comes to following their passion and putting in extra work for that. By exercising this constantly you get used to also applying this attitude on the work related tasks. It takes accurate planning, anticipation and forecasting in order to combine your work with your passion. Therefore having a full schedule and keeping up with it will only help develop and exercise such skills and also will prove to you that you are up to such a challenge. I always keep in mind as a final goal that if you get very good at your passion you can actually start earning from it. And I think that is the ultimate level when you can say that you make a living by doing exactly what you are passionate about. In conclusion, by taking the easy way not only do you miss out on something nice, but life’s priceless rewards are usually given by those things that you actually believe in and know how to stand up for over time.

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• MapRedux - PowerShell and Big Data

  - by Dittenhafer Solutions

  MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, I am more inclinded to be successful with experimentation when on the Windows platform. Of course, it is not that I am "religious" about one set of technologies other another, but rather more experienced. Anyway, within the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about PowerShell a bit more as the 2012 PowerShell Scripting Games approach and it occured to me that PowerShell's support for Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and some other inherent features of PowerShell might lend themselves particularly well to a simple implementation of the MapReduce framework. I fired up my PowerShell ISE and started writing just to see where it would take me. Quite simply, the ScriptBlock feature combined with the ability of Invoke-Command to create remote jobs on networked servers provides much of the plumbing of a distributed computing environment. There are some limiting factors of course. Microsoft provided some default settings which prevent PowerShell from taking over a network without administrative approval first. But even with just one adjustment, a given Windows-based machine can become a node in a MapReduce-style distributed computing environment. Ok, so enough introduction. Let's talk about the code. First, any machine that will participate as a remote "node" will need WinRM enabled for remote access, as shown below. This is not exactly practical for hundreds of intended nodes, but for one (or five) machines in a test environment it does just fine. C:> winrm quickconfig WinRM is not set up to receive requests on this machine. The following changes must be made: Set the WinRM service type to auto start. Start the WinRM service. Make these changes [y/n]? y Alternatively, you could take the approach described in the Remotely enable PSRemoting post from the TechNet forum and use PowerShell to create remote scheduled tasks that will call Enable-PSRemoting on each intended node. Invoke-MapRedux Moving on, now that you have one or more remote "nodes" enabled, you can consider the actual Map and Reduce algorithms. Consider the following snippet: $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose Invoke-MapRedux takes an instance of a MapReduceItem which references the Map and Reduce scriptblocks, an array of computer names which are the remote nodes, and the initial data set to be processed. As simple as that, you can start working with concepts of big data and the MapReduce paradigm. Now, how did we get there? I have published the initial version of my PsMapRedux PowerShell Module on GitHub. The PsMapRedux module provides the Invoke-MapRedux function described above. Feel free to browse the underlying code and even contribute to the project! In a later post, I plan to show some of the inner workings of the module, but for now let's move on to how the Map and Reduce functions are defined. Map Both the Map and Reduce functions need to follow a prescribed prototype. The prototype for a Map function in the MapRedux module is as follows. A simple scriptblock that takes one PsObject parameter and returns a hashtable. It is important to note that the PsObject $dataset parameter is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property which offers an array of data to be processed by the Map function. $aMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) # Indicate the job is running on the remote node. Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); # The hashtable to return $list = @{}; # ... Perform the mapping work and prepare the $list hashtable result with your custom PSObject... # ... The $dataset has a single 'Data' property which contains an array of data rows # which is a subset of the originally submitted data set. # Return the hashtable (Key, PSObject) Write-Output $list; } Reduce Likewise, with the Reduce function a simple prototype must be followed which takes a $key and a result $dataset from the MapRedux's partitioning function (which joins the Map results by key). Again, the $dataset is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property as described in the Map section. $aReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) # The hashtable to return $redux = @{}; # Return Write-Output $redux; } All Together Now When everything is put together in a short example script, you implement your Map and Reduce functions, query for some starting data, build the MapReduxItem via New-MapReduxItem and call Invoke-MapRedux to get the process started: # Import the MapRedux and SQL Server providers Import-Module "MapRedux" Import-Module “sqlps” -DisableNameChecking # Query the database for a dataset Set-Location SQLSERVER:\sql\dbserver1\default\databases\myDb $query = "SELECT MyKey, Date, Value1 FROM BigData ORDER BY MyKey"; Write-Host "Query: $query" $dataset = Invoke-SqlCmd -query $query # Build the Map function $MyMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); $list = @{}; foreach($row in $dataset.Data) { # Write-Host ("Key: " + $row.MyKey.ToString()); if($list.ContainsKey($row.MyKey) -eq $true) { $s = $list.Item($row.MyKey); $s.Sum += $row.Value1; $s.Count++; } else { $s = New-Object PSObject; $s | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MyKey -Value $row.MyKey; $s | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -Name Sum -Value $row.Value1; $list.Add($row.MyKey, $s); } } Write-Output $list; } $MyReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) $redux = @{}; $count = 0; foreach($s in $dataset.Data) { $sum += $s.Sum; $count += 1; } # Reduce $redux.Add($s.MyKey, $sum / $count); # Return Write-Output $redux; } # Create the item data $Mr = New-MapReduxItem "My Test MapReduce Job" $MyMap $MyReduce # Array of processing nodes... $MyNodes = ("node1", "node2", "node3", "node4", "localhost") # Run the Map Reduce routine... $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose # Show the results Set-Location C:\ $MyMrResults | Out-GridView Conclusion I hope you have seen through this article that PowerShell has a significant infrastructure available for distributed computing. While it does take some code to expose a MapReduce-style framework, much of the work is already done and PowerShell could prove to be the the easiest platform to develop and run big data jobs in your corporate data center, potentially in the Azure cloud, or certainly as an academic excerise at home or school. Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on the continuing progress of my Powershell MapRedux module, and thanks for reading! Daniel

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives Part 2 - Jumpstarting your IAM program with R2

  - by Tanu Sood

  Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t a new concept. Over the past decade, companies have begun to address identity management through a variety of solutions that have primarily focused on provisioning. . The new age workforce is converging at a rapid pace with ever increasing demand to use diverse portfolio of applications and systems to interact and interface with their peers in the industry and customers alike. Oracle has taken a significant leap with their release of Identity and Access Management 11gR2 towards enabling this global workforce to conduct their business in a secure, efficient and effective manner. As companies deal with IAM business drivers, it becomes immediately apparent that holistic, rather than piecemeal, approaches better address their needs. When planning an enterprise-wide IAM solution, the first step is to create a common framework that serves as the foundation on which to build the cost, compliance and business process efficiencies. As a leading industry practice, IAM should be established on a foundation of accurate data for identity management, making this data available in a uniform manner to downstream applications and processes. Mature organizations are looking beyond IAM’s basic benefits to harness more advanced capabilities in user lifecycle management. For any organization looking to embark on an IAM initiative, consider the following use cases in managing and administering user access. Expanding the Enterprise Provisioning Footprint Almost all organizations have some helpdesk resources tied up in handling access requests from users, a distraction from their core job of handling problem tickets. This dependency has mushroomed from the traditional acceptance of provisioning solutions integrating and addressing only a portion of applications in the heterogeneous landscape Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11gR2 solves this problem by offering integration with third party ticketing systems as “disconnected applications”. It allows for the existing business processes to be seamlessly integrated into the system and tracked throughout its lifecycle. With minimal effort and analysis, an organization can begin integrating OIM with groups or applications that are involved with manually intensive access provisioning and de-provisioning activities. This aspect of OIM allows organizations to on-board applications and associated business processes quickly using out of box templates and frameworks. This is especially important for organizations looking to fold in users and resources from mergers and acquisitions. Simplifying Access Requests Organizations looking to implement access request solutions often find it challenging to get their users to accept and adopt the new processes.. So, how do we improve the user experience, make it intuitive and personalized and yet simplify the user access process? With R2, OIM helps organizations alleviate the challenge by placing the most used functionality front and centre in the new user request interface. Roles, application accounts, and entitlements can all be found in the same interface as catalog items, giving business users a single location to go to whenever they need to initiate, approve or track a request. Furthermore, if a particular item is not relevant to a user’s job function or area inside the organization, it can be hidden so as to not overwhelm or confuse the user with superfluous options. The ability to customize the user interface to suit your needs helps in exercising the business rules effectively and avoiding access proliferation within the organization. Saving Time with Templates A typical use case that is most beneficial to business users is flexibility to place, edit, and withdraw requests based on changing circumstances and business needs. With OIM R2, multiple catalog items can now be added and removed from the shopping cart, an ecommerce paradigm that many users are already familiar with. This feature can be especially useful when setting up a large number of new employees or granting existing department or group access to a newly integrated application. Additionally, users can create their own shopping cart templates in order to complete subsequent requests more quickly. This feature saves the user from having to search for and select items all over again if a request is similar to a previous one. Advanced Delegated Administration A key feature of any provisioning solution should be to empower each business unit in managing their own access requests. By bringing administration closer to the user, you improve user productivity, enable efficiency and alleviate the administration overhead. To do so requires a federated services model so that the business units capable of shouldering the onus of user life cycle management of their business users can be enabled to do so. OIM 11gR2 offers advanced administrative options for creating, managing and controlling business logic and workflows through easy to use administrative interface and tools that can be exposed to delegated business administrators. For example, these business administrators can establish or modify how certain requests and operations should be handled within their business unit based on a number of attributes ranging from the type of request or the risk level of the individual items requested. Closed-Loop Remediation Security continues to be a major concern for most organizations. Identity management solutions bolster security by ensuring only the right users have the right access to the right resources. To prevent unauthorized access and where it already exists, the ability to detect and remediate it, are key requirements of an enterprise-grade proven solution. But the challenge with most solutions today is that some of this information still exists in silos. And when changes are made to systems directly, not all information is captured. With R2, oracle is offering a comprehensive Identity Governance solution that our customer organizations are leveraging for closed loop remediation that allows for an automated way for administrators to revoke unauthorized access. The change is automatically captured and the action noted for continued management. Conclusion While implementing provisioning solutions, it is important to keep the near term and the long term goals in mind. The provisioning solution should always be a part of a larger security and identity management program but with the ability to seamlessly integrate not only with the company’s infrastructure but also have the ability to leverage the information, business models compiled and used by the other identity management solutions. This allows organizations to reduce the cost of ownership, close security gaps and leverage the existing infrastructure. And having done so a multiple clients’ sites, this is the approach we recommend. In our next post, we will take a journey through our experiences of advising clients looking to upgrade to R2 from a previous version or migrating from a different solution. Meet the Writers:   Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• Google Analytics on Android

  - by pjv

  There is a specific and official analytics SDK for native Android apps (note that I'm not talking about webpages in apps on a phone). This library basically sends pages and events to Google Analytics and you can view your analytics in exactly the same dashboard as for websites. Since my background is apps rather than websites, and since a lot of the Google Analytics terminology seems particularly inapplicable to a native app, I need some pointers. Please discuss my remarks, provide some clarification where you think I'm off-track, and above all share good experiences! 1. Page Views Pages mostly can match different Activities (and Dialogs) being displayed. Activities can be visible behind non-full-screen Activities however, though only the top-level Activity can be interacted. This sort-off clashes with a "(page) view". You'd also want at least one page view for each visit and therefore put one page view tracker in the Application class. However this does not constitute a window or sorts. Usually an Activity will open at the same time, so the time spent on that page will have been 0. This will influence your "time spent" statistics. How are these counted anyway? Moreover, there is a loose coupling between the Activities, by means of Intents. A user can, much like on any website, step in at any Activity, although usually this then concerns resuming the application where he left off. This makes that the hierarchy of Activities usually is very flat. And since there are no url's involved. What meaning would using slashes in page titles have, such as "/Home"? All pages would appear on an equal level in the reports, so no content drilldown. Non-unique page views seem to be counted as some kind of indicator of successfulness: how often does the visitor revisit the page. When the user rotates the screen however usually an Activity resumes again, thus making it a new page view. This happens a lot. Maybe a well-thought-through placement of the call might solve this, or placing several, I'm not sure. How to deal with Page Views? 2. Events I'd say there are two sorts: A user event Something that happened, usually as an indirect consequence of the above. The latter particularly is giving me headaches. First of all, many events aren't written in code any more, but pieced logically together by means of Intents. This means that there is no place to put the analytics call. You'd either have to give up this advantage and start doing it the old-fashioned way in favor of good analytics, or, just be missing some events. Secondly, as a developer you're not so much interested in when a user clicks a button, but if the action that should have been performed really was performed and what the result was. There seems to be no clear way to get resulting data into Google Analytics (what's up with the integers? I want to put in Strings!). The same that applies to the flat pages hierarchy, also goes for the event categories. You could do "vertical" categories (topically, that is), but some code is shared "horizontally" and the tracking will be equally shared. Just as with the Intents mechanism, inheritance makes it hard for you to put the tracking in the right places at all times. And I can't really imagine "horizontal" categories. Unless you start making really small categories, such as all the items form the same menu in one category, I have a hard time grasping the concept. Finally, how do you deal with cancelling? Usually you both have an explicit cancel mechanism by ways of a button, as well as the implicit cancel when the "back"-button is pressed to leave the activity and there were no changes. The latter also applies to "saves", when the back button is pressed and there ARE changes. How are you consequently going to catch all these if not by doing all the "back"-button work yourself? How to deal with events? 3. Goals For goal types I have choice of: URL Destination, Time on Site, and Pages/Visit. Most apps don't have a funnel that leads the user to some "registration done" or "order placed" page. Apps have either already been bought (in which case you want to stimulate the user to love your app, so that he might bring on new buyers) or are paid for by in-app ads. So URL Destination is not a very important goal. Time on Site also seems troublesome. First, I have some doubt on how this would be measured. Second, I don't necessarily want my user to spend a lot of time in my already paid app, just be active and content. Equivalently, why not mention how frequent a user uses your app? Regarding Pages/Visit I already mentioned how screen orientation changes blow up the page view numbers. In an app I'd be most interested in events/visit to measure the user's involvement/activity. If he's intensively using the app then he must be loving it right? Furthermore, I also have some small funnels (that do not lead to conversion though) that I want to see streamlined. In my mind those funnels would end in events rather than page views but that seems not to be possible. I could also measure clickthroughs on in-app ads, but then I'd need to track those as Page Views rather than Events, in view of "URL Destination". What are smart goals for apps and how can you fit them on top of Analytics? 4. Optimisation Is there a smart way to manually do what "Website Optimiser" does for websites? Most importantly, how would I track different landing page designs? 5. Traffic Sources Referrals deal with installation time referrals, if you're smart enough to get them included. But perhaps I'd also want to get some data which third-party app sends users to my app to perform some actions (this app interoperability is possible via Intents). Many of the terminologies related to "Traffic Sources" seem totally meaningless and there is no possibility of connecting in AdSense. What are smart uses of this data? 6. Visitors Of the "Browser capabilities", "Network Properties" and "Mobile" tabs, many things are pointless as they have no influence on / relation with my mostly offline app that won't use flash anyway. Only if you drill down far enough, can you get to OS versions, which do matter a lot. I even forgot where you could check what exact Android devices visited. What are smart uses of this data? How can you make the relevant info more prominent? 7. Other No in-page analytics. I have to register my app as a web-url (What!?)?

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