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• SQLAuthority News – 7th Anniversary of Blog – A Personal Note

  - by Pinal Dave

  Special Day Today is a very special day – seven years ago I blogged for the very first time.  Seven years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to blog, or even what a blog was or what to write.  I was working as a DBA, and I was trying to solve a problem – at my job, there were a few issues I had to fix again and again and again.  There were days when I was rewriting the same solution over and over, and there were times when I would get very frustrated because I could not write the same elegant solution that I had written before.  I came up with a solution to this problem – posting these solutions online, where I could access them whenever I needed them.  At that point, I had no idea what a blog was, or even how the internet worked, I had no idea that a blog would be visible to others.  Can you believe it? Google it on Yahoo! After a few posts on this “blog,” there was a surprise for me – an e-mail saying that someone had left me a comment.  I was surprised, because I didn’t even know you could comment on a blog!  I logged on and read my comment.  It said: “I like your script,but there is a small bug.  If you could fix it, it will run on multiple other versions of SQL Server.”  I was like, “wow, someone figured out how to find my blog, and they figured out how to fix my script!”  I found the bug, I fixed the script, and a wrote a thank you note to the guy.  My first question for him was: how did you figure it out – not the script, but how to find my blog?  He said he found it from Yahoo Search (this was in the time before Google, believe it or not). From that day, my life changed.  I wrote a few more posts, I got a few more comments, and I started to watch my traffic.  People were reading, commenting, and giving feedback.  At the end of the day, people enjoyed what I was writing.  This was a fantastic feeling!  I never thought I would be writing for others.  Even today, I don’t feel like I am writing for others, but that I am simply posting what I am learning every day.  From that very first day, I decided that I would not change my intent or my blog’s purpose. 72 Million Views – 2600 Posts – 57000 comments – 10 books – 9 courses Today, this blog is my habit, my addiction, my baby.  Every day I try to learn something new, and that lesson gets posted on the blog.  Lately there have been days where I am traveling for a full 24 hours, but even on those days I try to learn something new, and later when I have free time, I will still post it to the blog.  Because of this habit, this blog has over 72 millions views, I have written more than 2600 posts, and there are 57,000 comments and counting.  I have also written 10 books, 9 courses, and learned so many things.  This blog has given me back so much more than I ever put it into it.  It gave me an education, a reason to learn something new every day, and a way to connect to people.  I like to think of it as a learning chain, a relay where we all pass knowledge from one to another. Never Ending Journey When I started the blog, I thought I would write for a few days and stop, but now after seven years I haven’t stopped and I have no intention of stopping!  However, change happens, and for this blog it will start today.  This blog started as a single resource for SQL Server, but now it has grown beyond, to Sharepoint, Personal Development, Developer Training, MySQL, Big Data, and lots of other things.  Truly speaking, this blog is more than just SQL Server, and that was always my intention.  I named it “SQL Authority,” not “SQL Server Authority”!  Loudly and clearly, I would like to announce that I am going to go back to my roots and start writing more about SQL, more about big data, and more about the other technology like relational databases, MySQL, Oracle, and others.  My goal is not to become a comprehensive resource for every technology, my goal is to learn something new every day – and now it can be so much more than just SQL Server.  I will learn it, and post it here for you. I have written a very long post on this anniversary, but here is the summary: Thank You.  You all have been wonderful.  Seven years is a long journey, and it makes me emotional.  I have been “with” this blog before I met my wife, before we had our daughter.  This blog is like a fourth member of the family.  Keep reading, keep commenting, keep supporting.  Thank you all. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: About Me, MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Day 4 - Game Sprites In Action

  - by dapostolov

  Yesterday I drew an image on the screen. Most exciting, but ... I spent more time blogging about it then actual coding. So this next little while I'm going to streamline my game and research and simply post key notes. Quick notes on the last session: The most important thing I wanted to point out were the following methods:           spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);           spriteBatch.End(); The spriteBatch object is used to draw Textures and a 2D texture is called a Sprite A texture is generally an image, which is called an Asset in XNA The Draw Method in the Game1.cs is looped (until exit) and utilises the spriteBatch object to draw a Scene To begin drawing a Scene you call the Begin Method. To end a Scene you call the End Method. And to place an image on the Scene you call the Draw method. The most simple implementation of the draw method is:           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White); 1) sprite - the 2D texture you loaded to draw 2) position - the 2d vector, a set of x & y coordinates 3) Color.White - the tint to apply to the texture, in this case, white light = nothing, nada, no tint. Game Sprites In Action! Today, I played around with Draw methods to get comfortable with their "quirks". The following is an example of the above draw method, but with more parameters available for us to use. Let's investigate!             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position2, null, Color.White, MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), new Vector2(sprite.Width / 2, sprite.Height / 2), 1.0F, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0F); The parameters (in order): 1) sprite  the texture to display 2) position2 the position on the screen / scene this can also be a rectangle 3) null the portion of the image to display within an image null = display full image this is generally used for animation strips / grids (more on this below) 4) Color.White Texture tinting White = no tint 5) MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f) rotation of the object, in this case 45 degrees rotates from the set plotting point. 6) new Vector(0,0) the plotting point in this case the top left corner the image will rotate from the top left of the texture in the code above, the point is set to the middle of the image. 7) 1.0f Image scaling (1x) 8) SpriteEffects.None you can flip the image horizontally or vertically 9) 0.0f The z index of the image. 0 = closer, 1 behind? And playing around with different combinations I was able to come up with the following whacky display:   Checking off Yesterdays Intention List: learn game development terminology (in progress) - We learned sprite, scene, texture, and asset. how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen (completed) - The thing to note was, it's was in radians and I found a cool helper method to convert degrees into radians. Also, the image rotates from it's specified point. how to layer static images on the screen (completed) - I couldn't seem to get the zIndex working, but one things for sure, the order you draw the image in also determines how it is rendered on the screen. understand image scaling (in progress) - I'm not sure I have this fully covered, but for the most part plug a number in the scaling field and the image grows / shrinks accordingly. can we reuse images? (completed) - yes, I loaded one image and plotted the bugger all over the screen. understand how framerate is handled in XNA (in progress) - I hacked together some code to display the framerate each second. A framerate of 60 appears to be the standard. Interesting to note, the GameTime object does provide you with some cool timing capabilities, such as...is the game running slow? Need to investigate this down the road. how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen (in progress) - i got text rendered on the screen, and i understand containing rectangles. However, I didn't display "shapes" & "colors" how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) (todo) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques (in progress) - I was able to create a stripe animation of numbers ranging from 1 - 4, each block was 40 x 40 pixles for a total stripe size of 160 x 40. Using the portion (source Rectangle) parameter, i limited this display to each section at varying intervals. It was interesting to note my first implementation animated at rocket speed. I then tried to create a smoother animation by limiting the redraw capacity, which seemed to work. I guess a little more research will have to be put into this for animating characters / scenes. how to detect colliding images or screen edges (todo) - but the rectangle object can detect collisions I believe. how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching (in progress) - I haven't figured out how to modify a specific color to be another color, but the tinting parameter definately could be used. As for stretching, use the rectangle object as the positioning and the image will stretch to fit! how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel (completed) - as per basic animation techniques what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) (todo) Tomorrows Intention Tomorrow I am going to take a stab at rendering a game menu and from there I'm going to investigate how I can improve upon the code and techniques. Intention List: Render a menu, fancy or not Show the mouse cursor Hook up click event A basic animation of somesort Investigate image / menu techniques D.

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

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

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• College Courses through distance learning

  - by Matt

  I realize this isn't really a programming question, but didn't really know where to post this in the stackexchange and because I am a computer science major i thought id ask here. This is pretty unique to the programmer community since my degree is about 95% programming. I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can. So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for. Class I need: Only need one C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms C SC 445 Algorithms C SC 473 Automata Only need one C SC 452 Operating Systems C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category. Some other classes I can take are: CSC 447 - Green Computing CSC 425 - Computer Networking CSC 460 - Database Design CSC 466 - Computer Security I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need. Thanks! Descriptions Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security. Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast. Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications. Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers. Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers. Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems. Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound). Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages). Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases.

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• Amanda Todd&ndash;What Parents Can Learn From Her Story

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Amanda Todd was a bullied teenager who committed suicide this week. Her story has become headline news due in part to her You Tube video she posted telling her story:   The story is heartbreaking for so many reasons, but I wanted to talk about what we as parents can learn from this. Being the dad to two girls, one that’s 10, I’m very aware of the dangers that the internet holds. When I saw her story, one thing jumped out at me – unmonitored internet access at an early age. My daughter (then 9) came home from a friends place once and asked if she could be in a YouTube video with her friend. Apparently this friend was allowed to do whatever she wanted on the internet, including posting goofy videos. This set off warning bells and we ensured our daughter realized the dangers and that she was not to ever post videos of herself. In looking at Amanda’s story, the access to unmonitored internet time along with just being a young girl and being flattered by an online predator were the key events that ultimately led to her suicide. Yes, the reaction of her classmates and “friends” was horrible as well, I’m not diluting that. But our youth don’t fully understand yet that what they do on the internet today will follow them potentially forever. And the people they meet online aren’t necessarily who they claim to be. So what can we as parents learn from Amanda’s story? Parents Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Being Internet Police Our job as parents is in part to protect our kids and keep them safe, even if they don’t like our measures. This includes monitoring, supervising, and restricting their internet activities. In our house we have a family computer in the living room that the kids can watch videos and surf the web. It’s in plain view of everyone, so you can’t hide what you’re looking at. If our daughter goes to a friend’s place, we ask about what they did and what they played. If the computer comes up, we ask about what they did on it. Luckily our daughter is very up front and honest in telling us things, so we have very open discussions. Parents Need to Be Honest About the Dangers of the Internet I’m sure every generation says that “kids grow up so fast these days”, but in our case the internet really does push our kids to be exposed to things they otherwise wouldn’t experience. One wrong word in a Google search, a click of a link in a spam email, or just general curiosity can expose a child to things they aren’t ready for or should never be exposed to (and I’m not just talking about adult material – have you seen some of the graphic pictures from war zones posted on news sites recently?). Our stance as parents has been to be open about discussing the dangers with our kids before they encounter any content – be proactive instead of reactionary. Part of this is alerting them to the monsters that lurk on the internet as well. As kids explore the world wide web, they’re eventually going to encounter some chat room or some Facebook friend invite or other personal connection with someone. More than ever kids need to be educated on the dangers of engaging with people online and sharing personal information. You can think of it as an evolved discussion that our parents had with us about using the phone: “Don’t say ‘I’m home alone’, don’t say when mom or dad get home, don’t tell them any information, etc.” Parents Need to Talk Self Worth at Home Katie makes the point better than I ever could (one bad word towards the end): Our children need to understand their value beyond what the latest issue of TigerBeat says, or the media who continues flaunting physical attributes over intelligence and character, or a society that puts focus on status and wealth. They also have to realize that just because someone pays you a compliment, that doesn’t mean you should ignore personal boundaries and limits. What does this have to do with the internet? Well, in days past if you wanted to be social you had to go out somewhere. Now you can video chat with any number of people from the comfort of wherever your laptop happens to be – and not just text but full HD video with sound! While innocent children head online in the hopes of meeting cool people, predators with bad intentions are heading online too. As much as we try to monitor their online activity and be honest about the dangers of the internet, the human side of our kids isn’t something we can control. But we can try to influence them to see themselves as not needing to search out the acceptance of complete strangers online. Way easier said than done, but ensuring self-worth is something discussed, encouraged, and celebrated is a step in the right direction. Parental Wake Up Call This post is not a critique of Amanda’s parents. The reality is that cyber bullying/abuse is happening every day, and there are millions of parents that have no clue its happening to their children. Amanda’s story is a wake up call that our children’s online activities may be putting them in danger. My heart goes out to the parents of this girl. As a father of daughters, I can’t imagine what I would do if I found my daughter having to hide in a ditch to avoid a mob or call 911 to report my daughter had attempted suicide by drinking bleach or deal with a child turning to drugs/alcohol/cutting to cope. It would be horrendous if we as parents didn’t re-evaluate our family internet policies in light of this event. And in the end, Amanda’s video was meant to bring attention to her plight and encourage others going through the same thing. We may not be kids, but we can still honour her memory by helping safeguard our children.

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• Exadata Parameter _AUTO_MANAGE_EXADATA_DISKS

  - by AVargas

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE HE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99" LatentStyleCount="267" UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size: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:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Exadata auto disk management is controlled by the parameter _AUTO_MANAGE_EXADATA_DISKS. The default value for this parameter is TRUE.When _AUTO_MANAGE_EXADATA_DISKS is enabled, Exadata automate the following disk operations:If a griddisk becomes unavailable/available, ASM will OFFLINE/ONLINE it.If a physicaldisk fails or its status change to predictive failure, for all griddisks built on it ASM will DROP FORCE the failed ones and DROP the ones with predictive failures.If a flashdisk performance degrades, if there are griddisks built on it, they will be DROPPED FORCE in ASM.If a physicaldisk is replaced, the celldisk and griddisks will be recreated and the griddisks will be automatically ADDED in ASM, if they were automatically dropped by ASM. If you manually drop the disks, that will not happen.If a NORMAL, ONLINE griddisk is manually dropped, FORCE option should not be used, otherwise the disk will be automatically added back in ASM. If a gridisk is inactivated, ASM will automatically OFFLINE it.If a gridisk is activated, ASM will automatically ONLINED it. There are some error conditions that may require to temporarily disable _AUTO_MANAGE_EXADATA_DISKS.Details on MOS 1408865.1 - Exadata Auto Disk Management Add disk failing and ASM Rebalance interrupted with error ORA-15074. Immediately after taking care of the problem _AUTO_MANAGE_EXADATA_DISKS should be set back to its default value of TRUE. Full details on Auto disk management feature in Exadata (Doc ID 1484274.1)

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• Is this proper OO design for C++?

  - by user121917

  I recently took a software processes course and this is my first time attempting OO design on my own. I am trying to follow OO design principles and C++ conventions. I attempted and gave up on MVC for this application, but I am trying to "decouple" my classes such that they can be easily unit-tested and so that I can easily change the GUI library used and/or the target OS. At this time, I have finished designing classes but have not yet started implementing methods. The function of the software is to log all packets sent and received, and display them on the screen (like WireShark, but for one local process only). The software accomplishes this by hooking the send() and recv() functions in winsock32.dll, or some other pair of analogous functions depending on what the intended Target is. The hooks add packets to SendPacketList/RecvPacketList. The GuiLogic class starts a thread which checks for new packets. When new packets are found, it utilizes the PacketFilter class to determine the formatting for the new packet, and then sends it to MainWindow, a native win32 window (with intent to later port to Qt).1 Full size image of UML class diagram Here are my classes in skeleton/header form (this is my actual code): class PacketModel { protected: std::vector<byte> data; int id; public: PacketModel(); PacketModel(byte* data, unsigned int size); PacketModel(int id, byte* data, unsigned int size); int GetLen(); bool IsValid(); //len >= sizeof(opcode_t) opcode_t GetOpcode(); byte* GetData(); //returns &(data[0]) bool GetData(byte* outdata, int maxlen); void SetData(byte* pdata, int len); int GetId(); void SetId(int id); bool ParseData(char* instr); bool StringRepr(char* outstr); byte& operator[] (const int index); }; class SendPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* returnAddy; public: byte* GetReturnAddy(); void SetReturnAddy(byte* addy); }; class RecvPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* callAddy; public: byte* GetCallAddy(); void SetCallAddy(byte* addy); }; //problem: packets may be added to list at any time by any number of threads //solution: critical section associated with each packet list class Synch { public: void Enter(); void Leave(); }; template<class PacketType> class PacketList { private: static const int MAX_STORED_PACKETS = 1000; public: static const int DEFAULT_SHOWN_PACKETS = 100; private: vector<PacketType> list; Synch synch; //wrapper for critical section public: void AddPacket(PacketType* packet); PacketType* GetPacket(int id); int TotalPackets(); }; class SendPacketList : PacketList<SendPacket> { }; class RecvPacketList : PacketList<RecvPacket> { }; class Target //one socket { bool Send(SendPacket* packet); bool Inject(RecvPacket* packet); bool InitSendHook(SendPacketList* sendList); bool InitRecvHook(RecvPacketList* recvList); }; class FilterModel { private: opcode_t opcode; int colorID; bool bFilter; char name[41]; }; class FilterFile { private: FilterModel filter; public: void Save(); void Load(); FilterModel* GetFilter(opcode_t opcode); }; class PacketFilter { private: FilterFile filters; public: bool IsFiltered(opcode_t opcode); bool GetName(opcode_t opcode, char* namestr); //return false if name does not exist COLORREF GetColor(opcode_t opcode); //return default color if no custom color }; class GuiLogic { private: SendPacketList sendList; RecvPacketList recvList; PacketFilter packetFilter; void GetPacketRepr(PacketModel* packet); void ReadNew(); void AddToWindow(); public: void Refresh(); //called from thread void GetPacketInfo(int id); //called from MainWindow }; I'm looking for a general review of my OO design, use of UML, and use of C++ features. I especially just want to know if I'm doing anything considerably wrong. From what I've read, design review is on-topic for this site (and off-topic for the Code Review site). Any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading this.

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• Merck Serono Gains Deep Understanding of Product Portfolio Value-Drivers, Risks, and Sales Expectations Through Forecasting Solution

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Merck Serono S.A. is the biopharmaceutical division of Merck KGaA. It offers leading brands in 150 countries to help patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, infertility, endocrine and metabolic disorders, as well as cardiovascular diseases. Challenges: Establish a better decision-making framework for its complex, development portfolio of pharmaceutical products, where single-point estimates or expected averages of portfolio values, portfolio risks, and sales forecasts are insufficient and can be misleading Enable the company to be aware at all times of the range of possible outcomes of technical and market risks and uncertainties, such as the technical uncertainty of whether a product will produce the desired clinical outcomes, or the market-related uncertainty of whether a product will be outperformed by its competitors Solutions to Overcome the Challenges: Used Oracle Crystal Ball to devise a Monte-Carlo-based approach to better analyze and define the values and risks of the company’s development portfolio, laying the groundwork for optimized decision-making Enabled a better understanding of the range of potential values and risks to improve portfolio planning Enabled detailed analysis of the likelihood of favorable or unfavorable outcomes, such as the likelihood of whether Merck Serono can meet its sales targets planned for the next ten years with its existing product portfolio Gained the ability to take into account correlative risks, synergies and project interactions, enabling Merck Serono to better forecast what the company may achieve—for example, that there is a 70% probability of a particular sales target being met Established Monte-Carlo-based analysis using Oracle Crystal Ball as a useful element in decision-making at the board level, as the approach provides a better analysis of values and risks associated with the company’s product portfolio “Oracle Crystal Ball enables us to make Monte Carlo simulations of the potential value and sales of our development portfolio. It is a very powerful tool for gaining a thorough understanding and improved awareness of value drivers, uncertainties, and risks, along with associated probabilities.” – Riccardo Lampariello, Associate Director, Merck Serono S.A Why Oracle “We chose Oracle Crystal Ball to enable us to perform Monte Carlo analysis, which gives us a deeper understanding and improved awareness of the value drivers, uncertainties and risks of our portfolio of development projects,” said Kimber Hardy, head of valuation and analysis, Merck Serono S.A. 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Click here to read the full version of the customer success story Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Populate a WCF syndication podcast using MP3 ID3 metadata tags

  - by brian_ritchie

  In the last post, I showed how to create a podcast using WCF syndication.  A podcast is an RSS feed containing a list of audio files to which users can subscribe.  The podcast not only contains links to the audio files, but also metadata about each episode.  A cool approach to building the feed is reading this metadata from the ID3 tags on the MP3 files used for the podcast. One library to do this is TagLib-Sharp.  Here is some sample code: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 2: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 3: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 4: { 5: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 6: size = fileInfo.Length, 7: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 8: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 9: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 10: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 11: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 12: id = fileInfo.Name 13: }; 14: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 15: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); This reads the ID3 tags into an object for later use in creating the syndication feed.  When the MP3 is created, these tags are set...or they can be set after the fact using the Properties dialog in Windows Explorer.  The only "hack" is that there isn't an easily accessible tag for "subtitle" or "published date" so I used other tags in this example. Feel free to change this to meet your purposes.  You could remove the subtitle & use the file modified data for example. That takes care of the episodes, for the feed level settings we'll load those from an XML file: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <iTunesPodcastFeed 3: baseUrl ="" 4: title="" 5: subTitle="" 6: description="" 7: copyright="" 8: category="" 9: ownerName="" 10: ownerEmail="" 11: mediaType="audio/mp3" 12: mediaFiles="*.mp3" 13: imageUrl="" 14: link="" 15: /> Here is the full code put together. Read the feed XML file and deserialize it into an iTunesPodcastFeed classLoop over the files in a directory reading the ID3 tags from the audio files .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: public static iTunesPodcastFeed CreateFeedFromFiles(string podcastDirectory, string podcastFeedFile) 2: { 3: XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(iTunesPodcastFeed)); 4: iTunesPodcastFeed feed; 5: using (var fs = File.OpenRead(Path.Combine(podcastDirectory, podcastFeedFile))) 6: { 7: feed = (iTunesPodcastFeed)serializer.Deserialize(fs); 8: } 9: foreach (var f in Directory.GetFiles(podcastDirectory, feed.mediaFiles)) 10: { 11: try 12: { 13: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 14: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 15: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 16: { 17: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 18: size = fileInfo.Length, 19: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 20: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 21: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 22: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 23: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 24: id = fileInfo.Name 25: }; 26: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 27: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); 28: feed.Items.Add(item); 29: } 30: catch 31: { 32: // ignore files that can't be accessed successfully 33: } 34: } 35: return feed; 36: } Usually putting a "try...catch" like this is bad, but in this case I'm just skipping over files that are locked while they are being uploaded to the web site.Here is the code from the last couple of posts.  

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Five Things Learned at the BSR Conference in San Francisco on Nov 2nd-4th

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  The BSR Conference 2011—“Redefining Leadership”—held from Nov 2nd to Nov 4th in San Francisco, with Oracle as one of the main sponsors, saw senior business executives, civil society representatives, and other experts from around the world gathering to share strategies and insights on the future of sustainability. The general conference sessions kicked off on November 2nd with a plenary address by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Other sessions were presented by CEOs of the caliber of Carl Bass (Autodesk), Brian Dunn (Best Buy), Carlos Brito (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Ofra Strauss (Strauss Group). Here are five key highlights from the conference: 1.      The main leadership challenge is integrating sustainability into core business functions and overcoming short-termism. The “BSR GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business Poll 2011” - a survey of nearly 500 business leaders from 300 member companies - shows that 84% of respondents are optimistic that global businesses will embrace CSR/sustainability as part of their core strategies and operations in the next five years but consider integrating sustainability into their core business functions the key challenge. It is still difficult for many companies that are committed to the sustainability agenda to find investors that understand the long-term implications and as Al Gore said “Many companies are given the signal by the investors that it is the short term results that matter and that is a terribly debilitating force in the market.” 2.      Companies are required to address increasing compliance requirements and transparency in their supply chain, especially in relation with conflict minerals legislation and water management. The Dodd-Frank legislation, OECD guidelines, and the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules require companies to monitor upstream the sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, but given the complexity of this issue companies need to collaborate and partner with peer companies in their industry as well as in other industries to understand how to address conflict minerals in their supply chains. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ (IPE) China Water Pollution Map enables the public to access thousands of environmental quality, discharge, and infraction records released by various government agencies. Empowered with this information, the public has the opportunity to place greater pressure on polluting companies to comply with environmental standards and create solutions to improve their performance. 3.      A new standard for reporting on supply chain greenhouse gas emissions is available. The New “Scope 3” Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Inventory Standard, released on October 4th 2011, is the only international greenhouse gas emissions standard that accounts for the full lifecycle of a company’s products. It provides a framework for companies to account for indirect emissions outside of energy use, such as transportation, manufacturing, and distribution, and it incorporates both upstream and downstream impacts of a product. With key investors now listing supplier vulnerability to rising energy prices and disruptions of service as a key concern, greenhouse gas (GHG) management isn’t just for leading companies but a necessity for any business. 4.      Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) reporting is becoming increasingly important to investors and other stakeholders. While European investors have traditionally driven the ESG agenda, U.S. investors are increasingly including ESG data in their analyses. This trend will likely increase as stakeholders continue to demand that an ESG lens be applied to their investments. Investors are increasingly looking to partner on sustainability, as they see the benefits of ESG providing significant returns on investment. 5.      Software companies are offering an increasing variety of solutions to help drive changes and measure performance internally, in supply chains, and across peer companies. The significant challenge is how to integrate different software systems to facilitate decision-making based on a holistic understanding of trade-offs. Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President, Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle was a panelist in the “Trends in Sustainability Software” session and commented that, “How we think about our business decisions really comes down to how we think about cost. And as long as we don’t assign a cost to things that have an environmental impact or social impact, then we make decisions based on incomplete information. If we could include that in the process that determines ‘Is this product profitable? we would then have a much better decision.” For more information on BSR visit www.brs.org. You can also view highlights of the plenary session at http://www.bsr.org/en/bsr-conference/session-summaries/2011. Oracle is proud to be a sponsor of this BSR conference. By Elena Avesani, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Oracle          

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• Can't connect to Wired Network after installing 12.04

  - by ezz9

  I have installed 12.04 into a used HP Compaq DC 7100 CMT. Plugged in LAN cable into the computer and it says network disconnected. from what I understand on the things I've read, it's not getting the address right, maybe it's just a guess (hardware address 00:16:35:78:47:bb). I know the LAN cable is working I can get on the net with the old computer. (Old computer is using device MAC address; Auto eth0 00:11:11:E6:4F:FE). I have put this address into the newer HP and it shows last used (minutes ago) but no Internet sever not found. I tried the hardware address it says never. I feel and think this should be easy to fix. But I just don't know. Here is the info everyone has asked for, but they never say what I should do. sudo lshw -C network; rfkill list; cat /etc/network/interfaces; cat /etc/lsb-release; lspci -nn; lsusb; uname -a; ifconfig; route -n *-network description: ethernet interface product; NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:40:00.0 logical name: eth0 verson: 01 serial: 00:16:35:78:47:bb size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000-fd configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion= 3.121 duplex=full firmware=5751-v3.29a latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twi sted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:17 memory:f0400000-f040ffff auto lo iface lo inet loopback DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION= "Ubuntu 12.04 LTS" 00:00.0 host bridge [0600]: Inter Corporation 82915G/P/GV/GL/PL/910GL Memory Con troller Hub [8086:2580] (rev 04) 00.02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL inte grated Graphics Controller [8086:2582] (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2660] (rev 03) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2662] (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #1 [8086:2658] (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #2 [8086:2659] (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #3 [8086:265a] (rev 03) 00:1d.3 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #4 [8086:265b] (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB2 UHCI Controller [8086:265c] (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI bridge [8086:244e] (rev d 3) 00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/ FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Autio conrtroller [8086:266e] (rev 03) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/RF (ICH6/ICH6R) LPC Interfa ce Bridge [8086:2640] (rev 03) 00:1f.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 fami ly) IDE Controller [8086:266f] (rev 03) 00:1f.2 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FW (ICH6/ICH6W) SATA Con troller [8086:2651] (rev 03) 40:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXreme BCM5751 Gigab it Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1677} (rev 01) Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Linux bob-desktop 3.2.0-23-generic-pae #36-Ubuntu SMP Tpr 10 22:19:09 UTC 20 12 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16:35:78:47:bb inet6 addr: fe80::216:35ff:47bb/64 Scope:link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2517 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:164 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:164508 (164.5 KB) TX bytes: 40884 (40.0 KB) Interrupt:17 lo Link encap:Local loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:3290 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:3290 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen: 0 RX bytes:267212 (267.2 KB) TX bytes: 267212 (267.2 KB) Kernel Ip routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface ran this sudo dhclient eth0 no reply ran this ip addr 1: lo <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: eth0: <BROADCAST ,MULTICAST ,UP ,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP qlen 1000 link/enter 00:16:35:78:47:BB brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 169.254.7.172/16 brd 169.254.255.255 scope link eth0:avahi inet6 fe80::216:35ff:fe78:47bb/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever Help please.

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Why is my Ubuntu system not using the correct kernel?

  - by Brooks Moses

  We're having a bit of confusion on a Ubuntu remote system -- /boot/grub/menu.lst suggests the system should boot into kernel 2.6.35-30-generic, but it is actually running kernel 2.6.32-27-generic. Where should I look to start figuring out why this is happening and how to fix it? Specifically, /boot/grub/menu.lst has default 0 and the first entry is title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2- ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic Further, I've confirmed that /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic and /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic exist and have appropriate permissions. Meanwhile, uname -a returns: $ uname -a Linux cuda2 2.6.32-27-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 2 00:51:09 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux Edit: I've also tried re-running update-grub, and rebooting; no luck. Here's the full menu.lst, as requested by a commenter: # menu.lst - See: grub(8), info grub, update-grub(8) # grub-install(8), grub-floppy(8), # grub-md5-crypt, /usr/share/doc/grub # and /usr/share/doc/grub-legacy-doc/. ## default num # Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and # the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used. # # You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry # is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'. # WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use 'savedefault' or your # array will desync and will not let you boot your system. default 0 ## timeout sec # Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry # (normally the first entry defined). timeout 3 ## hiddenmenu # Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu) hiddenmenu # Pretty colours #color cyan/blue white/blue ## password ['--md5'] passwd # If used in the first section of a menu file, disable all interactive editing # control (menu entry editor and command-line) and entries protected by the # command 'lock' # e.g. password topsecret # password --md5 $1$gLhU0/$aW78kHK1QfV3P2b2znUoe/ # password topsecret # # examples # # title Windows 95/98/NT/2000 # root (hd0,0) # makeactive # chainloader +1 # # title Linux # root (hd0,1) # kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro # # # Put static boot stanzas before and/or after AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST ### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST ## lines between the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST markers will be modified ## by the debian update-grub script except for the default options below ## DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs ## ## Start Default Options ## ## default kernel options ## default kernel options for automagic boot options ## If you want special options for specific kernels use kopt_x_y_z ## where x.y.z is kernel version. Minor versions can be omitted. ## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro ## kopt_2_6_8=root=/dev/hdc1 ro ## kopt_2_6_8_2_686=root=/dev/hdc2 ro # kopt=root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro ## default grub root device ## e.g. groot=(hd0,0) # groot=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ## should update-grub create alternative automagic boot options ## e.g. alternative=true ## alternative=false # alternative=true ## should update-grub lock alternative automagic boot options ## e.g. lockalternative=true ## lockalternative=false # lockalternative=false ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the ## alternatives ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5 # defoptions=quiet splash ## should update-grub lock old automagic boot options ## e.g. lockold=false ## lockold=true # lockold=false ## Xen hypervisor options to use with the default Xen boot option # xenhopt= ## Xen Linux kernel options to use with the default Xen boot option # xenkopt=console=tty0 ## altoption boot targets option ## multiple altoptions lines are allowed ## e.g. altoptions=(extra menu suffix) extra boot options ## altoptions=(recovery) single # altoptions=(recovery mode) single ## controls how many kernels should be put into the menu.lst ## only counts the first occurence of a kernel, not the ## alternative kernel options ## e.g. howmany=all ## howmany=7 # howmany=all ## specify if running in Xen domU or have grub detect automatically ## update-grub will ignore non-xen kernels when running in domU and vice versa ## e.g. indomU=detect ## indomU=true ## indomU=false # indomU=detect ## should update-grub create memtest86 boot option ## e.g. memtest86=true ## memtest86=false # memtest86=true ## should update-grub adjust the value of the default booted system ## can be true or false # updatedefaultentry=false ## should update-grub add savedefault to the default options ## can be true or false # savedefault=false ## ## End Default Options ## title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-32-server uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-32-server (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-27-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-27-generic (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic title Chainload into GRUB 2 root 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/grub/core.img title Ubuntu 10.10, memtest86+ uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST To add complication and joy to my life, this is a desktop machine in a remote datacenter; we don't have either local access or serial-console access. Suggestions?

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• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

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• IndyTechFest Recap

  - by Johnm

  The sun had yet to raise above the horizon on Saturday, May 22nd and I was traveling toward the location of the 2010 IndyTechFest. In my freshly awaken, and pre-coffee, state I reflected on the months that preceded this day and how quickly they slipped away. The big day had finally come and the morning dew glistened with a unique brightness that morning. What is this all about? For those who are unfamiliar with IndyTechFest, it is a regional conference held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA) and the Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server (IndyPASS).  The event presents multiple tracks and sessions covering subjects such as Business Intelligence,  Database Administration, .NET Development, SharePoint Development, Windows Mobile Development as well as non-Microsoft topics such as Lean and MongoDB. This year's event was the third hosting of IndyTechFest. No man is an island No event such as IndyTechFest is executed by a single person. My fellow co-founders, with their highly complementary skill sets and philanthropy make the process very enjoyable. Our amazing volunteers and their aid were indispensible. The generous financial support of our sponsors that made the event and fabulous prizes possible. The spectacular line up of speakers who came from near and far to donate their time and knowledge. Our beloved attendees who sacrificed the first sunny Saturday in weeks to expand their skill sets and network with their peers. We are deeply appreciative. Challenges in preparation With the preparation of any event comes challenges. It is these challenges that makes the process of planning an event so interesting. This year's largest challenge was the location of the event. In the past two years IndyTechFest was held at the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Center in Indianapolis. This facility has been the hub of the Indy technical community for many years. As the big day drew near, the facility's availability came into question due to some recent changes that had occurred with those who operated the facility. We began our search for an alternative option. Thankfully, the Marriott Indianapolis East was available, was very spacious and willing to work within the range of our budget. Within days of our event, the decision to move proved to be wise since the prior location had begun renovations to the interior. Whew! Always trust your gut. Every day it's getting better At the ending of each year, we huddle together, review the evaluations and identify an area in which the event could improve. This year's big opportunity for improvement resided in the prize give-away portion at the end of the day. In the 2008 event, admittedly, this portion was rather chaotic, rushed and disorganized. This year, we broke the drawing into two sections, of which each attendee received two tickets. The first ticket was a drawing for the mountain of books that were given away. The second ticket was a drawing for the big prizes, the 2 Xboxes, 3 laptops and iPad. We peppered the ticket drawings with gift card raffles and tossing t-shirts into the audience. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again Each year of IndyTechFest, we have offered a means for ad-hoc sessions or discussion groups to pop-up. To our disappointment it was something that never quite took off. We have always believed that this unique type of session was valuable and wanted to figure out a way to make it work for this year. A special thanks to Alan Stevens, who took on and facilitated the "open space" track and made it an official success. Share with your tweety When the attendee badges were designed we decided to place an emphasis on the attendee's Twitter account as well as the events hash-tag (#IndyTechFest) to encourage some real-time buzz during the day. At the host table we displayed a Twitter feed for all to enjoy. It was quite successful and encouraging use of social media. My badge was missing my Twitter account since it was recently changed. For those who care to follow my rather sparse tweets, my address is @johnnydata. Man, this is one long blog post! All in all it was a very successful event. It is always great to see new faces and meet old friends. The planning for the 2011 IndyTechFest will kick off very soon. We have more capacity for future growth and a truck full of great ideas. Stay tuned!

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• Design review for application facing memory issues

  - by Mr Moose

  I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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• WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 6: Chaining multiple Token Services

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  See the previous posts first. So far we looked at the (simpler) scenario where a client acquires a token from an identity provider and uses that for authentication against a relying party WCF service. Another common scenario is, that the client first requests a token from an identity provider, and then uses this token to request a new token from a Resource STS or a partner’s federation gateway. This sounds complicated, but is actually very easy to achieve using WIF’s WS-Trust client support. The sequence is like this: Request a token from an identity provider. You use some “bootstrap” credential for that like Windows integrated, UserName or a client certificate. The realm used for this request is the identifier of the Resource STS/federation gateway. Use the resulting token to request a new token from the Resource STS/federation gateway. The realm for this request would be the ultimate service you want to talk to. Use this resulting token to authenticate against the ultimate service. Step 1 is very much the same as the code I have shown in the last post. In the following snippet, I use a client certificate to get a token from my STS: private static SecurityToken GetIdPToken() {     var factory = new WSTrustChannelFactory(         new CertificateWSTrustBinding(SecurityMode.TransportWithMessageCredential,         idpEndpoint);     factory.TrustVersion = TrustVersion.WSTrust13;       factory.Credentials.ClientCertificate.SetCertificate(         StoreLocation.CurrentUser,         StoreName.My,         X509FindType.FindBySubjectDistinguishedName,         "CN=Client");       var rst = new RequestSecurityToken     {         RequestType = RequestTypes.Issue,         AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress(rstsRealm),         KeyType = KeyTypes.Symmetric     };       var channel = factory.CreateChannel();     return channel.Issue(rst); } To use a token to request another token is slightly different. First the IssuedTokenWSTrustBinding is used and second the channel factory extension methods are used to send the identity provider token to the Resource STS: private static SecurityToken GetRSTSToken(SecurityToken idpToken) {     var binding = new IssuedTokenWSTrustBinding();     binding.SecurityMode = SecurityMode.TransportWithMessageCredential;       var factory = new WSTrustChannelFactory(         binding,         rstsEndpoint);     factory.TrustVersion = TrustVersion.WSTrust13;     factory.Credentials.SupportInteractive = false;       var rst = new RequestSecurityToken     {         RequestType = RequestTypes.Issue,         AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress(svcRealm),         KeyType = KeyTypes.Symmetric     };       factory.ConfigureChannelFactory();     var channel = factory.CreateChannelWithIssuedToken(idpToken);     return channel.Issue(rst); } For this particular case I chose an ADFS endpoint for issued token authentication (see part 1 for more background). Calling the service now works exactly like I described in my last post. You may now wonder if the same thing can be also achieved using configuration only – absolutely. But there are some gotchas. First of all the configuration files becomes quite complex. As we discussed in part 4, the bindings must be nested for WCF to unwind the token call-stack. But in this case svcutil cannot resolve the first hop since it cannot use metadata to inspect the identity provider. This binding must be supplied manually. The other issue is around the value for the realm/appliesTo when requesting a token for the R-STS. Using the manual approach you have full control over that parameter and you can simply use the R-STS issuer URI. Using the configuration approach, the exact address of the R-STS endpoint will be used. This means that you may have to register multiple R-STS endpoints in the identity provider. Another issue you will run into is, that ADFS does only accepts its configured issuer URI as a known realm by default. You’d have to manually add more audience URIs for the specific endpoints using the ADFS Powershell commandlets. I prefer the “manual” approach. That’s it. Hope this is useful information.

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• Getting a handle on mobile data

  - by Eric Jensen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} written by Ashok Joshi The proliferation of mobile devices in the corporate world is both a blessing as well as a challenge.  Mobile devices improve productivity and the velocity of business for the end users; on the other hand, IT departments need to manage the corporate data and applications that run on these devices. Oracle Database Mobile Server (DMS for short) provides a simple and effective way to deal with the management challenge.  DMS supports data synchronization between a central Oracle database server and data on mobile devices.  It also provides authentication, encryption and application and device management.  Finally, DMS is a highly scalable solution that can be used to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.   Here’s a simplified outline of how such a solution might work. Each device runs local sync and mgmt agents that handle bidirectional data flow with an Oracle enterprise backend, run remote commands, and provide status to the management console. For example, mobile admins could monitor multiple networks of mobile devices, upgrade their software remotely, and even destroy the local database on a compromised device. DMS supports either Oracle Berkeley DB or SQLite for device-local storage, and runs on a wide variety of mobile platforms. The schema for the device-local database is pretty simple – it contains the name of the application that’s installed on the device as well as details such as product name, version number, time of last access etc. Each mobile user has an account on the monitoring system.  DMS supports authentication via the Oracle database authentication mechanisms or alternately, via an external authentication server such as Oracle Identity Management. DMS also provides the option of encrypting the data on disk as well as while it is being synchronized. Whenever a device connects with DMS, it sends the list of all local application changes to the server; the server updates the central repository with this information.  Synchronization can be triggered on-demand, whenever there’s a change on the device (e.g. new application installed or an existing application removed) or via a rule-based schedule (e.g. every Saturday). Synchronization is very fast and efficient, since only the changes are propagated.  This includes resume capability; should synchronization be interrupted for any reason, the next synchronization will resume where the previous synchronization was interrupted. If the device should be lost or stolen, DMS has the capability to remove the applications and/or data from the device. This ability to control access to sensitive data and applications is critical in the corporate environment. The central repository also allows the IT manager to track the kinds of applications that mobile users use and recommend patches and upgrades, while still allowing the mobile user full control over what applications s/he downloads and uses on the device.  This is useful since most devices are used for corporate as well as personal information. In certain restricted use scenarios, the IT manager can also control whether a certain application can be installed on a mobile device.  Should an unapproved application be installed, it can easily be removed the next time the device connects with the central server. Oracle Database mobile server provides a simple, effective and highly secure and scalable solution for managing the data and applications for the mobile workforce.

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• EPM and Business Analytics Talking-head Videos from Oracle OpenWorld 2013

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Here is a selection of 2 to 3 minute video interviews at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld: 1. George Somogyi, Solutions Architect, New Edge Group, talks about the importance of having their integrated Oracle Hyperion Platform consisting of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management, Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and Oracle Business Intelligence Extended Edition plus their use of Oracle Managed Cloud Services. Speaker: George Somogyi @ http://youtu.be/kWn0dQxCUy8 2. Gregg Thompson, Director of Financial Systems for ADT, talks about using Oracle Data Relationship Management prior to implementing an Enterprise Performance Management solution. Gregg confirmed that there are big benefits to bringing the full Oracle Hyperion Financial Close suite online with Oracle DRM as the metadata source. Reduced maintenance time and use of external consultants translates into significant time and cost savings and faster implementation times. Speaker: Gregg Thompson @ http://youtu.be/XnFrR9Uk4xk 3. Jeff Spangler, Director Financial Planning and Analysis for Speedy Cash Holdings Corp, talked to us about the benefits achieved through implementing Oracle Hyperion Planning and financial reporting solutions. He also describes how the use of Data Relationship Management will keep the process running smoothly now and in the future. Speaker: Jeff Spangler @ http://youtu.be/kkkuMkgJ22U 4. Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision at Oracle, talks about Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision, how it is an integral part of the financial close process and that it provides better internal controls and automation of this task. Marc talks about Oracle Partners and customers alike who are seeing great value. Speaker: Marc Seewald @ http://youtu.be/lM_nfvACGuA 5. Matt Bradley, SVP of Product Development for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Applications at Oracle, talked to us about different deployment options for Oracle EPM. Cloud services (SaaS), managed services, on-premise, off-premise all have their merits, and organizations need flexibility to easily move between them as their companies evolve. Speaker: Matt Bradley @ http://youtu.be/ATO7Z9dbE-o 6. Neil Sellers, Partner, Qubix International talks about their experience with previewing Oracle’s new Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. He describes the benefits of the step-by-step task lists, the speed of getting the application up and running, and the huge benefits of not having to manage the software and hardware side of the planning process. Speaker: Neil Sellers @ http://youtu.be/xmosO28e4_I 7. Praveen Pasupuleti, Senior Business Intelligence Development Manager of Citrix Systems Inc., talks about their Oracle Hyperion Planning upgrade and the huge performance improvement now experienced in forecasting. He also talked about the benefits of Oracle Hyperion Workforce Planning achieved by Citrix. Speaker: Praveen Pasupuleti @ http://youtu.be/d1e_4hLqw8c 8. CheckPoint Consulting, talked to us about how Enterprise Performance Management should be viewed as an entire solution, rather than as a bunch of applications in silos, to provide significant benefits; and how Data Relationship Management can tie it all together effectively. Speaker: Ron Dimon @ http://youtu.be/sRwbdbbXvUE 9. Sonal Kulkarni, Enterprise Performance Management Leader, Cummins Inc., talks about their use of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management (Account Reconciliation Manager), Oracle Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and how this is providing efficiency, visibility and compliance benefits. Speaker: Sonal Kulkarni @ http://youtu.be/OEgup5dKyVc 10. Todd Renard, Manager Financial Planning and Business Analytics for B/E Aerospace Inc., talks about the huge benefits that B/E Aerospace is experiencing from Oracle Financial Close Suite. He was extremely excited about Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and how this helps them integrate a new business in as little as three weeks. Speaker: Todd Renard @ http://youtu.be/nIfqK46uVI8 11. Peter Smolianski, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia Courts, talked to us about how D.C. Courts is using Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management to push their 5 year plan forward, to report results to their constituents, and take accountability for process changes to become more efficient. Speaker: Peter Smolianski @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-DtB5pl-uk 12. Rich Wilkie, Senior Director of Product Management for Financial Close Suite at Oracle, talked to us about Oracle Financial Management Analytics. He told us how the prebuilt dashboards on top of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Suite make it easy for everyone to see the numbers and understand where they are in the close process, and if there is an issue, they can see where it is. Executives are excited to get this information on mobile devices too. Speaker: Rich Wilkie @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHuHgx74Yg 13. Dinesh Balebail, Senior Director of Software Development for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, talked to us about the power and speed of Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management and how it is being used to do deep costing for Telecoms, Hospitals, Banks and other high transaction volume organizations effectively. Speaker: Dinesh Balebail @ http://youtu.be/ivx5AZCXAfs /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 &ndash; The failed Sprint

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.  The standard flippant answer of all Scrum professionals, “Well that's not Scrum”, does not get you any brownie points in these situations. The response could be “Well we are not doing Scrum then” which in turn leads to “We are doing Scrum…But, we have split the scrum team into units of 2/3 so that they can concentrate on a specific area of work”. While this may work, it is not Scrum and should not be called so… It is just a form of Agile. Don’t get me wrong at this stage, there is nothing wrong with Agile, just don’t call it Scrum. The reason that the Product Owner wants to do this is that, in effect, through a number of miscommunications and failings in our implementation of Scrum, there was NO unit of potentially Shippable software at the end of the first sprint. It does not matter to them that most Scrum teams will fail the first Sprint, even those that are high performing teams. Remember it is the product owners their money! We should NOT break up scrum teams into smaller units for the purpose of having less people tied up in the Scrum Ceremonies. The amount of backlog the Team selects is solely up to the Team… Only the Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org The entire team must accept the work and in order to understand what they can accept they must be free to size it as a team. This both encourages common understanding and increases visibility on why team members think a task is of a particular size. This has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire team in the problem domain. A new Team often first realizes that it will either sink or swim as a Team, not individually, in this meeting. The Team realizes that it must rely on itself. As it realizes this, it starts to self-organize to take on the characteristics and behaviour of a real Team. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org This paragraph goes to the why of having the whole team at the meeting; The goal of Scrum it to produce a unit of potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. In order to achieve this we need high performing teams and this is what Scrum as a framework has been optimised to produce. I think that our Product Owner is understandably upset over loosing two weeks work and is losing sight the end goal of Scrum in the failures of the moment. As the man spending the money, I completely understand his perspective and I think that we should not have started Scrum on an internal project, but selected a customer  that is open to the ideas and complications of Scrum. So, what should we have NOT done on our first Scrum project: Should not have had 3 interns as the only on site resource – This lead to bad practices as the experienced guys were not there helping and correcting as they usually would. Should not have had the only experienced guys offsite – With both the experienced technical guys in completely different time zones it was difficult to get time for questions. Helping the guys on site was just plain impossible. Should not have used a part time ScrumMaster – Although the ScrumMaster attended all of the Ceremonies, because they are only in 2 full days of the week it makes it difficult for the team to raise impediments as they go. Should not have used a proxy product owner. – This was probably the worst decision that was made. Mainly because the proxy product owner did not have the same vision as the product owner. While Scrum does not explicitly reject the idea of a Proxy Product Owner, I do not think it works very well in practice. The “single wringable neck” needs to contain both the Money and the Vision as well as attending the required meetings. I will be brining all of these things up at the Sprint Retrospective and we will learn from our mistakes and move on. Do, Inspect then Adapt…   Technorati Tags: Scrum,Sprint Planing,Sprint Retrospective,Scrum.org,Scrum Guide,Scrum Ceremonies,Scrummaster,Product Owner Need Help? Professional Scrum Developer Training SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

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• why installing lame it is getting failed

  - by Rahul Mehta

  I want to install ffmpeg with mp3lame enabled for this m following this tutorial , http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9868359&postcount=1289 and in step 2 error is libfaac is not found ? and in step 5 installing lame is giving this error , why it is getting failed , please advised what to do ? reach121@youngib:~/lame-3.98.4$ sudo checkinstall --pkgname=lame-ffmpeg --pkgversion="3.98.4" --backup=no --default --deldoc=yes checkinstall 1.6.2, Copyright 2009 Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran This software is released under the GNU GPL. ***************************************** **** Debian package creation selected *** ***************************************** This package will be built according to these values: 0 - Maintainer: [ root@youngib ] 1 - Summary: [ Package created with checkinstall 1.6.2 ] 2 - Name: [ lame-ffmpeg ] 3 - Version: [ 3.98.4 ] 4 - Release: [ 1 ] 5 - License: [ GPL ] 6 - Group: [ checkinstall ] 7 - Architecture: [ amd64 ] 8 - Source location: [ lame-3.98.4 ] 9 - Alternate source location: [ ] 10 - Requires: [ ] 11 - Provides: [ lame-ffmpeg ] 12 - Conflicts: [ ] 13 - Replaces: [ ] Enter a number to change any of them or press ENTER to continue: Installing with make install... ========================= Installation results =========================== Making install in mpglib make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' Making install in libmp3lame make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' Making install in i386 make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' Making install in vector make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' test -z "/usr/local/lib" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/lib" /bin/bash ../libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c 'libmp3lame.la' '/usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.la' /usr/bin/install -c .libs/libmp3lame.lai /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.la /usr/bin/install -c .libs/libmp3lame.a /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.a chmod 644 /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.a ranlib /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.a PATH="$PATH:/sbin" ldconfig -n /usr/local/lib ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Libraries have been installed in: /usr/local/lib If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries in a given directory, LIBDIR, you must either use libtool, and specify the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR' flag during linking and do at least one of the following: - add LIBDIR to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH' environment variable during execution - add LIBDIR to the `LD_RUN_PATH' environment variable during linking - use the `-Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR' linker flag - have your system administrator add LIBDIR to `/etc/ld.so.conf' See any operating system documentation about shared libraries for more information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' Making install in frontend make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' test -z "/usr/local/bin" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/bin" /bin/bash ../libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c 'lame' '/usr/local/bin/lame' /usr/bin/install -c lame /usr/local/bin/lame make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' Making install in Dll make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' Making install in debian make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' Making install in doc make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc' Making install in html make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. test -z "/usr/local/share/doc/lame/html" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/share/doc/lame/html" /bin/mkdir: cannot create directory `/usr/local/share/doc': No such file or directory make[3]: *** [install-pkghtmlDATA] Error 1 make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[2]: *** [install-am] Error 2 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[1]: *** [install-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc' make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1 **** Installation failed. Aborting package creation. Cleaning up...OK Bye. reach121@youngib:~/lame-3.98.4$

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• Blog Buzz - Devoxx 2011

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Some day I will make it to Devoxx – for now, I’m content to vicariously follow the blogs of attendees and pick up on what’s happening.  I’ve been doing more blog "fishing," looking for the best commentary on 2011 Devoxx. There’s plenty of food for thought – and the ideas are not half-baked.The bloggers are out in full, offering useful summaries and commentary on Devoxx goings-on.Constantin Partac, a Java developer and a member of Transylvania JUG, a community from Cluj-Napoca/Romania, offers an excellent summary of the Devoxx keynotes. Here’s a sample:“Oracle Opening Keynote and JDK 7, 8, and 9 Presentation•    Oracle is committed to Java and wants to provide support for it on any device.•    JSE 7 for Mac will be released next week.•    Oracle would like Java developers to be involved in JCP, to adopt a JSR and to attend local JUG meetings.•    JEE 7 will be released next year.•    JEE 7 is focused on cloud integration, some of the features are already implemented in glassfish 4 development branch.•    JSE 8 will be release in summer of 2013 due to “enterprise community request” as they can not keep the pace with an 18    month release cycle.•    The main features included in JSE8 are lambda support, project Jigsaw, new Date/Time API, project Coin++ and adding   support for sensors. JSE 9 probably will focus on some of these features:1.    self tuning JVM2.    improved native language integration3.    processing enhancement for big data4.    reification (adding runtime class type info for generic types)5.    unification of primitive and corresponding object classes6.    meta-object protocol in order to use type and methods define in other JVM languages7.    multi-tenancy8.    JVM resource management” Thanks Constantin! Ivan St. Ivanov, of SAP Labs Bulgaria, also commented on the keynotes with a different focus.  He summarizes Henrik Stahl’s look ahead to Java SE 8 and JavaFX 3.0; Cameron Purdy on Java EE and the cloud; celebrated Java Champion Josh Bloch on what’s good and bad about Java; Mark Reinhold’s quick look ahead to Java SE 9; and Brian Goetz on lambdas and default methods in Java SE 8. Here’s St. Ivanov’s account of Josh Bloch’s comments on the pluses of Java:“He started with the virtues of the platform. To name a few:    Tightly specified language primitives and evaluation order – int is always 32 bits and operations are executed always from left  to right, without compilers messing around    Dynamic linking – when you change a class, you need to recompile and rebuild just the jar that has it and not the whole application    Syntax  similarity with C/C++ – most existing developers at that time felt like at home    Object orientations – it was cool at that time as well as functional programming is today    It was statically typed language – helps in faster runtime, better IDE support, etc.    No operator overloading – well, I’m not sure why it is good. Scala has it for example and that’s why it is far better for defining DSLs. But I will not argue with Josh.”It’s worth checking out St. Ivanov’s summary of Bloch’s views on what’s not so great about Java as well. What's Coming in JAX-RS 2.0Marek Potociar, Principal Software Engineer at Oracle and currently specification lead of Java EE RESTful web services API (JAX-RS), blogged on his talk about what's coming in JAX-RS 2.0, scheduled for final release in mid-2012.  Here’s a taste:“Perhaps the most wanted addition to the JAX-RS is the Client API, that would complete the JAX-RS story, that is currently server-side only. In JAX-RS 2.0 we are adding a completely interface-based and fluent client API that blends nicely in with the existing fluent response builder pattern on the server-side. When we started with the client API, the first proposal contained around 30 classes. Thanks to the feedback from our Expert Group we managed to reduce the number of API classes to 14 (2 of them being exceptions)! The resulting is compact while at the same time we still managed to create an API that reflects the method invocation context flow (e.g. once you decide on the target URI and start setting headers on the request, your IDE will not try to offer you a URI setter in the code completion). This is a subtle but very important usability aspect of an API…” Obviously, Devoxx is a great Java conference, one that is hitting this year at a time when much is brewing in the platform and beginning to be anticipated.

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• MCM Lab exam this week

  - by Rob Farley

  In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously. It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?) The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”. The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock. I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me. I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?” I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them. Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room. I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time... ...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :) If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me. @rob_farley PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

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