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• How to remap media keys on laptop,without external programs?

  - by polemon

  As on most laptops, my laptop has "special" keys, or media keys, as they are sometimes called. On Linux, I can easily read keycodes with things like xev, put other functions back to it. Either with xmodmap or by simply giving the keys functions in my window manager. How is that possible on Windows? Is there even a way to scan those keys and remap them? Possibly even give them different functions as on Linux? If so, where do I do that? I heard of several programs atempting on changing that, but I don't see why I should install another program. I see it as integral part of the OS. For instance, I have a key with an 'i' in a circle. It normally opens a new browser window. When Chrome is already open, it makes the current tab go to my selected homepage (which is about:blank). I'd like to change the functionality of it.

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• httpd.conf variables : What is the difference between ${var} and %{var}?

  - by 108.im

  What is the difference between ${var} and %{var} in httpd.conf? How and when would one use ${} and %{}? http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/configuring.html mentions : The values of variables defined with the Define of or shell environment variables can be used in configuration file lines using the syntax ${VAR}. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_rewrite.html mentions: Server-Variables:These are variables of the form %{ NAME_OF_VARIABLE } and RewriteMap expansions:These are expansions of the form ${mapname:key|default}. Will ${VAR} be used everywhere in httpd.conf, except in mod_rewrite directive's (like RewriteCond, RewriteRule but except for RewriteMap expansions which use ${} as in RewriteRule ^/ex/(.*) ${examplemap:$1} ) Would a variable set in httpd.conf using SetEnvIf Directive, for use in same httpd.conf, be used as ${var} except when the variable is used with mod_rewrite directive's, where the variable would be used as %{var}?

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• Evil DRY

  - by StefanSteinegger

  DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." So the important thing here is "knowledge". Nobody ever said "every piece of code". I try to give some examples of misusing the DRY principle. Code Repetitions by Coincidence There is code that is repeated by pure coincidence. It is not the same code because it is based on the same piece of knowledge, it is just the same by coincidence. It's hard to give an example of such a case. Just think about some lines of code the developer thinks "I already wrote something similar". Then he takes the original code, puts it into a public method, even worse into a base class where none had been there before, puts some weird arguments and some if or switch statements into it to support all special cases and calls this "increasing maintainability based on the DRY principle". The resulting "reusable method" is usually something the developer not even can give a meaningful name, because its contents isn't anything specific, it is just a bunch of code. For the same reason, nobody will really understand this piece of code. Typically this method only makes sense to call after some other method had been called. All the symptoms of really bad design is evident. Fact is, writing this kind of "reusable methods" is worse then copy pasting! Believe me. What will happen when you change this weird piece of code? You can't say what'll happen, because you can't understand what the code is actually doing. So better don't touch it anymore. Maintainability just died. Of course this problem is with any badly designed code. But because the developer tried to make this method as reusable as possible, large parts of the system get dependent on it. Completely independent parts get tightly coupled by this common piece of code. Changing on the single common place will have effects anywhere in the system, a typical symptom of too tight coupling. Without trying to dogmatically (and wrongly) apply the DRY principle, you just had a system with a weak design. Now you get a system which just can't be maintained anymore. So what can you do against it? When making code reusable, always identify the generally reusable parts of it. Find the reason why the code is repeated, find the common "piece of knowledge". If you have to search too far, it's probably not really there. Explain it to a colleague, if you can't explain or the explanation is to complicated, it's probably not worth to reuse. If you identify the piece of knowledge, don't forget to carefully find the place where it should be implemented. Reusing code is never worth giving up a clean design. Methods always need to do something specific. If you can't give it a simple and explanatory name, you did probably something weird. If you can't find the common piece of knowledge, try to make the code simpler. For instance, if you have some complicated string or collection operations within this code, write some general-purpose operations into a helper class. If your code gets simple enough, its not so bad if it can't be reused. If you are not able to find anything simple and reasonable, copy paste it. Put a comment into the code to reference the other copies. You may find a solution later. Requirements Repetitions by Coincidence Let's assume that you need to implement complex tax calculations for many countries. It's possible that some countries have very similar tax rules. These rules are still completely independent from each other, since every country can change it of its own. (Assumed that this similarity is actually by coincidence and not by political membership. There might be basic rules applying to all European countries. etc.) Let's assume that there are similarities between an Asian country and an African country. Moving the common part to a central place will cause problems. What happens if one of the countries changes its rules? Or - more likely - what happens if users of one country complain about an error in the calculation? If there is shared code, it is very risky to change it, even for a bugfix. It is hard to find requirements to be repeated by coincidence. Then there is not much you can do against the repetition of the code. What you really should consider is to make coding of the rules as simple as possible. So this independent knowledge "Tax Rules in Timbuktu" or wherever should be as pure as possible, without much overhead and stuff that does not belong to it. So you can write every independent requirement short and clean. DRYing try-catch and using Blocks This is a technical issue. Blocks like try-catch or using (e.g. in C#) are very hard to DRY. Imagine a complex exception handling, including several catch blocks. When the contents of the try block as well as the contents of the individual catch block are trivial, but the whole structure is repeated on many places in the code, there is almost no reasonable way to DRY it. try { // trivial code here using (Thingy thing = new thingy) { //trivial, but always different line of code } } catch(FooException foo) { // trivial foo handling } catch (BarException bar) { // trivial bar handling } catch { // trivial common handling } finally { // trivial finally block } The key here is that every block is trivial, so there is nothing to just move into a separate method. The only part that differs from case to case is the line of code in the body of the using block (or any other block). The situation is especially interesting if the many occurrences of this structure are completely independent: they appear in classes with no common base class, they don't aggregate each other and so on. Let's assume that this is a common pattern in service methods within the whole system. Examples of Evil DRYing in this situation: Put a if or switch statement into the method to choose the line of code to execute. There are several reasons why this is not a good idea: The close coupling of the formerly independent implementation is the strongest. Also the readability of the code and the use of a parameter to control the logic. Put everything into a method which takes a delegate as argument to call. The caller just passes his "specific line of code" to this method. The code will be very unreadable. The same maintainability problems apply as for any "Code Repetition by Coincidence" situations. Enforce a base class to all the classes where this pattern appears and use the template method pattern. It's the same readability and maintainability problem as above, but additionally complex and tightly coupled because of the base class. I would call this "Inheritance by Coincidence" which will not lead to great software design. What can you do against it: Ideally, the individual line of code is a call to a class or interface, which could be made individual by inheritance. If this would be the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I assume that it is no such a trivial case. Consider to refactor the error concept to make error handling easier. The last but not worst option is to keep the replications. Some pattern of code must be maintained in consistency, there is nothing we can do against it. And no reason to make it unreadable. Conclusion The DRY-principle is an important and basic principle every software developer should master. The key is to identify the "pieces of knowledge". There is code which can't be reused easily because of technical reasons. This requires quite a bit flexibility and creativity to make code simple and maintainable. It's not the problem of the principle, it is the problem of blindly applying a principle without understanding the problem it should solve. The result is mostly much worse then ignoring the principle.

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• Integrating Social, Marketing, and Loyalty to Deliver Great Customer Experiences

  - by Charles Knapp

  Eighty nine percent of consumers quit a brand after one bad experience. With the high cost of acquiring new customers, what can brand leaders do? At the Loyalty World Conference this week in London, global business leaders such as the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s shared the latest in how to retain customers and boost advocacy. Melissa Boxer and Sundar Swaminathan of Oracle shared that by taking an outside-in approach, you can deliver a differentiated, loyalty-building experience throughout the customer lifecycle, from researching and selecting through to using and recommending. To transform customer experiences, you need to integrate your brand’s social, marketing, and loyalty functions from the commonplace silos. Three key strategies: Know more and understand, unifying and capturing insights across touch points to better understand who to serve, how to serve, and when to serve.  Connect and engage across social and traditional channels, empowering a relationship ecosystem between social communities, customers, and employees. Make the personalized experience easy and rewarding. Visit us on twitter.com/oraclecrm to learn more useful highlights from the #lwconf conference.

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• A WPF Image Button

  - by psheriff

  Instead of a normal button with words, sometimes you want a button that is just graphical. Yes, you can put an Image control in the Content of a normal Button control, but you still have the button outline, and trying to change the style can be rather difficult. Instead I like creating a user control that simulates a button, but just accepts an image. Figure 1 shows an example of three of these custom user controls to represent minimize, maximize and close buttons for a borderless window. Notice the highlighted image button has a gray rectangle around it. You will learn how to highlight using the VisualStateManager in this blog post.Figure 1: Creating a custom user control for things like image buttons gives you complete control over the look and feel.I would suggest you read my previous blog post on creating a custom Button user control as that is a good primer for what I am going to expand upon in this blog post. You can find this blog post at http://weblogs.asp.net/psheriff/archive/2012/08/10/create-your-own-wpf-button-user-controls.aspx.The User ControlThe XAML for this image button user control contains just a few controls, plus a Visual State Manager. The basic outline of the user control is shown below:<Border Grid.Row="0"        Name="borMain"        Style="{StaticResource pdsaButtonImageBorderStyle}"        MouseEnter="borMain_MouseEnter"        MouseLeave="borMain_MouseLeave"        MouseLeftButtonDown="borMain_MouseLeftButtonDown">  <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>  ... MORE XAML HERE ...  </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>  <Image Style="{StaticResource pdsaButtonImageImageStyle}"         Visibility="{Binding Path=Visibility}"         Source="{Binding Path=ImageUri}"         ToolTip="{Binding Path=ToolTip}" /></Border>There is a Border control named borMain and a single Image control in this user control. That is all that is needed to display the buttons shown in Figure 1. The definition for this user control is in a DLL named PDSA.WPF. The Style definitions for both the Border and the Image controls are contained in a resource dictionary names PDSAButtonStyles.xaml. Using a resource dictionary allows you to create a few different resource dictionaries, each with a different theme for the buttons.The Visual State ManagerTo display the highlight around the button as your mouse moves over the control, you will need to add a Visual State Manager group. Two different states are needed; MouseEnter and MouseLeave. In the MouseEnter you create a ColorAnimation to modify the BorderBrush color of the Border control. You specify the color to animate as “DarkGray”. You set the duration to less than a second. The TargetName of this storyboard is the name of the Border control “borMain” and since we are specifying a single color, you need to set the TargetProperty to “BorderBrush.Color”. You do not need any storyboard for the MouseLeave state. Leaving this VisualState empty tells the Visual State Manager to put everything back the way it was before the MouseEnter event.<VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>  <VisualStateGroup Name="MouseStates">    <VisualState Name="MouseEnter">      <Storyboard>        <ColorAnimation             To="DarkGray"            Duration="0:0:00.1"            Storyboard.TargetName="borMain"            Storyboard.TargetProperty="BorderBrush.Color" />      </Storyboard>    </VisualState>    <VisualState Name="MouseLeave" />  </VisualStateGroup></VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>Writing the Mouse EventsTo trigger the Visual State Manager to run its storyboard in response to the specified event, you need to respond to the MouseEnter event on the Border control. In the code behind for this event call the GoToElementState() method of the VisualStateManager class exposed by the user control. To this method you will pass in the target element (“borMain”) and the state (“MouseEnter”). The VisualStateManager will then run the storyboard contained within the defined state in the XAML.private void borMain_MouseEnter(object sender,  MouseEventArgs e){  VisualStateManager.GoToElementState(borMain,    "MouseEnter", true);}You also need to respond to the MouseLeave event. In this event you call the VisualStateManager as well, but specify “MouseLeave” as the state to go to.private void borMain_MouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs e){  VisualStateManager.GoToElementState(borMain,     "MouseLeave", true);}The Resource DictionaryBelow is the definition of the PDSAButtonStyles.xaml resource dictionary file contained in the PDSA.WPF DLL. This dictionary can be used as the default look and feel for any image button control you add to a window. <ResourceDictionary  ... >  <!-- ************************* -->  <!-- ** Image Button Styles ** -->  <!-- ************************* -->  <!-- Image/Text Button Border -->  <Style TargetType="Border"         x:Key="pdsaButtonImageBorderStyle">    <Setter Property="Margin"            Value="4" />    <Setter Property="Padding"            Value="2" />    <Setter Property="BorderBrush"            Value="Transparent" />    <Setter Property="BorderThickness"            Value="1" />    <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment"            Value="Top" />    <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"            Value="Left" />    <Setter Property="Background"            Value="Transparent" />  </Style>  <!-- Image Button -->  <Style TargetType="Image"         x:Key="pdsaButtonImageImageStyle">    <Setter Property="Width"            Value="40" />    <Setter Property="Margin"            Value="6" />    <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment"            Value="Top" />    <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"            Value="Left" />  </Style></ResourceDictionary>Using the Button ControlOnce you make a reference to the PDSA.WPF DLL from your WPF application you will see the “PDSAucButtonImage” control appear in your Toolbox. Drag and drop the button onto a Window or User Control in your application. I have not referenced the PDSAButtonStyles.xaml file within the control itself so you do need to add a reference to this resource dictionary somewhere in your application such as in the App.xaml.<Application.Resources>  <ResourceDictionary>    <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>      <ResourceDictionary         Source="/PDSA.WPF;component/PDSAButtonStyles.xaml" />    </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>  </ResourceDictionary></Application.Resources>This will give your buttons a default look and feel unless you override that dictionary on a specific Window or User Control or on an individual button. After you have given a global style to your application and you drag your image button onto a window, the following will appear in your XAML window.<my:PDSAucButtonImage ... />There will be some other attributes set on the above XAML, but you simply need to set the x:Name, the ToolTip and ImageUri properties. You will also want to respond to the Click event procedure in order to associate an action with clicking on this button. In the sample code you download for this blog post you will find the declaration of the Minimize button to be the following:<my:PDSAucButtonImage       x:Name="btnMinimize"       Click="btnMinimize_Click"       ToolTip="Minimize Application"       ImageUri="/PDSA.WPF;component/Images/Minus.png" />The ImageUri property is a dependency property in the PDSAucButtonImage user control. The x:Name and the ToolTip we get for free. You have to create the Click event procedure yourself. This is also created in the PDSAucButtonImage user control as follows:private void borMain_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender,  MouseButtonEventArgs e){  RaiseClick(e);}public delegate void ClickEventHandler(object sender,  RoutedEventArgs e);public event ClickEventHandler Click;protected void RaiseClick(RoutedEventArgs e){  if (null != Click)    Click(this, e);}Since a Border control does not have a Click event you will create one by using the MouseLeftButtonDown on the border to fire an event you create called “Click”.SummaryCreating your own image button control can be done in a variety of ways. In this blog post I showed you how to create a custom user control and simulate a button using a Border and Image control. With just a little bit of code to respond to the MouseLeftButtonDown event on the border you can raise your own Click event. Dependency properties, such as ImageUri, allow you to set attributes on your custom user control. Feel free to expand on this button by adding additional dependency properties, change the resource dictionary, and even the animation to make this button look and act like you want.NOTE: You can download the sample code for this article by visiting my website at http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips & Tricks”, then select “A WPF Image  Button” from the drop down list.

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• Bitlocker-to-go on fixed drive

  - by Unsigned

  Scenario Two drives are connected to a computer. One via a SATA-to-USB interface, the other directly via a SATA-to-eSATA cable. The drive on USB appears as a removable drive, the drive on eSATA appears as a fixed drive. Both use NTFS. The USB drive offers Bitlocker-To-Go, the eSATA drive only offers BitLocker. Question It is my understanding that drives encrypted with BitLocker-To-Go include an app to allow Windows XP read-only access to the volume. Is this the only difference, and is there a way to use Bitlocker-To-Go on the eSATA drive? Update Another difference is found here: The recovery key is required when a BitLocker-protected fixed data drive configured for automatic unlocking is moved to another computer.[1] Assuming that does not apply to removable drives.

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• Election 2012: Twitter Breaks Records with MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Twitter VP of Infrastructure Operations Engineering Mazen Rawashdeh shared news and numbers yesterday on his blog: "Last night, the world tuned in to Twitter to share the election results as U.S. voters chose a president and settled many other campaigns. Throughout the day, people sent more than 31 million election-related Tweets (which contained certain key terms and relevant hashtags). And as results rolled in, we tracked the surge in election-related Tweets at 327,452 Tweets per minute (TPM). These numbers reflect the largest election-related Twitter conversation during our 6 years of existence, though they don’t capture the total volume of all Tweets yesterday." "Last night, Twitter averaged about 9,965 TPS from 8:11pm to 9:11pm PT, with a one-second peak of 15,107 TPS at 8:20pm PT and a one-minute peak of 874,560 TPM. Seeing a sustained peak over the course of an entire event is a change from the way people have previously turned to Twitter during live events. Now, rather than brief spikes, we are seeing sustained peaks for hours." Congrats to Jeremy Cole, Davi Arnaut and the rest of the team at Twitter for their excellent work! Jeremy recently held a keynote presentation at MySQL Connect describing how MySQL powers Twitter, and why they chose and continue to rely on MySQL for their operations. You can watch the presentation here. He also went into more details during another presentation later that day and you can access the slides here. Below a couple of tweets from Jeremy after what have surely been hectic days...  Keep up the good work guys!

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• Ubuntu Lucid startup events

  - by Lakshman Prasad

  On starting up Ubuntu, I seem to have to do the following, all the time: Enter the password for the keyring to unlock, so that it connects to wifi Enable the "Extra" Visual effects from the Appearances preferences Start skype. How can I automate all of these. Bonus points, if I can use the existing chat bundled in the system to use my skype account. Also, since I dual boot, I get the grub options initially to select Windows or Ubuntu that waits for 10 seconds for me to choose. How do I make it go to ubuntu, unless I explicitly not press a key to boot to windows. Thanks in advance.

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• Blogging After The Blog Boom

  - by Tim Murphy

  I have been blogging on Geeks With Blogs since 2005 and on other blogging sites before that.  In this age of Twitter, Facebook and G+ it feels like we are in the post-blog age and yet here I continue.  There are several reasons for this.  The first is that I still find it to be the best place for self publishing long form thought that won’t fit well on Twitter or Facebook.  Google+ allows for this type of content, but it suffers from the same scroll factor as the other social media platforms.  If you aren’t looking at the right moment you miss it.  On a blog I can put complete thoughts with examples and people can find what they want via key words or search engine. The second reason I blog is to have a place for me to put information I want to be able to reference back to later.  Although I use OneNote which is now accessible everywhere the blog gives me somewhere to refer co-workers and clients when I have solutions for problems I have previously solved. I know that other people use their blog as a resume builder, but that hasn’t been one of my primary concerns.  Don’t get me wrong.  Opportunities do come up because you put out well thought out, topical material.  That just isn’t one of my top motivators. I don’t always find the time to blog or even have anything to say lately, but I will continue to produce content for myself and others to learn from and hopefully enjoy. del.icio.us Tags: Blogging,Social Media

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• How to skip words in OS X terminal?

  - by Yuval

  Say I wrote a long command in the Mac OSX terminal, i.e say "Hello, how are you? I am good thank you. How is it going with you? Fine, thanks" and now I decided I want to change the word Hello to Hi. To do that, right now I have to keep pressing (or hold down) the left keyboard key until the "cursor" gets to the end of the word Hello, and then delete it. The usual 'holding down option' technique doesn't work as it does in most other OS X applications. Is there a way to skip a word at a time instead (or any other shorter way of getting the cursor there)? Thanks!

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• How to properly deny Railo directory access through Apache

  - by Sn3akyP3t3

  I've been battle tested on this and failed to achieve my goal which is to deny all access to all directories except the Public directory and only allow access to all all other directories with specific IP addresses. To get Railo+Apache+Tomcat installed I pretty much followed this script: https://github.com/talltroym/Railo-Ubuntu-Installer-Script then verified settings with this tutorial: http://blog.nictunney.com/2012/03/railo-tomcat-and-apache-on-amazon-ec2.html From the installation script these mods are enabled: sudo a2enmod ssl sudo a2enmod proxy sudo a2enmod proxy_http sudo a2enmod rewrite sudo a2ensite default-ssl Outside of the script I copied the sites-available to sites-enabled then reloaded Apache. I have a directory created for Railo cmfl located at /var/www/Railo/ Navigating the browser to http ://Server_IP_Address/Railo forces ssl and relocates to https ://Server_IP_Address/Railo which shows off index.cfm. Not providing index.cfm and omitting https indicates that the DirectoryIndex directive and RewriteCond of Apache appears to be working for the sites-enabled VirtualHost. The problem I'm encountering is that I cannot seem to deny access to all directories except Public. My directory structure is rather simple and looks like this: Railo error Public NotPublic Sandbox These are my sites-enabled configurations: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www #Default Deny All to prevent walking backwards in file system Alias /Railo/ "/var/www/Railo/" <Directory ~ ".*/Railo/(?!Public).*"> Order Deny,Allow Deny from All </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel warn CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 </Directory> DirectoryIndex index.cfm index.cfml default.cfm default.cfml index.htm index.html index.cfc RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$ RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R] </VirtualHost> and <IfModule mod_ssl.c> <VirtualHost _default_:443> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www Alias /Railo/ "/var/www/Railo/" <Directory ~ "/var/www/Railo/(?!Public).*"> Order Deny,Allow Deny from All </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel warn CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/ssl_access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 </Directory> # SSL Engine Switch: # Enable/Disable SSL for this virtual host. SSLEngine on # A self-signed (snakeoil) certificate can be created by installing # the ssl-cert package. See # /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.Debian.gz for more info. # If both key and certificate are stored in the same file, only the # SSLCertificateFile directive is needed. SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key # Server Certificate Chain: # Point SSLCertificateChainFile at a file containing the # concatenation of PEM encoded CA certificates which form the # certificate chain for the server certificate. Alternatively # the referenced file can be the same as SSLCertificateFile # when the CA certificates are directly appended to the server # certificate for convinience. #SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server-ca.crt # Certificate Authority (CA): # Set the CA certificate verification path where to find CA # certificates for client authentication or alternatively one # huge file containing all of them (file must be PEM encoded) # Note: Inside SSLCACertificatePath you need hash symlinks # to point to the certificate files. Use the provided # Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes. #SSLCACertificatePath /etc/ssl/certs/ #SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/ca-bundle.crt # Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL): # Set the CA revocation path where to find CA CRLs for client # authentication or alternatively one huge file containing all # of them (file must be PEM encoded) # Note: Inside SSLCARevocationPath you need hash symlinks # to point to the certificate files. Use the provided # Makefile to update the hash symlinks after changes. #SSLCARevocationPath /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/ #SSLCARevocationFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crl/ca-bundle.crl # Client Authentication (Type): # Client certificate verification type and depth. Types are # none, optional, require and optional_no_ca. Depth is a # number which specifies how deeply to verify the certificate # issuer chain before deciding the certificate is not valid. #SSLVerifyClient require #SSLVerifyDepth 10 # Access Control: # With SSLRequire you can do per-directory access control based # on arbitrary complex boolean expressions containing server # variable checks and other lookup directives. The syntax is a # mixture between C and Perl. See the mod_ssl documentation # for more details. #<Location /> #SSLRequire ( %{SSL_CIPHER} !~ m/^(EXP|NULL)/ \ # and %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_O} eq "Snake Oil, Ltd." \ # and %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_OU} in {"Staff", "CA", "Dev"} \ # and %{TIME_WDAY} >= 1 and %{TIME_WDAY} <= 5 \ # and %{TIME_HOUR} >= 8 and %{TIME_HOUR} <= 20 ) \ # or %{REMOTE_ADDR} =~ m/^192\.76\.162\.[0-9]+$/ #</Location> # SSL Engine Options: # Set various options for the SSL engine. # o FakeBasicAuth: # Translate the client X.509 into a Basic Authorisation. This means that # the standard Auth/DBMAuth methods can be used for access control. The # user name is the `one line' version of the client's X.509 certificate. # Note that no password is obtained from the user. Every entry in the user # file needs this password: `xxj31ZMTZzkVA'. # o ExportCertData: # This exports two additional environment variables: SSL_CLIENT_CERT and # SSL_SERVER_CERT. These contain the PEM-encoded certificates of the # server (always existing) and the client (only existing when client # authentication is used). This can be used to import the certificates # into CGI scripts. # o StdEnvVars: # This exports the standard SSL/TLS related `SSL_*' environment variables. # Per default this exportation is switched off for performance reasons, # because the extraction step is an expensive operation and is usually # useless for serving static content. So one usually enables the # exportation for CGI and SSI requests only. # o StrictRequire: # This denies access when "SSLRequireSSL" or "SSLRequire" applied even # under a "Satisfy any" situation, i.e. when it applies access is denied # and no other module can change it. # o OptRenegotiate: # This enables optimized SSL connection renegotiation handling when SSL # directives are used in per-directory context. #SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +ExportCertData +StrictRequire <FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$"> SSLOptions +StdEnvVars </FilesMatch> <Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin> SSLOptions +StdEnvVars </Directory> # SSL Protocol Adjustments: # The safe and default but still SSL/TLS standard compliant shutdown # approach is that mod_ssl sends the close notify alert but doesn't wait for # the close notify alert from client. When you need a different shutdown # approach you can use one of the following variables: # o ssl-unclean-shutdown: # This forces an unclean shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. no # SSL close notify alert is send or allowed to received. This violates # the SSL/TLS standard but is needed for some brain-dead browsers. Use # this when you receive I/O errors because of the standard approach where # mod_ssl sends the close notify alert. # o ssl-accurate-shutdown: # This forces an accurate shutdown when the connection is closed, i.e. a # SSL close notify alert is send and mod_ssl waits for the close notify # alert of the client. This is 100% SSL/TLS standard compliant, but in # practice often causes hanging connections with brain-dead browsers. Use # this only for browsers where you know that their SSL implementation # works correctly. # Notice: Most problems of broken clients are also related to the HTTP # keep-alive facility, so you usually additionally want to disable # keep-alive for those clients, too. Use variable "nokeepalive" for this. # Similarly, one has to force some clients to use HTTP/1.0 to workaround # their broken HTTP/1.1 implementation. Use variables "downgrade-1.0" and # "force-response-1.0" for this. BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" \ nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \ downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 # MSIE 7 and newer should be able to use keepalive BrowserMatch "MSIE [17-9]" ssl-unclean-shutdown DirectoryIndex index.cfm index.cfml default.cfm default.cfml index.htm index.html #Proxy .cfm and cfc requests to Railo ProxyPassMatch ^/(.+.cf[cm])(/.*)?$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/$1 ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8888/ #Deny access to admin except for local clients <Location /railo-context/admin/> Order deny,allow Deny from all # Allow from <Omitted> # Allow from <Omitted> Allow from 127.0.0.1 </Location> </VirtualHost> </IfModule> The apache2.conf includes the following: # Include the virtual host configurations: Include sites-enabled/ <IfModule !mod_jk.c> LoadModule jk_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_jk.so </IfModule> <IfModule mod_jk.c> JkMount /*.cfm ajp13 JkMount /*.cfc ajp13 JkMount /*.do ajp13 JkMount /*.jsp ajp13 JkMount /*.cfchart ajp13 JkMount /*.cfm/* ajp13 JkMount /*.cfml/* ajp13 # Flex Gateway Mappings # JkMount /flex2gateway/* ajp13 # JkMount /flashservices/gateway/* ajp13 # JkMount /messagebroker/* ajp13 JkMountCopy all JkLogFile /var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log </IfModule> I believe I understand most of this except the jk_module inclusion which I've noticed has an error that shows up in the logs that I can't sort out: [warn] No JkShmFile defined in httpd.conf. Using default /etc/apache2/logs/jk-runtime-status I've checked my Regular expression against the paths of the directories with RegexBuddy just to be sure that I wasn't correct. The problem doesn't appear to be Regex related although I may have something incorrect in the Directory directive. The Location directive seems to be working correctly for blocking out Railo admin site access.

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• Introducing the BizTalk Maturity Assessment

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/22/153208.aspxIn the past I have had a number of customer engagements where Ive been called in because there are problems. There were often common themes to these issues faced by customers and I had a few processes, tools and ideas about how I helped these customers.Over time I learned developed a way of analysing the customers position and this has evolved into the BizTalk Maturity Assessment which I wanted to share.  The idea is that you complete a survey which asks various things related to BizTalk in your organisation.  You are then presented with a visualization of where you sit in terms of maturity in different areas of your BizTalk capability.You should be able to see the areas you need to improve and by retaking the survey at regular intervals you should be able to demonstrate improvement.I have taken the original idea and then been joined by some of my good friends in the community and included ideas from their experience and I think we have something which will help a lot of customers and something which could be a key community asset in the future.The site for this project is on the following link:http://www.biztalkmaturity.com/There is also a case study where I have used the original assessment which demonstrated how I originally used this to help one customer get from a place where they had lots of problems to a place where they were doing BizTalk really well.

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• ssl between balancer members?

  - by jemminger

  I have apache running on one machine as a load balancer: <VirtualHost *:443> ServerName ssl.example.com DocumentRoot /home/example/public SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/example.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/example.key <Proxy balancer://myappcluster> BalancerMember http://app1.example.com:12345 route=app1 BalancerMember http://app2.example.com:12345 route=app2 </Proxy> ProxyPass / balancer://myappcluster/ stickysession=_myapp_session ProxyPassReverse / balancer://myappcluster/ </VirtualHost> Note that the balancer takes requests under SSL port 443, but then communicates to the balancer members on a non-ssl port. Is it possible to have the forwarding to the balancer members be under SSL too? If so, is this the best/recommended way? If so, do I have to have another SSL cert for each balancer member? Does the SSLProxyEngine directive have anything to do with this?

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• Make 'volume up' from 'mute' go to volume step one not previous volume on Macbook Pro

  - by Bill Cheatham

  Currently, on my Macbook Pro (OSX 10.6.5), I will often use the 'mute' button to turn the volume off, for example if I'm working at night. I may then watch a video or something, and decide to have the volume on very quietly. So I press the 'volume up' key—but instead of going to volume level one (the logical 'volume step up' from mute), the volume jumps to whatever mega-decibels I was blasting out before I muted in the first place. Is there a way to change the behavior of this? Ideally the 'mute' button would be changed to actually turn the volume to zero, rather than just muting. (And re-pressing mute would turn the volume back up to the original). Thanks!

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• HealthSouth Upgrades to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle RAC

  - by jenny.gelhausen

  HealthSouth Corporation, the nation's largest provider of inpatient rehabilitation services, has upgraded to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 underneath PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management. Additionally, HealthSouth improved the availability and performance of its Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise applications and Enterprise Data Warehouse using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters. Oracle Database options -- Oracle Advanced Compression and Oracle Partitioning are key to HealthSouth's data lifecycle management practices and to utilizing storage systems more efficiently. Using compression on both partitioned as well as non-partitioned tables in its data warehouse, HealthSouth has seen a 4X storage reduction without any cost to performance. "Oracle Database 11g, along with Oracle Real Application Clusters, Advanced Compression and Partitioning, all lend themselves to delivering highly available, performant data warehousing," said Henry Lovoy, Data Manager, HealthSouth Corporation. Press Release var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-13185312-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

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• Issue 15: SVP Focus

  - by rituchhibber

       SVP FOCUS FOCUS -- Chris Baker SVP Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners’ business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) OPN Solutions Catalog Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Cloud Computing Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle and Java SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES "By taking part in marketing activities, our partners accelerate their sales cycles." -- Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best—building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best-in-class application platform so ISVs are free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success. How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use of our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme. How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry. What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data—a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle. What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation. Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: "I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud". The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them. Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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• Map Caps-Lock to Control in Windows 8.1

  - by Eric Huang

  Before the Windows 8.1 update, I was able to map Caps-Lock to Controls through the type of registry tweak in this post: Remapping a keyboard key in windows 8.1 However, after updating to 8.1, my tweak no longer works. What I had done was Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00 Windows 8.1 may have changed how it interprets the keyboard layout registry, I'm guessing. I'm an avid emacs user, so this problem is a life-or-death scenario for me.

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• An Overview of Batch Processing in Java EE 7

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Up on otn/java is a new article by Oracle senior software engineer Mahesh Kannan, titled “An Overview of Batch Processing in Java EE 7.0,” which explains the new batch processing capabilities provided by JSR 352 in Java EE 7. Kannan explains that “Batch processing is used in many industries for tasks ranging from payroll processing; statement generation; end-of-day jobs such as interest calculation and ETL (extract, load, and transform) in a data warehouse; and many more. Typically, batch processing is bulk-oriented, non-interactive, and long running—and might be data- or computation-intensive. Batch jobs can be run on schedule or initiated on demand. Also, since batch jobs are typically long-running jobs, check-pointing and restarting are common features found in batch jobs.” JSR 352 defines the programming model for batch applications plus a runtime to run and manage batch jobs. The article covers feature highlights, selected APIs, the structure of Job Scheduling Language, and explains some of the key functions of JSR 352 using a simple payroll processing application. The article also describes how developers can run batch applications using GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0. Kannan summarizes the article as follows: “In this article, we saw how to write, package, and run simple batch applications that use chunk-style steps. We also saw how the checkpoint feature of the batch runtime allows for the easy restart of failed batch jobs. Yet, we have barely scratched the surface of JSR 352. With the full set of Java EE components and features at your disposal, including servlets, EJB beans, CDI beans, EJB automatic timers, and so on, feature-rich batch applications can be written fairly easily.” Check out the article here.

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• Registry in Windows7 - appears in powershell, but not regedit

  - by Dan

  Hi. My software is writing to the registry (HKCU:\software\classes\clsid\). The key that I'm writing isn't appearing when I go to that location in regedit. However, if I navigate to that location in powershell, then I see ONLY the entry I added, and not the other class ids that I see in regedit. It's almost as if there's two versions of the registry. I'm using Windows7 (moved recently from XP, so there's probably some weird virtualization stuff going on which I've not learnt yet! ;-)). Thanks for any help with this, Dan.

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• Type App Name To Launch/Activate in Win 8.1?

  - by Rubistro

  Early versions of Windows 8 had this amazingly useful feature: Hit the Windows Key Type the first few letters of an application name Hit Enter to activate it (make it frontmost) If the application was not already running, it would launch it. This still happens, even in Windows 8.1. But if the application was already running, it would still be brought to the front. This is broken in Windows 8.1 (It was also broken in later versions of Windows 8.) Has anyone found a fix for this? So that the application is always brought frontmost, whether or not it is already running?

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• Ubuntu Lucid startup events

  - by becomingGuru

  On starting up Ubuntu, I seem to have to do the following, all the time: Enter the password for the keyring to unlock, so that it connects to wifi Enable the "Extra" Visual effects from the Appearances preferences Start skype. How can I automate all of these. Bonus points, if I can use the existing chat bundled in the system to use my skype account. Also, since I dual boot, I get the grub options initially to select Windows or Ubuntu that waits for 10 seconds for me to choose. How do I make it go to ubuntu, unless I explicitly not press a key to boot to windows. Thanks in advance.

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• Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

  - by Randy Walker

  I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

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• All traffic is passed through OpenVPN although not requested

  - by BFH

  I have a bash script on a Ubuntu box which searches for the fastest openvpn server, connects, and binds one program to the tun0 interface. Unfortunately, all traffic is being passed through the VPN. Does anybody know what's going on? The relevant line follows: openvpn --daemon --config $cfile --auth-user-pass ipvanish.pass --status openvpn-status.log There don't seem to be any entries in iptables when I enter sudo iptables --list. The config files look like this: client dev tun proto tcp remote nyc-a04.ipvanish.com 443 resolv-retry infinite nobind persist-key persist-tun persist-remote-ip ca ca.ipvanish.com.crt tls-remote nyc-a04.ipvanish.com auth-user-pass comp-lzo verb 3 auth SHA256 cipher AES-256-CBC keysize 256 tls-cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA There is nothing in there that would direct everything through tun0, so maybe it's a new vagary of Ubuntu? I don't remember this happening in the past.

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• How can I get Opera speed-dial and password management features in other browsers?

  - by Howard Guo

  I heavily rely on Opera's speed dial and password management features. Lack of these two features is really stopping me from switching to another web browser such as Chrome or Firefox. Opera's password management has two unique characteristics which I rely on heavily: It saves passwords on all pages, (apparently) despite the page's meta data asking not to save passwords. It offers keyboard shortcut and button to automatically fill in username/passwords and all other fields in a login form, then automatically submit the form. (So I'm only one key/click away from logging into a website) How can I get those functions in other browsers? Thank you! Edit: Reason being that I use other web browsers at work and I wish they could have those functions.

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• Adding objects to the environment at timed intervals

  - by david

  I am using an ArrayList to handle objects and at each interval of 120 frames, I am adding a new object of the same type at a random location along the z-axis of 60. The problem is, it doesn't add just 1. It depends on how many are in the list. If I kill the Fox before the time interval when one is supposed to spawn comes, then no Fox will be spawned. If I don't kill any foxes, it grows exponentially. I only want one Fox to be added every 120 frames. This problem never happened before when I created new ones and added them to the environment. Any insights? Here is my code: /**** FOX CLASS ****/ import env3d.EnvObject; import java.util.ArrayList; public class Fox extends Creature { private int frame = 0; public Fox(double x, double y, double z) { super(x, y, z); // Must use the mutator as the fields have private access // in the parent class setTexture("models/fox/fox.png"); setModel("models/fox/fox.obj"); setScale(1.4); } public void move(ArrayList<Creature> creatures, ArrayList<Creature> dead_creatures, ArrayList<Creature> new_creatures) { frame++; setX(getX()-0.2); setRotateY(270); if (frame > 120) { Fox f = new Fox(60, 1, (int)(Math.random()*28)+1); new_creatures.add(f); frame = 0; } for (Creature c : creatures) { if (this.distance(c) < this.getScale()+c.getScale() && c instanceof Tux) { dead_creatures.add(c); } } for (Creature c : creatures) { if (c.getX() < 1 && c instanceof Fox) { dead_creatures.add(c); } } } } import env3d.Env; import java.util.ArrayList; import org.lwjgl.input.Keyboard; /** * A predator and prey simulation. Fox is the predator and Tux is the prey. */ public class Game { private Env env; private boolean finished; private ArrayList<Creature> creatures; private KingTux king; private Snowball ball; private int tuxcounter; private int kills; /** * Constructor for the Game class. It sets up the foxes and tuxes. */ public Game() { // we use a separate ArrayList to keep track of each animal. // our room is 50 x 50. creatures = new ArrayList<Creature>(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { creatures.add(new Tux((int)(Math.random()*10)+1, 1, (int)(Math.random()*28)+1)); } for (int i = 0; i < 1; i++) { creatures.add(new Fox(60, 1, (int)(Math.random()*28)+1)); } king = new KingTux(25, 1, 35); ball = new Snowball(-400, -400, -400); } /** * Play the game */ public void play() { finished = false; // Create the new environment. Must be done in the same // method as the game loop env = new Env(); // Make the room 50 x 50. env.setRoom(new Room()); // Add all the animals into to the environment for display for (Creature c : creatures) { env.addObject(c); } for (Creature c : creatures) { if (c instanceof Tux) { tuxcounter++; } } env.addObject(king); env.addObject(ball); // Sets up the camera env.setCameraXYZ(30, 50, 55); env.setCameraPitch(-63); // Turn off the default controls env.setDefaultControl(false); // A list to keep track of dead tuxes. ArrayList<Creature> dead_creatures = new ArrayList<Creature>(); ArrayList<Creature> new_creatures = new ArrayList<Creature>(); // The main game loop while (!finished) { if (env.getKey() == 1 || tuxcounter == 0) { finished = true; } env.setDisplayStr("Tuxes: " + tuxcounter, 15, 0); env.setDisplayStr("Kills: " + kills, 140, 0); processInput(); ball.move(); king.check(); // Move each fox and tux. for (Creature c : creatures) { c.move(creatures, dead_creatures, new_creatures); } for (Creature c : creatures) { if (c.distance(ball) < c.getScale()+ball.getScale() && c instanceof Fox) { dead_creatures.add(c); ball.setX(-400); ball.setY(-400); ball.setZ(-400); kills++; } } // Clean up of the dead tuxes. for (Creature c : dead_creatures) { if (c instanceof Tux) { tuxcounter--; } env.removeObject(c); creatures.remove(c); } for (Creature c : new_creatures) { creatures.add(c); env.addObject(c); } // we clear the ArrayList for the next loop. We could create a new one // every loop but that would be very inefficient. dead_creatures.clear(); new_creatures.clear(); // Update display env.advanceOneFrame(); } // Just a little clean up env.exit(); } private void processInput() { int keyDown = env.getKeyDown(); int key = env.getKey(); if (keyDown == 203) { king.setX(king.getX()-1); } else if (keyDown == 205) { king.setX(king.getX()+1); } if (ball.getX() <= -400 && key == Keyboard.KEY_S) { ball.setX(king.getX()); ball.setY(king.getY()); ball.setZ(king.getZ()); } } /** * Main method to launch the program. */ public static void main(String args[]) { (new Game()).play(); } } /**** CREATURE CLASS ****/ /* (Parent class to Tux, Fox, and KingTux) */ import env3d.EnvObject; import java.util.ArrayList; abstract public class Creature extends EnvObject { private int frame; private double rand; /** * Constructor for objects of class Creature */ public Creature(double x, double y, double z) { setX(x); setY(y); setZ(z); setScale(1); rand = Math.random(); } private void randomGenerator() { rand = Math.random(); } public void move(ArrayList<Creature> creatures, ArrayList<Creature> dead_creatures, ArrayList<Creature> new_creatures) { frame++; if (frame > 12) { randomGenerator(); frame = 0; } // if (rand < 0.25) { // setX(getX()+0.3); // setRotateY(90); // } else if (rand < 0.5) { // setX(getX()-0.3); // setRotateY(270); // } else if (rand < 0.75) { // setZ(getZ()+0.3); // setRotateY(0); // } else if (rand < 1) { // setZ(getZ()-0.3); // setRotateY(180); // } if (rand < 0.5) { setRotateY(getRotateY()-7); } else if (rand < 1) { setRotateY(getRotateY()+7); } setX(getX()+Math.sin(Math.toRadians(getRotateY()))*0.5); setZ(getZ()+Math.cos(Math.toRadians(getRotateY()))*0.5); if (getX() < getScale()) setX(getScale()); if (getX() > 50-getScale()) setX(50 - getScale()); if (getZ() < getScale()) setZ(getScale()); if (getZ() > 50-getScale()) setZ(50 - getScale()); // The move method now handles collision detection if (this instanceof Fox) { for (Creature c : creatures) { if (c.distance(this) < c.getScale()+this.getScale() && c instanceof Tux) { dead_creatures.add(c); } } } } } The rest of the classes are a bit trivial to this specific problem.

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