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• WinMo&rsquo;s Demise: Notifying Next of &ldquo;Kin&rdquo;

  - by andrewbrust

  This past Monday, April 12th, Visual Studio 2010 was launched.  And on that same day, Microsoft also launched a new line of  mobile phone handsets, called Kin.  The two product launches are actually connected, but only by what they do not have in common, and what they commonly lack. On the former point: VS 2010 had released to manufacturing a couple weeks prior to its launch.  The Kin phones, meanwhile are not yet available.  We don’t even know what they will cost.  (And I think cost will be a major factor in Kin’s success…I told ChannelWeb’s Yara Souza so in this article). What do the two products both lack? Simple: Windows Mobile 6.x. For example, Kin seems to be based on the same platform as Windows Phone 7 (albeit a subset).  And VS 2010 does not support .NET Compact Framework development, which means no .NET development support for WinMo 6.x and earlier. So I guess April 12th marks Windows Phone “clean slate day.”  If you want to develop for the old phone platform, you will need to use the old version of Visual Studio (i.e. 2008).  Luckily VS 2010 and 2008 can be installed side-by-side.  But I doubt that’s much consolation to developers who still target WinMo 6.5 and earlier. Remember, WinMo isn’t just about the phone.  There are all sorts of non-telephony mobile devices, including ruggedized Pocket PC-style instruments, bar code readers and shop-floor-deployed units that don’t run Windows Phone 7 and couldn’t, even if they wanted to. Where will developers in these markets go?  I would guess some will stick with WinMo 6.x and earlier, until Windows Phone 7 can handle their workloads, assuming that does indeed happen.  Others will likely go to Google’s Android platform. For OEMs and developers who need a customizable mobile software stack, Android is turning out to be out-WinMo-ing WinMo.  As I wrote in this post, Google took Microsoft’s model (minus the licensing fees) and combined it with a modern SmartPhone feature set (rather than a late 90s/early oughts PDA paradigm), to great success.  You might say Google embraced and extended. You might also say Microsoft shunned and withdrew.

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• Oracle Tutor: *** CAUTION to Word .docx Users ***

  - by [email protected]

  Microsoft released a security update KB969604 for Office 2007 (around June 2009) This update causes document variables within Word docx files to be scrambled. This update might still be pushed out via Office 2007 updates DO NOT save files as docx using MS OFFICE 2007 until you apply the MS hotfix # 970942 available here If you are using Windows XP with Office 2003 or Office 2000 and have installed an older Office 2007 compatibility pack, documents saved as docx may also cause the scrambled document variables. Installing the 2007 compatibility pack published on 1/6/2010 (version 4) will prevent the document variables from becoming corrupt. Those on Windows 2000 may not be able to install the latest compatibility pack, or the compatibility pack may not function properly. This situation will hopefully be rectified in the coming months. What is a document variable? Document variables store data inside the document, invisible to the user. The Tutor software uses them when converting the document to HTML and when creating the flowchart, just to name a couple of uses. How will you know if a document's variables are scrambled? The difficulty in diagnosing the issue is that the symptoms can take myriad forms. There isn't a single error message or a single feature that one can point to and say, "test for the problem by doing this." The best clue about the error is seeing any kind of string in an error message that has garbage characters, question marks, xml code snippets, or just nonsense. Such as "Language ?????????????xlr;lwlerkjl could not be found." It is also possible to see the corrupted data in the footers of the Word docs. And, just because the footers look correct does not mean that the document variables are not corrupted. The corruption problem does not occur in every document variable in the document, just some of them. Often it is less than a quarter of them. What is the difference between docx files and doc files? Office 2007 uses Office Open XML formats with .docx and .docm filename extensions. - Docx is an Office Open XML word document. - Docm is a macro enabled Office Open XML document. This means the file structure behind the scenes is quite different from the binary file formats used prior to Office 2007 such as .doc, .dot, .xls, and .ppt. Solution Summary: For Windows XP and Word 2007: Install the hotfix, or save files as *.doc For Windows XP and Word 2000 and 2003: Install the latest compatibility pack or save files as *.doc For Windows 2000 with Word 2000 or 2003, do not use any compatibility pack, save files as *.doc Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager for Oracle Tutor

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• How To Disable Individual Plug-ins in Google Chrome

  - by The Geek

  Have you ever wondered how to disable useless or insecure browser plug-ins in Google Chrome? Here’s the lowdown on how to get rid of Java, Acrobat, Silverlight, and the rest of the plugins you probably want to get rid of. Disabling Plugins in Google Chrome If you head to about:plugins in your address bar, you’ll probably see a list of plugins, but won’t be able to disable them yet. What you’ll need to do is switch over to the Dev channel of Chrome, which gives you access to all the latest features—though you might be warned that sometimes the dev channel might be less stable than the release or beta channels. Ready to proceed? Head to the Dev Channel page, and then click the link to run the installer. You’ll be prompted to restart Chrome when you’re done. Note that Mac and Windows users can both run an installer to switch. Linux users will have to install a package. Note: Once you’ve switched to the Dev channel, you can’t really switch to the stable channel. You’ll have to uninstall Chrome and then reinstall the regular version. Now that you’ve switched to the dev channel and restarted your browser, head to about:plugins in the address bar, and then just disable each plugin you really don’t need. Plugins you can generally live without?  Java, Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight. These will be on a case-by-case basis, of course, but the vast majority of large websites don’t require any of those. When it comes right down to it, the only plugin that most people require is Flash… and leave the “Default Plug-in” alone too. Special thanks to @jordanconway for pointing out the solution. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable YouTube Comments while using ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickAdd Notes to Google Notebook from ChromeAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar

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• Java EE 7 turns one today!

  - by delabassee

  "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Benjamin Franklin) Today marks the first year anniversary of Java EE 7. The JSR 342 specification was finalised on May 28, 2013 with the official launch taking place on June 12, 2013 (original press release). As of today, there are already 3 Java EE 7 compatible Application Servers, coming from different 'vendors' (Oracle, TmaxSoft and Red Hat). Two of those Java EE 7 Application Servers are free and open source. We expect the list of Java EE 7 compatible Application Servers to grow over the coming months. Source: RebelLabs - 'Java Tools and Technologies Landscape for 2014' According to a recent independent survey, one third of the Java EE users who participated in that survey is already using Java EE 7. This is a good sign but it also means that a lot of people are not yet on Java EE 7. So if you haven't yet embarked on Java EE 7, now is really the time to do so! There are various ways to learn Java EE 7, in no particular order ... Continue to read The Aquarium. Through this blog, we are relaying Java EE news but we are also doing our best to highlight relevant technical contents such as articles, community tutorials, etc. Watch the GlassFish YouTube channel. Amongst others, it contains the different videos of the Java EE 7 launch, those videos will give you good technical update on Java EE and its different components specifications (JMS 2.0, JAX-RS 2.0, EJB 3.2, etc.) Take a formal training. Oracle University is starting to roll-out Java EE 7 trainings like the 'Java EE 7: New Features' class.  Attend conferences and JUGs sessions. On that note, we have spent a lot of time to create a strong JavaOne 'Server-Side Java' track. It's still possible to benefit from the early bird JavaOne pricing but don't wait too much! Read books. There are more than 25 (!) books related to Java EE 7 or to one of the Java EE 7 component specification.  There are many more ways to learn Java EE but if I have to suggest one and only one way, I would recommend the Java EE 7 Tutorial. It's exhaustive and clear, it's free and it continues to evolve. And finally as the introductory quote suggest, participation is key to learning. Participate in JUGs,  participate in Adopt-a-JSR, get involved in the different open source communities evolving around Java EE, participate in the JCP... in one word, participate!

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• Tales of a corrupt SQL log

  - by guybarrette

  Warning: I’m a simple dev, not an all powerful DBA with godly powers. This morning, one of my sites was down and DNN reported a problem with the database.  A quick series of tests revealed that the culprit was a corrupted log file. Easy fix I said, I have daily backups so it’s just a mater of restoring a good copy of the database and log files.  Well, I found out that’s not exactly true.  You see, for this database, I have daily file backups and these are not database backups created by SQL Server. So I restored a set of files from a couple of days ago, stopped the SQL service, copied the files over the bad ones, restarted the service only to find out that SQL doesn’t like when you do that.  It suspects something fishy and marks the database as suspect.  A database marked as suspect can’t be accessed at all.  So now what? I searched throughout the tubes of the InterWeb and found that you can restore from a corrupted log file by creating a new database with the same name as the defective one, then copy the restored database file (the one with data) over the newly created one.  Sweet!  But you still end up with SQL marking the database as suspect but at least, the newly created log is OK.  Well not true, it’s not corrupted but the lack of data makes it not OK for SQL so you need to rebuild the log.  How can you do that when SQL blocks any action the database?  First, you need to change the database status from suspect to emergency.  Then you need to set the database for single access only.  After that, you need to repair the log with DBCC and do the DBA dance.  If you dance long enough, SQL should repair the log file.  Now you need to set the access back to multi user.  Here’s the T-SQL script: use master GO EXEC sp_resetstatus 'MyDatabase' ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET EMERGENCY Alter database MyDatabase set Single_User DBCC checkdb('MyDatabase') ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE DBCC CheckDB ('MyDatabase', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS) ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET MULTI_USER So I guess that I would have been a lot easier to restore a SQL backup.  I can’t really say but the InterWeb seems to say so.  Anyway, lessons learned: Vive la différence: File backups are different then SQL backups. Don’t touch me: SQL doesn’t like when you restore a file over a corrupted one. The more the merrier: You should do both SQL and file backups. WTF?: The InterWeb provides you with dozens of way to deal with the problem but many are SQL 2000 or SQL 2005 only, many are confusing and many are written in strange dialects only DBAs understand. var addthis_pub="guybarrette";

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• 2D Grid Map Connectivity Check (avoiding stack overflow)

  - by SombreErmine

  I am trying to create a routine in C++ that will run before a more expensive A* algorithm that checks to see if two nodes on a 2D grid map are connected or not. What I need to know is a good way to accomplish this sequentially rather than recursively to avoid overflowing the stack. What I've Done Already I've implemented this with ease using a recursive algorithm; however, depending upon different situations it will generate a stack overflow. Upon researching this, I've come to the conclusion that it is overflowing the stack because of too many recursive function calls. I am sure that my recursion does not enter an infinite loop. I generate connected sets at the beginning of the level, and then I use those connected sets to determine connectivity on the fly later. Basically, the generating algorithm starts from left-to-right top-to-bottom. It skips wall nodes and marks them as visited. Whenever it reaches a walkable node, it recursively checks in all four cardinal directions for connected walkable nodes. Every node that gets checked is marked as visited so they aren't handled twice. After checking a node, it is added to either a walls set, a doors set, or one of multiple walkable nodes sets. Once it fills that area, it continues the original ltr ttb loop skipping already-visited nodes. I've also looked into flood-fill algorithms, but I can't make sense of the sequential algorithms and how to adapt them. Can anyone suggest a better way to accomplish this without causing a stack overflow? The only way I can think of is to do the left-to-right top-to-bottom loop generating connected sets on a row basis. Then check the previous row to see if any of the connected sets are connected and then join the sets that are. I haven't decided on the best data structures to use for that though. I also just thought about having the connected sets pre-generated outside the game, but I wouldn't know where to start with creating a tool for that. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3)

  - by Ankit G

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Delighted to announce the GA of EM Cloud Control Release 3 on all supported platforms. This release includes a new 12.1.0.3 version of platform (OMS & Agent), along with revised new versions of several Plug-ins and Metadata plug-ins (including a brand new Metadata plug-in for Oracle Virtual Networking). This release marks yet another major & significant milestone for Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control product releases. Following shows the list of new plug-ins versions available along the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3). The new plug-ins have dependency on 12.1.0.3 platform, and customer needs to be on minimum 12.1.0.3 platform (OMS/Agent) version of the product before being able to deploy/use these plug-in versions. (In other words, the new plug-in versions cannot be deployed, unless Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3) is installed or upgraded to). Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3) release includes tons of new features, along with several stability and performance bug fixes and is available for download for all platforms from OTN:Installation/Upgrade paths: EM Customers can do a fresh installation using "Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12.1.0.3)", and will get the latest version of the platform, along with all the latest versions of plug-ins and Metadata plug-ins out of the box. EM Customers who are on Release1 (12.1.0.1+BP1) or Release 2 (12.1.0.2), or on older releases 11g and 10.2.0.5, can choose to use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 bits, to upgrade directly to the latest Release 3, and the plug-ins will be automatically upgraded to the latest versions. Enterprise Manager Certification Matrix is also now available on My Oracle Support - here.

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• C++11 Tidbits: Decltype (Part 2, trailing return type)

  - by Paolo Carlini

  Following on from last tidbit showing how the decltype operator essentially queries the type of an expression, the second part of this overview discusses how decltype can be syntactically combined with auto (itself the subject of the March 2010 tidbit). This combination can be used to specify trailing return types, also known informally as "late specified return types". Leaving aside the technical jargon, a simple example from section 8.3.5 of the C++11 standard usefully introduces this month's topic. Let's consider a template function like: template <class T, class U> ??? foo(T t, U u) { return t + u; } The question is: what should replace the question marks? The problem is that we are dealing with a template, thus we don't know at the outset the types of T and U. Even if they were restricted to be arithmetic builtin types, non-trivial rules in C++ relate the type of the sum to the types of T and U. In the past - in the GNU C++ runtime library too - programmers used to address these situations by way of rather ugly tricks involving __typeof__ which now, with decltype, could be rewritten as: template <class T, class U> decltype((*(T*)0) + (*(U*)0)) foo(T t, U u) { return t + u; } Of course the latter is guaranteed to work only for builtin arithmetic types, eg, '0' must make sense. In short: it's a hack. On the other hand, in C++11 you can use auto: template <class T, class U> auto foo(T t, U u) -> decltype(t + u) { return t + u; } This is much better. It's generic and a construct fully supported by the language. Finally, let's see a real-life example directly taken from the C++11 runtime library as implemented in GCC: template<typename _IteratorL, typename _IteratorR> inline auto operator-(const reverse_iterator<_IteratorL>& __x, const reverse_iterator<_IteratorR>& __y) -> decltype(__y.base() - __x.base()) { return __y.base() - __x.base(); } By now it should appear be completely straightforward. The availability of trailing return types in C++11 allowed fixing a real bug in the C++98 implementation of this operator (and many similar ones). In GCC, C++98 mode, this operator is: template<typename _IteratorL, typename _IteratorR> inline typename reverse_iterator<_IteratorL>::difference_type operator-(const reverse_iterator<_IteratorL>& __x, const reverse_iterator<_IteratorR>& __y) { return __y.base() - __x.base(); } This was guaranteed to work well with heterogeneous reverse_iterator types only if difference_type was the same for both types.

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• Now Shipping! NetAdvantage for .NET 2010 Volume 3!

  The new NetAdvantage Ultimate includes all four Line of Business user interface control sets for ASP .NET, Windows Forms, WPF and Silverlight plus two advanced Data Visualization UI control sets for WPF and Silverlight. With six NetAdvantage products in one robust package, Infragistics® gives you hundreds of controls and infinite development possibilities. Unified XAML Product Strategy-Share Code, Get More Controls In the 10.3 release, Infragistics continues to deliver code parity between the XAML platforms, WPF and Silverlight. In the line of business toolsets, Infragistics introduces the new xamSchedule™, full-featured, Outlook® 2010-style schedule controls, and the new xamDataTree™, a data bound tree view that comfortably handles tens of thousands of tree nodes. Mimicking our Silverlight Drag and Drop Framework, the WPF Drag and Drop Framework CTP empowers you to add your own rich touches to your applications. Track Users' Behaviors New to all NetAdvantage Silverlight controls is the Infragistics Analytics Framework (IGAF), which empowers you to track user behavior in RIAs running on Silverlight 4. Building on the Microsoft® Silverlight Analytics Framework, with IGAF you can analyze the user's behaviors to ensure the experience you want to deliver. NetAdvantage for Windows Forms--New Office® 2010 Ribbon and Application Menu 2010 Create new experiences with Windows Forms. Now with Office 2010 styling, NetAdvantage for Windows Forms has new features such as Microsoft® Office 2010 ribbon and enhanced Infragistics.Excel to export the contents of the high performance WinGrid™ into Microsoft Excel® 2010. The new Windows Message Support enables Infragistics standalone editor controls to process numerous Windows® OS messages, allowing them to respond just like native controls to changes in the Windows environment. Create Faster Web 2.0 Experiences with NetAdvantage for ASP .NET Infragistics continues to push the envelope to deliver the fastest ASP .NET WebForms controls available on the market. Our lightning fast ASP .NET grids are now enhanced with XPS/PDF Exporting and Summary Rows. This release also includes support for jQuery Templating (as a CTP) within our WebDataGrid™ and WebDataTree™ controls allowing you to quickly cut down overall page size. Deliver Business Intelligence with Power, Flexibility and the Office 2010 Experience NetAdvantage for WPF Data Visualization and NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization help you deliver flexible, powerful and usable end user experiences in Business Intelligence applications. Both suites include the Pivot Grid that delivers the full power of online analytical processing (OLAP) to present multi-dimensional data, sliced and diced in cross-tabulated form for end users to drill down into, interact with and easily extract meaning from the data. Mapping Made Easy 10.3 marks the official release of the WPF Data Visualization xamMap™ control to map anything and everything from geographic to geo-spacial mapping data. Map layers allow you to add successive levels of detail, navigational panes for panning in all directions, color swatch panes that facilitate value scales like Choropleth shading, and scale panes allowing users to zoom-in and out. Both toolsets introduce the first of many relationship maps! With the xamOrgChart™ CTP you can map out organizational charts of up to 50K employees, competitive brackets (think World Cup) and any other relational, organizational map your application needs. http://www.infragistics.com span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Big Companies Influence Retail in 2010

  - by David Dorf

  From a retail industry perspective, 2010 will go down as the year mobile went mainstream, the economy recovered from the crash, and Facebook surpassed Google as the most influential online property. While the economy certainly had the biggest impact on the retail industry, a few big companies also exerted influence. Here's a rundown and a look back at 2010: Apple -- Steve Jobs and company continued to lead the mobile pack. Consumers are using their iPhones to shop, retailers are using the iPod Touch for mobile checkout, and both are embracing the iPad as the next wave of technology. The Next Technology from Apple Mobile Platforms in Retail Apple Stores, Touch2Systems, and the iPad Google -- Not to be outdone, Google's Android platform grew faster than Apple's, plus they support QRCodes natively and will probably beat Apple to NFC. Google Checkout, Product Search, and Boutiques.com continue to impact the e-commerce scene. Google Leverages Like.com Facebook -- While the movie The Social Network certainly made Facebook a household name, Connect, Places, and seeing the "like" button all over the Web really pushed Facebook everywhere. 2010 set the foundations for f-commerce. Facebook Participatory Promotions Crowd Savers What's the value of a Facebook fan? Step Aside Google Leveraging Social Networks for Retail Social Shopping at Nine West Groupon -- This newcomer executed on a simple concept flawlessly, making them the fasted company to reach $1B in revenue. (See cool chart from Silicon Alley Insider.) Google's offer of $5-6B wasn't enough, so now they are raising an additional $1B in funding, presumably to buy-up all the copycats across the globe. Changing the Way We Shop Amazon -- As if leading the e-commerce charge wasn't enough, Amazon shook things up with their purchase of Woot and release of their Price Checker mobile app. They continue to push boundaries with Kindle, and don't seem worried about the iPad at all. You Can't Win on Price Amazon Looks at Your Social Graph eBay -- Acquiring Skype didn't exactly work out, but eBay's purchase of PayPal and RedLaser are driving the company forward. They are still a major force. Bump the Bill Oracle, SAP, HP, IBM, and Cisco left their marks on the retail industry as well with various acquisitions and CxO shake-ups. We'll just have to wait and see what 2011 brings next.

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• How to interview a natural scientist for a dev position?

  - by Silas

  I already did some interviews for my company, mostly computer scientists for dev positions but also some testers and project managers. Now I have to fill a vacancy in our research group within the R&D department (side note: “research” means that we try to solve problems in our professional domain/market niche using software in research projects together with universities, other companies, research centres and end user organisations. It’s not computer science research; we’re not going to solve the P=NP problem). Now we invited a guy holding an MSc in chemistry (with a lot of physics in his CV, too), who never had any computer science lesson. I already talked with him about half an hour at a local university’s career days and there’s no doubt the guy is smart. Also his marks are excellent and he graduated with distinction. For his BSc he needed to teach himself programming in Mathematica and told me believably that he liked programming a lot. Also he solved some physical chemistry problem that I probably don’t understand using his own software, implemented in Mathematica, for his MSc thesis. It includes a GUI and a notable size of 8,000 LoC. He seems to be very attracted by what we’re doing in our research group and to be honest it’s quite difficult for an SME like us to get good people. I also am very interested in hiring him since he could assist me in writing project proposals, reports, doing presentations and so on. He would probably fit to our team, too. The only question left is: How can I check if he will get the programming skills he needs to do software implementation in our projects since this will be a significant part of the job? Of course I will ask him what it is, that is fascinating him about programming. I’ll also ask how he proceeded to write his natural science software and how he structured it. I’ll ask about how he managed to obtain the skills and information about software development he needed. But is there something more I could ask? Something more concrete perhaps? Should I ask him to explain his Mathematica solution? To be clear: I’m not looking for knowledge in a particular language or technology stack. We’re a .NET shop in product development but I want to have a free choice for our research projects. So I’m interested in the meta-competence being able to learn whatever is actually needed. I hope this question is answerable and not open-ended since I really like to know if there is a default way to check for the ability to get further programming skills on the job. If something is not clear to you please give me some comments and let me improve my question.

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• Maximizing the Value of Software

  - by David Dorf

  A few years ago we decided to increase our investments in documenting retail processes and architectures.  There were several goals but the main two were to help retailers maximize the value they derive from our software and help system integrators implement our software faster.  The sale is only part of our success metric -- its actually more important that the customer realize the benefits of the software.  That's when we actually celebrate. This week many of our customers are gathered in Chicago to discuss their successes during our annual Crosstalk conference.  That provides the perfect forum to announce the release of the Oracle Retail Reference Library.  The RRL is available for free to Oracle Retail customers and partners.  It contains 1000s of hours of work and represents years of experience in the retail industry.  The Retail Reference Library is composed of three offerings: Retail Reference Model We've been sharing the RRM for several years now, with lots of accolades.  The RRM is a set of business process diagrams at varying levels of granularity. This release marks the debut of Visio documents, which should make it easier for retailers to adopt and edit the diagrams.  The processes represent an approximation of the Oracle Retail software, but at higher levels they are pretty generic and therefore usable with other software as well.  Using these processes, the business and IT are better able to communicate the expectations of the software.  They can be used to guide customization when necessary, and help identify areas for optimization in the organization. Retail Reference Architecture When embarking on a software implementation project, it can be daunting to start from a blank sheet of paper.  So we offer the RRA, a comprehensive set of documents that describe the retail enterprise in terms of logical architecture, physical deployments, and systems integration.  These documents and diagrams describe how all the systems typically found in a retailer enterprise work together.  They serve as a way to jump-start implementations using best practices we've captured over the years. Retail Semantic Glossary Have you ever seen two people argue over something because they're using misaligned terminology?  Its a huge waste and happens all the time.  The Retail Semantic Glossary is a simple application that allows retailers to define terms and metrics in a centralized database.  This initial version comes with limited content with the goal of adding more over subsequent releases.  This is the single source for defining key performance indicators, metrics, algorithms, and terms so that the retail organization speaks in a consistent language. These three offerings are downloaded from MyOracleSupport separately and linked together using the start page above.  Everything is navigated using a Web browser.  See the Oracle Retail Documentation blog for more details.

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• Are these non-standard applications of rendering practical in games?

  - by maul

  I've recently got into 3D and I came up with a few different "tricky" rendering techniques. Unfortunately I don't have the time to work on this myself, but I'd like to know if these are known methods and if they can be used in practice. Hybrid rendering Now I know that ray-tracing is still not fast enough for real-time rendering, at least on home computers. I also know that hybrid rendering (a combination of rasterization and ray-tracing) is a well known theory. However I had the following idea: one could separate a scene into "important" and "not important" objects. First you render the "not important" objects using traditional rasterization. In this pass you also render the "important" objects using a special shader that simply marks these parts on the image using a special color, or some stencil/depth buffer trickery. Then in the second pass you read back the results of the first pass and start ray tracing, but only from the pixels that were marked by the "important" object's shader. This would allow you to only ray-trace exactly what you need to. Could this be fast enough for real-time effects? Rendered physics I'm specifically talking about bullet physics - intersection of a very small object (point/bullet) that travels across a straight line with other, relatively slow-moving, fairly constant objects. More specifically: hit detection. My idea is that you could render the scene from the point of view of the gun (or the bullet). Every object in the scene would draw a different color. You only need to render a 1x1 pixel window - the center of the screen (again, from the gun's point of view). Then you simply check that central pixel and the color tells you what you hit. This is pixel-perfect hit detection based on the graphical representation of objects, which is not common in games. Afaik traditional OpenGL "picking" is a similar method. This could be extended in a few ways: For larger (non-bullet) objects you render a larger portion of the screen. If you put a special-colored plane in the middle of the scene (exactly where the bullet will be after the current frame) you get a method that works as the traditional slow-moving iterative physics test as well. You could simulate objects that the bullet can pass through (with decreased velocity) using alpha blending or some similar trick. So are these techniques in use anywhere, and/or are they practical at all?

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• How are software projects 'typically' managed/deployed

  - by rguilbault

  My company is evaluating adopting off-the-shelf ALM products to aid in our development lifecycle; we currently use our own homegrown solutions to manage requirements gathering, specification documentation, testing, etc. One of the issues I am having is that we have what we call a pipeline, which consists of particular stops: [Source] - [QC] - [Production] At the first stop, the developer works out a solution to some requested change and performs individual testing. When that process is complete (and peer review has been performed), our ALM system physically moves the affected programs from the [Source] runtime environment to the [QC] runtime environment. You can think of this as analogous to moving some web pages from the 'test' server to the 'live' server, where QC personnel can bang on the system and complain that the developer has it all wrong ;-) Once QC signs off that the changes are working, the system again moves the code along to the next stage, where additional testing is performed, etc. I have been searching the internet for a few days trying to find how the process is accomplished anywhere else -- I have read a bit about builds, automated testing, various ALM products, etc. but nowhere does any of this state how builds interact with initial change requests, what the triggers are, how dependencies are managed, how the various forms of testing are accommodated (e.g. unit testing, integration testing, regression testing), etc. Can anyone point me to any resources or attempt to explain (generically) how a change could/should be tracked and moved though the development lifecycle? I'd be very appreciative. To keep things consistent, let's say that we have a project called Calculator, which we want to add support for the basic trigonometric functions: sine, cosine and tangent. I'm open to reorganizing the company however we need to in order to accomplish due diligence testing and we can suppose that any tools are available for use (if that helps to illustrate the process). To start things off, I think I understand this much: we document the requirements, e.g.: support sine, cosine and tangent functions we create some type of change request/work order to assign to programming coding takes place, commits are made to version control peer review commences programmer marks the work order as completed? ... now what? How does QC do their thing? Would they perform testing before closing the 'work order'?

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• What exactly is a X-YMailISG header?

  - by iainH

  Finally ... our emails are being seen by Yahoo! not as junk anymore. Hurray! However I notice that the Yahoo! receiving MTA adds in a X-YMailISG header. It's very large ... 2**10 bits? Now that I've invested too large a chunk of my waking life in crafting our email headers I'm curious to know what an X-YMailISG header is. Can anybody tell me? Does it pose any security / authenticity issues? There's very little intelligible from Google results. Background: After many days tweaking TXT records in our domain's DNS zone file for SPF and DKIM, I have at last succeeded in generating email from our Drupal site that Yahoo! no longer marks as X-YahooFilteredBulk and the excellent service [email protected] returns results that show the emails passing SPF, DKIM and Sender-ID checks and appearing to SpamAssassin as ham. Yahoo! even adds a Received-SPF: pass header. Useful links: http://www.goldfisch.at/knowwiki/howtos/dkim-filter http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html Strangely enough the SPF TXT record needed / allowed a blank key / name field in our registrar's DNS management panel whereas the DKIM record needed the {selector}._domainkey as the key /name of the DKIM strings.

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• Rebuilding array on 3ware 9690SA-8I

  - by Tim Jones

  I have a RAID10 (8x1TB) array on a 3ware 9690 card running on an Ubuntu 1110 server. There was a kernel update so I scheduled a reboot after which the array was inaccessible. I checked the status a drive has died in the array, but the controller has thrown the entire array into an 'inoperable' state instead of simply degraded (what's the point of the RAID now ;-). After taking out the 'dead' drive I run a quick test to find it completely functional without a bad sector to be found. I try to put the drive back in but the array still marks the disk as degraded (remembering serial number or something??) and the entire array as inoperable... So I swap it out for a known working drive (not the same capacity but higher - should still work) and initiate a rebuild with the the new drive as a replacement. This fails instantly with the error "(0x0B:0x0033): Unit busy : Failed to start Rebuild on Unit 0". The unit shouldn't be busy as it is not mounted (the card itself is listed with lshw but the array it provides is not). I'm pretty much at an impasse now, I don't understand how I can have a single drive failure on a RAID10 that makes the entire array inaccessible, degraded I could understand but inaccessible?? I don't think the controller as prior to the reboot it was completely functional.

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• SD Card reader not working on Sony Vaio

  - by TessellatingHeckler

  This laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-Z31MN/B PCG-6z2m) has been installed with Windows 7 64 bit, all the drivers from Sony's VAIO site are installed, and everything in Device Manager both (a) has a driver and (b) shows as working, no exclamation marks or warnings. "Hide empty drives" in Folder options is disabled so the card reader appears, but will not read the card ("please insert a disk in drive O:"). Previously, when the laptop had Windows XP on it, it could read the same card. Also, Windows update suggested driver ("SD Card Reader") doesn't work, Ricoh own drivers install properly but do the same behaviour. Other 3rd party driver suggestions from forums (Acer and Texas-Instruments FlashMedia) do not seem to install properly. I would post the PCI id if I had it, but it was just showing up as rimsptsk\diskricohmemorystickstorage (while it had the Ricoh Driver installed). Edit: If there are any lower level diagnostic utlities which might shed more light on it I'd welcome hearing of them. Anything which might show get it to put troubleshooting logs in the event log or identify chipsets or whatever... Update: Device details are: SD\VID_03&OID_5344&PID_SD04G&REV_8.0\5&4617BC3&0&0 : SD Memory Card PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2934&SUBSYS_9025104D&REV_03\3&21436425&0&E8: Intel(R) ICH9 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 2934 PCI\VEN_1180&DEV_0476&SUBSYS_9025104D&REV_BA\4&1BD7BFCD&0&20F0: Ricoh R/RL/5C476(II) or Compatible CardBus Controller RIMSPTSK\DISK&VEN_RICOH&PROD_MEMORYSTICKSTORAGE&REV_1.00\MS0001: SD Storage Card PCI\VEN_1180&DEV_0592&SUBSYS_9025104D&REV_11\4&1BD7BFCD&0&24F0: Ricoh Memory Stick Host Controller WPDBUSENUMROOT\UMB\2&37C186B&1&STORAGE#VOLUME#_??_RIMSPTSK#DISK&VEN_RICOH&PROD_MEMORYSTICKSTORAGE&REV_1.00#MS0001#: O:\ STORAGE\VOLUME\{C82A81B8-5A4F-11E0-AACC-806E6F6E6963}#0000000000100000: Generic volume PCI\VEN_1180&DEV_0822&SUBSYS_9025104D&REV_21\4&1BD7BFCD&0&22F0: SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller ROOT\LEGACY_FVEVOL\0000 : Bitlocker Drive Encryption Filter Driver PCI\VEN_1180&DEV_0832&SUBSYS_9025104D&REV_04\4&1BD7BFCD&0&21F0: Ricoh 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller Now going to search for drivers for that.

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• Avoiding DNS timeouts when a dns server fails

  - by user65124

  Hi there. We have a small datacenter with about a hundred hosts pointing to 3 internal dns servers (bind 9). Our problem comes when one of the internal dns servers becomes unavailable. At that point all the clients that point to that server start performing very slowly. The problem seems to be that the stock linux resolver doesn't really have the concept of "failing over" to a different dns server. You can adjust the timeout and number of retries it uses, (and set rotate so it will work through the list), but no matter what settings one uses our services perform much more slowly if a primary dns server becomes unavailable. At the moment this is one of the largest sources of service disruptions for us. My ideal answer would be something like "RTFM: tweak /etc/resolv.conf like this...", but if that's an option I haven't seen it. I was wondering how other folks handled this issue? I can see 3 possible types of solutions: Use linux-ha/Pacemaker and failover ips (so the dns IP VIPs are "always" available). Alas, we don't have a good fencing infrastructure, and without fencing pacemaker doesn't work very well (in my experience Pacemaker lowers availability without fencing). Run a local dns server on each node, and have resolv.conf point to localhost. This would work, but it would give us a lot more services to monitor and manage. Run a local cache on each node. Folks seem to consider nscd "broken", but dnrd seems to have the right feature set: it marks dns servers as up or down, and won't use 'down' dns servers. Any-casting seems to work only at the ip routing level, and depends on route updates for server failure. Multi-casting seemed like it would be a perfect answer, but bind does not support broadcasting or multi-casting, and the docs I could find seem to suggest that multicast dns is more aimed at service discovery and auto-configuration rather than regular dns resolving. Am I missing an obvious solution?

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• Perl TDS character sets

  - by skiphoppy

  I'm using the FreeTDS driver with DBD::Sybase, connecting to an MS SQL Server. When I query certain values of certain records, I get this error: DBD::Sybase::st fetchrow_arrayref failed: OpenClient message: LAYER = (0) ORIGIN = (0) SEVERITY = (9) NUMBER = (99) Server , database Message String: WARNING! Some character(s) could not be converted into client's character set. Unconverted bytes were changed to question marks ('?'). This seems to happen for records that contain special Windows character-set characters, such as curly quotes, copied and pasted from people's Outlook and Word messages. Unfortunately, I do not have any control of this database; sanitizing the input on the way in is obviously the way to go, but is not available to me. What FreeTDS settings do I need to change to be able to successfully query these records? Additional information: The query works fine from tsql. I only get this error through Perl's DBD::Sybase interface. (Should I test through something else? I don't have the expertise yet to install PHP or Python. I've got jTDS and can use it, but I think that's a completely different implementation, not an interface to FreeTDS.) Adding client charset = UTF-8 to my freetds.conf file results in "Out of memory!" printed to STDERR.

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• Different routing rules for a particular user using firewall mark and ip rule

  - by Paul Crowley

  Running Ubuntu 12.10 on amd64. I'm trying to set up different routing rules for a particular user. I understand that the right way to do this is to create a firewall rule that marks the packets for that user, and add a routing rule for that mark. Just to get testing going, I've added a rule that discards all packets as unreachable: # ip rule 0: from all lookup local 32765: from all fwmark 0x1 unreachable 32766: from all lookup main 32767: from all lookup default With this rule in place and all firewall chains in all tables empty and policy ACCEPT, I can still ping remote hosts just fine as any user. If I then add a rule to mark all packets and try to ping Google, it fails as expected # iptables -t mangle -F OUTPUT # iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -j MARK --set-mark 0x01 # ping www.google.com ping: unknown host www.google.com If I restrict this rule to the VPN user, it seems to have no effect. # iptables -t mangle -F OUTPUT # iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -j MARK --set-mark 0x01 -m owner --uid-owner vpn # sudo -u vpn ping www.google.com PING www.google.com (173.194.78.103) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from wg-in-f103.1e100.net (173.194.78.103): icmp_req=1 ttl=50 time=36.6 ms But it appears that the mark is being set, because if I add a rule to drop these packets in the firewall, it works: # iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -j DROP -m mark --mark 0x01 # sudo -u vpn ping www.google.com ping: unknown host www.google.com What am I missing? Thanks!

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• PHP + MYSQL site perfomance

  - by Diego

  I have to manage a site which wasn't developed by me. It is in PHP using a mysql database, which is located in the web server. The site, sometimes (when the visitors increase too much) stops responding, or respond too slow. I have developed some sites in PHP but never took care of the management so really don't know where to start. The server (the hard) seems to be fine, when the web stops responding the cpu is being used at about 55% and has a lot of memory. I'm not asking someone to solve this issue. I only would really like if someone could give me a few tips about where can I find logs and how should I read and interpret them. So, that way I would be able to know if its the net traffic, the database (which queries), or what. Thanks! Update: Forgot to say: it is a Windows Server 2003. Note: I've recorded about a day with Jet Profiler. I don't really understand all the information it provides but there is one query which it marks as really slow. It makes sense because it is a select with a where clause which has three like condition. Initially I didn't include this in my question because when I run the query from MySQL Query Browser it doesn't take any long. It is under 0.01 seconds.

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• Failed to start apache Can't open /etc/apache2/envvars

  - by bumperbox

  i have had this problem a couple of times now and i am not sure what is causing it Failed to start apache : .: 45: Can't open /etc/apache2/envvars when i look at a dir listing, i get these question marks next to envvars, does anyone know what that means? os is ubuntu 10 if that helps drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jan 29 11:56 . drwxr-xr-x 83 root root 4096 Feb 4 10:34 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8113 Sep 29 01:52 apache2.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8027 Oct 3 22:26 apache2.conf.dpkg-old drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 11:56 conf.d ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? envvars -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 3 22:25 httpd.conf ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? magic drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 11:56 mods-available drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 10:18 mods-enabled ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? ports.conf drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 11:56 sites-available drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 11:55 sites-enabled UPDATE Just heard back from the hosting company, they move my VPS to a new hardware node last night, and something at their end wasn't quite right which caused the issue

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• Esx servers in a DMZ

  - by James

  I have two ESX 3.5 servers in a DMZ. I can access these servers on any port from my lan via a VPN. Servers in the DMZ are unable to initiate connections back to the lan, for obvious reasons. I have a vCenter server on my lan and can initially connect to the esx servers fine. However the esx servers then try to send a hearth beat back to the vCenter server on udp/902 obviously this will not get back to the vCenter server, which then marks the ESX servers as not responding and disconnects. There are two broad solutions I can think of; 1) Try to tell vCenter to ignore not getting heart beats. The best I can do here is delay the disconnect by 3 mins. 2) Try some clever network solution. However again I am at loss. Note: The vCenter server is on a lan, and cannot be given a public IP, so firewall rules back will not work. And also I cannot setup a VPN from the DMZ to the lan. **I am adding the following, explanation that I added to the comments Ok maybe this is the bit that I not explaining well. The DMZ is on a remote site, an entirely independent network (network 1). The vCenter server is on our office lan (network 2). Network 2 can connect to any machine on any port on network 1. But network 1 is not allowed to initiate a connection to network 2. Any traffic destined to network 2 from network 1 gets dropped by the firewall as it is traffic to a non-routable address. The only solution I can think of is setting up a VPN from network 1 to network 2, but this is not acceptable So any clever folk out there any ideas? J

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• Windows 7 "freezes" (chills?), and then "unfreezes" after about 1 minute.

  - by gbc001

  Hi, I have an Acer Timeline 1810T netbook (4GB RAM) with Windows 7 x64. About once or twice a day, it "freezes" - the reason I put this in quotation marks is that it does not really freeze, as I you cant move mouse, etc. I can move my mouse and jump between different applications, but I cant use the applications for anything. So I can jump between notepad and Firefox, but I cant browse to a new web page. I have been trying to determine the source of this misery for a while now, and I suspect it has something to do with the hard drive - indirectly if not directly. Here are some screen shots of the resource monitor during a "freeze" and during normal operation: Freeze: http://imgur.com/Gcgq1.jpg Normal operation: imgur.com/mlHaI.jpg As you can see, CPU is fine during freeze, but the disk is going bananas.. Does anyone have an idea of what these reading means, or about the problem in general? There seems to be no specific activity that sets this off - it can be during browsing, or during media playback with nothing else open. The fact that I can see navigate to applications but not use them might suggest a hard drive problem as well? Maybe I can access the stuff that is in RAM, but not anything that would require interaction with the drive.. Very appreciative of any help!

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