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• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager

  - by Anand Akela

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Contributed by Sunil Kunisetty and Daniel Chan Introduction and ArchitectureAs more and more enterprises deploy some of their non-critical workload on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s becoming critical to monitor those public AWS resources along side with their on-premise resources. Oracle recently announced Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in for Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to achieve that goal. The on-premise Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM12c) acts as a single tool to get a comprehensive view of your public AWS resources as well as your private cloud resources.  By deploying the plug-in within your Cloud Control environment, you gain the following management features: Monitor EBS, EC2 and RDS instances on Amazon Web Services Gather performance metrics and configuration details for AWS instances Raise alerts and violations based on thresholds set on monitoring Generate reports based on the gathered data Users of this Plug-in can leverage the rich Enterprise Manager features such as system promotion, incident generation based on thresholds, integration with 3rd party ticketing applications etc. AWS Monitoring via this Plug-in is enabled via Amazon CloudWatch API and the users of this Plug-in are responsible for supplying credentials for accessing AWS and the CloudWatch API. This Plug-in can only be deployed on an EM12C R2 platform and agent version should be at minimum 12c R2.Here is a pictorial view of the overall architecture: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Here are a few key features: Rich and exhaustive list of metrics. Metrics can be gathered from an Agent running outside AWS. Critical configuration information. Custom Home Pages with charts and AWS configuration information. Generate incidents based on thresholds set on monitoring data. Discovery and Monitoring AWS instances can be added to EM12C either via the EM12c User Interface (UI) or the EM12c Command Line Interface ( EMCLI)  by providing the AWS credentials (Secret Key and Access Key Id) as well as resource specific properties as target properties. Here is a quick mapping of target types and properties for each AWS resources AWS Resource Type Target Type Resource specific properties EBS Resource Amazon EBS Service CloudWatch base URI, EC2 Base URI, Period, Volume Id, Proxy Server and Port EC2 Resource Amazon EC2 Service CloudWatch base URI, EC2 Base URI, Period, Instance  Id, Proxy Server and Port RDS Resource Amazon RDS Service CloudWatch base URI, RDS Base URI, Period, Instance  Id, Proxy Server and Port Proxy server and port are optional and are only needed if the agent is within the firewall. Here is an emcli example to add an EC2 target. Please read the Installation and Readme guide for more details and step-by-step instructions to deploy  the plugin and adding the AWS the instances. ./emcli add_target \       -name="<target name>" \       -type="AmazonEC2Service" \       -host="<host>" \       -properties="ProxyHost=<proxy server>;ProxyPort=<proxy port>;EC2_BaseURI=http://ec2.<region>.amazonaws.com;BaseURI=http://monitoring.<region>.amazonaws.com;InstanceId=<EC2 instance Id>;Period=<data point periond>"  \     -subseparator=properties="=" ./emcli set_monitoring_credential \                 -set_name="AWSKeyCredentialSet"  \                 -target_name="<target name>"  \                 -target_type="AmazonEC2Service" \                 -cred_type="AWSKeyCredential"  \                 -attributes="AccessKeyId:<access key id>;SecretKey:<secret key>" Emcli utility is found under the ORACLE_HOME of EM12C install. Once the instance is discovered, the target will show up under the ‘All Targets’ list under “Amazon EC2 Service’. Once the instances are added, one can navigate to the custom homepages for these resource types. The custom home pages not only include critical metrics, but also vital configuration parameters and incidents raised for these instances.  By mapping the configuration parameters as instance properties, we can slice-and-dice and group various AWS instance by leveraging the EM12C Config search feature. The following configuration properties and metrics are collected for these Resource types. Resource Type Configuration Properties Metrics EBS Resource Volume Id, Volume Type, Device Name, Size, Availability Zone Response: Status Utilization: QueueLength, IdleTime Volume Statistics: ReadBrandwith, WriteBandwidth, ReadThroughput, WriteThroughput Operation Statistics: ReadSize, WriteSize, ReadLatency, WriteLatency EC2 Resource Instance ID, Owner Id, Root Device type, Instance Type. Availability Zone Response: Status CPU Utilization: CPU Utilization Disk I/O:  DiskReadBytes, DiskWriteBytes, DiskReadOps, DiskWriteOps, DiskReadRate, DiskWriteRate, DiskIOThroughput, DiskReadOpsRate, DiskWriteOpsRate, DiskOperationThroughput Network I/O : NetworkIn, NetworkOut, NetworkInRate, NetworkOutRate, NetworkThroughput RDS Resource Instance ID, Database Engine Name, Database Engine Version, Database Instance Class, Allocated Storage Size, Availability Zone Response: Status Disk I/O:  ReadIOPS, WriteIOPS, ReadLatency, WriteLatency, ReadThroughput, WriteThroughput DB Utilization:  BinLogDiskUsage, CPUUtilization, DatabaseConnections, FreeableMemory, ReplicaLag, SwapUsage Custom Home Pages As mentioned above, we have custom home pages for these target types that include basic configuration information,  last 24 hours availability, top metrics and the incidents generated. Here are few snapshots. EBS Instance Home Page: EC2 Instance Home Page: RDS Instance Home Page: Further Reading: 1)      AWS Plugin download 2)      Installation and  Read Me. 3)      Screenwatch on SlideShare 4)      Extensibility Programmer's Guide 5)      Amazon Web Services

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• Modern/Metro Internet Explorer: What were they thinking???

  - by Rick Strahl

  As I installed Windows 8.1 last week I decided that I really should take a closer look at Internet Explorer in the Modern/Metro environment again. Right away I ran into two issues that are real head scratchers to me.Modern Split Windows don't resize Viewport but Zoom OutThis one falls in the "WTF, really?" department: It looks like Modern Internet Explorer's Modern doesn't resize the browser window as every other browser (including IE 11 on the desktop) does, but rather tries to adjust the zoom to the width of the browser. This means that if you use the Modern IE browser and you split the display between IE and another application, IE will be zoomed out, with text becoming much, much smaller, rather than resizing the browser viewport and adjusting the pixel width as you would when a browser window is typically resized.Here's what I'm talking about in a couple of pictures. First here's the full screen Internet Explorer version (this shot is resized down since it's full screen at 1080p, click to see the full image):This brings up the first issue which is: On the desktop who wants to browse a site full screen? Most sites aren't fully optimized for 1080p widescreen experience and frankly most content that wide just looks weird. Even in typical 10" resolutions of 1280 width it's weird to look at things this way. At least this issue can be worked around with @media queries and either constraining the view, or adding additional content to make use of the extra space. Still running a desktop browser full screen is not optimal on a desktop machine - ever.Regardless, this view, while oversized, is what I expect: Everything is rendered in the right ratios, with font-size and the responsive design styling properly respected.But now look what happens when you split the desktop windows and show half desktop and have modern IE (this screen shot is not resized but cropped - this is actual size content as you can see in the cropped Twitter window on the right half of the screen):What's happening here is that IE is zooming out of the content to make it fit into the smaller width, shrinking the content rather than resizing the viewport's pixel width. In effect it looks like the pixel width stays at 1080px and the viewport expands out height-wise in response resulting in some crazy long portrait view.There goes responsive design - out the window literally. If you've built your site using @media queries and fixed viewport sizes, Internet Explorer completely screws you in this split view. On my 1080p monitor, the site shown at a little under half width becomes completely unreadable as the fonts are too small and break up. As you go into split view and you resize the window handle the content of the browser gets smaller and smaller (and effectively longer and longer on the bottom) effectively throwing off any responsive layout to the point of un-readability even on a big display, let alone a small tablet screen.What could POSSIBLY be the benefit of this screwed up behavior? I checked around a bit trying different pages in this shrunk down view. Other than the Microsoft home page, every page I went to was nearly unreadable at a quarter width. The only page I found that worked 'normally' was the Microsoft home page which undoubtedly is optimized just for Internet Explorer specifically.Bottom Address Bar opaquely overlays ContentAnother problematic feature for me is the browser address bar on the bottom. Modern IE shows the status bar opaquely on the bottom, overlaying the content area of the Web Page - until you click on the page. Until you do though, the address bar overlays the bottom content solidly. And not just a little bit but by good sizable chunk.In the application from the screen shot above I have an application toolbar on the bottom and the IE Address bar completely hides that bottom toolbar when the page is first loaded, until the user clicks into the content at which point the address bar shrinks down to a fat border style bar with a … on it. Toolbars on the bottom are pretty common these days, especially for mobile optimized applications, so I'd say this is a common use case. But even if you don't have toolbars on the bottom maybe there's other fixed content on the bottom of the page that is vital to display. While other browsers often also show address bars and then later hide them, these other browsers tend to resize the viewport when the address bar status changes, so the content can respond to the size change. Not so with Modern IE. The address bar overlays content and stays visible until content is clicked. No resize notification or viewport height change is sent to the browser.So basically Internet Explorer is telling me: "Our toolbar is more important than your content!" - AND gives me no chance to re-act to that behavior. The result on this page/application is that the user sees no actionable operations until he or she clicks into the content area, which is terrible from a UI perspective as the user has no idea what options are available on initial load.It's doubly confounding in that IE is running in full screen mode and has an the entire height of the screen at its disposal - there's plenty of real estate available to not require this sort of hiding of content in the first place. Heck, even Windows Phone with its more constrained size doesn't hide content - in fact the address bar on Windows Phone 8 is always visible.What were they thinking?Every time I use anything in the Modern Metro interface in Windows 8/8.1 I get angry.  I can pretty much ignore Metro/Modern for my everyday usage, but unfortunately with Internet Explorer in the modern shell I have to live with, because there will be users using it to access my sites. I think it's inexcusable by Microsoft to build such a crappy shell around the browser that impacts the actual usability of Web content. In both of the cases above I can only scratch my head at what could have possibly motivated anybody designing the UI for the browser to make these screwed up choices, that manipulate the content in a totally unmaintainable way.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Windows  HTML5   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• SQL University: What and why of database testing

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 2 – Tools of the trade With that out of the way let us sharpen our pencils and get going. Why test a database The sad state of the industry today is that there is very little emphasis on testing in general. Test driven development is still a small niche of the programming world while refactoring is even smaller. The cause of this is the inability of developers to convince themselves and their managers that writing tests is beneficial. At the moment they are mostly viewed as waste of time. This is because the average person (let’s not fool ourselves, we’re all average) is unable to think about lower future costs in relation to little more current work. It’s orders of magnitude easier to know about the current costs in relation to current amount of work. That’s why programmers convince themselves testing is a waste of time. However we have to ask ourselves what tests are really about? Maybe finding bugs? No, not really. If we introduce bugs, we’re likely to write test around those bugs too. But yes we can find some bugs with tests. The main point of tests is to have reproducible repeatability in our systems. By having a code base largely covered by tests we can know with better certainty what a small code change can break in other parts of the system. By having repeatability we can make code changes with confidence, since we know we’ll see what breaks in other tests. And here comes the inability to estimate future costs. By spending just a few more hours writing those tests we’d know instantly what broke where. Imagine we fix a reported bug. We check-in the code, deploy it and the users are happy. Until we get a call 2 weeks later about a certain monthly process has stopped working. What we don’t know is that this process was developed by a long gone coworker and for some reason it relied on that same bug we’ve happily fixed. There’s no way we could’ve known that. We say OK and go in and fix the monthly process. But what we have no clue about is that there’s this ETL job that relied on data from that monthly process. Now that we’ve fixed the process it’s giving unexpected (yet correct since we fixed it) data to the ETL job. So we have to fix that too. But there’s this part of the app we coded that relies on data from that exact ETL job. And just like that we enter the “Loop of maintenance horror”. With the loop eventually comes blame. Here’s a nice tip for all developers and DBAs out there: If you make a mistake man up and admit to it. All of the above is valid for any kind of software development. Keeping this in mind the database is nothing other than just a part of the application. But a big part! One reason why testing a database is even more important than testing an application is that one database is usually accessed from multiple applications and processes. This makes it the central and vital part of the enterprise software infrastructure. Knowing all this can we really afford not to have tests? What to test in a database Now that we’ve decided we’ll dive into this testing thing we have to ask ourselves what needs to be tested? The short answer is: everything. The long answer is: read on! There are 2 main ways of doing tests: Black box and White box testing. Black box testing means we have no idea how the system internals are built and we only have access to it’s inputs and outputs. With it we test that the internal changes to the system haven’t caused the input/output behavior of the system to change. The most important thing to test here are the edge conditions. It’s where most programs break. Having good edge condition tests we can be more confident that the systems changes won’t break. White box testing has the full knowledge of the system internals. With it we test the internal system changes, different states of the application, etc… White and Black box tests should be complementary to each other as they are very much interconnected. Testing database routines includes testing stored procedures, views, user defined functions and anything you use to access the data with. Database routines are your input/output interface to the database system. They count as black box testing. We test then for 2 things: Data and schema. When testing schema we only care about the columns and the data types they’re returning. After all the schema is the contract to the out side systems. If it changes we usually have to change the applications accessing it. One helpful T-SQL command when doing schema tests is SET FMTONLY ON. It tells the SQL Server to return only empty results sets. This speeds up tests because it doesn’t return any data to the client. After we’ve validated the schema we have to test the returned data. There no other way to do this but to have expected data known before the tests executes and comparing that data to the database routine output. Testing Authentication and Authorization helps us validate who has access to the SQL Server box (Authentication) and who has access to certain database objects (Authorization). For desktop applications and windows authentication this works well. But the biggest problem here are web apps. They usually connect to the database as a single user. Please ensure that that user is not SA or an account with admin privileges. That is just bad. Load testing ensures us that our database can handle peak loads. One often overlooked tool for load testing is Microsoft’s OSTRESS tool. It’s part of RML utilities (x86, x64) for SQL Server and can help determine if our database server can handle loads like 100 simultaneous users each doing 10 requests per second. SQL Profiler can also help us here by looking at why certain queries are slow and what to do to fix them.   One particular problem to think about is how to begin testing existing databases. First thing we have to do is to get to know those databases. We can’t test something when we don’t know how it works. To do this we have to talk to the users of the applications accessing the database, run SQL Profiler to see what queries are being run, use existing documentation to decipher all the object relationships, etc… The way to approach this is to choose one part of the database (say a logical grouping of tables that go together) and filter our traces accordingly. Once we’ve done that we move on to the next grouping and so on until we’ve covered the whole database. Then we move on to the next one. Database Testing is a topic that we can spent many hours discussing but let this be a nice intro to the world of database testing. See you in the next post.

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• The Top 5 MDM Sessions You Can’t Miss at OpenWorld

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Sessions, Demo pods, Hands On Labs, and much more – but where should you focus?  MDM has some excellent sessions planned for OOW –  here is a top 5 list to identify the sessions you just can’t afford to miss. October 3, 2012  1:15 PM - 2:15 PM    Moscone West - 3002/3004     What's There to Know About Oracle’s Master Data Management Portfolio and Roadmap? Hear about product strategy our vision for the future and how Oracle MDM is positioned to excel in helping organizations make the most of their customer,      partner, supplier or product data. October 3, 2012  5:00 PM - 6:00 PM   Westin San Francisco – Metropolitan I Oracle Customer MDM Applications: Implementation Best Practices, Data Governance, and ROI       Customers successes provide solid examples of technology at work and how organizations derive value from it. Attend this session and hear from our customers on how they built a business case, established governance and are realizing the benefits of Oracle Customer Hub. October 2, 2012  10:15 AM - 11:15 AM   Moscone West – 3001 Mastering Product Data: Strategies for Effective Product Information Management                                                                      Product data is vital for any enterprise in being able to provide a consolidated representation of products to their partners, customers and suppliers.  Hear how our customers leverage product information to be a leader in their respective area and how Oracle is critical to achieving this. October 2, 2012  11:45 AM - 12:45 PM   Moscone West – 2022 Enabling Trusted Enterprise Product Data with Oracle Fusion Product Hub                                                                                       Learn how Oracle Fusion Product Hub is paving the way for providing organizations with trusted product data as well as helping organizations make the most of the information and infrastructure they already possess. October 1, 2012  4:45 PM – 5:45 PM   InterContinental - Ballroom A Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management: Enabling Enterprise Transformation                                                                         Hear how Data Relationship Management drives enterprise transformation and why any organization embarking on an master data management initiative needs it, plus hear from our customers best practices as well as lessons learned.  Check out the Master Data Management Focus On document for all our sessions at OpenWorld 2012. 

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• Master Data

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Let's take a deeper look at what we mean when we talk about 'Master' data. In its most general sense, master data is data that exists in more than one operational application. These are the applications that automate business processes. These applications require significant amounts of data to function correctly.  This includes data about the objects that are involved in transactions, as well as the transaction data itself.  For example, when a customer buys a product, the transaction is managed by a sales application.  The objects of the transaction are the Customer and the Product.  The transactional data is the time, place, price, discount, payment methods, etc. used at the point of sale. Many thousands of transactional data attributes are needed within the application. These important data elements are local to the applications and have no bearing on other applications. Harmonization and synchronization across applications is not necessary. The Customer and Product objects of the transaction also have a large number of attributes. Customer for example, includes hierarchies, hierarchical and matrixed relationships, contacts, classifications, preferences, accounts, identifiers, profiles, and addresses galore for 'ship to', 'mail to'; 'service at'; etc. Dozens of attributes exist for individuals, hundreds for organizations, and thousands for products. This data has meaning beyond any particular application. It exists in many applications and drives the vital cross application enterprise business processes. These are the processes that define and differentiate the organization. At every decision point, information about the objects of the process determines the direction of the process flow. This is the nature of the data that exists in more than one application, and this is why we call it 'master data'. Let me elaborate. Parties Oracle has developed a party schema to model all participants in your daily business operations. It models people, organizations, groups, customers, contacts, employees, and suppliers. It models their accounts, locations, classifications, and preferences.  And most importantly, it models the vast array of hierarchical and matrixed relationships that exist between all the participants in your real world operations.  The model logically separates people and organizations from their relationships and accounts.  This separation creates flexibility unmatched in the industry and accounts for the fact that the Oracle schema for Customers, Suppliers, and Accounts is a true superset of the wide variety of commercial and homegrown customer models in existence. Sites Sites are places where business is conducted. They can be addresses, clusters such as retail malls, locations within a cluster, floors within a building, places where meters are located, rooms on floors, etc.  Fully understanding all attributes of a site is key to many business processes. Attributes such as 'noise abatement policy' at a point of delivery, or the size of an oven in a business kitchen drive day-to-day activities such as delivery schedules or food promotions. Typically this kind of data is siloed in departments and scattered across applications and spreadsheets.  This leads to conflicting information and poor operational efficiencies. Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold all site attributes in one place and enables a single version of authoritative site information across the enterprise. Products and Services The Oracle Global Single Schema also includes a number of entities that define the products and services a company creates and offers for sale. Key entities include Items organized into Catalogs and Price Lists. The Catalog structures provide for the ability to capture different views of a product such as engineering, manufacturing, and service which are based on a unified product model. As a result, designers, manufacturing engineers, purchasers and partners can work simultaneously on a common product definition. The Catalog schema allows for unlimited attributes, combines them into meaningful groups, and maps them to catalog categories to track these different types of information. The model also maps an unlimited number of functional structures for each item. For example, multiple Bills of Material (BOMs) can be constructed representing requirements BOM, features BOM, and packaging BOM for an item. The Catalog model also supports hierarchical information about each item and all standard Global Data Synchronization attributes. Business Processes Utilizing Linked Data Entities Each business entity codified into a centralized master data environment significantly improves the efficiency of the automated business processes that use the consolidated data.  When all the key business entities used by an organization's process are so consolidated, the advantages are multiplied.  The primary reason for business process breakdowns (i.e. data errors across application boundaries) is eliminated. All processes are positively impacted and business process automation is itself automated.  I like to use the "Call to Resolution" business process as an example to help illustrate this important point. It involves call center applications, service applications, RMA applications, transportation applications, inventory applications, etc. Customer, Site, Product and Supplier master data must all be correct and consistent across these applications.  What's more, the data relationships between customer and product, and product and suppliers must be right. This is the minimum quality needed to insure the business process flows without error. But that is not the end of the story. Critical master data attributes such as customer loyalty, profitability, credit worthiness, and propensity to buy can optimize the call center point of contact component of the process. Critical product information such as alternative parts or equivalent products can optimize the resolution selected by the process. A comprehensive understanding of the 'service at' location can help insure multiple trips are avoided in the process. Full supplier information on reliability, delivery delays, and potential alternates can prevent supplier exceptions and play a significant role in optimizing the process.  In other words, these master data attributes enable the optimization of the "Call to Resolution" enterprise business process. Master data supports and guides business process flows. Thus the phrase 'Master Data' is indeed appropriate. MDM is the software that houses, manages, and governs the master data that resides in all applications and controls the enterprise business processes. A complete master data solution takes a data model that holds fully attributed master data entities and their inter-relationships. Oracle has this model. Oracle, with its deep understanding of application data is the logical choice for managing all your master data within the enterprise whether or not your organization actually runs any Oracle Applications.

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• Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

  From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others...  General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon!  Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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• Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

  Communication with your environment is an essential part of everyone's life. And it doesn't matter whether you are actually living in a rural area in the middle of nowhere, within the pulsating heart of a big city, or in my case on a wonderful island in the Indian Ocean. The ability to exchange your thoughts, your experience and your worries with another person helps you to get different points of view and new ideas on how to resolve an issue you might be confronted with. Benefits of community work What happens to be common sense in your daily life, also applies to your work environment. Working in IT, or ICT as it is called in Mauritius, requires a lot of reading and learning. Not only during your lectures at the university but with your colleagues in a project assignment and hopefully with 'unknown' pals in the universe of online communities. At least I can say that I learned quite a lot from other developers code, their responses in various forums, their numerous blog articles, and while attending local user group meetings. When I started to work as a professional software developer (or engineer some may say) years ago I immediately checked the existence of communities on the programming language, the database technology and other vital information on software development in general. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to find. My employer had a subscription of the monthly magazines and newsletters of a national organisation which also run the biggest forum in that area. Getting in touch with other developers and reading their common problems but also solutions was a huge benefit to my growth. Image courtesy of Michael Kappel (CC BY-NC 2.0) Active participation and regular contribution to this community gave me some nice advantages, too. Within three years I was listed as a conference speaker at the annual developer's conference and provided several sessions on different topics during consecutive years. Back in 2004, I took over the responsibility and management of the monthly meetings of a regional user group, and organised it for more than two years. Furthermore, I was invited to the newly-founded community program of Microsoft Germany (Community Leader/Insider Program - CLIP). My website on Active FoxPro Pages was nominated in the second batch of online communities. Due to my community work and providing advice to others, I had the honour to be awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Visual Developer for Visual FoxPro in the years 2006 and 2007. It was a great experience to meet with other like-minded people and I'm really grateful for that. Just in case, more details are listed in my Curriculum Vitae. But this all changed when I moved to Mauritius... Cyber island Mauritius? During the first months in Mauritius I was way too busy to think about community activities at all. First of all, there was the new company that had to be set up, the new staff had to be trained and of course the communication work-flows and so on with the project managers back in Germany had to be sorted out, too. Second, I had to get a grip of my private matters like getting the basics for my new household or exploring the neighbourhood, and last but not least I needed a break from the hectic and intensive work prior to my departure. As soon as the sea literally calmed down, I started to have conversations with my colleagues about communities and user groups. Sadly, it turned out that there were none, or at least no one was aware of any at that time. Oh oh, what did I do? Anyway, having this kind of background and very positive experience with off-line and on-line activities I decided for myself that some day I'm going to found a community in Mauritius for all kind of IT/ICT-related fields. The main focus might be on software development but not on a certain technology or methodology. It was clear to me that it should be an open infrastructure and anyone is welcome to join, to experience, to share and to contribute if they would like to. That was the idea at that time... Ok, fast-forward to recent events. At the end of October 2012 I was invited to an event called Open Days organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands together with other local partners and resellers. There I got in touch with local Technical Evangelist Arnaud Meslier and we had a good conversation on communities during the breaks. Eventually, I left a good impression on him, as we are having chats on Facebook or Skype irregularly. Well, seeing that my personal and professional surroundings have been settled and running smooth, having that great exchange and contact with Microsoft IOI (again), and being really eager to re-animate my intentions from 2007, I recently founded a new community: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community - #MSCC It took me a while to settle down with the name but it was obvious that the community should not be attached to one single technology, like ie. .NET user group, Oracle developers, or Joomla friends (these are fictitious names). There are several other reasons why I came up with 'Craftsmanship' as the core topic of this community. The expression of 'engineering' didn't feel right with the fields covered. Software development in all kind of facets is a craft, and therefore demands a lot of practice but also guidance from more experienced developers. It also includes the process of designing, modelling and drafting the ideas. Has to deal with various types of tests and test methodologies, and of course should be focused on flexible and agile ways of acting. In order to meet and to excel a customer's request for a solution. Next, I was looking for an easy way to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments. Using all kind of social media platforms like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc. I was never really confident about their features of event handling. More by chance I stumbled upon Meetup.com and in combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I am looking forward to advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there will be a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians!

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• The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

  - by Phil Factor

  The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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• Unlocking Productivity

  - by Michael Snow

  Unlocking Productivity in Life Sciences with Consolidated Content Management by Joe Golemba, Vice President, Product Management, Oracle WebCenter As life sciences organizations look to become more operationally efficient, the ability to effectively leverage information is a competitive advantage. Whether data mining at the drug discovery phase or prepping the sales team before a product launch, content management can play a key role in developing, organizing, and disseminating vital information. The goal of content management is relatively straightforward: put the information that people need where they can find it. A number of issues can complicate this; information sits in many different systems, each of those systems has its own security, and the information in those systems exists in many different formats. Identifying and extracting pertinent information from mountains of farflung data is no simple job, but the alternative—wasted effort or even regulatory compliance issues—is worse. An integrated information architecture can enable health sciences organizations to make better decisions, accelerate clinical operations, and be more competitive. Unstructured data matters Often when we think of drug development data, we think of structured data that fits neatly into one or more research databases. But structured data is often directly supported by unstructured data such as experimental protocols, reaction conditions, lot numbers, run times, analyses, and research notes. As life sciences companies seek integrated views of data, they are typically finding diverse islands of data that seemingly have no relationship to other data in the organization. Information like sales reports or call center reports can be locked into siloed systems, and unavailable to the discovery process. Additionally, in the increasingly networked clinical environment, Web pages, instant messages, videos, scientific imaging, sales and marketing data, collaborative workspaces, and predictive modeling data are likely to be present within an organization, and each source potentially possesses information that can help to better inform specific efforts. Historically, content management solutions that had 21CFR Part 11 capabilities—electronic records and signatures—were focused mainly on content-enabling manufacturing-related processes. Today, life sciences companies have many standalone repositories, requiring different skills, service level agreements, and vendor support costs to manage them. With the amount of content doubling every three to six months, companies have recognized the need to manage unstructured content from the beginning, in order to increase employee productivity and operational efficiency. Using scalable and secure enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, organizations can better manage their unstructured content. These solutions can also be integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or research systems, making content available immediately, in the context of the application and within the flow of the employee’s typical business activity. Administrative safeguards—such as content de-duplication—can also be applied within ECM systems, so documents are never recreated, eliminating redundant efforts, ensuring one source of truth, and maintaining content standards in the organization. Putting it in context Consolidating structured and unstructured information in a single system can greatly simplify access to relevant information when it is needed through contextual search. Using contextual filters, results can include therapeutic area, position in the value chain, semantic commonalities, technology-specific factors, specific researchers involved, or potential business impact. The use of taxonomies is essential to organizing information and enabling contextual searches. Taxonomy solutions are composed of a hierarchical tree that defines the relationship between different life science terms. When overlaid with additional indexing related to research and/or business processes, it becomes possible to effectively narrow down the amount of data that is returned during searches, as well as prioritize results based on specific criteria and/or prior search history. Thus, search results are more accurate and relevant to an employee’s day-to-day work. For example, a search for the word "tissue" by a lab researcher would return significantly different results than a search for the same word performed by someone in procurement. Of course, diverse data repositories, combined with the immense amounts of data present in an organization, necessitate that the data elements be regularly indexed and cached beforehand to enable reasonable search response times. In its simplest form, indexing of a single, consolidated data warehouse can be expected to be a relatively straightforward effort. However, organizations require the ability to index multiple data repositories, enabling a single search to reference multiple data sources and provide an integrated results listing. Security and compliance Beyond yielding efficiencies and supporting new insight, an enterprise search environment can support important security considerations as well as compliance initiatives. For example, the systems enable organizations to retain the relevance and the security of the indexed systems, so users can only see the results to which they are granted access. This is especially important as life sciences companies are working in an increasingly networked environment and need to provide secure, role-based access to information across multiple partners. Although not officially required by the 21 CFR Part 11 regulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administraiton has begun to extend the type of content considered when performing relevant audits and discoveries. Having an ECM infrastructure that provides centralized management of all content enterprise-wide—with the ability to consistently apply records and retention policies along with the appropriate controls, validations, audit trails, and electronic signatures—is becoming increasingly critical for life sciences companies. Making the move Creating an enterprise-wide ECM environment requires moving large amounts of content into a single enterprise repository, a daunting and risk-laden initiative. The first key is to focus on data taxonomy, allowing content to be mapped across systems. The second is to take advantage new tools which can dramatically speed and reduce the cost of the data migration process through automation. Additional content need not be frozen while it is migrated, enabling productivity throughout the process. The ability to effectively leverage information into success has been gaining importance in the life sciences industry for years. The rapid adoption of enterprise content management, both in operational processes as well as in scientific management, are clear indicators that the companies are looking to use all available data to be better informed, improve decision making, minimize risk, and increase time to market, to maintain profitability and be more competitive. As more and more varieties and sources of information are brought under the strategic management umbrella, the ability to divine knowledge from the vast pool of information is increasingly difficult. Simple search engines and basic content management are increasingly unable to effectively extract the right information from the mountains of data available. By bringing these tools into context and integrating them with business processes and applications, we can effectively focus on the right decisions that make our organizations more profitable. More Information Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth 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;} (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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• Free Document/Content Management System Using SharePoint 2010

  - by KunaalKapoor

  That’s right, it’s true. You can use the free version of SharePoint 2010 to meet your document and content management needs and even run your public facing website or an internal knowledge bank.  SharePoint Foundation 2010 is free. It may not have all the features that you get in the enterprise license but it still has enough to cater to your needs to build a document management system and replace age old file shares or folders. I’ve built a dozen content management sites for internal and public use exploiting SharePoint. There are hundreds of web content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix).  On one hand we have commercial platforms like SharePoint, SiteCore, and Ektron etc. which are the most frequently used and on the other hand there are free options like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone etc. which are pretty common popular as well. But I would be very surprised if anyone was able to find a single CMS platform that is all things to all people. Infact not a lot of people consider SharePoint’s free version under the free CMS side but its high time organizations benefit from this. Through this blog post I wanted to present SharePoint Foundation as an option for running a FREE CMS platform. Even if you knew that there is a free version of SharePoint, what most people don’t realize is that SharePoint Foundation is a great option for running web sites of all kinds – not just team sites. It is a great option for many reasons, but in reality it is supported by Microsoft, and above all it is FREE (yay!), and it is extremely easy to get started.  From a functionality perspective – it’s hard to beat SharePoint. Even the free version, SharePoint Foundation, offers simple data connectivity (through BCS), cross browser support, accessibility, support for Office Web Apps, blogs, wikis, templates, document support, health analyzer, support for presence, and MUCH more.I often get asked: “Can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?” The answer really depends on ·          What are your specific requirements? ·          What systems you currently have in place for managing documents. ·          And of course how much money you have J Benefits? Not many large organizations have benefited from SharePoint yet. For some it has been an IT project to see what they can achieve with it, for others it has been used as a collaborative platform or in many cases an extended intranet. SharePoint 2010 has changed the game slightly as the improvements that Microsoft have made have been noted by organizations, and we are seeing a lot of companies starting to build specific business applications using SharePoint as the basis, and nearly every business process will require documents at some stage. If you require a document management system and have SharePoint in place then it can be a relatively straight forward decision to use SharePoint, as long as you have reviewed the considerations just discussed. The collaborative nature of SharePoint 2010 is also a massive advantage, as specific departmental or project sites can be created quickly and easily that allow workers to interact in a variety of different ways using one source of information.  This also benefits an organization with regards to how they manage the knowledge that they have, as if all of their information is in one source then it is naturally easier to search and manage. Is SharePoint right for your organization? As just discussed, this can only be determined after defining your requirements and also planning a longer term strategy for how you will manage your documents and information. A key factor to look at is how the users would interact with the system and how much value would it get for your organization. The amount of data and documents that organizations are creating is increasing rapidly each year. Therefore the ability to archive this information, whilst keeping the ability to know what you have and where it is, is vital to any organizations management of their information life cycle. SharePoint is best used for the initial life of business documents where they need to be referenced and accessed after time. It is often beneficial to archive these to overcome for storage and performance issues. FREE CMS – SharePoint, Really? In order to show some of the completely of what comes with this free version of SharePoint 2010, I thought it would make sense to use Wikipedia (since every one trusts it as a credible source). Wikipedia shows that a web content management system typically has the following components: Document Management:   -       CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction. SharePoint is king when it comes to document management.  Version history, exclusive check-out, security, publication, workflow, and so much more.  Content Virtualization:   -       CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission. Through the use of versioning, each content manager can preview, publish, and roll-back content of pages, wiki entries, blog posts, documents, or any other type of content stored in SharePoint.  The idea of each user having an entire copy of the website virtualized is a bit odd to me – not sure why anyone would need that for anything but the simplest of websites. Automated Templates:   -       Create standard output templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place. Through the use of Master Pages and Themes, SharePoint provides the ability to change the entire look and feel of site.  Of course, the older brother version of SharePoint – SharePoint Server 2010 – also introduces the concept of Page Layouts which allows page template level customization and even switching the layout of an individual page using different page templates.  I think many organizations really think they want this but rarely end up using this bit of functionality.  Easy Edits:   -       Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content. This is probably easier described with a screen cap of a vanilla SharePoint Foundation page in edit mode.  Notice the page editing toolbar, the multiple layout options…  It’s actually easier to use than Microsoft Word. Workflow management: -       Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it. Workflow, it’s in there. In fact, the same workflow engine is running under SharePoint Foundation that is running under the other versions of SharePoint.  The primary difference is that with SharePoint Foundation – you need to configure the workflows yourself.   Web Standards: -       Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards. SharePoint is in the fourth major iteration under Microsoft with the 2010 release.  In addition to the innovation that Microsoft continuously adds, you have the entire global ecosystem available. Scalable Expansion:   -       Available in most modern WCMSs is the ability to expand a single implementation (one installation on one server) across multiple domains. SharePoint Foundation can run multiple sites using multiple URLs on a single server install.  Even more powerful, SharePoint Foundation is scalable and can be part of a multi-server farm to ensure that it will handle any amount of traffic that can be thrown at it. Delegation & Security:  -       Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management. SharePoint Foundation provides very granular security capabilities. Read @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537811.aspx Content Syndication:  -       CMS software often assists in content distribution by generating RSS and Atom data feeds to other systems. They may also e-mail users when updates are available as part of the workflow process. SharePoint Foundation nails it.  With RSS syndication and email alerts available out of the box, content syndication is already in the platform. Multilingual Support: -       Ability to display content in multiple languages. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports more than 40 languages. Read More Read more @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256(v=office.12).aspxYou can download the free version from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5970

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• How to Plug a Small Hole in NetBeans JSF (Join Table) Code Generation

  - by MarkH

  I was asked recently to provide an assist with designing and building a small-but-vital application that had at its heart some basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, & Delete) functionality, built upon an Oracle database, to be accessible from various locations. Working from the stated requirements, I fleshed out the basic application and database designs and, once validated, set out to complete the first iteration for review. Using SQL Developer, I created the requisite tables, indices, and sequences for our first run. One of the tables was a many-to-many join table with three fields: one a primary key for that table, the other two being primary keys for the other tables, represented as foreign keys in the join table. Here is a simplified example of the trio of tables: Once the database was in decent shape, I fired up NetBeans to let it have first shot at the code. NetBeans does a great job of generating a mountain of essential code, saving developers what must be millions of hours of effort each year by building a basic foundation with a few clicks and keystrokes. Lest you think it (or any tool) can do everything for you, however, occasionally something tosses a paper clip into the delicate machinery and makes you open things up to fix them. Join tables apparently qualify.  :-) In the case above, the entity class generated for the join table (New Entity Classes from Database) included an embedded object consisting solely of the two foreign key fields as attributes, in addition to an object referencing each one of the "component" tables. The Create page generated (New JSF Pages from Entity Classes) worked well to a point, but when trying to save, we were greeted with an error: Transaction aborted. Hmm. A quick debugger session later and I'd identified the issue: when trying to persist the new join-table object, the embedded "foreign-keys-only" object still had null values for its two (required value) attributes...even though the embedded table objects had populated key attributes. Here's the simple fix: In the join-table controller class, find the public String create() method. It will look something like this:     public String create() {        try {            getFacade().create(current);            JsfUtil.addSuccessMessage(ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("JoinEntityCreated"));            return prepareCreate();        } catch (Exception e) {            JsfUtil.addErrorMessage(e, ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("PersistenceErrorOccured"));            return null;        }    } To restore balance to the force, modify the create() method as follows (changes in red):     public String create() {         try {            // Add the next two lines to resolve:            current.getJoinEntityPK().setTbl1id(current.getTbl1().getId().toBigInteger());            current.getJoinEntityPK().setTbl2id(current.getTbl2().getId().toBigInteger());            getFacade().create(current);            JsfUtil.addSuccessMessage(ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("JoinEntityCreated"));            return prepareCreate();        } catch (Exception e) {            JsfUtil.addErrorMessage(e, ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("PersistenceErrorOccured"));            return null;        }    } I'll be refactoring this code shortly, but for now, it works. Iteration one is complete and being reviewed, and we've met the milestone. Here's to happy endings (and customers)! All the best,Mark

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• Passing variables to shopping cart with Javascript

  - by albatross

  This question is an extension of this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2359238/calculate-order-price-by-date-selection-value I'm trying to make a conference registration page based off the previous page, which passes the variables(name, email, price) to my organization's outdated shopping cart using javascript. I'm also using Seminar Registration by CSSTricks (http://css-tricks.com/examples/SeminarRegTutorial/) Currently, my proceed to payment button produces an 'element is undefined' error on line 298(same thing on unresolved previous question, linked above^): switch (document.Information.amount.value) { Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm at my wits end with this. Here is the page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>Seminar Registration Form with jQuery</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" media="screen" /> <script src="js/jquery-1.2.6.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script> <script src="js/form-fun.jquery.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script> <!--[if IE]> <style type="text/css"> legend { position: relative; top: -30px; } fieldset { margin: 30px 10px 0 0; } </style> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function(){ $("#step_2 legend").css({ opacity: 0.5 }); $("#step_3 legend").css({ opacity: 0.5 }); }); </script> <![endif]--> </head> <body> <div id="page-wrap"> <h1>Conference <span>Registration</span></h1> <form action="#" method="post"> <fieldset id="step_1"> <legend>Step 1</legend> <label for="num_attendees"> How cool are you? </label> <select id="amount"> <option id="0" value="0">Please Choose</option> <option id="prof" value="90.00">Professional</option> <option id="grad" value="55.00">Graduate Student</option> </select> <br /> <div id="attendee_1_wrap" class="name_wrap push"> <h3>Who are you?</h3> <p> <label for="FirstName"> First Name: </label> <input type="text" id="FirstName" class="name_input"></input> </p> <p> <label for="LastName"> Last Name: </label> <input type="text" id="LastName" class="name_input"></input> </p> <p> <label for="OfficialTitle"> Official Title: </label> <input type="text" id="OfficialTitle" class="name_input"></input> </p> <h3>How do we find you?</h3> <label for="email">Email: </label> <input id="email" name="email" class="required email" /> </p> <p> <label for="Address">Street Address: </label><input name="Address" id="Address" type="text" size="20" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p> <label for="City">City: </label><input name="City" id="City" /> </p> <p> <label for="State">State: </label><select name="State" id="State"> <option selected value="IL">IL</option> <option value="AL">AL</option> <option value="AK">AK</option> <option value="AZ">AZ</option> <option value="AR">AR</option> <option value="CA">CA</option> <option value="CO">CO</option> <option value="CT">CT</option> <option value="DE">DE</option> <option value="DC">DC</option> <option value="FL">FL</option> <option value="GA">GA</option> <option value="HI">HI</option> <option value="ID">ID</option> <option value="IN">IN</option> <option value="IA">IA</option> <option value="KS">KS</option> <option value="KY">KY</option> <option value="LA">LA</option> <option value="ME">ME</option> <option value="MD">MD</option> <option value="MA">MA</option> <option value="MI">MI</option> <option value="MN">MN</option> <option value="MS">MS</option> <option value="MO">MO</option> <option value="MT">MT</option> <option value="NE">NE</option> <option value="NV">NV</option> <option value="NH">NH</option> <option value="NJ">NJ</option> <option value="NM">NM</option> <option value="NY">NY</option> <option value="NC">NC</option> <option value="ND">ND</option> <option value="OH">OH</option> <option value="OK">OK</option> <option value="OR">OR</option> <option value="PA">PA</option> <option value="RI">RI</option> <option value="SC">SC</option> <option value="SD">SD</option> <option value="TN">TN</option> <option value="TX">TX</option> <option value="UT">UT</option> <option value="VT">VT</option> <option value="VA">VA</option> <option value="WA">WA</option> <option value="WV">WV</option> <option value="WI">WI</option> <option value="WY">WY</option> </select> </p> <p> <label for="Zip">Zip Code: </label><input name="Zip" id="Zip" type="text" value="" size="5" maxlength="10" /> </p> <p> <label for="Phone">Telephone: </label><input name="Phone" id="Phone" type="text" value="" size="10" maxlength="13" /> </p> </div> </fieldset> <fieldset id="step_2"> <legend>Step 2</legend> <p> Do you work in Higher Education? </p> <input type="radio" id="company_name_toggle_on" name="company_name_toggle_group"></input> <label for="company_name_toggle_on">Yes</label> &emsp; <input type="radio" id="company_name_toggle_off" name="company_name_toggle_group"></input> <label for="company_name_toggle_off">No</label> <div id="company_name_wrap"> <label for="company_name"> Which School? </label> <input type="text" id="company_name"></input> </div> <div class="push"> <p> Will anyone in your group require special accommodations? </p> <input type="radio" id="special_accommodations_toggle_on" name="special_accommodations_toggle"></input> <label for="special_accommodations_toggle_on">Yes</label> &emsp; <input type="radio" id="special_accommodations_toggle_off" name="special_accommodations_toggle"></input> <label for="special_accommodations_toggle_off">No</label> </div> <div id="special_accommodations_wrap"> <label for="special_accomodations_text"> Please explain below: </label> <textarea rows="10" cols="10" id="special_accomodations_text"></textarea> </div> </fieldset> <fieldset id="step_3"> <legend>Step 3</legend> <label for="rock"> Are you ready to rock? </label> <input type="checkbox" id="rock"></input> <p> <INPUT onclick="javascript:PaymentButtonClick()" type=button value="Proceed to payment" name=PaymentButton> <img src="images/visa1.gif" /> <img src="images/mastercard1.gif" /> </p> </fieldset> </form> </div> <FORM name="emailForm" action="mailform.asp" method=post"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="Conference Registration" name="mf_subject"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="Yes" name="mf_email_results"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="20" name="num_attendees"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="17" name="FirstName"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="22" name="LastName"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" size="64" name="OfficialTitle"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" size="40" name="email"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" size="48" name="Address"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="17" name="City"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="17" name="State"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="17" name="Zip"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="17" name="Phone"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffa0" size="17" name="company_name"> <INPUT type="hidden" title="" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" size="20" name="special_accomodations_text"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="[email protected]" name="mf_from"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="[email protected]" name="mf_to"> </FORM> <FORM name="addform" action="https://webcluster.niu.edu/CreditCard/servlet/Shopping_Cart_Add_Item_Servlet" method="post"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="orient" name="Dept_ID"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="Orientation" name="Product_Name"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="z000000" name="Product_Code"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="" name="amount"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="/orientation/index.shtml" name="return_link"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="http://www.niu.edu" name="return_server"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="1" name="quantity"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="0" name="tax"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="0" name="ship"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="DQ83225" name="sale_id"> <INPUT type="hidden" value="XXXXXX" name="sale_acct"> </FORM> <SCRIPT language="Javascript"> function PaymentButtonClick() { switch (document.Information.amount.value) { case 'prof': document.Information.amount.value = 90.00; break; case 'grad': document.Information.amount.value = 55.00; break; } document.addform.Product_Name.value = document.Information.FirstName.value + ","+ document.Information.LastName.value+","+ document.Information.OfficialTitle.value+","+ document.Information.email.name+","+","+ document.Information.Address.value+ "," + document.Information.City.value+ "," + document.Information.State.value+ "," + document.Information.Zip.value+ "," + document.Information.Phone.value+ "," + document.Information.company_name.value+ "," + document.Information.special_accomodations_text.value; document.addform.Product_Code.value = document.Information.LastName.value; if ((document.Information.UCheck.checked==true) && (document.Information.altDate1.value != "") && (document.Information.altDate1.value != "x")) { if (document.Information.StudentLastName.value != "" || document.Information.StudentFirstName.value != "" || document.Information.StudentID.value != "" ) { document.addform.submit(); } else { alert("Please enter missing information"); } } } </SCRIPT> </body> </html>

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• How do I ensure that a JPanel Shrinks when the parent frame is resized?

  - by dah

  I have a basic notes panel that I'm looking to shrink the width of when the parent jframe is resized but it isn't happening. I'm using nested gridbaglayouts. package com.protocase.notes.views; import com.protocase.notes.controller.NotesController; import com.protocase.notes.model.Subject; import com.protocase.notes.model.Note; import com.protocase.notes.model.database.PMSNotesAdapter; import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.GridBagConstraints; import java.awt.GridBagLayout; import javax.swing.BorderFactory; import javax.swing.JButton; import javax.swing.JLabel; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.JScrollPane; /** * @author DavidH */ public class NotesViewer extends JPanel { // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Attributes"> private Subject subject; private NotesController controller; //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Getters N' Setters"> /** * Gets back the current subject. * @return */ public Subject getSubject() { return subject; } public NotesController getController() { return controller; } public void setController(NotesController controller) { this.controller = controller; } /** * Should clear the panel of the current subject and load the details for * the other object. * @param subject */ public void setSubject(Subject subject) { this.subject = subject; } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Constructor"> /** * -- Sets up a note viewer with a subject and a controller. Likely this * would be the constructor used if you were passing off from another * NoteViewer or something else that used a notes adapter or controller. * @param subject * @param controller */ public NotesViewer(Subject subject, NotesController controller) { this.subject = subject; this.controller = controller; initComponents(); } /** * -- Sets up a note view with a subject and creates a new controller. This * would be the constructor typically chosen if choosing notes was * infrequent and only one or two notes needs to be displayed. * @param subject */ public NotesViewer(Subject subject) { this(subject, new NotesController(new PMSNotesAdapter())); } /** * -- Sets up a note view without a subject and creates a new controller. * This would be for a note viewer without any notes, perhaps populating * as you choose values in another form. * @param subject */ public NotesViewer() { this(null); } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="initComponents()"> /** * Sets up the view for the NotesViewer */ private void initComponents() { // -- Make a new panel for the header JPanel panel = new JPanel(); panel.setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints c = new GridBagConstraints(); c.gridx = 0; c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL; c.gridy = 0; c.weightx = .5; //c.anchor = GridBagConstraints.NORTHWEST; JLabel label = new JLabel("Viewing Notes for [Subject]"); label.setAlignmentX(JLabel.LEFT_ALIGNMENT); label.setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.YELLOW)); panel.add(label); JButton newNoteButton = new JButton("New"); c = new GridBagConstraints(); // c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL; c.gridx = 1; c.gridy = 0; c.weightx = .5; c.anchor = GridBagConstraints.EAST; panel.add(newNoteButton, c); // -- NotePanels c = new GridBagConstraints(); c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL; c.weightx = 1; c.weighty = 1; c.gridx = 0; c.gridwidth = 2; int y = 1; for (Note n : subject.getNotes()) { c.gridy = y++; panel.add(new NotesPanel(n, controller), c); } this.setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints pc = new GridBagConstraints(); pc.gridx = 0; pc.gridy = 0; pc.weightx = 1; pc.weighty = 1; pc.fill = GridBagConstraints.BOTH; panel.setBackground(Color.blue); JScrollPane scroll = new JScrollPane(); scroll.setViewportView(panel); //scroll.setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(JScrollPane.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_NEVER); this.add(scroll, pc); //this.add(panel, pc); // -- Add it all to the layout } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="private methods"> //</editor-fold> } package com.protocase.notes.views; import com.protocase.notes.controller.NotesController; import com.protocase.notes.model.Note; import java.awt.CardLayout; import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.Component; import java.awt.Dimension; import java.awt.GridBagConstraints; import java.awt.GridBagLayout; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import java.text.DateFormat; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import javax.swing.BorderFactory; import javax.swing.JButton; import javax.swing.JLabel; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.JScrollPane; import javax.swing.JTextArea; import javax.swing.JTextField; import javax.swing.border.BevelBorder; import javax.swing.border.Border; import javax.swing.border.MatteBorder; /** * @author dah01 */ public class NotesPanel extends JPanel { // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Attributes"> private Note note; private NotesController controller; private CardLayout cardLayout; private JTextArea viewTextArea; private JTextArea editTextArea; //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Getters N' Setters"> public NotesController getController() { return controller; } public void setController(NotesController controller) { this.controller = controller; } public Note getNote() { return note; } public void setNote(Note note) { this.note = note; } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Constructor"> /** * Sets up a note panel that shows everything about the note. * @param note */ public NotesPanel(Note note, NotesController controller) { this.note = note; cardLayout = new CardLayout(); this.setLayout(cardLayout); // -- Setup the layout manager. this.setBackground(new Color(199, 187, 192)); this.setBorder(new BevelBorder(BevelBorder.RAISED)); // -- ViewPanel this.add("ViewPanel", initViewPanel()); this.add("EditPanel", initEditPanel()); } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="EditPanel"> private JPanel initEditPanel() { JPanel editPanel = new JPanel(); editPanel.setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints c = new GridBagConstraints(); c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL; c.gridy = 0; c.weightx = 1; c.weighty = 0.3; editPanel.add(initCreatorLabel(), c); c.gridy++; editPanel.add(initEditTextScroll(), c); c.gridy++; c.anchor = GridBagConstraints.WEST; c.fill = GridBagConstraints.NONE; editPanel.add(initEditorLabel(), c); c.gridx++; c.anchor = GridBagConstraints.EAST; editPanel.add(initSaveButton(), c); return editPanel; } private JScrollPane initEditTextScroll() { this.editTextArea = new JTextArea(note.getContents()); editTextArea.setLineWrap(true); editTextArea.setWrapStyleWord(true); JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane(editTextArea); scrollPane.setAlignmentX(JScrollPane.LEFT_ALIGNMENT); Border b = scrollPane.getViewportBorder(); MatteBorder mb = BorderFactory.createMatteBorder(2, 2, 2, 2, Color.BLUE); scrollPane.setBorder(mb); return scrollPane; } private JButton initSaveButton() { final CardLayout l = this.cardLayout; final JPanel p = this; final NotesController c = this.controller; final Note n = this.note; final JTextArea noteText = this.viewTextArea; final JTextArea textToSubmit = this.editTextArea; ActionListener al = new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { //controller.saveNote(n); noteText.setText(textToSubmit.getText()); l.next(p); } }; JButton saveButton = new JButton("Save"); saveButton.addActionListener(al); saveButton.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(62, 26)); return saveButton; } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="ViewPanel"> private JPanel initViewPanel() { JPanel viewPanel = new JPanel(); viewPanel.setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints c = new GridBagConstraints(); c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL ; c.gridy = 0; c.weightx = 1; c.weighty = 0.3; viewPanel.add(initCreatorLabel(), c); c.gridy++; viewPanel.add(this.initNoteTextArea(), c); c.fill = GridBagConstraints.NONE; c.anchor = GridBagConstraints.WEST; c.gridy++; viewPanel.add(initEditorLabel(), c); c.gridx++; c.anchor = GridBagConstraints.EAST; viewPanel.add(initEditButton(), c); return viewPanel; } private JLabel initCreatorLabel() { DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd"); if (note != null) { String noteBy = "Note by " + note.getCreator(); String noteCreated = formatter.format(note.getDateCreated()); JLabel creatorLabel = new JLabel(noteBy + " @ " + noteCreated); creatorLabel.setAlignmentX(JLabel.LEFT_ALIGNMENT); return creatorLabel; } else { System.out.println("NOTE IS NULL"); return null; } } private JScrollPane initNoteTextArea() { // -- Setup the notes area. this.viewTextArea = new JTextArea(note.getContents()); viewTextArea.setEditable(false); viewTextArea.setLineWrap(true); viewTextArea.setWrapStyleWord(true); JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane(viewTextArea); scrollPane.setAlignmentX(JScrollPane.LEFT_ALIGNMENT); return scrollPane; } private JLabel initEditorLabel() { // -- Setup the edited by label. JLabel editorLabel = new JLabel(" -- Last edited by " + note.getLastEdited() + " at " + note.getDateModified()); editorLabel.setAlignmentX(Component.LEFT_ALIGNMENT); return editorLabel; } private JButton initEditButton() { final CardLayout l = this.cardLayout; final JPanel p = this; ActionListener ar = new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { l.next(p); } }; JButton editButton = new JButton("Edit"); editButton.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(62,26)); editButton.addActionListener(ar); return editButton; } //</editor-fold> // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Grow Width When Resized"> @Override public Dimension getPreferredSize() { int fw = this.getParent().getSize().width; int fh = super.getPreferredSize().height; return new Dimension(fw,fh); } //</editor-fold> }

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• WCF REST on .Net 4.0

  - by AngelEyes

  A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began.  One of the things that caught my attention about early start-ups using the AJAX/REST/Web 2.0 model was how nice the URIs were for their applications.  Those were my first impressions of REST; pretty URIs.  Turns out there is a little more to it than that. REST is an architectural style that focuses on resources and structured ways to access those resources via the web.  REST evolved as an “anti-SOAP” movement, driven by developers who did not want to deal with all the complexity SOAP introduces (which is al lot when you don’t have frameworks hiding it all).  One of the biggest benefits to REST is that browsers can talk to rest services directly because REST works using URIs, QueryStrings, Cookies, SSL, and all those HTTP verbs that we don’t have to think about anymore. If you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC then you have been exposed to rest at some level.  MVC is relies heavily on routing to generate consistent and clean URIs.  REST for WCF gives you the same type of feel for your services.  Let’s dive in. WCF REST in .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 This post will cover WCF REST in .NET 4 which drew heavily from the REST Starter Kit and community feedback.  There is basic REST support in .NET 3.5 SP1 and you can also grab the REST Starter Kit to enable some of the features you’ll find in .NET 4. This post will cover REST in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Getting Started To get started we’ll create a basic WCF Rest Service Application using the new on-line templates option in VS 2010: When you first install a template you are prompted with this dialog: Dude Where’s my .Svc File? The WCF REST template shows us the new way we can simply build services.  Before we talk about what’s there, let’s look at what is not there: The .Svc File An Interface Contract Dozens of lines of configuration that you have to change to make your service work REST in .NET 4 is greatly simplified and leverages the Web Routing capabilities used in ASP.NET MVC and other parts of the web frameworks.  With REST in .NET 4 you use a global.asax to set the route to your service using the new ServiceRoute class.  From there, the WCF runtime handles dispatching service calls to the methods based on the Uri Templates. global.asax using System; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.Web; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     public class Global : HttpApplication     {         void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             RegisterRoutes();         }         private static void RegisterRoutes()         {             RouteTable.Routes.Add(new ServiceRoute("TimeService",                 new WebServiceHostFactory(), typeof(TimeService)));         }     } } The web.config contains some new structures to support a configuration free deployment.  Note that this is the default config generated with the template.  I did not make any changes to web.config. web.config <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration>   <system.web>     <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />   </system.web>   <system.webServer>     <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">       <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,            System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     </modules>   </system.webServer>   <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"/>     <standardEndpoints>       <webHttpEndpoint>         <!--             Configure the WCF REST service base address via the global.asax.cs file and the default endpoint             via the attributes on the <standardEndpoint> element below         -->         <standardEndpoint name="" helpEnabled="true" automaticFormatSelectionEnabled="true"/>       </webHttpEndpoint>     </standardEndpoints>   </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Building the Time Service We’ll create a simple “TimeService” that will return the current time.  Let’s start with the following code: using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.ServiceModel.Web; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     [ServiceContract]     [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]     [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerCall)]     public class TimeService     {         [WebGet(UriTemplate = "CurrentTime")]         public string CurrentTime()         {             return DateTime.Now.ToString();         }     } } The endpoint for this service will be http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService.  To get the current time http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService/CurrentTime will do the trick. The Results Are In Remember That Route In global.asax? Turns out it is pretty important.  When you set the route name, that defines the resource name starting after the host portion of the Uri. Help Pages in WCF 4 Another feature that came from the starter kit are the help pages.  To access the help pages simply append Help to the end of the service’s base Uri. Dropping the Soap Having dabbled with REST in the past and after using Soap for the last few years, the WCF 4 REST support is certainly refreshing.  I’m currently working on some REST implementations in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 and am looking forward to working on REST in .NET 4 and VS 2010.

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• Your thoughts on Best Practices for Scientific Computing?

  - by John Smith

  A recent paper by Wilson et al (2014) pointed out 24 Best Practices for scientific programming. It's worth to have a look. I would like to hear opinions about these points from experienced programmers in scientific data analysis. Do you think these advices are helpful and practical? Or are they good only in an ideal world? Wilson G, Aruliah DA, Brown CT, Chue Hong NP, Davis M, Guy RT, Haddock SHD, Huff KD, Mitchell IM, Plumbley MD, Waugh B, White EP, Wilson P (2014) Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLoS Biol 12:e1001745. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001745 Box 1. Summary of Best Practices Write programs for people, not computers. (a) A program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once. (b) Make names consistent, distinctive, and meaningful. (c) Make code style and formatting consistent. Let the computer do the work. (a) Make the computer repeat tasks. (b) Save recent commands in a file for re-use. (c) Use a build tool to automate workflows. Make incremental changes. (a) Work in small steps with frequent feedback and course correction. (b) Use a version control system. (c) Put everything that has been created manually in version control. Don’t repeat yourself (or others). (a) Every piece of data must have a single authoritative representation in the system. (b) Modularize code rather than copying and pasting. (c) Re-use code instead of rewriting it. Plan for mistakes. (a) Add assertions to programs to check their operation. (b) Use an off-the-shelf unit testing library. (c) Turn bugs into test cases. (d) Use a symbolic debugger. Optimize software only after it works correctly. (a) Use a profiler to identify bottlenecks. (b) Write code in the highest-level language possible. Document design and purpose, not mechanics. (a) Document interfaces and reasons, not implementations. (b) Refactor code in preference to explaining how it works. (c) Embed the documentation for a piece of software in that software. Collaborate. (a) Use pre-merge code reviews. (b) Use pair programming when bringing someone new up to speed and when tackling particularly tricky problems. (c) Use an issue tracking tool. I'm relatively new to serious programming for scientific data analysis. When I tried to write code for pilot analyses of some of my data last year, I encountered tremendous amount of bugs both in my code and data. Bugs and errors had been around me all the time, but this time it was somewhat overwhelming. I managed to crunch the numbers at last, but I thought I couldn't put up with this mess any longer. Some actions must be taken. Without a sophisticated guide like the article above, I started to adopt "defensive style" of programming since then. A book titled "The Art of Readable Code" helped me a lot. I deployed meticulous input validations or assertions for every function, renamed a lot of variables and functions for better readability, and extracted many subroutines as reusable functions. Recently, I introduced Git and SourceTree for version control. At the moment, because my co-workers are much more reluctant about these issues, the collaboration practices (8a,b,c) have not been introduced. Actually, as the authors admitted, because all of these practices take some amount of time and effort to introduce, it may be generally hard to persuade your reluctant collaborators to comply them. I think I'm asking your opinions because I still suffer from many bugs despite all my effort on many of these practices. Bug fix may be, or should be, faster than before, but I couldn't really measure the improvement. Moreover, much of my time has been invested on defence, meaning that I haven't actually done much data analysis (offence) these days. Where is the point I should stop at in terms of productivity? I've already deployed: 1a,b,c, 2a, 3a,b,c, 4b,c, 5a,d, 6a,b, 7a,7b I'm about to have a go at: 5b,c Not yet: 2b,c, 4a, 7c, 8a,b,c (I could not really see the advantage of using GNU make (2c) for my purpose. Could anyone tell me how it helps my work with MATLAB?)

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• 3 Trends for SMBs around Social, Mobile, and Sensor

  - by Socially_Aware_Enterprise

  While I often am talking to big companies or discussing enterprise solutions. There are times when individuals ask me about Small or Medium sized business trends.  Interestingly,  the Enterprise Social, Mobile, and Sensor initiatives I regularly discuss are in fact related to even the Mom and Pop storefront. The eco-system of new service players in the Social-Mobile-Sensor space generally emerge developing partnerships with enterprises as they develop and bring economy to scale to their services for the larger market. And of course Oracle has an entire division dedicated for delivering products and support to help emerging companies compete without the need to open an industrial strength credit line.. So here are some trends that we are helping large enterprises to deploy today, but small and medium businesses should be able to take advantage of by the end of this year and starting into 2015. 1) The typical small business is generally "Localized". But the ability to be "Hyper-Localized" will come as location based services become ubiquitous. Many small businesses have one or several storefronts and theirs are typically within a single regional economic footprint. While the internet provides global reach, it will be the businesses that invest in social, mobile and local that will win in the end.  Of course I am a huge SoMoLo evangelist. The SMBs' content and targeting with platforms for Geo-Fencing, Geo-Conquesting and Path-Matching to HHI are all going to be accessible to them, if not for Mobile Apps, then via Mobile messaging in Social Networks that offer it.. Expect to be able to target FaceBook messaging not by city, but by store or mall… This makes being able to be "Hyper-Local" even more important. And with new proximity services coming online more than ever before, SMBs will operate and service customers with pinpoint accuracy right down to where they stand in an aisle. Geo-Conquesting will be huge for small players to place ads when customers pass through competitors regions. Car Dealers are doing this now.. But also of course iBeacons are now very cheap and getting easier to put in retail stores. The ability for sales to happen anywhere in the store via a mobile phone or tablet is huge, as it will give the small shop the flexibility to not have to "Guard the Register" as more or most transactions will be digital. Thus, M-Commerce and T-Commerce will change the job of cashier dramatically.. 2) Intra-Brand Advocacy, the idea now is that rather than just depend on your trusty social media manager and his team, you are going to push more and more individuals with expertise inside the organization to help manage, reach-out, and utilize social channels to manage the incoming questions and answers customers need. While for years CRM was the tool of the enterprise, today CRMs enable this now "Salesforce et al" capability to trickle throughout the company. This gives greater pressure to organize roles, but also flatten out the organization. Internal collaboration around topics and customer needs is going to be the key for SMBs to finally get serious about customer experiences. Their customers are online and in social networks. This includes not just B2C SMBs but also B2B companies as well. Don't believe me? To find the players just use hashtag #SocialSelling and you will see… 3) The Visual Networks will begin to move from Content Aggregators to Content Collaboration platforms, which means Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, & others will begin to move to add more features brands want, first marketing platforms, rather than unique brand partnerships as they do today, but this will open ways for SMBs to engage with clear brand messaging and metrics. Eventually providing more "Collaboration" between Brand and Consumer.. Don't think for a minute Facebook bought Oculus Rift so you could see your timeline in 3-D. The Social Networks I advise customers to invest in are ones that are audio and visual intrinsically. Players from SoundCloud to Pinterest are deploying ways for brands to harness their interactive visual or audio based social networks to sell ad units aka brand messaging. While the Social Media revolution is going on, the emphasis was on the social, today it more and more about the media in social, that enterprises soon small and medium businesses will be connected to. 

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• Managing Your First SharePoint Project or Team

  - by Mark Rackley

  (*editor’s note* If you have proper SharePoint Training, know the difference between a site and a site collection, and have the utmost respect for the knowledge of your SharePoint team skip this blog and go directly to meetdux.com, do not pass go, do not collect $200… otherwise, please proceed) Dear Mr. or Mrs. I-know-nothing-about-SharePoint-but-hey,-I-have-manager-in-my-title-so-I’ll-tell-you-how-to-your-job, Thank you so much for joining the Acme corporation. We appreciate your eagerness and willingness to jump in and help us accomplish all of our goals here at acme (these roadrunner rockets don’t make themselves). You may have noticed that we have this thing called SharePoint lying around and we have invested some time in money to make it not a complete piece of garbage. So, I thought I’d give you some pointers to help make your stay here enjoyable and productive. Yeah… you don’t really know SharePoint Just because you had a mysite at your last organization or had a SharePoint 2003 team site does NOT mean you comprehend the vastness that is SharePoint. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know what should and should not be done. No, we CAN’T just query the SQL database directly. Yes, it really does take that long. No, we can’t do that out-of-the-box. Your experience doesn’t mean as much as you think it means… Yes, I’m aware that you co-created the internet with Al Gore and have been managing projects since I was blowing up GI Joe figures with firecrackers, however SharePoint is not like anything you have worked with before from a management perspective. Please don’t tell us the proper way to do our job or tell us how “you” would do it, and PLEASE don’t utter the words “I used to do some .NET development so let me know if you get stuck and need some guidance.” It MAY be possible for a incredible project manager to manage a SharePoint project and not understand the technology, but if you force your ideas on us or treat us like we don’t really know what we’re doing then you will prove yourself to NOT be one of those types. Oh no you didn’t… Please don’t tell us how you can bring in a group of guys of Kazakhstan to do the project for $20/hr. There are many companies out there who can do some really crappy SharePoint work and we don’t want to be stuck maintaining their junk. Do you know what it means to deploy a solution? Neither do some of those companies out there. However, there are are few AWESOME consulting firms out there but $150/hr is cheap for these guys. Believe me, it’s worth it though. You get what you pay for! Show us some respect We truly do appreciate and value your opinion and experience, but when we tell you something is different in SharePoint don’t be condescending and dismiss OUR experience and opinions. We have spent a lot of time and energy learning a very complicated technology that can open up a world of possibilities when used properly. We just want to make sure it is used properly. It’s not the same as .NET development. It’s not like a regular web application. There’s more going on behind the scenes than you can possibly fathom. Have a little faith in us please and listen when we talk. You may actually learn a thing or two. Take some time to learn the technology There is hope… you don’t have to be totally worthless. Take some time to learn SharePoint. Learn what it is and what it can do. Invest some time in learning our SharePoint environment. What’s our logical architecture and taxonomy? What governance do we have in place? If you just thought “huh?” then yes, I’m talking to you. Sincerely, Your SharePoint Team (This rant is not pointed at any particular organization or person. If you think it’s about you, you are wrong. This is just a general rant based upon things people have told me and things I’ve seen. If you don’t think it applies to you, please move on. If you think you might be guilty of handling your SharePoint team the wrong way, then just please listen, learn, and have a little faith in your team. You all have the same goal in mind. Also, take the time to learn something about SharePoint, you will all be less frustrated with each other.)

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• Access Control Service v2: Registering Web Identities in your Applications [concepts]

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  ACS v2 support two fundamental types of client identities– I like to call them “enterprise identities” (WS-*) and “web identities” (Google, LiveID, OpenId in general…). I also see two different “mind sets” when it comes to application design using the above identity types: Enterprise identities – often the fact that a client can present a token from a trusted identity provider means he is a legitimate user of the application. Trust relationships and authorization details have been negotiated out of band (often on paper). Web identities – the fact that a user can authenticate with Google et al does not necessarily mean he is a legitimate (or registered) user of an application. Typically additional steps are necessary (like filling out a form, email confirmation etc). Sometimes also a mixture of both approaches exist, for the sake of this post, I will focus on the web identity case. I got a number of questions how to implement the web identity scenario and after some conversations it turns out it is the old authentication vs. authorization problem that gets in the way. Many people use the IsAuthenticated property on IIdentity to make security decisions in their applications (or deny user=”?” in ASP.NET terms). That’s a very natural thing to do, because authentication was done inside the application and we knew exactly when the IsAuthenticated condition is true. Been there, done that. Guilty ;) The fundamental difference between these “old style” apps and federation is, that authentication is not done by the application anymore. It is done by a third party service, and in the case of web identity providers, in services that are not under our control (nor do we have a formal business relationship with these providers). Now the issue is, when you switch to ACS, and someone with a Google account authenticates, indeed IsAuthenticated is true – because that’s what he is! This does not mean, that he is also authorized to use the application. It just proves he was able to authenticate with Google. Now this obviously leads to confusion. How can we solve that? Easy answer: We have to deal with authentication and authorization separately. Job done ;) For many application types I see this general approach: Application uses ACS for authentication (maybe both enterprise and web identities, we focus on web identities but you could easily have a dual approach here) Application offers to authenticate (or sign in) via web identity accounts like LiveID, Google, Facebook etc. Application also maintains a database of its “own” users. Typically you want to store additional information about the user In such an application type it is important to have a unique identifier for your users (think the primary key of your user database). What would that be? Most web identity provider (and all the standard ACS v2 supported ones) emit a NameIdentifier claim. This is a stable ID for the client (scoped to the relying party – more on that later). Furthermore ACS emits a claims identifying the identity provider (like the original issuer concept in WIF). When you combine these two values together, you can be sure to have a unique identifier for the user, e.g.: Facebook-134952459903700\799880347 You can now check on incoming calls, if the user is already registered and if yes, swap the ACS claims with claims coming from your user database. One claims would maybe be a role like “Registered User” which can then be easily used to do authorization checks in the application. The WIF claims authentication manager is a perfect place to do the claims transformation. If the user is not registered, show a register form. Maybe you can use some claims from the identity provider to pre-fill form fields. (see here where I show how to use the Facebook API to fetch additional user properties). After successful registration (which may include other mechanisms like a confirmation email), flip the bit in your database to make the web identity a registered user. This is all very theoretical. In the next post I will show some code and provide a download link for the complete sample. More on NameIdentifier Identity providers “guarantee” that the name identifier for a given user in your application will always be the same. But different applications (in the case of ACS – different ACS namespaces) will see different name identifiers. This is by design to protect the privacy of users because identical name identifiers could be used to create “profiles” of some sort for that user. In technical terms they create the name identifier approximately like this: name identifier = Hash((Provider Internal User ID) + (Relying Party Address)) Why is this important to know? Well – when you change the name of your ACS namespace, the name identifiers will change as well and you will will lose your “connection” to your existing users. Oh an btw – never use any other claims (like email address or name) to form a unique ID – these can often be changed by users.

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• CSC folder data access AND roaming profiles issues (Vista with Server 2003, then 2008)

  - by Alex Jones

  I'm a junior sysadmin for an IT contractor that helps small, local government agencies, like little towns and the like. One of our clients, a public library with ~ 50 staff users, was recently migrated from Server 2003 Standard to Server 2008 R2 Standard in a very short timeframe; our senior employee, the only network engineer, had suddenly put in his two weeks notice, so management pushed him to do this project before quitting. A bit hasty on management's part? Perhaps. Could we do anything about that? Nope. Do I have to fix this all by myself? Pretty much. The network is set up like this: a) 50ish staff workstations, all running Vista Business SP2. All staff use MS Outlook, which uses RPC-over-HTTPS ("Outlook Anywhere") for cached Exchange access to an offsite location. b) One new (virtualized) Server 2008 R2 Standard instance, running atop a Server 2008 R2 host via Hyper-V. The VM is the domain's DC, and also the site's one and only file server. Let's call that VM "NEWBOX". c) One old physical Server 2003 Standard server, running the same roles. Let's call it "OLDBOX". It's still on the network and accessible, but it's been demoted, and its shares have been disabled. No data has been deleted. c) Gigabit Ethernet everywhere. The organization's only has one domain, and it did not change during the migration. d) Most users were set up for a combo of redirected folders + offline files, but some older employees who had been with the organization a long time are still on roaming profiles. To sum up: the servers in question handle user accounts and files, nothing else (eg, no TS, no mail, no IIS, etc.) I have two major problems I'm hoping you can help me with: 1) Even though all domain users have had their redirected folders moved to the new server, and loggin in to their workstations and testing confirms that the Documents/Music/Whatever folders point to the new paths, it appears some users (not laptops or anything either!) had been working offline from OLDBOX for a long time, and nobody realized it. Here's the ugly implication: a bunch of their data now lives only in their CSC folders, because they can't access the share on OLDBOX and sync with it finally. How do I get this data out of those CSC folders, and onto NEWBOX? 2) What's the best way to migrate roaming profile users to non-roaming ones, without losing vital data like documents, any lingering PSTs, etc? Things I've thought about trying: For problem 1: a) Reenable the documents share on OLDBOX, force an Offline Files sync for ALL domain users, then copy OLDBOX's share's data to the equivalent share on NEWBOX. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: How do I safely force a domain-wide Offline Files sync? Could I lose data by reenabling the share on OLDBOX and forcing the sync? Afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? b) Determine which users have unsynced changes to OLDBOX (again, how?), search each user's CSC folder domain-wide via workstation admin shares, and grab the unsynched data. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: How can I detect which users have unsynched changes with a script? How can I search each user's CSC folder, when the ownership and permissions set for CSC folders are so restrictive? Again, afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? c) Manually visit each workstation, copy the contents of the CSC folder, and manually copy that data onto NEWBOX. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: Again, how do I 'break into' the CSC folder and get to its data? As an experiment, I took one workstation's HD offsite, imaged it for safety, and then tried the following with one of our shop PCs, after attaching the drive: grant myself full control of the folder (failed), grant myself ownership of the folder (failed), run chkdsk on the whole drive to make sure nothing's messed up (all OK), try to take full control of the entire drive (failed), try to take ownership of the entire drive (failed) MS KB articles and Googling around suggests there's a utility called CSCCMD that's meant for this exact scenario...but it looks like it's available for XP, not Vista, no? Again, afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? For problem 2: a) Figure out which users are on roaming profiles, and where their profiles 'live' on the server. Create new folders for them in the redirected folders repository, migrate existing data, and disable the roaming. With this: Finding out who's roaming isn't hard. But what's the best way to disable the roaming itself? In AD Users and Computers, or on each user's workstation? Doing it centrally on the server seems more efficient; that said, all of the KB research I've done turns up articles on how to go from local to roaming, not the other way around, so I don't have good documentation on this. In closing: we have good backups of NEWBOX and OLDBOX, but not of the workstations themselves, so anything drastic on the client side would need imaging and testing for safety. Thanks for reading along this far! Hopefully you can help me dig us out of this mess.

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• a friendly elaboratation on how iceweasel misses as recent request was discovered in post tut

  - by v3x3n

  I would like to specify what you asked about in how iceweasel misses on in hopes that you are interested in considering the answer to be valid considering the package should run efficient to a novice user especially when getting a first impression on a new software, browser, or package they are given by default. First let me say that I am very grateful for all debian has and continues to do for its user base and I am not complaining, only hoping that in mentioning such it will eventually aid in improving the disappointing experience iceweasel gave me in multiple ways right from the start of using it. I am sure tremendous amounts of hard work went into making it work as well as it does, and tremendous effort continues to go into IW like the rest of the package and distros such as this... Having said that, I do aim to keep my examples simple as possible but also explained in enough detail as to not leave out important info to get a full idea of my issue... (Thanks for understanding if I sound novice to debian, I am but continue to learn and advance by trial and error each day, and of course the wonderful help from all the great minds available here and there)... Well, my bone to pick (unfortunately as I disdain being a complainer when so much has been done for us, the end user) with IW is mainly 3 immediately noticed problems in offering me a smooth test drive (completely normal browsing conduct of your average user, I should indicate) as soon as I started out a task using IW (heading directly to google images and searched for a few web sized images, then saved a few (no more than 800 to 900 in dimensions, typically a normal procedure I would imagine) I experienced a horrendous reoccurring freeze and lag time that almost left me to kill the process more than once on each attempt and continued to compound so that by a few attempts later, even 1 single image save locked up the entire browser, ultimately giving up on my procedure in its simplicity with a bit of aggravation, if there was something I had done wrong on my end pre-attempt or during installation. Secondly, visiting video player sites in this case youtube will not allow for any video feed to play whatsoever and again, experienced a slight freezing that eventually dissipated as long as I didn't attempt to press play or reload another video trial... Very annoying and possibly related to my first issue (which could rely on my own lack of knowledge in setup config, but that troubles me if so).... Lastly as another user has stated already, in which brought you to ask them what exactly seemed to be the problem in the first place is also my final straw that broke the weasel's back, leading me here to find a solution to a updated version of firefox... being that iceweasel (an apparent build of firefox 17.x.x) leaving the user to find themselves out of luck when installing their favorite or much useful add-ons or plugins that aid their task or normal usage online.... As the other user clearly stated... there is almost zero options and barely any luck to find compatible plugins with such an outdated version still being used... I can only imagine if as a novoice or standard user to linux... and beginner to debian (which I am all for btw!) if I am discovering major conductivity issues which hinder normal user conduct right off the bat... that there is probably a bundle or more of security vulnerabilities that would unravel to me if I continued to give mr Hommey's package any further attention, or interest in continuing to use... This is a deal breaker on any account, unless all 3 of these issues stated are due to a very n00berish setting or lack thereof (which if that is the case, such was not properly stated for beginner in any place available by following installation tutorials such as LVM installers, which I felt lacked a clear understanding to someone who is trying to learn why and how, rather than, a fix to a potentially broken out of box installation... I really think that is irrelevant in any case however, as there is much step by step support regarding that kind of thing, just saying... its very challenging, along side a job to keep deadlines on, and the need to learn a better and more costomizible system, that was not as popularized when I became a dev via windows (OK OK I know thats a huge mistake and now I am way off original topic but anyway) Thanks very much for taking the time to read over this, and I hope it honestly gives you a few good and valid reasons for users wanting and seeking a way to get around iceweasel altogether... Finally, if I am missing something vital that renders all I've stated invalid or useless, please feel free to shove that elephant in the room my direction! Thanks for all you do, as I am sure it is very useful and dedicated, being you are a debian maintainer, and super user! Much love for intelligence, freedom and sharing the secrets of the web! May it remain unregulated and a good place to grow and learn for generations to come! Stay true! Take care now! -v3x (v3x @ gmx .com)

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• Oracle data warehouse design - fact table acting as a dimension?

  - by Elizabeth

  THANKS: Both answers here are very helpful, but I could only pick one. I really appreciate the advice! our datawarehouse will be used more for workflow reports than traditional analytical reports. Our users care about "current picture" far more than history. (though history matters, too.) We are a government entity that does not have costs or related calculations. Mostly just counts of people within given locations and with related history. We are using Oracle, and I have found distinct advantage in using the star join whenever possible and would like to rearchitect everything to as closely resemble the star schema as is reasonable for our business uses. Speed in this DW is vital, and a number of tests have already proven the star schema approach to me. Our "person" table is key - it contains over 4 million records and will be the most frequently used source in queries. It can be seen at the center of a star with multiple dimensions (like age, gender, affiliation, location, etc.). It is a very LONG table, particularly when I join it to the address and contact information. However, it is more like a dimension table when we start looking at history. For example, there are two different history tables that have a person key pointing to the person table. One has over 20 million records and the other has almost 50 million and grows daily. Is this table a fact table or a dimension table? Can one work as both? If so, is that going to be a big performance problem? Is it common to query more off of a dimension than a fact? What happens if a DIFFERENT fact table that uses the person table as a dimension is actually only 60,000 records (much smaller.). I think my problem is that our data and use of it does not fit with the commonly use examples of star schemas. CLARIFICATION: Some good thoughts have been added below, but perhaps I left too much out to really explain well. Here's some more info: We handle a voter database. We don't have any measures except voter counts by various groups: voter counts by party, by age, by location; voter counts by ballot type and election, by ballot status and election, etc. We do have a "voting history" log as well as an activity audit log (change of address, party, etc.). We have information on which voters are election workers and all that related information. I figure I'll get to the peripheral stuff later. For now I'm focusing on our two major "business processes": voter registration(which IS a voter.) and election turnout. In the first, voter is a fact. In the second, voter is a dimension, along with party, election, and type of ballot. (and in case anyone is worried - no we don't know HOW people vote. Just that they do. LOL ) I hope that clarifies things a bit.

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• Icon for shortcut

  - by Jacek

  Hi! Could you tell me what is wrong in this code?? Why it doesn't work?? <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Icon Id="ikonka" SourceFile="Files\AdministKOB.exe"/> <Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir"> <Directory Id="DesktopFolder"/> <Directory Id="ProgramMenuFolder"> <!--<Directory Id="MenuStartProduct" Name="Administrator KOB"/>--> </Directory> <Directory Id="ProgramFilesFolder"> <Directory Id="INSTALLLOCATION" Name="Administ_KOB"> <!-- TODO: Remove the comments around this Component element and the ComponentRef below in order to add resources to this installer. --> <Component Id="ProductComponent" Guid="6bd37582-5219-4ae4-a56e-cd1ecd375efa"> <!-- TODO: Insert files, registry keys, and other resources here. --> <File Id="AdministKOB" Name="AdministKOB.exe" Source="Files\AdministKOB.exe" KeyPath="yes"> <Shortcut Advertise="yes" Id="DesktopShortcut" Directory="DesktopFolder" Name="AdministKOB" WorkingDirectory="INSTALLDIR" Description="Elektroniczna ksiazka budynku" Icon ="ikonka"> </Shortcut> </File> <!--<File Id="ikonka" Name="C.ico" DiskId="1" Source="City.ico" Vital="yes" />--> </Component> <Component Id="ProductComponent_cfg" Guid="6bd37582-5219-4ae4-a56e-cd1ecd375efb"> <File Id="data.cfg" Name="data.cfg" Source="Files\data.cfg" /> </Component> <Component Id="ProductComponent_dll" Guid="6bd37582-5219-4ae4-a56e-cd1ecd375efc"> <File Id="DB.dll" Name="DB.dll" Source="Files\DB.dll" /> </Component> <Directory Id="Data"> <Directory Id="Data_1" Name="Data"> <Component Id="ProductComponent_mdf" DiskId="1" Guid="45B88917-DB08-4C4A-9DE4-D41BCE449BA5"> <File Id="bazaKOB.mdf" Name="bazaKOB.mdf" Source="Files\Data\bazaKOB.mdf" /> </Component> <Component Id="ProductComponent_ldf" DiskId="1" Guid="EFEBF7C5-338C-417C-8F5B-3C3BDE46F8EB"> <File Id="bazaKOB_log.LDF" Name="bazaKOB_log.LDF" Source="Files\Data\bazaKOB_log.LDF" /> </Component> </Directory> </Directory> </Directory> </Directory> </Directory> <Feature Id="ProductFeature" Title="AdministKOB" Level="1"> <!-- TODO: Remove the comments around this ComponentRef element and the Component above in order to add resources to this installer. --> <ComponentRef Id="ProductComponent" /> <ComponentRef Id="ProductComponent_cfg" /> <ComponentRef Id="ProductComponent_dll" /> <ComponentRef Id="ProductComponent_mdf" /> <ComponentRef Id="ProductComponent_ldf" /> </Feature> <Property Id="WIXUI_INSTALLDIR" Value="INSTALLLOCATION" /> <UIRef Id="WixUI_InstallDir" /> <WixVariable Id="WixUIDialogBmp" Value="background_projectUp.bmp" /> <WixVariable Id="WixUILicenseRtf" Value="license.rtf" /> <UI /> </Product> I get this error and warnings: The extension of Icon 'ikonka' for Shortcut 'DesktopShortcut' is not "exe" or "ico". The Icon will not be displayed correctly. Why?? I give ICO file. The extension of Icon 'ikonka' for Shortcut 'DesktopShortcut' does not match the extension of the Key File for component 'ProductComponent'. Have you any idea?? Thanks for all:) Jacek

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• Serializing WPF DataTemplates and {Binding Expressions} (from PowerShell?)

  - by Jaykul

  Ok, here's the deal: I have code that works in C#, but when I call it from PowerShell, it fails. I can't quite figure it out, but it's something specific to PowerShell. Here's the relevant code calling the library (assuming you've added a reference ahead of time) from C#: public class Test { [STAThread] public static void Main() { Console.WriteLine( PoshWpf.XamlHelper.RoundTripXaml( "<TextBlock Text=\"{Binding FullName}\" xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation\"/>" ) ); } } Compiled into an executable, that works fine ... but if you call that method from PowerShell, it returns with no {Binding FullName} for the Text! add-type -path .\PoshWpf.dll [PoshWpf.Test]::Main() I've pasted below the entire code for the library, all wrapped up in a PowerShell Add-Type call so you can just compile it by pasting it into PowerShell (you can leave off the first and last lines if you want to paste it into a new console app in Visual Studio. To output (from PowerShell 2) as an executable, just change the -OutputType parameter to ConsoleApplication and the -OutputAssembly to PoshWpf.exe (or something). Thus, you can see that running the SAME CODE from the executable gives you the correct output. But running the two lines as above or manually calling [PoshWpf.XamlHelper]::RoundTripXaml or [PoshWpf.XamlHelper]::ConvertToXaml from PowerShell just doesn't seem to work at all ... HELP?! Add-Type -TypeDefinition @" using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Globalization; using System.Linq; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Data; using System.Windows.Markup; namespace PoshWpf { public class Test { [STAThread] public static void Main() { Console.WriteLine( PoshWpf.XamlHelper.RoundTripXaml( "<TextBlock Text=\"{Binding FullName}\" xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation\"/>" ) ); } } public class BindingTypeDescriptionProvider : TypeDescriptionProvider { private static readonly TypeDescriptionProvider _DEFAULT_TYPE_PROVIDER = TypeDescriptor.GetProvider(typeof(Binding)); public BindingTypeDescriptionProvider() : base(_DEFAULT_TYPE_PROVIDER) { } public override ICustomTypeDescriptor GetTypeDescriptor(Type objectType, object instance) { ICustomTypeDescriptor defaultDescriptor = base.GetTypeDescriptor(objectType, instance); return instance == null ? defaultDescriptor : new BindingCustomTypeDescriptor(defaultDescriptor); } } public class BindingCustomTypeDescriptor : CustomTypeDescriptor { public BindingCustomTypeDescriptor(ICustomTypeDescriptor parent) : base(parent) { } public override PropertyDescriptorCollection GetProperties(Attribute[] attributes) { PropertyDescriptor pd; var pdc = new PropertyDescriptorCollection(base.GetProperties(attributes).Cast<PropertyDescriptor>().ToArray()); if ((pd = pdc.Find("Source", false)) != null) { pdc.Add(TypeDescriptor.CreateProperty(typeof(Binding), pd, new Attribute[] { new DefaultValueAttribute("null") })); pdc.Remove(pd); } return pdc; } } public class BindingConverter : ExpressionConverter { public override bool CanConvertTo(ITypeDescriptorContext context, Type destinationType) { return (destinationType == typeof(MarkupExtension)) ? true : false; } public override object ConvertTo(ITypeDescriptorContext context, CultureInfo culture, object value, Type destinationType) { if (destinationType == typeof(MarkupExtension)) { var bindingExpression = value as BindingExpression; if (bindingExpression == null) throw new Exception(); return bindingExpression.ParentBinding; } return base.ConvertTo(context, culture, value, destinationType); } } public static class XamlHelper { static XamlHelper() { // this is absolutely vital: TypeDescriptor.AddProvider(new BindingTypeDescriptionProvider(), typeof(Binding)); TypeDescriptor.AddAttributes(typeof(BindingExpression), new Attribute[] { new TypeConverterAttribute(typeof(BindingConverter)) }); } public static string RoundTripXaml(string xaml) { return XamlWriter.Save(XamlReader.Parse(xaml)); } public static string ConvertToXaml(object wpf) { return XamlWriter.Save(wpf); } } } "@ -language CSharpVersion3 -reference PresentationCore, PresentationFramework, WindowsBase -OutputType Library -OutputAssembly PoshWpf.dll Again, you can get an executable by just altering the last line like so: "@ -language CSharpVersion3 -reference PresentationCore, PresentationFramework, WindowsBase -OutputType ConsoleApplication -OutputAssembly PoshWpf.exe

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• <div> of images, retrieved by getJSON, disappear after append()

  - by Midiane

  Hi all I'm working on a GMaps application to retrieve images, via getJSON(), and to populate a popup marker. The following is the markup which I add to the marker dynamically: <div id="images"></div> <div id="CampWindow" style="display:none;width:550px;height:500px;"> <h4 id="camp-title"></h4> <p>View... (all links open in new windows)</p> <ul> <li><a id="camp-hp-link" target="_blank" href="">camp home page</a></li> <li>information: <a id="camp-av-link" target="_blank" href="">availability</a> | <a id="camp-vi-link" target="_blank" href="">vital information</li> </ul> <p id="message"></p> I've been clawing out my eyes and woohoo for the past couple of days, trying to get the images to show inside the CampWindow . Then, I decided to think laterally and to see if the images were being retrieved at all. I then moved the images outside and sure as Bob (Hope), the images were being retrieved and refreshed with every click. So, I decided to the keep the images outside and then once loaded, append it to the CampWindow . It's not working still; when I append the div to the main CampWindow div, the images won't show. I check in Firebug with the pointer thingy and it shows me the images as empty. I try it again with the images outside and it shows the images. I've tried before append and appendTo with no success. Am I missing something here? I have no more woohoo to claw out. Please, please help. marker.clicked = function(marker){ $("#images").html(''); $('#camp-title').text(this.name); $('#camp-hp-link').attr('href', this.url); $('#camp-av-link').attr('href', this.url + '/tourism/availability.php'); $('#camp-vi-link').attr('href', this.url + '/tourism/general.php'); // get resort images via jQuery AJAX call - includes/GetResortImages.inc.php $.getJSON('./includes/GetResortImages.inc.php', { park: this.park_name, camp: this.camp_name }, RetrieveImages); function RetrieveImages (data) { if ('failed' == data.status) { $('#messages').append("<em>We don't have any images for this rest camp right now!</em>"); } else { if ('' != data.camp) { $.each(data, function(key,value){ $("<img/>").attr("src", value).appendTo('#images'); }); } } } //.append($("#images")); $("#CampWindow").show(); var windowContent = $("<html />"); $("#CampWindow").appendTo(windowContent); var infoWindowAnchor = marker.getIcon().infoWindowAnchor; var iconAnchor = marker.getIcon().iconAnchor; var offset = new google.maps.Size(infoWindowAnchor.x-iconAnchor.x,infoWindowAnchor.y-iconAnchor.y); map.openInfoWindowHtml(marker.getLatLng(), windowContent.html(), {pixelOffset:offset}); } markers.push(marker); });

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• Issue 15: Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ Oracle OpenWorld

  - by rituchhibber

       ORACLE FOCUS Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange@ ORACLE OpenWorld Sylvie MichouSenior DirectorPartner Marketing & Communications and Strategic Programs RESOURCES -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Registration Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange SpecializationTest Fest Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder Oracle OpenWorld Promotional Toolkit for Partners Oracle Partner Events Oracle Partner Webcasts Oracle EMEA Partner News SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES If you are attending our forthcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco from 30 September to 4 October, you will discover a new dedicated programme of keynotes and sessions tailored especially for you, our valued partners. Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld has been created to enhance the opportunities for you to learn from and network with Oracle executives and experts. The programme also provides more informal opportunities than ever throughout the week to meet up with the people who are most important to your business: customers, prospects, colleagues and the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels management team. Oracle remains fully focused on building the industry's most admired partner ecosystem—which today spans over 25,000 partners. This new OPN Exchange programme offers an exciting change of pace for partners throughout the conference. Now it will be possible to enjoy a fully-integrated, partner-dedicated session schedule throughout the week, as well as key social events such as the Sunday night Welcome Reception, networking lunches from Monday to Thursday at the Howard Street Tent, and a fantastic closing event on the last Thursday afternoon. In addition to the regular Oracle OpenWorld conference schedule, if you have registered for the Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld programme, you will be invited to attend a much anticipated global partner keynote presentation, plus more than 40 conference sessions aimed squarely at what's most important to you, as partners. Prominent topics for discussion will include: Oracle technologies and roadmaps and how they fit with partners' business plans; business development; regional distinctions in business practices; and much more. Each session will provide plenty of food for thought ahead of the numerous networking opportunities throughout the week, encouraging the knowledge exchange with Oracle executives, customers, prospects, and colleagues that will make this conference of even greater value for you. At Oracle we always work closely with our partners to deliver solution offerings that improve business value, simplify the IT experience and drive innovation and efficiencies for joint customers. The most important element of our new OPN Exchange is content that helps you get more from technology investments, more from your peer-to-peer connections, and more from your interactions with customers. To this end we've created some partner-specific tools which can be used by OPN members ahead of the conference itself. Crucially, a comprehensive Content Catalog already lists and organises details of every OPN Exchange session, speaker, exhibitor, demonstration and related materials. This Content Catalog can be used by all our partners to identify interesting content that you can add to your own personalised Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder, allowing more effective planning and pre-enrolment for vital sessions. There are numerous highlights that you will definitely want to include in those personal schedules. On Sunday morning, 30 September we will start the week with partner dedicated OPN Exchange sessions, following our Global Partner Keynote at 13:00 with Judson Althoff, SVP, Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales and senior executives, giving insight into Oracle's partner vision, strategy, and resources—all designed to help build and strengthen market opportunities for you. This will be followed by a number of OPN Exchange general sessions, the Oracle OpenWorld Opening Keynote with Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle and concluded with the OPN Exchange AfterDark Welcome Reception, starting at 19:30 at the Metreon. From Monday 1 to Thursday 4 October, you can attend the OPN Exchange sessions that are most relevant to your business today and over the coming year. Oracle's top product and sales leaders will be on hand to discuss Oracle's strategic direction in 40+ targeted and in-depth sessions focussing on critical success factors to develop your business. Oracle's dedication to innovation, specialization, enablement and engineering provides Oracle partners with a huge opportunity to create new services and solutions, differentiate themselves and deliver extreme value to joint customers across the globe. Oracle will even be helping over 1000 partners to earn OPN Specialization certification during the Oracle OpenWorld OPN Exchange Test Fest, which will be providing all the study materials and exams required to drive Specialization for free at the conference. You simply need to check the list of current certification tracks available, and make sure you pre-register to reserve a seat in one of the ten sessions being offered free to OPN Exchange registered attendees. And finally, let's not forget those all-important networking opportunities, which can so often provide partners with valuable long-term alliances as well as exciting new business leads. The Oracle PartnerNetwork Lounge, located at Moscone South, exhibition hall, room 100 is the place where partners can meet formally or informally with colleagues, customers, prospects, and other industry professionals. OPN Specialized partners with OPN Exchange passes can also visit the OPN Video Blogging room to record and share ideas, and at the OPN Information Station you will find consultants available to answer your questions. "For the first time ever we will have a full partner conference within OpenWorld. OPN Exchange @ OpenWorld will kick-off on the first Sunday and run the entire week. We'll have over 40 sessions throughout that time and partners will hear from our top development executives, with special sessions dedicated to partnering throughout. It's going to be a phenomenal event, and we look forward to seeing our partners there." Judson Althoff, SVP, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales So if you haven't done so already, please register for Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld today or add OPN Exchange to your existing registration for just $100 through My Account. And if you have any further questions regarding partner activities at Oracle OpenWorld, please don't hesitate to contact the Oracle PartnerNetwork team at [email protected] will be on hand to share the very latest information about: Oracle's SPARC Superclusters: the latest Engineered Systems from Oracle, delivering radically improved performance, faster deployment and greatly reduced operational costs for mixed database and enterprise application consolidation Oracle's SPARC T4 servers: with the newly developed T4 processor and Oracle Solaris providing up to five times the single threaded performance and better overall system throughput for expanded application versatility Oracle Database Appliance: a new way to take advantage of the world's most popular database, Oracle Database 11g, in a single, easy-to-deploy and manage system. It's a complete package engineered to deliver simple, reliable and affordable database services to small and medium size businesses and departmental systems. All hardware and software components are supported together and offer customers unique pay-as-you-grow software licensing to quickly scale from two to 24 processor cores without incurring the costs and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades Oracle Exalogic: the world's only integrated cloud machine, featuring server hardware and middleware software engineered together for maximum performance with minimum set-up and operational cost Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking and software that is massively scalable, secure and redundant Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances: providing enterprise-class NAS performance, price-performance, manageability and TCO by combining third-generation software with high-performance controllers, flash-based caches and disks Oracle Pillar Axiom Quality-of-Service: confidently consolidate storage for multiple applications into a single datacentre storage solution Oracle Solaris 11: delivering secure enterprise cloud deployments with the ability to run hundreds of virtual application with no overhead and co-engineered with other Oracle software products to provide the highest levels of security, manageability and performance Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Oracle's integrated enterprise IT management product, providing the industry's only complete, integrated and business-driven enterprise cloud management solution Oracle VM 3.0: the latest release of Oracle's server virtualisation and management solution, helping to move datacentres beyond server consolidation to improve application deployment and management. Register today and ensure your place at the Extreme Performance Tour! Extreme Performance Tour events are free to attend, but places are limited. To make sure that you don't miss out, please visit Oracle's Extreme Performance Tour website, select the city that you'd be interest in attending an event in, and then click on the 'Register Now' button for that city to secure your interest. Each individual city page also contains more in-depth information about your local event, including logistics, agenda and maybe even a preview of VIP guest speakers. -- Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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