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• Bluetooth DUN Tethering fails

  - by tacone

  I have an HTC Desire HD, with Android Froyo (2.2) and PDANet installed. I am using Ubuntu 10.10. I cannot tether it over Bluetooth either with Network Manager or BlueMan. (note, I installed Blueman only after failing with NetWork manager, and I even tried the last version from the PPA). With both my device is discovered, paired, setup. But connecting always fail. Network manager says it cannot get the details of my device Blueman says Connection Refused (111) Here are some relevant entries from syslog. Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2242]: Bluetooth deamon 4.69 Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Starting SDP server Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Starting experimental netlink support Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Failed to find Bluetooth netlink family Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Failed to init netlink plugin Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.284357] Bluetooth: L2CAP ver 2.14 Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.284361] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.446781] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3 Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.446784] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: HCI dev 0 registered Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.569481] Bluetooth: SCO (Voice Link) ver 0.6 Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.569484] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: HCI dev 0 up Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Starting security manager 0 Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: ioctl(HCIUNBLOCKADDR): Invalid argument (22) Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.818600] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.818607] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 158.818610] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11 Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: probe failed with driver input-headset for device /org/bluez/2242/hci0/dev_F8_DB_7F_AF_6B_EE Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Adapter /org/bluez/2242/hci0 has been enabled Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook pulseaudio[1757]: bluetooth-util.c: Error from ListDevices reply: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook NetworkManager[1247]: <warn> bluez error getting adapter properties: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.4" (uid=0 pid=1247 comm="NetworkManager) interface="org.bluez.Adapter" member="GetProperties" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination="org.bluez" (uid=0 pid=2242 comm="/usr/sbin/bluetoothd)) Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: return_link_keys (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=00:23:6C:C0:F1:B0) Mar 11 22:13:00 tacone-macbook pulseaudio[1757]: bluetooth-util.c: Error from GetProperties reply: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied Mar 11 22:15:02 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Discovery session 0x2262d7c0 with :1.45 activated Mar 11 22:15:15 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Stopping discovery Mar 11 22:15:15 tacone-macbook pulseaudio[1757]: bluetooth-util.c: Error from GetProperties reply: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied Mar 11 22:15:16 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: link_key_request (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE) Mar 11 22:15:16 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: io_capa_request (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE) Mar 11 22:15:17 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: io_capa_response (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE) Mar 11 22:15:18 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Stopping discovery Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: link_key_notify (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE, type=5) Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 306.585725] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 306.630757] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Authentication requested Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: link_key_request (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE) Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 306.784829] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:15:28 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 306.857861] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:15:29 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: probe failed with driver input-headset for device /org/bluez/2242/hci0/dev_F8_DB_7F_AF_6B_EE Mar 11 22:15:29 tacone-macbook pulseaudio[1757]: bluetooth-util.c: Error from GetProperties reply: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied Mar 11 22:15:29 tacone-macbook pulseaudio[1757]: last message repeated 8 times Mar 11 22:15:29 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: Stopping discovery Mar 11 22:15:30 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (tty/rfcomm0): could not get port's parent device Mar 11 22:15:30 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (rfcomm0) opening serial device... Mar 11 22:15:30 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (rfcomm0): probe requested by plugin 'Generic' Mar 11 22:15:43 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (rfcomm0) closing serial device... Mar 11 22:15:43 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (rfcomm0) opening serial device... Mar 11 22:15:49 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (rfcomm0) closing serial device... Mar 11 22:16:15 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (tty/rfcomm0): could not get port's parent device Mar 11 22:16:19 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 357.375108] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: link_key_request (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 362.169506] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 362.215529] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook bluetoothd[2243]: link_key_request (sba=00:23:6C:B5:03:6F, dba=F8:DB:7F:AF:6B:EE) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 362.281559] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook kernel: [ 362.330588] l2cap_recv_acldata: Unexpected continuation frame (len 0) Mar 11 22:16:24 tacone-macbook modem-manager: (tty/rfcomm0): could not get port's parent device Any help ? PS: tethering via USB or WiFi is not an option, I need to do it over Bluetooth.

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• Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate stirs a movement

  - by Gopinath

  Bollywood actor Aamir Khan is known for his dedication and hard work in inspiring millions of viewers though movies by discussing social problems and motivating people to solve them. His movie Rang De Basanthi seeded Indian anti-corruption movement, Tare Zameen Par touched the problems faced by few challenged kids and the latest movie 3 idiots exposed how education institutions in India are producing lakhs of Donkeys out of colleges every year. He extended his dedication of serving the society to small screen with the launch of reality TV show Satyamev Jayate. Before you start misjudging it as one of those non sense drama / entertaining reality shows, let me tell you that it is not a typical music, games, fight or dance reality show. Satyamev Jayate is all about the real people of India, their problems and how to tackle them.  This is not just a reality show, its movement to educate people about the social evils. Its been many years since I spent couple of hours  in front of TV as most of the programs are too cynical or does not add much value.  In my childhood I use to anxiously wait for Mahabarath or He-Man TV shows to start but after a two decades I waited anxiously for the start of Satyamev Jayate. The wait was worth and the 1 hours 30 minutes spent watching it meaningful. When was the last time you were so satisfied after watching a TV show and inspired to do something? I don’t remember. Today, the show focused on female foeticide and its impact. It showed women who were tortured and forced to abort female foetuses. On the show few brave women shared their experiences of giving birth to girl babies and rough times they are going through with their in-laws & husbands. The show not only focused on the problem but also on the root cause of the evil,  inspiring people working to tackle it and what every individual can do his part to solve it.  The best part of the show is,  its not a blame game. When there is a problem most of the people quickly get into identifying who is wrong and start blaming them instead of solve the actual problem.  Aamir did not blame anyone for female foeticide – neither the government who don’t impose strict rules, nor the doctors who abort girl babies to make money or the mother-in-laws & husbands who torcher girl baby mothers are blamed. He careful highlighted the problem, showed horrifying statistics and their impact on the future society and few inspiring people working to tackle the problem.  He touched heart and stirred a movement against the issue. First time ever I voted for a reality show through SMS and it’s for Satyamev Jayate. I’m proud to do so. Here are the few reactions of popular people, activists & media about the program @aamir_khan absolutely the best program I have seen on TV in recent past. Thanku for converting an idiot box into an inspirationsl medium — Kiran Bedi (@thekiranbedi) May 6, 2012 Satyamev Jayate proves tht TV 2 can b a tool of social change. — Shekhar Kapur (@shekharkapur) May 6, 2012 i absolutely loved #satyamevjayate. at least aamir is doing what all of us only talk about. — Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) May 6, 2012 Now Television will no longer be called an idiot box,the VISION of Television broadens up with#SatyamevJayate !!! — Madhur Bhandarkar (@mbhandarkar268) May 6, 2012 The Sunday 11am slot seems to have come back with a bang… #SatyamevJayate — atul kasbekar (@atulkasbekar) May 6, 2012   I was spellbound, says Prasoon Joshi – It’s a unique show. I was completely bowled over by it. It’s a never-done before concept Aamir Khan strikes the right chord with Satyamev Jayate – The format is quite crisp. Talking about the emotional connect, there are moments when your eyes well up with tears, but the various segments ensure there’s more content than emotional drama ‘Satyamev Jayate’ gutsy, sensible show: Viewers – From filmmakers to clinical psychologists to professors – everyone has given the thumbs up to Aamir Khan’s television show ‘Satyamev Jayate’, saying it is a gutsy, hard-hitting and sensible programme that strikes an emotional chord with the audiences. Aamir Khan’s TV debut ‘Satyamev Jayate’ takes Twitter by storm – The roads of the capital sported a deserted look around 11 am on Sunday morning, as everyone was hooked on to their TV sets. Did you watch the program? What is your opinion? I’m waiting for next 11 AM of next Sunday. Are you?

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• SQL SERVER – Service Broker and CAP_CPU_PERCENT – Limiting SQL Server Instances to CPU Usage

  - by pinaldave

  I have mentioned several times on this blog that the best part of blogging is the questions I receive from readers. They are often very interesting. The questions from readers give me a good idea what other readers might be thinking as well. After reading my earlier article Simple Example to Configure Resource Governor – Introduction to Resource Governor – I received an email from a reader and we exchanged a few emails. After exchanging emails we both figured out what is going on. It was indeed interesting and reader suggested to that I should blog about it.  I asked for permission to publish his name but he does not like the attention so we will just call him Jeff. I have converted our emails into chat for easy consumption. Jeff: Your script does not work at all. I think either there is a bug in SQL Server. Pinal: Would you please explain in detail? Jeff: Your code does not limit the CPU usage? Pinal: How did you measure it? Jeff: Well, we have third party tools for it but let us say I have limited the resources for Reporting Services and used your script described in your blog. After that I ran only reporting service workload the CPU is still used more than 100% and it is not limited to 30% as described in your script. Clearly something is wrong somewhere. Pinal: Did you say you ONLY ran reporting server load? Jeff: Yeah, to validate I ran ONLY reporting server load and CPU did not throttle at 30% as per your script. Pinal: Oh! I get it here is the answer - CAP_CPU_PERCENT = 30. Use it. Jeff: What is that, I think your earlier script says it will throttle the Reporting Service workload and Application/OLTP workload and balance it. Pinal: Exactly, that is correct. Jeff: You need to write more in email buddy! Just like your blogs, your answers do not make sense! No Offense! Pinal: Hmm…feedback well taken. Let me try again. In SQL Server 2012 there are a few enhancements with regards to SQL Server Resource Governor. One of the enhancement is how the resources are allocated. Let me explain you with examples. Configuration: [Read Earlier Post] Reporting Workload: MIN_CPU_PERCENT=0, MAX_CPU_PERCENT=30 Application/OLTP Workload: MIN_CPU_PERCENT=50, MAX_CPU_PERCENT=100 Example 1: If there is only Reporting Workload on the server: SQL Server will not limit usage of CPU to only 30% workload but SQL Server instance will use all available CPU (if needed). In another word in this scenario it will use more than 30% CPU. Example 2: If there is Reproting Workload and heavy Application/OLTP workload: SQL Server will allocate a maximum of 30% CPU resources to Reporting Workload and allocate remaining resources to heavy application/OLTP workload. The reason for this enhancement is for better utilization of the resources. Let us think, if there is only single workload, which we have limited to max CPU usage to 30%. The other unused available CPU resources is now wasted. In this situation SQL Server allows the workload to use more than 30% resources leading to overall improved/optimized performance. However, in the case of multiple workload where lots of resources are needed the limits specified in MAX_CPU_PERCENT are acknowledged. Example 3: If there is a situation where the max CPU workload has to be enforced: This is a very interesting scenario, in the case when the max CPU workload has to be enforced irrespective of the workload and enhanced algorithm, the keyword CAP_CPU_PERCENT is essential. It specifies a hard cap on the CPU bandwidth that all requests in the resource pool will receive. It will never let CPU usage for reporting workload to go over 30% in our case. You can use the key word as follows: -- Creating Resource Pool for Report Server CREATE RESOURCE POOL ReportServerPool WITH ( MIN_CPU_PERCENT=0, MAX_CPU_PERCENT=30, CAP_CPU_PERCENT=40, MIN_MEMORY_PERCENT=0, MAX_MEMORY_PERCENT=30) GO Notice that there is MAX_CPU_PERCENT=30 and CAP_CPU_PERCENT=40, what it means is that when SQL Server Instance is under heavy load under different workload it will use the maximum CPU at 30%. However, when the SQL Server instance is not under workload it will go over the 30% limit. However, as CAP_CPU_PERCENT is set to 40, it will not go over 40% in any case by limiting the usage of CPU. CAP_CPU_PERCENT puts a hard limit on the resources usage by workload. Jeff: Nice Pinal, you should blog about it. [A day passes by] Pinal: Jeff, it is done! Click here to read it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Service Broker

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• How to Sync Specific Folders With Dropbox

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to sync specific folders with Dropbox instead of automatically syncing all of your folders to all of your computers?  Here’s how using Selective Sync available in the latest Beta version of Dropbox. Dropbox is a great tool for keeping your important files synced between your computers, and we have covered many interesting things you can do with your Dropbox account.  But until now, there was no way to only sync certain folders with each computer; it was all or nothing.  This could be frustrating if you wanted to store large files from one computer but didn’t want them on a computer with a smaller hard drive.  The latest Beta version of Dropbox allows you to selectively choose which folders to sync between computers. Please Note: This feature is currently only available in the 0.8 beta version of Dropbox. Setup the new Beta Download the new beta version of Dropbox 0.8 (link below); choose the correct download for your system.  Run the installer as normal. It only took a couple seconds to install, though it made the taskbar disappear briefly at the end of the installation on our tests.  Strangely, the installer doesn’t let you know it’s finished installing; if you already had a previous version of Dropbox installed, it will simply start working from your system tray as before.  If this is a new installation of Dropbox, you will be asked to enter your Dropbox account info or create a new account.   Selectively Sync Folders By default, Dropbox will still sync all of your Dropbox folders to all of your computers.  Once this beta is installed, you can choose individual folders or subfolders you don’t want to sync.  Right-click the Dropbox icon in your system tray and select Preferences. Click the Advanced tab on the top, and then click the new Selective Sync button. Now uncheck any folders you don’t want to sync to this computer.  These folders will still exist on your other machines and in the Dropbox web interface, but they will not be downloaded to this computer. The default view only shows your top-level folders in your Dropbox account.  If you wish to sync certain folders but exclude their subfolders, click the Switch to Advanced View button.   Expand any folder and uncheck any subfolders you don’t want to sync.  Notice that the parent folder’s check box is filled now, showing that it is partially synced. Click OK when you’ve made the changes you want.  Dropbox will then make sure you know these folders will stop syncing to this computer; click OK again if you’re sure you don’t want to sync these folders.   Dropbox will cleanup your folder and remove the files and folders you don’t want synced.   Next time you open your Dropbox folder, you’ll notice that the folders we unchecked are no longer in this computer’s Dropbox folder.  They are still in our Dropbox online account, and on any other computers we’re syncing with. If you add a new folder with the same name as a folder you stopped syncing, you’ll notice a grey minus icon over the folder.  This folder will not sync with your other computers or your online Dropbox account. If you want to add these folders back to this computer’s Dropbox, just repeat the steps, this time checking the folders you want to sync.  If you have any folders that were not syncing before, their names will have (Selective Sync Conflict) added to the end, and will sync with all of your computers. Conclusion We’re excited that we can now choose exactly which folders we want synced on each computer.  Since everything is still synced with the online Dropbox, we can still access any of the folders from anywhere.  This makes your Dropbox much more versatile, and can help you keep the folders synced exactly the way you want. Links Download the new Dropbox 0.8.64 beta Signup for Dropbox Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add "My Dropbox" to Your Windows 7 Start MenuSync Your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs with DropboxUser Guide to Dropbox Shared FoldersUse Any Folder For Your Ubuntu Desktop (Even a Dropbox Folder)Shut Down or Reboot a Solaris System TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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• Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts

  - by jkauffman

  From a consumption point of view, tech blogging is a great resource for one-off articles on niche subjects. If you spend any time reading tech blogs, you may find yourself running into several common, useless types of posts tech bloggers slip into. Some of these lame posts may just be natural due to common nerd psychology, and some others are probably due to lame, lemming-like laziness. I’m sure I’ll do my fair share of fitting the mold, but I quickly get bored when I happen upon posts that hit these patterns without any real purpose or personal touches. 1. The Content Regurgitation Posts This is a common pattern fueled by the starving pan-handlers in the web traffic economy. These are posts that are terse opinions or addendums to an existing post. I commonly see these involve huge block quotes from the linked article which almost always produces over 50% of the post itself. I’ve accidentally gone to these posts when I’m knowingly only interested in the source material. Web links can degrade as well, so if the source link is broken, then, well, I’m pretty steamed. I see this occur with simple opinions on technologies, Stack Overflow solutions, or various tech news like posts from Microsoft. It’s not uncommon to go to the linked article and see the author announce that he “added a blog post” as a response or summary of the topic. This is just rude, but those who do it are probably aware of this. It’s a matter of winning that sweet, juicy web traffic. I doubt this leeching is fooling anybody these days. I would like to rally human dignity and urge people to avoid these types of posts, and just leave a comment on the source material. 2. The “Sorry I Haven’t Posted In A While” Posts This one is far too common. You’ll most likely see this quote somewhere in the body of the offending post: I have been really busy. If the poster is especially guilt-ridden, you’ll see a few volleys of excuses. Here are some common reasons I’ve seen, which I’ll list from least to most painfully awkward. Out of town Vague allusions to personal health problems (these typically includes phrases like “sick”, “treatment'”, and “all better now!”) “Personal issues” (which I usually read as "divorce”) Graphic or specific personal health problems (maximum awkwardness potential is achieved if you see links to charity fund websites) I can’t help but to try over-analyzing why this occurs. Personally, I see this an an amalgamation of three plain factors: Life happens Us nerds are duty-driven, and driven to guilt at personal inefficiencies Tech blogs can become personal journals I don’t think we can do much about the first two, but on the third I think we could certainly contain our urges. I’m a pretty boring guy and, whether or I like it or not, I have an unspoken duty to protect the world from hearing about my unremarkable existence. Nobody cares what kind of sandwich I’m eating. Similarly, if I disappear for a while, it’s unlikely that anybody who happens upon my blog would care why. Rest assured, if I stop posting for a while due to a vasectomy, you will be the first to know. 3. The “At A Conference”, or “Conference Review” Posts I don’t know if I’m like everyone else on this one, but I have never been successfully interested in these posts. It even sounds like a good idea: if I can’t make it to a particular conference (like the KCDC this year), wouldn’t I be interested in a concentrated summary of events? Apparently, no! Within this realm, I’ve never read a post by a blogger that held my interest. What really baffles is is that, for whatever reason, I am genuinely engaged and interested when talking to someone in person regarding the same topic. I have noticed the same phenomenon when hearing about others’ vacations. If someone sends me an email about their vacation, I gloss over it and forget about it quickly. In contrast, if I’m speaking to that individual in person about their vacation, I’m actually interested. I’m unsure why the written medium eradicates the intrigue. I was raised by a roaming pack of friendly wild video games, so that may be a factor. 4. The “Top X Number of Y’s That Z” Posts I’ve seen this one crop up a lot more in the past few of years. Here are some fabricated examples: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Code Top 7 Good Habits Programmers Learn From Experience The 8 Things to Consider When Giving Estimates Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts These are attention-grabbing headlines, and I’d assume they rack up hits. In fact, I enjoy a good number of these. But, I’ve been drawn to articles like this just to find an endless list of identically formatted posts on the blog’s archive sidebar. Often times these posts have overlapping topics, too. These types of posts give the impression that the author has given thought to prioritize and organize the points as a result of a comprehensive consideration of a particular topic. Did the author really weigh all the possibilities when identifying the “Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Patterns”? Unfortunately, probably not. What a tool. To reiterate, I still enjoy the format, but I feel it is abused. Nowadays, I’m pretty skeptical when approaching posts in this format. If these trends continue, my brain will filter these blog posts out just as effectively as it ignores the encroaching “do xxx with this one trick” advertisements. Conclusion To active blog readers, I hope my guide has served you precious time in being able to identify lame blog posts at a glance. Save time and energy by skipping over the chaff of the internet! And if you author a blog, perhaps my insight will help you to avoid the occasional urge to produce these needless filler posts.

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• Protecting offline IRM rights and the error "Unable to Connect to Offline database"

  - by Simon Thorpe

  One of the most common problems I get asked about Oracle IRM is in relation to the error message "Unable to Connect to Offline database". This error message is a result of how Oracle IRM is protecting the cached rights on the local machine and if that cache has become invalid in anyway, this error is thrown. Offline rights and security First we need to understand how Oracle IRM handles offline use. The way it is implemented is one of the main reasons why Oracle IRM is the leading document security solution and demonstrates our methodology to ensure that solutions address both security and usability and puts the balance of these two in your control. Each classification has a set of predefined roles that the manager of the classification can assign to users. Each role has an offline period which determines the amount of time a user can access content without having to communicate with the IRM server. By default for the context model, which is the classification system that ships out of the box with Oracle IRM, the offline period for each role is 3 days. This is easily changed however and can be as low as under an hour to as long as years. It is also possible to switch off the ability to access content offline which can be useful when content is very sensitive and requires a tight leash. So when a user is online, transparently in the background, the Oracle IRM Desktop communicates with the server and updates the users rights and offline periods. This transparent synchronization period is determined by the server and communicated to all IRM Desktops and allows for users rights to be kept up to date without their intervention. This allows us to support some very important scenarios which are key to a successful IRM solution. A user doesn't have to make any decision when going offline, they simply unplug their laptop and they already have their offline periods synchronized to the maximum values. Any solution that requires a user to make a decision at the point of going offline isn't going to work because people forget to do this and will therefore be unable to legitimately access their content offline. If your rights change to REMOVE your access to content, this also happens in the background. This is very useful when someone has an offline duration of a week and they happen to make a connection to the internet 3 days into that offline period, the Oracle IRM Desktop detects this online state and automatically updates all rights for the user. This means the business risk is reduced when setting long offline periods, because of the daily transparent sync, you can reflect changes as soon as the user is online. Of course, if they choose not to come online at all during that week offline period, you cannot effect change, but you take that risk in giving the 7 day offline period in the first place. If you are added to a NEW classification during the day, this will automatically be synchronized without the user even having to open a piece of content secured against that classification. This is very important, consider the scenario where a senior executive downloads all their email but doesn't open any of it. Disconnects the laptop and then gets on a plane. During the flight they attempt to open a document attached to a downloaded email which has been secured against an IRM classification the user was not even aware they had access to. Because their new role in this classification was automatically synchronized their experience is a good one and the document opens. More information on how the Oracle IRM classification model works can be found in this article by Martin Abrahams. So what about problems accessing the offline rights database? So onto the core issue... when these rights are cached to your machine they are stored in an encrypted database. The encryption of this offline database is keyed to the instance of the installation of the IRM Desktop and the Windows user account. Why? Well what you do not want to happen is for someone to get their rights for content and then copy these files across hundreds of other machines, therefore getting access to sensitive content across many environments. The IRM server has a setting which controls how many times you can cache these rights on unique machines. This is because people typically access IRM content on more than one computer. Their work desktop, a laptop and often a home computer. So Oracle IRM allows for the usability of caching rights on more than one computer whilst retaining strong security over this cache. So what happens if these files are corrupted in someway? That's when you will see the error, Unable to Connect to Offline database. The most common instance of seeing this is when you are using virtual machines and copy them from one computer to the next. The virtual machine software, VMWare Workstation for example, makes changes to the unique information of that virtual machine and as such invalidates the offline database. How do you solve the problem? Resolution is however simple. You just delete all of the offline database files on the machine and they will be recreated with working encryption when the Oracle IRM Desktop next starts. However this does mean that the IRM server will think you have your rights cached to more than one computer and you will need to rerequest your rights, even though you are only going to be accessing them on one. Because it still thinks the old cache is valid. So be aware, it is good practice to increase the server limit from the default of 1 to say 3 or 4. This is done using the Enterprise Manager instance of IRM. So to delete these offline files I have a simple .bat file you can use; Download DeleteOfflineDBs.bat Note that this uses pskillto stop the irmBackground.exe from running. This is part of the IRM Desktop and holds open a lock to the offline database. Either kill this from task manager or use pskillas part of the script.

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• Dynamic Grouping and Columns

  - by Tim Dexter

  Some good collaboration between myself and Kan Nishida (Oracle BIP Consulting) over at bipconsulting on a question that came in yesterday to an internal mailing list. Is there a way to allow columns to be place into a template dynamically? This would be similar to the Answers Column selector. A customer has said Crystal can do this and I am trying to see how BI Pub can do the same. Example: Report has Regions as a dimension in a table, they want the user to select a parameter that will insert either Units or Dollars without having to create multiple templates. Now whether Crystal can actually do it or not is another question, can Publisher? Yes we can! Kan took the first stab. His approach, was to allow to swap out columns in a table in the report. Some quick steps: 1. Create a parameter from BIP server UI 2. Declare the parameter in RTF template You can check this post to see how you can declare the parameter from the server. http://bipconsulting.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-to-pass-user-input-values-to-report.html 3. Use the parameter value to condition if a particular column needs to be displayed or not. You can use <?if@column:.....?> syntax for Column level IF condition. The if@column is covered in user documentation. This would allow a developer to create a report with the parameter or multiple parameters to allow the user to pick a column to be included in the report. I took a slightly different tack, with the mention of the column selector in the Answers report I took that to mean that the user wanted to select more of a dimensional column and then have the report recalculate all its totals and subtotals based on that selected column. This is a little bit more involved and involves some smart XSL and XPATH expressions, but still very doable. The user can select a column as a parameter, that is passed to the template rather than the query. The parameter value that is actually passed is the element name that you want to regroup the data by. Inside the template we then reference that parameter value in our for-each-group loop. That's where we need the trixy XSL/XPATH code to get the regrouping to happen. At this juncture, I need to hat tip to Klaus, for his article on dynamic sorting that he wrote back in 2006. I basically took his sorting code and applied it to the for-each loop. You can follow both of Kan's first two steps above i.e. Create a parameter from BIP server UI - this just needs to be based on a 'list' type list of value with name/value pairs e.g. Department/DEPARTMENT_NAME, Job/JOB_TITLE, etc. The user picks the 'friendly' value and the server passes the element name to the template. Declare the parameter in RTF template - been here before lots of times right? <?param@begin:group1;'"DEPARTMENT_NAME"'?> I have used a default value so that I can test the funtionality inside the template builder (notice the single and double quotes.) Next step is to use the template builder to build a re-grouped report layout. It does not matter if its hard coded right now; we will add in the dynamic piece next. Once you have a functioning template that is re-grouping correctly. Open up the for-each-group field and modify it to use the parameter: <?for-each-group:ROW;./*[name(.) = $group1]?> 'group1' is my grouping parameter, declared above. We need the XPATH expression to find the column in the XML structure we want to group that matches the one passed by the parameter. Its essentially looking through the data tree for a match. We can show the actual grouping value in the report output with a similar XPATH expression <?./*[name(.) = $group1]?> In my example, I took things a little further so that I could have a dynamic label for the parameter value. For instance if I am using MANAGER as the parameter I want to show: Manager: Tim Dexter My XML elements are readable e.g. DEPARTMENT_NAME. Its a simple case of replacing the underscore with a space and then 'initcapping' the result: <?xdoxslt:init_cap(translate($group1,'_',' '))?> With this in place, the user can now select a grouping column in the BIP report viewer and the layout will re-group the data and any calculations based on that column. I built a group above report but you could equally build the group left version to truly mimic the Answers column selector. If you are interested you can get an example report, sample data and layout template here. Of course, you can combine Klaus' dynamic sorting, Kan's conditional column approach and this dynamic grouping to build a real kick ass report for users that will keep them happy for hours..

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• 2010 Collaboration Summit Impressions

  - by Elena Zannoni

  It's a bit late, but there you have it anyway. April 14 to 16 I attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in SFO. I was running two tracks, one on tracing and one on tools. You can see the tracks and the slides here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/slides I was pretty busy both days, Thursday with a whole day tracing track, Friday with a half day toolchain track. The sessions were well attended, the rooms were full, with people spilling in the hallways. Some new things were presented, like Kernelshark, by Steve Rostedt, a GUI (yes, believe it or not, a GUI) written in GTK. It is very nice, showing a timeline for traced kernel events, and you can zoom in and filter at will. It works on the latest kernels, and it requires some new things/fixes in GTK. I don't recall exactly what version of GTK though. Dominique Toupin from Ericsson presented something about user requirements for tracing. Mostly though about who's who in the embedded world, and eclipse. Masami and Mathieu presented an update on their work. See their slides. The interesting thing to me was of course the new version of uprobes w/o underlying utrace presented by Jim Keniston. At the end of the session we had a discussion about the future of utrace. Roland wasn't there, butTom Tromey (also from RedHat) collected the feedback. Basically we are at a standstill now that utrace has been rejected yet again. There wasn't much advise that anybody could give, except jokingly, we decided that the only way in is to make it a part of perf events. There needs to be another refactoring, but most of all, this "killer app" that would be enabled because of utrace hasn't materialized yet. We think that having a good debugging story on Linux is enough of a killer app, for instance allowing multiple tracers, and not relying on SIGCHLD etc. I think this wasn't completely clear to the kernel community. Trying to achieve debugging via a gdb stub inside the kernel interfacing to utrace and that is controlled via the gdb remote protocol also lost its appeal (thankfully, since the gdb remote protocol is archaic). Somebody would have to be creative in how to submit utrace. It doesn't have to be called utrace (it was really a random choice, for lack of a letter that was not already used in front of the word "trace"). So basically, I think the ideas behind utrace are sound, and the necessity of a new interface is acknowledged. But I believe the integration/submission process with the kernel folks has to restart from scratch, clean slate. We'll see. There are many conferences and meetings coming up in the near future where things can be discussed further. On the second day, Friday, we had the tools talks. It was interesting to observe the more "kernel" oriented people's behavior towards the gcc etc community. The first talk was by Mark Mitchell, about Gcc and its new plugin architecture. After that, Paolo talked about the new C++1x standard, which will be finalized in 2011. Many features are already implemented in the libstdc++ library and gcc and usable today. We had a few minutes (really, the half day track was quite short) where Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Center explained the GPLv3 exception for gcc (due to the new gcc plugin architecture and the availability of the intermediate results from the compilation, which is a new thing). I will not try to explain, but basically you cannot take the result of the preprocessing and then use that in your own proprietary compiler. After, we had a talk by Ian Taylor about the new Gold linker. One good thing in that area is that they are trying to make gold the new default linker (for instance Fedora will use gold as the distro linker). However gold is very different from binutils' old linker. It doesn't use a linker script, for instance. The kernel has been linked with gold many times as an exercise (the ground work was done by Kris Van Hees), but this needs to be constantly tested/monitored because the kernel linker script is very complex, and uses esoteric features (Wenji is now monitoring that each kernel RC can be built with gold). It was positive that people are now aware of gold and the need for it to be ported to more architectures. It seems that the porting is very easy, with little arch dependent code. Finally Tom Tromey presented about gdb and the archer project. Archer is a development branch of gdb mostly done by RedHat, where they are focusing on better c++ printing, c++ expression parsing, and plugins. The archer work is merged regularly in the gdb mainline. In general it was a good conference. I did miss most of the first day, because that's when I flew in. But I caught a couple of talks. Nothing earth shattering, except for Google giving each person registered a free Android phone. Yey.

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• SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival     Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner”     Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions     The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation     I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…     As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files     For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session   Picture Albums     For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion     A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.         -Frog Out   links: Michigan image

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• Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers.  As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA.  Most of my fears were unrealized.   But I made it.  I was here.  I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen.  The name  badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home.  It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade.   A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device).  The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs.  Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching.   “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself.  “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate.  Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs.  Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations…   …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball…   …vintage video games…           …and a even giant chess board.  Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry.   The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life.  Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots:   And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace.  On a high-tech mode of transport, of course.   She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next.  Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret.   Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.”  Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft…   …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth.   Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area.  Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day.  While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day.  And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks…   …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds.  This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once.  No one went away hungry.   The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue.   Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing.  There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area.  But they were only rumors.   Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff.  Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always.  Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day.  Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers?  These folks did.  Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks!   And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing:  Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event.  Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry.   So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me.  The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands.  And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks.  Win-win.   Until New Orleans…

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• Book Review: Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide

  - by Frank Nimphius

  Recently PACKT Publishing published "Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide" by Jobinesh Purushothaman, a product manager in our team. Though already the sixth book dedicated to Oracle ADF, it has a lot of great information in it that none of the previous books covered, making it a safe buy even for those who own the other books published by Oracle Press (McGrwHill) and PACKT Publishing. More than the half of the "Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide" book is dedicated to Oracle ADF Business Components in a depth and clarity that allows you to feel the expertise that Jobinesh gained in this area. If you enjoy Jobinesh blog (http://jobinesh.blogspot.co.uk/) about Oracle ADF, then, no matter what expert you are in Oracle ADF, this book makes you happy as it provides you with detail information you always wished to have. If you are new to Oracle ADF, then this book alone doesn't get you flying, but, if you have some Java background, accelerates your learning big, big, big times. Chapter 1 is an introduction to Oracle ADF and not only explains the layers but also how it compares to plain Java EE solutions (page 13). If you are new to Oracle JDeveloper and ADF, then at the end of this chapter you know how to start JDeveloper and begin your ADF development Chapter 2 starts with what Jobinesh really is good at: ADF Business Components. In this chapter you learn about the architecture ingredients of ADF Business Components: View Objects, View Links, Associations, Entities, Row Sets, Query Collections and Application Modules. This chapter also provides a introduction to ADFBC SDO services, as well as sequence diagrams for what happens when you execute queries or commit updates. Chapter 3 is dedicated to entity objects and  is one of many chapters in this book you will enjoy and never want to miss. Jobinesh explains the artifacts that make up an entity object, how to work with entities and resource bundles, and many advanced topics, including inheritance, change history tracking, custom properties, validation and cursor handling.  Chapter 4 - you guessed it - is all about View objects. Comparable to entities, you learn about the XM files and classes that make a view object, as well as how to define and work with queries. List-of-values, inheritance, polymorphism, bind variables and data filtering are interesting - and important topics that follow. Again the chapter provides helpful sequence diagrams for you to understand what happens internally within a view object. Chapter 5 focuses on advanced view object and entity object topics, like lifecycle callback methods and when you want to override them. This chapter is a good digest of Jobinesh's blog entries (which most ADF developers have in their bookmark list). Really worth reading ! Chapter 6 then is bout Application Modules. Beside of what application modules are, this chapter covers important topics like properties, passivation, activation, application module pooling, how and where to write custom logic. In addition you learn about the AM lifecycle and request sequence. Chapter 7 is about the ADF binding layer. If you are new to Oracle ADF and got lost in the more advanced ADF Business Components chapters, then this chapter is where you get back into the game. In very easy terms, Jobinesh explains what the ADF binding is, how it fits into the JSF request lifecycle and what are the metadata file involved. Chapter 8 then goes into building data bound web user interfaces. In this chapter you get the basics of JavaServer Faces (e.g. managed beans) and learn about the interaction between the JSF UI and the ADF binding layer. Later this chapter provides advanced solutions for working with tree components and list of values. Chapter 9 introduces bounded task flows and ADF controller. This is a chapter you want to read if you are new to ADF of have started. Experts don't find anything new here, which doesn't mean that it is not worth reading it (I for example, enjoyed the controller talk very much) Chapter 10 is an advanced coverage of bounded task flow and talks about contextual events  Chapter 11 is another highlight and explains error handling, trains, transactions and more. I can only recommend you read this chapter. I am aware of many documents that cover exception handling in Oracle ADF (and my Oracle Magazine article for January/February 2013 does the same), but none that covers it in such a great depth. Chapter 12 covers ADF best practices, which is a great round-up of all the tips provided in this book (without Jobinesh to repeat himself). Its all cool stuff that helps you with your ADF projects. In summary, "Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide" by Jobinesh Purushothaman is a great book and addition for all Oracle ADF developers and those who want to become one. Frank

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• What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

  - by tobyehatch

  Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy.  Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities.  Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject.  So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company.  To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges.  What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars!  Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit.  However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing.  “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes.  From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM).  Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios.  Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.”   Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable.  “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice.  Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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• WP7 “Phantom Data” Source Possibly Revealed?

  - by Bil Simser

  Recently there’s been rumours floating around regarding “phantom” Windows Phone 7 data being magically sent and received on the latest WP7 phones. The news has mostly been floating around twitter so I didn’t pay it much attention. The BBC Technology News picked it up so I thought I would look more into it myself seeing that we have WP7 phones and maybe there was some truth to all this (and more importantly what was the cause). Full disclosure. I don’t have a lot of data points around this. This is from looking at a few phone logs, changing the configuration and looking back again after the change. I haven’t done a clean baseline test nor have I done testing with hundreds of phones. I leave the experience up to the reader to decide. So I went spelunking into the phone logs to see what was up. Most providers will show you data usage, at least on a daily basis. I lucked out with the provider and plan in that they provide hourly breakdowns. Here’s a snapshot from my usage throughout one night. Timestamp Data Usage 12:38:30 AM 2098 Kilobytes 1:30:30 AM 2 Kilobytes 2:38:30 AM 7118 Kilobytes 3:38:30 AM 6622 Kilobytes 4:38:30 AM 76 Kilobytes 5:38:30 AM 29 Kilobytes 6:38:30 AM 19 Kilobytes 7:38:30 AM 20 Kilobytes So a few observations from this data: Data seems to be collected on a regular basis. Looking at some other people phone logs, the times vary but it’s always hourly. There’s not a tremendous amount of data here (about 16 megabytes) but it seems like a lot for 7 hours The phone was connected to my home Wifi during this period Nothing was running and the phone was in a locked state Like I said, not a lot of data but it adds up. 16MB for 7 hours = about 50MB in a 24 hour period. That’s just plain old data being collected (somewhere, somehow) and not actual usage (Marketplace, Email, Browsing, etc.). Besides, when connected to a WiFi network you shouldn’t be charged data usage from your phone company (in theory, YMMV). After reviewing the logs I made a theory that the only thing that could possibly be sending data is the Feedback feature. With no other apps running under lock, what else could it be? In Windows 7 under your Settings the last option is Feedback. This sends feedback to Microsoft to “help improve Windows Phone”. On this page you have three options: Send feedback and use my cellular data connection Send feedback and (presumably) use my WiFi connection Don’t send feedback Knowing what I know about Microsoft, they do use the feedback data. For example some of the placement and inclusion of features in Office 2007 was based on that Feedback data that Office sends (assuming you had opted in). However in the Privacy Statement (it’s long but a good read at least once in your life), the Phone manual, and every other source I could look at there is no information about how much data it’s planning to send, just that it’s sending some data and that “some data charges with your carrier may apply”. Looking back at the logs, I have to wonder. 6MB at 3:30 and *then* 7MB the next hour. That’s a lot of information. And it adds up. 50MB in a 24 hour period X 30 days puts most people over a normal 1GB plan. And frankly why am I paying for a data plan only to have 80% of it chewed up by Microsoft, with no real benefit to me. If they included porn in the 50mb daily transfer I’d be okay with this, but I don’t see any new movies on my phone. So I turned it off. Set Feedback to disabled and wait. I waited. And waited. And generally didn’t use the phone if I could. The next day I went back to look at the data usage logs from the time period after turning the feedback mechanism off. Here are the results. Timestamp Data Usage 1:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 2:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 3:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 4:19:48 PM 678 Kilobytes (took a phone call) 5:19:48 PM 82 Kilobytes 6:19:48 PM 88 Kilobytes 7:20:30 PM 86 Kilobytes (guess they changed their reporting time) 8:20:30 PM 86 Kilobytes 9:20:30 PM 66 Kilobytes 10:20:30 PM 67 Kilobytes 11:20:30 PM 49 Kilobytes 12:20:30 AM 32 Kilobytes 1:20:30 AM 38 Kilobytes 2:20:31 AM 18 Kilobytes 3:20:31 AM 27 Kilobytes 4:20:31 AM 86 Kilobytes 5:20:31 AM 53 Kilobytes 6:20:31 AM 22 Kilobytes 7:22:15 AM 30 Kilobytes (another reporting time change) 8:22:15 AM 29 Kilobytes 9:22:15 AM 74 Kilobytes 10:22:15 AM 154 Kilobytes (phone call) 11:22:15 AM 12 Kilobytes 12:13:27 PM 49 Kilobytes 1:13:27 PM 197 Kilobytes (phone call) Quite a *drastic* change from what Feedback was turned on. I mean for a 24 hour period (sans 3 phone calls) I consumed about 1MB. Still quite a bit of transfer going on but at least it amounts to 30MB per month, not 30MB per day! Like I said this observation is neither scientific or conclusive. You decide what to do but frankly until Microsoft makes this data transfer exempt from your data plan (like that will happen) I would just turn Feedback off. YMMV.

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: Importance of Relational Database in Big Data World – Day 9 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is HDFS. In this article we will take a quick look at the importance of the Relational Database in Big Data world. A Big Question? Here are a few questions I often received since the beginning of the Big Data Series - Does the relational database have no space in the story of the Big Data? Does relational database is no longer relevant as Big Data is evolving? Is relational database not capable to handle Big Data? Is it true that one no longer has to learn about relational data if Big Data is the final destination? Well, every single time when I hear that one person wants to learn about Big Data and is no longer interested in learning about relational database, I find it as a bit far stretched. I am not here to give ambiguous answers of It Depends. I am personally very clear that one who is aspiring to become Big Data Scientist or Big Data Expert they should learn about relational database. NoSQL Movement The reason for the NoSQL Movement in recent time was because of the two important advantages of the NoSQL databases. Performance Flexible Schema In personal experience I have found that when I use NoSQL I have found both of the above listed advantages when I use NoSQL database. There are instances when I found relational database too much restrictive when my data is unstructured as well as they have in the datatype which my Relational Database does not support. It is the same case when I have found that NoSQL solution performing much better than relational databases. I must say that I am a big fan of NoSQL solutions in the recent times but I have also seen occasions and situations where relational database is still perfect fit even though the database is growing increasingly as well have all the symptoms of the big data. Situations in Relational Database Outperforms Adhoc reporting is the one of the most common scenarios where NoSQL is does not have optimal solution. For example reporting queries often needs to aggregate based on the columns which are not indexed as well are built while the report is running, in this kind of scenario NoSQL databases (document database stores, distributed key value stores) database often does not perform well. In the case of the ad-hoc reporting I have often found it is much easier to work with relational databases. SQL is the most popular computer language of all the time. I have been using it for almost over 10 years and I feel that I will be using it for a long time in future. There are plenty of the tools, connectors and awareness of the SQL language in the industry. Pretty much every programming language has a written drivers for the SQL language and most of the developers have learned this language during their school/college time. In many cases, writing query based on SQL is much easier than writing queries in NoSQL supported languages. I believe this is the current situation but in the future this situation can reverse when No SQL query languages are equally popular. ACID (Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) – Not all the NoSQL solutions offers ACID compliant language. There are always situations (for example banking transactions, eCommerce shopping carts etc.) where if there is no ACID the operations can be invalid as well database integrity can be at risk. Even though the data volume indeed qualify as a Big Data there are always operations in the application which absolutely needs ACID compliance matured language. The Mixed Bag I have often heard argument that all the big social media sites now a days have moved away from Relational Database. Actually this is not entirely true. While researching about Big Data and Relational Database, I have found that many of the popular social media sites uses Big Data solutions along with Relational Database. Many are using relational databases to deliver the results to end user on the run time and many still uses a relational database as their major backbone. Here are a few examples: Facebook uses MySQL to display the timeline. (Reference Link) Twitter uses MySQL. (Reference Link) Tumblr uses Sharded MySQL (Reference Link) Wikipedia uses MySQL for data storage. (Reference Link) There are many for prominent organizations which are running large scale applications uses relational database along with various Big Data frameworks to satisfy their various business needs. Summary I believe that RDBMS is like a vanilla ice cream. Everybody loves it and everybody has it. NoSQL and other solutions are like chocolate ice cream or custom ice cream – there is a huge base which loves them and wants them but not every ice cream maker can make it just right  for everyone’s taste. No matter how fancy an ice cream store is there is always plain vanilla ice cream available there. Just like the same, there are always cases and situations in the Big Data’s story where traditional relational database is the part of the whole story. In the real world scenarios there will be always the case when there will be need of the relational database concepts and its ideology. It is extremely important to accept relational database as one of the key components of the Big Data instead of treating it as a substandard technology. Ray of Hope – NewSQL In this module we discussed that there are places where we need ACID compliance from our Big Data application and NoSQL will not support that out of box. There is a new termed coined for the application/tool which supports most of the properties of the traditional RDBMS and supports Big Data infrastructure – NewSQL. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about NewSQL. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SanjayP&rsquo;s venture after Microsoft involves no Microsoft

  - by eddraper

  When I was at Microsoft, I always found Sanjay Parthasarathy to be a bright and passionate leader.  While he was a bit disconnected at times with what was really going on out in the trenches, I always thought he was true believer in what we in Developer Platform and Evangelism (DPE) were doing.  He got it.  He had started DPE and kicked a lot of doors down up in Redmond to make it happen.  Back in the early 2000s, battles over platform choices at large customers was trench warfare… bayonets and hand grenades at the P-Code level.  This model was not at all suited to Microsoft’s org structure at the time.  While there were plenty of people fully able to have competitive conversations around Windows Server, or AD, or Exchange, or the desktop, there weren’t many that could have deep technical conversations around Java vs .NET and the platform “stack” as a cohesive, unified unit of value.  This task fell to DPE. Sanjay ended up leaving Microsoft a number of months before me in 2009 and I remember thinking these exact words: “holy shit, SanjayP left Microsoft.”  When SanjayP left DPE years before that,  Sheila Gulati had stepped into his shoes and I thought we where starting to miss a beat.  Sheila had built an amazing business at Microsoft India, but I don’t recall being inspired by her as a leader.  SanjayP’s talks felt like the opening scene of “Patton” with George C. Scott pacing in front of the American flag.  Sheila was a voice on a con-call.  When she moved on in 2007, Walid Abu-Hadba was given the reigns.  Personally, I don’t ever recall even seeing his face.  I think I might recall hearing his voice on some con-calls, but for all intents and purposes he was invisible to me.  Perhaps this was the beginning of my carelessness around seeking “visibility.” Fast forward to Build 2011.  First off, we have no PDC – we have Build.  Microsoft had made an 11 year investment by this time in building an organization to make its technology relevant to developers.  One would think such an org would be in the driver’s seat of such an event, but we see Windows product group people on the podiums.  Watching, I could see the messaging unfold… but no story.  It was like the old days.  Demos and PowerPoints by team members building the tech, and in many cases VPs.  The ensuing confusion is almost legendary now.  Windows 8 was, and is, a pretty big deal… but who is telling the story – not just features and benefits, but the story around how it all fits together. Having been out of Microsoft for two years now, and looking in, I can only conclude that the “DPE of old” has at best been emasculated, and at worst been completely marginalized by internal politics, or perhaps the eternal march of the corporate entropy generator that resides at all large companies.  I don’t think this is a good thing for anyone. And now, back to Sanjay who is the father of Microsoft DPE… I noticed that he has moved back to India and is doing start-up work.  His current company Indix looks to be doing some interesting things with “big data” and here’s their stack: Nary a trace of anything Microsoft.  What could account for this?  I wonder….  Better availability of labor and expertise in India for this stack?  Donno, but even in India, leet R and Hadoop skills have to be hard to find. Technical superiority?  This, I sincerely doubt. This stack, with SanjayP’s name as CEO leaves me with an unsettling feeling.  If he did believe, he no longer does.  One doesn’t place bets with real money on things they don’t believe in.  Perhaps he never did believe, and was a corporate creature seeking to find a niche for himself after which he manipulated me and others.  Or perhaps… anger… be it passive aggression or an outright “in your face F*** you” to his former masters. I guess in the end, only he knows the true reason… But I have my theory...

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• Figuring out the IIS Version for a given OS in .NET Code

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's an odd requirement: I need to figure out what version of IIS is available on a given machine in order to take specific configuration actions when installing an IIS based application. I build several configuration tools for application configuration and installation and depending on which version of IIS is available on IIS different configuration paths are taken. For example, when dealing with XP machine you can't set up an Application Pool for an application because XP (IIS 5.1) didn't support Application pools. Configuring 32 and 64 bit settings are easy in IIS 7 but this didn't work in prior versions and so on. Along the same lines I saw a question on the AspInsiders list today, regarding a similar issue where somebody needed to know the IIS version as part of an ASP.NET application prior to when the Request object is available. So it's useful to know which version of IIS you can possibly expect. This should be easy right? But it turns there's no real easy way to detect IIS on a machine. There's no registry key that gives you the full version number - you can detect installation but not which version is installed. The easiest way: Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_SOFTWARE"] The easiest way to determine IIS version number is if you are already running inside of ASP.NET and you are inside of an ASP.NET request. You can look at Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_SOFTWARE"] to get a string like Microsoft-IIS/7.5 returned to you. It's a cinch to parse this to retrieve the version number. This works in the limited scenario where you need to know the version number inside of a running ASP.NET application. Unfortunately this is not a likely use case, since most times when you need to know a specific version of IIS when you are configuring or installing your application. The messy way: Match Windows OS Versions to IIS Versions Since Version 5.x of IIS versions of IIS have always been tied very closely to the Operating System. Meaning the only way to get a specific version of IIS was through the OS - you couldn't install another version of IIS on the given OS. Microsoft has a page that describes the OS version to IIS version relationship here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/224609 In .NET you can then sniff the OS version and based on that return the IIS version. The following is a small utility function that accomplishes the task of returning an IIS version number for a given OS: /// <summary> /// Returns the IIS version for the given Operating System. /// Note this routine doesn't check to see if IIS is installed /// it just returns the version of IIS that should run on the OS. /// /// Returns the value from Request.ServerVariables["Server_Software"] /// if available. Otherwise uses OS sniffing to determine OS version /// and returns IIS version instead. /// </summary> /// <returns>version number or -1 </returns> public static decimal GetIisVersion() { // if running inside of IIS parse the SERVER_SOFTWARE key // This would be most reliable if (HttpContext.Current != null && HttpContext.Current.Request != null) { string os = HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_SOFTWARE"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(os)) { //Microsoft-IIS/7.5 int dash = os.LastIndexOf("/"); if (dash > 0) { decimal iisVer = 0M; if (Decimal.TryParse(os.Substring(dash + 1), out iisVer)) return iisVer; } } } decimal osVer = (decimal) Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major + ((decimal) Environment.OSVersion.Version.MajorRevision / 10); // Windows 7 and Win2008 R2 if (osVer == 6.1M) return 7.5M; // Windows Vista and Windows 2008 else if (osVer == 6.0M) return 7.0M; // Windows 2003 and XP 64 bit else if (osVer == 5.2M) return 6.0M; // Windows XP else if (osVer == 5.1M) return 5.1M; // Windows 2000 else if (osVer == 5.0M) return 5.0M; // error result return -1M; } } Talk about a brute force apporach, but it works. This code goes only back to IIS 5 - anything before that is not something you possibly would want to have running. :-) Note that this is updated through Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2. Later versions will need to be added as needed. Anybody know what the Windows Version number of Windows 8 is?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  IIS   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 8, PLINQ’s ForAll Method

  - by Reed

  Parallel LINQ extends LINQ to Objects, and is typically very similar.  However, as I previously discussed, there are some differences.  Although the standard way to handle simple Data Parellelism is via Parallel.ForEach, it’s possible to do the same thing via PLINQ. PLINQ adds a new method unavailable in standard LINQ which provides new functionality… LINQ is designed to provide a much simpler way of handling querying, including filtering, ordering, grouping, and many other benefits.  Reading the description in LINQ to Objects on MSDN, it becomes clear that the thinking behind LINQ deals with retrieval of data.  LINQ works by adding a functional programming style on top of .NET, allowing us to express filters in terms of predicate functions, for example. PLINQ is, generally, very similar.  Typically, when using PLINQ, we write declarative statements to filter a dataset or perform an aggregation.  However, PLINQ adds one new method, which provides a very different purpose: ForAll. The ForAll method is defined on ParallelEnumerable, and will work upon any ParallelQuery<T>.  Unlike the sequence operators in LINQ and PLINQ, ForAll is intended to cause side effects.  It does not filter a collection, but rather invokes an action on each element of the collection. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea.  For example, Eric Lippert clearly explained two philosophical objections to providing an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method, one of which still applies when parallelized.  The sole purpose of this method is to cause side effects, and as such, I agree that the ForAll method “violates the functional programming principles that all the other sequence operators are based upon”, in exactly the same manner an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method would violate these principles.  Eric Lippert’s second reason for disliking a ForEach extension method does not necessarily apply to ForAll – replacing ForAll with a call to Parallel.ForEach has the same closure semantics, so there is no loss there. Although ForAll may have philosophical issues, there is a pragmatic reason to include this method.  Without ForAll, we would take a fairly serious performance hit in many situations.  Often, we need to perform some filtering or grouping, then perform an action using the results of our filter.  Using a standard foreach statement to perform our action would avoid this philosophical issue: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action foreach (var item in filteredItems) { // These will now run serially item.DoSomething(); } .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; } This would cause a loss in performance, since we lose any parallelism in place, and cause all of our actions to be run serially. We could easily use a Parallel.ForEach instead, which adds parallelism to the actions: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action once the filter completes Parallel.ForEach(filteredItems, item => { // These will now run in parallel item.DoSomething(); }); This is a noticeable improvement, since both our filtering and our actions run parallelized.  However, there is still a large bottleneck in place here.  The problem lies with my comment “perform an action once the filter completes”.  Here, we’re parallelizing the filter, then collecting all of the results, blocking until the filter completes.  Once the filtering of every element is completed, we then repartition the results of the filter, reschedule into multiple threads, and perform the action on each element.  By moving this into two separate statements, we potentially double our parallelization overhead, since we’re forcing the work to be partitioned and scheduled twice as many times. This is where the pragmatism comes into play.  By violating our functional principles, we gain the ability to avoid the overhead and cost of rescheduling the work: // Perform an action on the results of our filter collection .AsParallel() .Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ) .ForAll( i => i.DoSomething() ); The ability to avoid the scheduling overhead is a compelling reason to use ForAll.  This really goes back to one of the key points I discussed in data parallelism: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task.  Here, this means leaving the statement attached to the expression, even though it causes side effects and is not standard usage for LINQ. This leads to my one guideline for using ForAll: The ForAll extension method should only be used to process the results of a parallel query, as returned by a PLINQ expression. Any other usage scenario should use Parallel.ForEach, instead.

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• SQL SERVER – Solution – Puzzle – Statistics are not Updated but are Created Once

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I asked puzzle why statistics are not updated. Read the complete details over here: Statistics are not Updated but are Created Once In the question I have demonstrated even though statistics should have been updated after lots of insert in the table are not updated.(Read the details SQL SERVER – When are Statistics Updated – What triggers Statistics to Update) In this example I have created following situation: Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated Auto Update Statistics and Auto Create Statistics for database is TRUE Now I have requested two things in the example 1) Why this is happening? 2) How to fix this issue? I have many answers – here is the how I fixed it which has resolved the issue for me. NOTE: There are multiple answers to this problem and I will do my best to list all. Solution: Create nonclustered Index on column City Here is the working example for the same. Let us understand this script and there is added explanation at the end. -- Execution Plans Difference -- Estimated Execution Plan Vs Actual Execution Plan -- Create Sample Database CREATE DATABASE SampleDB GO USE SampleDB GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE ExecTable (ID INT, FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100), City VARCHAR(100)) GO CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ExecTable1 ON ExecTable (City); GO -- Insert One Thousand Records -- INSERT 1 INSERT INTO ExecTable (ID,FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 1000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name) RowID, 'Bob', CASE WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 7 THEN 'La Cinega' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 13 THEN 'San Diego' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 17 THEN 'Las Vegas' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Display statistics of the table sp_helpstats N'ExecTable', 'ALL' GO -- Select Statement SELECT FirstName, LastName, City FROM ExecTable WHERE City  = 'New York' GO -- Display statistics of the table sp_helpstats N'ExecTable', 'ALL' GO -- Replace your Statistics over here DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS('ExecTable', IX_ExecTable1); GO -------------------------------------------------------------- -- Round 2 -- Insert One Thousand Records -- INSERT 2 INSERT INTO ExecTable (ID,FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 1000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name) RowID, 'Bob', CASE WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 7 THEN 'La Cinega' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 13 THEN 'San Diego' WHEN  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%20 = 17 THEN 'Las Vegas' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Select Statement SELECT FirstName, LastName, City FROM ExecTable WHERE City  = 'New York' GO -- Display statistics of the table sp_helpstats N'ExecTable', 'ALL' GO -- Replace your Statistics over here DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS('ExecTable', IX_ExecTable1); GO -- Clean up Database DROP TABLE ExecTable GO When I created non clustered index on the column city, it also created statistics on the same column with same name as index. When we populate the data in the column the index is update – resulting execution plan to be invalided – this leads to the statistics to be updated in next execution of SELECT. This behavior does not happen on Heap or column where index is auto created. If you explicitly update the index, often you can see the statistics are updated as well. You can see this is for sure happening if you follow the tell of John Sansom. John Sansom‘s suggestion: That was fun! Although the column statistics are invalidated by the time the second select statement is executed, the query is not compiled/recompiled but instead the existing query plan is reused. It is the “next” compiled query against the column statistics that will see that they are out of date and will then in turn instantiate the action of updating statistics. You can see this in action by forcing the second statement to recompile. SELECT FirstName, LastName, City FROM ExecTable WHERE City = ‘New York’ option(RECOMPILE) GO Kevin Cross also have another suggestion: I agree with John. It is reusing the Execution Plan. Aside from OPTION(RECOMPILE), clearing the Execution Plan Cache before the subsequent tests will also work. i.e., run this before round 2: ————————————————————– – Clear execution plan cache before next test DBCC FREEPROCCACHE WITH NO_INFOMSGS; ————————————————————– Nice puzzle! Kevin As this was puzzle John and Kevin both got the correct answer, there was no condition for answer to be part of best practices. I know John and he is finest DBA around – his tremendous knowledge has always impressed me. John and Kevin both will agree that clearing cache either using DBCC FREEPROCCACHE and recompiling each query every time is for sure not good advice on production server. It is correct answer but not best practice. By the way, if you have better solution or have better suggestion please advise. I am open to change my answer and publish further improvement to this solution. On very separate note, I like to have clustered index on my Primary Key, which I have not mentioned here as it is out of the scope of this puzzle. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Statistics

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• SQLAuthority News – Why VoIP Service Providers Should Think About NuoDB’s Geo Distribution

  - by Pinal Dave

  You can always tell when someone’s showing off their cool, cutting edge comms technology. They tend to raise their voice a lot. Back in the day they’d announce their gadget leadership to the rest of the herd by shouting into their cellphone. Usually the message was no more urgent than “Hi, I’m on my cellphone!” Now the same types will loudly name-drop a different technology to the rest of the airport lounge. “I’m leveraging the wifi,” a fellow passenger bellowed, the other day, as we filtered through the departure gate. Nobody needed to know that, but the subtext was “look at me everybody”. You can tell the really advanced mobile user – they tend to whisper. Their handset has a microphone (how cool is that!) and they know how to use it. Sometimes these shouty public broadcasters aren’t even connected anyway because the database for their Voice over IP (VoIP) platform can’t cope. This will happen if they are using a traditional SQL model to try and cope with a phone network which has far flung offices and hundreds of mobile employees. That, like shouting into your phone, is just wrong on so many levels. What VoIP needs now is a single, logical database across multiple servers in different geographies. It needs to be updated in real-time and automatically scaled out during times of peak demand. A VoIP system should scale up to handle increased traffic, but just as importantly is must then go back down in the off peak hours. Try this with a MySQL database. It can’t scale easily enough, so it will keep your developers busy. They’ll have spent many hours trying to knit the different databases together. Traditional relational databases can possibly achieve this, at a price. Mind you, you could extend baked bean cans and string to every point on the network and that would be no less elegant. That’s not really following engineering principles though is it? Having said that, most telcos and VoIP systems use a separate, independent solution for each office location, which they link together – loosely.  The more office locations, the more complex and expensive the solution becomes and so the more you spend on maintenance. Ideally, you’d have a fluid system that can automatically shift its shape as the need arises. That’s the point of software isn’t it – it adapts. Otherwise, we might as well return to the old days. A MySQL system isn’t exactly baked bean cans attached by string, but it’s closer in spirit to the old many teethed mechanical beast that was employed in the first type of automated switchboard. NuoBD’s NewSQL is designed to be a single database that works across multiple servers, which can scale easily, and scale on demand. That’s one system that gives high connectivity but no latency, complexity or maintenance issues. MySQL works in some circumstances, but a period of growth isn’t one of them. So as a company moves forward, the MySQL database can’t keep pace. Data storage and data replication errors creep in. Soon the diaspora of offices becomes a problem. Your telephone system isn’t just distributed, it is literally all over the place. Though voice calls are often a software function, some of the old habits of telephony remain. When you call an engineer out, some of them will listen to what you’re asking for and announce that it cannot be done. This is what happens if you ask, say, database engineers familiar with Oracle or Microsoft to fulfill your wish for a low maintenance system built on a single, fluid, scalable database. No can do, they’d say. In fact, I heard one shouting something similar into his VoIP handset at the airport. “I can’t get on the network, Mac. I’m on MySQL.” You can download NuoDB from here. “NuoDB provides the ability to replicate data globally in real-time, which is not available with any other product offering,” states Weeks.  “That alone is remarkable and it works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it.  I’ve tested it. The ability to deploy NuoDB removes a tremendous burden from our support and engineering teams.” Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: NuoDB

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• On checking is a port open on the firewall?

  - by [email protected]

  Hi, well sometimes DBAs and sysadmin need to check if a particular port is "open" on the corporate firewall --i.e. *Grid Control* Will the communication between OMS and a management agent work? --One solution well consist on deploying the piece of software in question, start it and just check if everything works fine, however i find more classy trying to get that information beforeThere are several tools for doing so --i.e. nmap *like Trinity on The Matrix*, but just found a nice piece of code for establishing a socket on a parameter passed port.After running the program doing a telnet from the client machine  will be a walk in the park Normal 0 21 false false false 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-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:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} #include <stdio.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/socket.h> #include <netinet/in.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {      int sockfd, newsockfd, portno, clilen;      char buffer[256];      struct sockaddr_in serv_addr, cli_addr;      int n;      if (argc < 2) {          fprintf(stderr,"ERROR: A port must be provided. Aborting ...\n");          return 1;      }      sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);      if (sockfd < 0)          {         fprintf("ERROR: Unable to open socket. Aborting ...\n");         return 1;       }      portno = atoi(argv[1]);      serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;      serv_addr.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;      serv_addr.sin_port = htons(portno);      if (bind(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) &serv_addr,sizeof(serv_addr)) < 0)          {               fprintf("ERROR: Unable to bind socket. Aborting ...\n");               return 1;       }      listen(sockfd,5);      clilen = sizeof(cli_addr);      newsockfd = accept(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) &cli_addr,&clilen);      if (newsockfd < 0)          {           fprintf("ERROR: Unable to accept connection. Aborting...\n");           return 1;        }      return 0; }Of course, you can still ask to the network guy if the port is open or notHope it helpsL

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• Edit Media Center TV Recordings with Windows Live Movie Maker

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever wanted to take a TV program you’ve recorded in Media Center and remove the commercials or save clips of favorite scenes? Today we’ll take a look at editing WTV and DVR-MS files with Windows Live Movie Maker. Download and Install Windows Live Movie Maker. The download link can be found at the end of the article. WLMM is part of Windows Live Essentials, but you can choose to install only the applications you want. You’ll also want to be sure to uncheck any unwanted settings like settings Bing as default search provider or MSN as your browser home page.   Add your recorded TV file to WLMM by clicking the Add videos and photos button, or by dragging and dropping it onto the storyboard.   You’ll see your video displayed in the Preview window on the left and on the storyboard. Adjust the Zoom Time Scale slider at the lower right to change the level of detail displayed on the storyboard. You may want to start zoomed out and zoom in for more detailed edits.   Removing Commercials or Unwanted Sections Note: Changes and edits made in Windows Live Movie Maker do not change or effect the original video file. To accomplish this, we will makes cuts, or “splits,” and the beginning and end of the section we want to remove, and then we will delete that section from our project. Click and drag the slider bar along the the storyboard to scroll through the video. When you get to the end of a row in on the storyboard, drag the slider down to the beginning of the next row. We’ve found it easiest and most accurate to get close to the end of the commercial break and then use the Play button and the Previous Frame and Next Frame buttons underneath the Preview window to fine tune your cut point. When you find the right place to make your first cut, click the split button on the Edit tab on the ribbon. You will see your video “split” into two sections. Now, repeat the process of scrolling through the storyboard to find the end of the section you wish to cut. When you are at the proper point, click the Split button again.   Now we’ll delete that section by selecting it and pressing the Delete key, selecting remove on the Home tab, or by right clicking on the section and selecting Remove.   Trim Tool This tool allows you to select a portion of the video to keep while trimming away the rest.   Click and drag the sliders in the preview windows to select the area you want to keep. The area outside the sliders will be trimmed away. The area inside is the section that is kept in the movie. You can also adjust the Start and End points manually on the ribbon.   Delete any additional clips you don’t want in the final output. You can also accomplish this by using the Set start point and Set end point buttons. Clicking Set start point will eliminate everything before the start point. Set end point will eliminate everything after the end point. And you’re left with only the clip you want to keep.   Output your Video Select the icon at the top left, then select Save movie. All of these settings will output your movie as a WMV file, but file size and quality will vary by setting. The Burn to DVD option also outputs a WMV file, but then opens Windows DVD Maker and prompts you to create and burn a DVD.   Conclusion WLMM is one of the few applications that can edit WTV files, and it’s the only one we’re aware of that’s free. We should note only WTV and DVR-MS files will appear in the Recorded TV library in Media Center, so if you want to view your WMV output file in WMC you’ll need to add it to the Video or Movie library. Would you like to learn more about Windows Live Movie Maker? Check out are article on how to turn photos and home videos into movies with Windows Live Movie Maker. Need to add videos from a network location? WLMM doesn’t allow this by default, but you check out how to add network support to Windows Live Move Maker. Download Windows Live Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Rotate a Video 90 degrees with VLC or Windows Live Movie MakerHow to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows VistaFamily Fun: Share Photos with Photo Gallery and Windows Live SpacesAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterAutomatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• ISO Files to USB &ndash; The Cheap and Easy Way

  - by RonGarlit

  (DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We have personally Netbooks and light wait highly mobile laptops that do not have DVD burner. USB ports are all the rage and now we have USB 3.0 which is way faster than the 2.0 we are used to. Just looking at the technology, space saving and the cost issues alone is a reason to buy these answer to the DVD’s. So what is special about USB 2.0 and USB 3.0? USB 2 has a maximum speed of 480 Mbps... (That is Megabits per SECOND!!) Now look at the storage that we have with USB thumb drives that are now up to 64 GB in size, cell phone and PDAs that have a lots of internal storage built in well above the 16 Gig range. At the MAX USB 2.0 speed of 480 Mbps a full transfer of data in between devices can take a long time. Time is money right. Every back up a iPhone? Don’t get me started. So at least the engineers have been planning ahead with USB 3.0 which offers a maximum transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps... (That is Giga bits per SECOND!!) That speed is almost 10 times faster than USB 2.0 …. We don’t need to do the math on that one do we? But for now I'm thrilled with USB 2.0 and the fact I can get these little 4 Gig USB drives for $4.00 each at Staples on sale. Well that is a no brainer don’t you think. But what can you do with them to replace that DVD. Simply and cheaply put………. THIS! First let’s get an ISO file like the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate DVD ISO from MSDN to demonstrate with. I develop on several computers so this is a good choice for me. So we downloaded the ISO file and put it in a folder somewhere like this. Next we go download to the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool site and read about the tool. http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool And click this like to get the tool and install it. Once it is installed you go to the Start, Programs menu, Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool folder. And then click the tool to open it up. As you will see it is a sweet, simple tool that was originally designed to put the ISO for Windows 7 which is designed to be bootable on a USB or DVD for us geeks to play with. It is now being used for the Windows 8 Developer Preview by many developers for that for the same purpose it was built for in the past. But for now we will use it to put a NON Bootable ISO on a USB. Hey it does the job and I’m reusing a left over program. Why buy the fancy one or a free trial and clutter up my machine. We will click the BROWSE button and navigate to where we put our ISO file we want to put on the USB drive. Obviously we are going to click NEXT and continue to select a USB Device (you can guess what the DVD button is for). Next we select the USB that we have plugged into one of our laptops USB ports. Then we click the BEGIN COPYING button and the first thing the program does is format our USB drive. Then it starts copying out files out of the ISO and constructing the USB as if it was a DVD. So now that the files are copying to the drive I’m going to warn you. We will error out here. This program was design for bootable ISO’s of which this one is NOT. No problem because what fails it the writing of the bootable data to the drive that isn’t there. No biggie…. Forget the STARTOVER button is even there and click the dialog’s CLOSE button and exit the program. Now go to Windows Explorer and navigate to the USB Device. You can now access everything and even add stuff to the drive. But for me I want to keep this drive for one purpose and that is to install VS2010 on various machines. So the only stuff I’ll add to this is a folder of notes on things on visual studio that I might want to put on other machines I’m installing VS2010 on to. So that is it. Have a nice day! The Ron

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• SQLAuthority News – Technology and Online Learning – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  This is the fourth post in my series about Personal Technology Tips and Tricks, and I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.  But at first I was conflicted.   Is online learning really a personal tip?  Is it really a trick that no one knows?  However, I have decided to stick with my original idea because online learning is everywhere.  It’s a trick that we can’t – and shouldn’t – overlook.  Here are ten of my ideas about how we should be taking advantage of online learning. 1) Get ahead in the work place.  We all know that a good way to become better at your job, and to become more competitive for promotions and raises.  Many people overlook online learning as a way to get job training, though, thinking it is a path for people still seeking their high school or college diplomas.  But take a look at what companies like Pluralsight offer, and you might be pleasantly surprised. 2) Flexibility.  Some of us remember the heady days of college with nostalgia, others remember it with loathing.  A lot of bad memories come from remembering the strict scheduling and deadlines of college.  But with online learning, the classes fit into your free time – you don’t have to schedule your life around classes.  Even better, there are usually no homework or test deadlines, only one final deadline where all work must be completed.  This allows students to work at their own pace – my next point. 3) Learn at your own pace.  One thing traditional classes suffer from is that they are highly structured.  If you work more quickly than the rest of the class, or especially if you work more slowly, traditional classes do not work for you.  Online courses let you move as quickly or as slowly as you find necessary. 4) Fill gaps in your knowledge.  I’m sure I am not the only one who has thought to myself “I would love to take a course on X, Y, or Z.”  The problem is that it can be very hard to find the perfect class that teaches exactly what you’re interested in, at a time and a price that’s right.  But online courses are far easier to tailor exactly to your tastes. 5) Fits into your schedule.  Even harder to find than a class you’re interested in is one that fits into your schedule.  If you hold down a job – even a part time job – you know it’s next to impossible to find class times that work for you.  Online classes can be taken anytime, anywhere.  On your lunch break, in your car, or in your pajamas at the end of the day. 6) Student centered.  Online learning has to stay competitive.  There are hundreds, even thousands of options for students, and every provider has to find a way to lure in students and provide them with a good education.  The best kind of online classes know that they need to provide great classes, flexible scheduling, and high quality to attract students – and the student benefit from this kind of attention. 7) You can save money.  The average cost for a college diploma in the US is over $20,000.  I don’t know about you, but that is not the kind of money I just have lying around for a rainy day.  Sometimes I think I’d love to go back to school, but not for that price tag.  Online courses are much, much more affordable.  And even better, you can pick and choose what courses you’d like to take, and avoid all the “electives” in college. 8) Get access to the best minds in the business.  One of the perks of being the best in your field is that you are one person who knows the most about something.  If students are lucky, you will choose to share that knowledge with them on a college campus.  For the hundreds of other students who don’t live in your area and don’t attend your school, they are out of luck.  But luckily for them, more and more online courses is attracting the best minds in the business, and if you enroll online, you can take advantage of these minds, too. 9) Save your time.  Getting a four year degree is a great decision, and I encourage everyone to pursue their Bachelor’s – and beyond.  But if you have already tried to go to school, or already have a degree but are thinking of switching fields, four years of your life is a long time to go back and redo things.  Getting your online degree will save you time by allowing you to work at your own pace, set your own schedule, and take only the classes you’re interested in. 10) Variety of degrees and programs.  If you’re not sure what you’re interested in, or if you only need a few classes here and there to finish a program, online classes are perfect for you.  You can pick and choose what you’d like, and sample a wide variety without spending too much money. I hope I’ve outlined for everyone just a few ways that they could benefit from online learning.  If you’re still unconvinced, just check out a few of my other articles that expand more on these topics. Here are the blog posts relevent to developer trainings: Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Developer Training

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