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• Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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• When row estimation goes wrong

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Whilst working at a client site, I hit upon one of those issues that you are not sure if that this is something entirely new or a bug or a gap in your knowledge. The client had a large query that needed optimizing.  The query itself looked pretty good, no udfs, UNION ALL were used rather than UNION, most of the predicates were sargable other than one or two minor ones.  There were a few extra joins that could be eradicated and having fixed up the query I then started to dive into the plan. I could see all manor of spills in the hash joins and the sort operations,  these are caused when SQL Server has not reserved enough memory and has to write to tempdb.  A VERY expensive operation that is generally avoidable.  These, however, are a symptom of a bad row estimation somewhere else, and when that bad estimation is combined with other estimation errors, chaos can ensue. Working my way back down the plan, I found the cause, and the more I thought about it the more i came convinced that the optimizer could be making a much more intelligent choice. First step is to reproduce and I was able to simplify the query down a single join between two tables, Product and ProductStatus,  from a business point of view, quite fundamental, find the status of particular products to show if ‘active’ ,’inactive’ or whatever. The query itself couldn’t be any simpler The estimated plan looked like this: Ignore the “!” warning which is a missing index, but notice that Products has 27,984 rows and the join outputs 14,000. The actual plan shows how bad that estimation of 14,000 is : So every row in Products has a corresponding row in ProductStatus.  This is unsurprising, in fact it is guaranteed,  there is a trusted FK relationship between the two columns.  There is no way that the actual output of the join can be different from the input. The optimizer is already partly aware of the foreign key meta data, and that can be seen in the simplifiction stage. If we drop the Description column from the query: the join to ProductStatus is optimized out. It serves no purpose to the query, there is no data required from the table and the optimizer knows that the FK will guarantee that a matching row will exist so it has been removed. Surely the same should be applied to the row estimations in the initial example, right ?  If you think so, please upvote this connect item. So what are our options in fixing this error ? Simply changing the join to a left join will cause the optimizer to think that we could allow the rows not to exist. or a subselect would also work However, this is a client site, Im not able to change each and every query where this join takes place but there is a more global switch that will fix this error,  TraceFlag 2301. This is described as, perhaps loosely, “Enable advanced decision support optimizations”. We can test this on the original query in isolation by using the “QueryTraceOn” option and lo and behold our estimated plan now has the ‘correct’ estimation. Many thanks goes to Paul White (b|t) for his help and keeping me sane through this

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• best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

  - by DXM

  I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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• SQL Saturday 27 (Portland, Oregon)

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These are not Microsoft-sponsored events – it’s truly the community at work. Think of a big user-group meeting – I mean REALLY big – held in a central location, like at a college (as ours was) or some larger, inexpensive venue like that. Everyone there is volunteering – it’s my own money and time to drive several hours to a hotel for the night, feed myself and present. It’s their own time and money for the folks that organize the event – unless a vendor or two steps in to help. It’s their own time and money for the attendees to drive a long way, spend the night and their Saturday to listen to the speakers. Why do all this?   Because everybody benefits. Every speaker learns something new, meets new people, and reaches a new audience. Every volunteer does the same. And the attendees? Well, it’s pretty obvious what they get. A 7Am to 10PM extravaganza of knowledge from every corner of the product. In fact, this year the Portland group hooked up with the CodeCamp folks and held a combined event. We had over 850 people, and I had everyone from data professionals to developers in my sessions.   So I’ll take this opportunity to do two things: to say “thank you” to all of the folks who attended, from those who spoke to those who worked and those who came to listen, and to challenge you to attend the next SQL Saturday anywhere near you. You can find the list here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/. Don’t see anything in your area? Start one! The PASS folks have a package that will show you how. Sure, it’s a big job, but the key is to get as many people helping you as possible. Even if you have only a few dozen folks show up the first time, no worries. The first events I presented at had about 20 in the room. But not this week.   See you at the Launch Event if you’re near the San Francisco area tomorrow, and see you at the Redmond SQL Saturday and TechEd if not.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Should I install ubuntu on USB instead of HDD dual-boot?

  - by user2147243

  I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed as dual-boot OS on top of Vista on my laptop. Hacked the grub settings to default to Vista (instead of the default Ubuntu -- pain) on startup, and all was OK for occasional Ubuntu use for past 6 months. Then last week I got a strange message about 'lack of disk space' (~50MB free) when installing pxyplot, even though there was still about 6GB free disk space when I checked later. Then today the Ubuntu wouldn't load at all, and checking the HDD partitions in Vista it looked like the 15GB Ubuntu partition was now three smaller partitions! So, I got rid of those partitions and expanded the Vista partition to use the reclaimed space. Now can't restart ('grub rescue' appears and doesn't 'rescue' anything), so I'll have to do a boot recovery using a Vista installation CD. (Not a particularly user-friendly failure mode of the dual-boot installation!) I now have to decide to either a) try installing ubuntu on the HDD again, but don't want to stuff up my Vista ever again, as that is my most used OS, or b) install Ubuntu on a 16GB USB 3.0 stick. Apparently performance from USB won't be as good as from HDD, and running OS from USB stick does lots of r/w so the stick may fail after a few years! Perhaps installing Ubuntu on live USB and setup to then run in RAM would alleviate the performance/USB lifespan problems? If I create a live-USB for Ubuntu OS, will it boot off that when I restart the laptop with it plugged in? Or will I have to change the laptop setting for boot-order whenever I want to boot Ubuntu instead of Vista (that would be even more painful than the grub default boot order putting Ubuntu ahead of the existing Vista OS!) -- update: I recovered my Vista setup using Iolo SystemMechanic Disaster Recovery Tool, and created a bootable USB of Ubuntu 13.10 on an 8GB USB3.0 pendrive, with 4GB of 'persistence' to allow saving of settings, install some packages etc. It worked OK for a couple of test boots, but once I changed the time and desktop wallpaper, the next Ubuntu reboot crashed and I then couldn't get it to boot successfully. So I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a dual-boot again, but this time instead of partitioning the HDD and installing from an ISO DVD I used the wubi.exe tool to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot. Worked very well, although one oddity was that, despite asking how big the make the partition (20GB), the installed Ubuntu appears to be happily installed somewhere within the Vista NTFS file system (no partition shows up in Windows disk manager, and in Ubuntu disk management tool the entire 133 GB of HDD is showing, with ~40GB free space). A nice feature of installing the dual-boot using wubi is that the laptop now uses Windows boot manager on startup, with Vista as the default OS and Ubuntu happily listed as second on the list. So far so good.

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

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• Confusion about inheritance

  - by Samuel Adam

  I know I might get downvoted for this, but I'm really curious. I was taught that inheritance is a very powerful polymorphism tool, but I can't seem to use it well in real cases. So far, I can only use inheritance when the base class is an abstract class. Examples : If we're talking about Product and Inventory, I quickly assumed that a Product is an Inventory because a Product must be inventorized as well. But a problem occured when user wanted to sell their Inventory item. It just doesn't seem to be right to change an Inventory object to it's subtype (Product), it's almost like trying to convert a parent to it's child. Another case is Customer and Member. It is logical (at least for me) to think that a Member is a Customer with some more privileges. Same problem occurred when user wanted to upgrade an existing Customer to become a Member. A very trivial case is the Employee case. Where Manager, Clerk, etc can be derived from Employee. Still, the same upgrading issue. I tried to use composition instead for some cases, but I really wanted to know if I'm missing something for inheritance solution here. My composition solution for those cases : Create a reference of Inventory inside a Product. Here I'm making an assumption about that Product and Inventory is talking in a different context. While Product is in the context of sales (price, volume, discount, etc), Inventory is in the context of physical management (stock, movement, etc). Make a reference of Membership instead inside Customer class instead of previous inheritance solution. Therefor upgrading a Customer is only about instantiating the Customer's Membership property. This example is keep being taught in basic programming classes, but I think it's more proper to have those Manager, Clerk, etc derived from an abstract Role class and make it a property in Employee. I found it difficult to find an example of a concrete class deriving from another concrete class. Is there any inheritance solution in which I can solve those cases? Being new in this OOP thing, I really really need a guidance. Thanks!

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• Meet This Year's Most Impressive WebCenter Customer Projects

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Customer Projects Oracle OpenWorld Session – Tuesday Oct. 2, 2012: Moscone West, Room 3001 at 11:45AM This year – the Oracle Excellence awards had an amazing number of nominations. Each group at Oracle had a challenge to select the most innovative and game-changing nominations for their winners. The Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards, jointly sponsored by Oracle, OAUG, QUEST, ODTUG, IOUG, AUSOUG and UKOUG, honor organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value.  This year, the awards will recognize customers across eight distinct categories: Oracle Exalogic Cloud Application Foundation Service Integration (SOA) and BPM WebCenter Identity Management Data Integration Application Development Framework and Fusion Development Business Analytics (BI, EPM and Exalytics)  The nominations included the pioneers in our customer base using these solutions in innovative ways to achieve significant business value. Tune in this afternoon for a listing of the WebCenter winners.

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• The Connected Company: WebCenter Portal - Feedback - Analytics and Polls

  - by Michael Snow

  Evernote Export body, td { }Guest Post by: Mitchell Palski, Staff Sales Consultant The importance of connecting peers has been widely recognized and socialized as a critical component of employee intranets. Organizations are striving to provide mediums for sharing knowledge and improving awareness across their enterprise. Indirectly, the socialization of your enterprise should lead to cost savings and improved product/service quality. However, many times the direct effects of connecting an organization’s leadership with its employees are overlooked. Oracle WebCenter Portal can help you bridge that gap by gathering implicit and explicit feedback. Implicit Feedback Through Usage Analytics Analytics allows administrators to track and analyze WebCenter Portal traffic and usage. Analytics provides the following basic functionality: Usage Tracking Metrics: Analytics collects and reports metrics of common WebCenter Portal functions, including community and portlet traffic. Behavior Tracking: Analytics can be used to analyze WebCenter Portal metrics to determine usage patterns, such as page visit duration and usage over time. User Profile Correlation: Analytics can be used to correlate metric information with user profile information. Usage tracking reports can be viewed and filtered by user profile data such as country, company or title. Usage analytics help measure how users interact with website content – allowing your IT staff and business analysts to make informed decisions when planning development for your next intranet enhancement. For example: If users are not accessing your Announcements page and missing critical information that they need to be aware of, you may elect to use graphical links on the home page to direct more users to that page. As a result, the number of employee help-requests to HR decreases. If users are not accessing your News page to read recent articles, you may elect to stop spending as much time updating the page with new stories and cut costs in your communications department. You notice that there is a high volume of users accessing the Employee Dashboard page so your organization decides to continue making personalization enhancements to the page and investing in the Portal tool that most users are accessing. Usage analytics aren’t necessarily a new concept in the IT industry. What sets WebCenter Portal Analytics apart is: Reports are tailored for WebCenter specific tools Report can be easily added to a page as simple as a drag-and-drop Explicit Feedback Through Polls WebCenter Portal users can create, edit, take, and analyze online polls. With polls, you can survey your audience (such as their opinions and their experience level), check whether they can recall important information, and gather feedback and metrics. How many times have you been involved in a requirements discussion and someone has asked a question similar to “Well how do you know that no one likes our home page?” and the response is “Everyone says they hate it! That’s all anyone complains about.” No one has any measurable, quantifiable metric to gauge user satisfaction. Analytics measure usage, but your organization also needs to measure the quality of your portal as defined by the actual people that use it. With that information, your leadership can make informed decisions that will not only match usage patterns but also relate to employees on a personal level. The end result is a connection between employees and leadership that gives everyone in the organization a sense of ownership of their Portal rather than the feeling of development decisions being segregated to leadership only. Polls can be created and edited through the Poll Manager: Polls and View Poll Results can easily be added to a page through drag-and-drop. What did we learn? Being a “connected” company doesn’t just mean helping employees connect with each other horizontally across your enterprise. It also means connecting those employees to the decisions that affect their everyday activities. Through WebCenter Portal Usage Analytics and Polls, any decision that is made to remove a Portal page, update a Portal page, or develop new Portal functionality, can be justified by quantifiable metrics. Instead of fielding complaints and hearing that your employees don’t have a voice, give those employees a voice and listen!

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• An invitation to join a JDeveloper and ADF productivity clinic (and more!) at KScope

  - by Chris Muir

  Would you like a chance to influence Oracle's decisions on tool usability and productivity? If you're attending ODTUG's Kaleidoscope conference this year in San Antonio, Oracle would like to invite you to participate in our Usability Activity Research and separately our JDeveloper and ADF Productivity Clinics with our experienced user experience teams.  The teams are keen to hear what you have to say about your experiences with our tools in general and specifically JDeveloper and ADF.  The details of each event are described below. Invitation to Usability Activity - Sunday June 24th to Wednesday June 27th Oracle is constantly working on new tools and new features for developers, and invites YOU to become a key part of the process!  As a special addition to Kscope 12, Oracle will be conducting onsite usability research in the Alyssum room, from Sunday June 24 to Wednesday June 27. Usability activities are scheduled ahead of time for participants' convenience.  If you would like to take part, please fill out this form to let us know of the session(s) that you would like to attend and your development experience. You will be emailed with your scheduled session before the start of the conference. JDeveloper and ADF Productivity Clinic - Thursday June 28th Are you concerned that Java, Oracle ADF or JDeveloper is difficult? Is JDeveloper making you jump through hoops?  Do you hate a particular dialog or feature of JDeveloper? Well, come and get things off your chest! Oracle is hosting a product management and user experience clinic where we want to hear about your issues and concerns. What's difficult to use?  What doesn't work the way you want, and how would you want it to work?  What isn't behaving like your current favorite tool?  If we can't help on you the spot, we'll take your feedback and use it to improve the product experience.  A great opportunity to get answers, or get improvements. Drop by the Alyssum room, anytime from 8:30 to 10:30 on Thursday, June 28. We look forward to seeing you at KScope soon! 

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• Universities 2030: Learning from the Past to Anticipate the Future

  - by Mohit Phogat

  What will the landscape of international higher education look like a generation from now? What challenges and opportunities lie ahead for universities, especially “global” research universities? And what can university leaders do to prepare for the major social, economic, and political changes—both foreseen and unforeseen—that may be on the horizon? The nine essays in this collection proceed on the premise that one way to envision “the global university” of the future is to explore how earlier generations of university leaders prepared for “global” change—or at least responded to change—in the past. As the essays in this collection attest, many of the patterns associated with contemporary “globalization” or “internationalization” are not new; similar processes have been underway for a long time (some would say for centuries).[1] A comparative-historical look at universities’ responses to global change can help today’s higher-education leaders prepare for the future. Written by leading historians of higher education from around the world, these nine essays identify “key moments” in the internationalization of higher education: moments when universities and university leaders responded to new historical circumstances by reorienting their relationship with the broader world. Covering more than a century of change—from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first—they explore different approaches to internationalization across Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. Notably, while the choice of historical eras was left entirely open, the essays converged around four periods: the 1880s and the international extension of the “modern research university” model; the 1930s and universities’ attempts to cope with international financial and political crises; the 1960s and universities’ role in an emerging postcolonial international development apparatus; and the 2000s and the rise of neoliberal efforts to reform universities in the name of international economic “competitiveness.” Each of these four periods saw universities adopt new approaches to internationalization in response to major historical-structural changes, and each has clear parallels to today. Among the most important historical-structural challenges that universities confronted were: (1) fluctuating enrollments and funding resources associated with global economic booms and busts; (2) new modes of transportation and communication that facilitated mobility (among students, scholars, and knowledge itself); (3) increasing demands for applied science, technical expertise, and commercial innovation; and (4) ideological reconfigurations accompanying regime changes (e.g., from one internal regime to another, from colonialism to postcolonialism, from the cold war to globalized capitalism, etc.). Like universities today, universities in the past responded to major historical-structural changes by internationalizing: by joining forces across space to meet new expectations and solve problems on an ever-widening scale. Approaches to internationalization have typically built on prior cultural or institutional ties. In general, only when the benefits of existing ties had been exhausted did universities reach out to foreign (or less familiar) partners. As one might expect, this process of “reaching out” has stretched universities’ traditional cultural, political, and/or intellectual bonds and has invariably presented challenges, particularly when national priorities have differed—for example, with respect to curricular programs, governance structures, norms of academic freedom, etc. Strategies of university internationalization that either ignore or downplay cultural, political, or intellectual differences often fail, especially when the pursuit of new international connections is perceived to weaken national ties. If the essays in this collection agree on anything, they agree that approaches to internationalization that seem to “de-nationalize” the university usually do not succeed (at least not for long). Please continue reading the other essays at http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/

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• Is 2 lines of push/pop code for each pre-draw-state too many?

  - by Griffin

  I'm trying to simplify vector graphics management in XNA; currently by incorporating state preservation. 2X lines of push/pop code for X states feels like too many, and it just feels wrong to have 2 lines of code that look identical except for one being push() and the other being pop(). The goal is to eradicate this repetitiveness,and I hoped to do so by creating an interface in which a client can give class/struct refs in which he wants restored after the rendering calls. Also note that many beginner-programmers will be using this, so forcing lambda expressions or other advanced C# features to be used in client code is not a good idea. I attempted to accomplish my goal by using Daniel Earwicker's Ptr class: public class Ptr<T> { Func<T> getter; Action<T> setter; public Ptr(Func<T> g, Action<T> s) { getter = g; setter = s; } public T Deref { get { return getter(); } set { setter(value); } } } an extension method: //doesn't work for structs since this is just syntatic sugar public static Ptr<T> GetPtr <T> (this T obj) { return new Ptr<T>( ()=> obj, v=> obj=v ); } and a Push Function: //returns a Pop Action for later calling public static Action Push <T> (ref T structure) where T: struct { T pushedValue = structure; //copies the struct data Ptr<T> p = structure.GetPtr(); return new Action( ()=> {p.Deref = pushedValue;} ); } However this doesn't work as stated in the code. How might I accomplish my goal? Example of code to be refactored: protected override void RenderLocally (GraphicsDevice device) { if (!(bool)isCompiled) {Compile();} //TODO: make sure state settings don't implicitly delete any buffers/resources RasterizerState oldRasterState = device.RasterizerState; DepthFormat oldFormat = device.PresentationParameters.DepthStencilFormat; DepthStencilState oldBufferState = device.DepthStencilState; { //Rendering code } device.RasterizerState = oldRasterState; device.DepthStencilState = oldBufferState; device.PresentationParameters.DepthStencilFormat = oldFormat; }

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• Call for Papers for both Devoxx UK and France now open!

  - by Yolande

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The two conferences are taking place the last week of March 2013 with London on March 26th and 27 and Paris on March 28th and 29th. Oracle fully supports "Devoxx UK" and "Devoxx France" as a European Platinum Partner. Submit proposals and participate in both conferences since they are a two-hour train ride away from one another. The Devoxx conferences are designed “for developers by developers.” The conference committees are looking for speakers who are passionate developers unafraid to share their knowledge of Java, mobile, web and beyond. The sessions are about frameworks, tools and development with in-depth conference sessions, short practical quickies, and bird-of-a-feather discussions. Those different formats allow speakers to choose the best way to present their topics and can be mentioned during the submission process Devoxx has proven its success under Stephan Janssen, organizer of Devoxx in Belgium for the past 11 years. Devoxx has been the biggest Java conference in Europe for many years. To organize those local conferences, Stephan has enrolled the top community leaders in the UK and France. Ben Evans and Martijn Verberg are the leaders of London Java User Group (JUG) and are also known internationally for starting the Adopt-a-JSR program. Antonio Goncalves is the leader of the Paris JUG. He organized last year’s Devoxx France, which was a big success with twice the size first expected. The organizers made sure to add the local character to the conferences. "The community energy has to feel right," said Ben Evans and for that he picked an "old Victoria hall" for the venue. Those leaders are part of very dynamic Java communities in France and in the UK. France has 22 JUGs; the Paris JUG alone has 2,000 members. The UK has over 50,000 developers working in London and its surroundings; a lot of them are Java developers working in the financial industry. The conference fee is kept as low as possible to encourage those developers to attend. Devoxx promises to be crowded and sold out in advance. Make sure to submit your talks to both Devoxx UK and France before January 31st, 2013. 

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• But what version is the database now?

  - by BuckWoody

  When you upgrade your system to SQL Server 2008 R2, you’ll know that the instance is at that version by using the standard commands like SELECT @@VERSION or EXEC xp_msver. My system came back with this info when I typed those: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (RTM) - 10.50.1600.1 (Intel X86)   Apr  2 2010 15:53:02   Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation  Developer Edition on Windows NT 6.0 <X86> (Build 6002: Service Pack 2) (Hypervisor) Index Name Internal_Value Character_Value 1 ProductName NULL Microsoft SQL Server 2 ProductVersion 655410 10.50.1600.1 3 Language 1033 English (United States) 4 Platform NULL NT INTEL X86 5 Comments NULL SQL 6 CompanyName NULL Microsoft Corporation 7 FileDescription NULL SQL Server Windows NT 8 FileVersion NULL 2009.0100.1600.01 ((KJ_RTM).100402-1540 ) 9 InternalName NULL SQLSERVR 10 LegalCopyright NULL Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. 11 LegalTrademarks NULL Microsoft SQL Server is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. 12 OriginalFilename NULL SQLSERVR.EXE 13 PrivateBuild NULL NULL 14 SpecialBuild 104857601 NULL 15 WindowsVersion 393347078 6.0 (6002) 16 ProcessorCount 1 1 17 ProcessorActiveMask 1 1 18 ProcessorType 586 PROCESSOR_INTEL_PENTIUM 19 PhysicalMemory 2047 2047 (2146934784) 20 Product ID NULL NULL   But a database properties are separate from the Instance. After an upgrade, you always want to make sure that the compatibility options (which have much to do with how NULLs and other objects are treated) is at what you expect. For the most part, as long as the application can handle it, I set my compatibility levels to the latest version. For SQL Server 2008, that was “10.0” or “10”. You can do this with the ALTER DATABASE command or you can just right-click the database and select “Properties” and then “Database Options” in SQL Server Management Studio. To check the database compatibility level, I use this query: SELECT name, cmptlevel FROM sys.sysdatabases When I did that this morning I saw that the databases (all of them) were at 10.0 – not 10.5 like the Instance. That’s expected – we didn’t revise the database format up with the Instance for this particular release. Didn’t want to catch you by surprise on that. While your databases should be at the “proper” level for your situation, you can’t rely on the compatibility level to indicate the Instance level. More info on the ALTER DATABASE command in SQL Server 2008 R2 is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510680(SQL.105).aspx Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• AVIO Academy - ADF w/Oracle BPM

  - by BPMWarrior

  Oracle Platinum Partner AVIO Consulting is excited to announce the launch of the industry’s first ADF with Oracle BPM developer training program.  This training program is for any prospects or customers that could benefit from a better understanding of Oracle ADF and Oracle BPM.    Visit the AVIO Academy website for an in-depth description of the new ADF with Oracle BPM Workshop .     What it is: ·         Industry’s first ADF with Oracle BPM training program ·         3-day workshop showcasing application development using ADF with Oracle BPM Suite   Training Purpose: Teaches developers how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) with the Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite.  The workshop is the only one of its kind on the market today.  During the course, students gain a better understanding of Oracle ADF, and the nuances of making it work with Oracle BPM.   Course Overview This course in AVIO’s BPM series, consists of 11 hands-on lessons designed specifically for developers.   It provides a comprehensive overview of ADF and Oracle BPM concepts, and step-by-step easy to follow instructions for creating and integrating ADF user interfaces with Oracle BPM processes.  Students leave the workshop with the working versions of the projects they build for their future reference.  Rather than just frantically clicking through the lessons, concepts are thoroughly explained and demonstrated.  Students leave understanding the best practices AVIO established during years of developing ADF solutions for Oracle BPM and SOA.   AVIO Academy This new workshop is offered through AVIO Academy, the only program with curriculum specifically developed for the most recent version of the Oracle BPM Suite. The academy specializes in hands-on role based training that uses an organization’s own processes for a more practical learning experience.   Visit the AVIO Academy website for an in-depth description of the new ADF with Oracle BPM Workshop. If you have any questions please contact Brandon Dean at [email protected]

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• What is 'Ubuntu Unity' (for the Desktop)?

  - by Martin

  Ok, so there's the buzz of Canonical (wanting to) switch for new Ubuntu version from the GNOME default desktop to their own Unity shell. (I hope that's accurate.) It seems I can not totally fathom what Unity actually is. For looking at its homepage it currently is firmly targeted at netbooks and the somehow different usage model on these. Is it a classical desktop? -- Taskbar? Shortcuts? Is the difference between Ubuntu(GNOME)+Unity more/less pronounced than the difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu? Will "my parents" be able to get the interface if they've been using the classical gnome desktop so far? Edit: I would not like to split this up into more specific questions, as What is Unity? is exactly what the people I set up Ubuntu boxes for will ask me if they hear that the newer Ubuntu version is using that instead of the Desktop -- and it might well happen someone phrases it like that :-) I will certainly not give them the link to the HP as the explanation there does not lay out if it is a desktop or something more or something less: (It does not for me - therefore I'm asking here.) Unity is designed for netbooks and related touch-based devices. It includes [...] that makes it fast and easy to access [...] while removing screen elements that are rarely used in mobile and netbook computing. (emphasis mine) -- the explanation there doesn't even mention the desktop-PC! Unity has a vertical task management panel on the left-hand side and a menu panel at the top of the screen. [...] This sounds like a re-themed normal desktop. Clicking on an icon will give the target application focus if it is already running or launch it if it is not already running. If you click the ... Aha. Sounds like Windows 7. ... icon of an application that already has focus, Unity will activate an Expose-style view of all the open windows associated with that application. No clue what that's supposed to be. So it would really be nice if someone could explain for non desktop-design-terms experts what Unity is.

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• Using elapsed time for SlowMo in XNA

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm trying to create a slow-mo effect in my pong game so that when a player is a button the paddles and ball will suddenly move at a far slower speed. I believe my understanding of the concepts of adjusting the timing in XNA are done, but I'm not sure of how to incorporate it into my design exactly. The updates for my bats (paddles) are done in my Bat.cs class: /// Controls the bat moving up the screen /// </summary> public void MoveUp() { SetPosition(Position + new Vector2(0, -moveSpeed)); } /// <summary> /// Controls the bat moving down the screen /// </summary> public void MoveDown() { SetPosition(Position + new Vector2(0, moveSpeed)); } /// <summary> /// Updates the position of the AI bat, in order to track the ball /// </summary> /// <param name="ball"></param> public virtual void UpdatePosition(Ball ball) { size.X = (int)Position.X; size.Y = (int)Position.Y; } While the rest of my game updates are done in my GameplayScreen.cs class (I'm using the XNA game state management sample) Class GameplayScreen { ........... bool slow; .......... public override void Update(GameTime gameTime, bool otherScreenHasFocus, bool coveredByOtherScreen) base.Update(gameTime, otherScreenHasFocus, false); if (IsActive) { // SlowMo Stuff Elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; if (Slowmo) Elapsed *= .8f; MoveTimer += Elapsed; double elapsedTime = gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds; if (Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) slow = true; else if (Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Down)) slow = false; if (slow == true) elapsedTime *= .1f; // Updating bat position leftBat.UpdatePosition(ball); rightBat.UpdatePosition(ball); // Updating the ball position ball.UpdatePosition(); and finally my fixed time step is declared in the constructor of my Game1.cs Class: /// <summary> /// The main game constructor. /// </summary> public Game1() { IsFixedTimeStep = slow = false; } So my question is: Where do I place the MoveTimer or elapsedTime, so that my bat will slow down accordingly?

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• eSTEP Newsletter December 2012

  - by uwes

  Dear Partners,We would like to inform you that the December issue of our Newsletter is now available.The issue contains informations to the following topics: Notes from Corporate: It's Earth day - Every Day, Oracle SPARC Newsletter, Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox), Oracle Database Appliance Now Certified by SAP, Database High Availability, Cultivating Business-Led Innovation Technical Corner: Geek Fest! Talking About the Design of the T4 and T5 SPARC Chips, Blog: Is This Your Idea of Disaster Recovery?; Oracle® Practitioner Guide - A Pragmatic Approach to Cloud Adoption; Oracle Practitioner Guide: A pragmatic Approach to Cloud Adoption; Darren Moffat Explains the new ZFS Encryption Features in Solaris 11.1; Command Summary: Basic Operations with the Image Packaging System; SPARC T4 Server Delivers Outstanding Performance on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g; SPARC T4-4 Servers Set First World Record on PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Benchmark; Sun ZFS Appliance Monitor Refresh: Core Factor Table; Remanufactured Systems Program for Sun Systems from Oracle; Reminder: Oracle Premier Support for Systems; Reminder: Oracle Platinum Services Learning & Events: eSTEP Events Schedule; Recently Delivered Techcasts; Webinar: Maximum Availibility with Oracle GoldenGate References: LUKOIL Overseas Holding Optimizes Oil Field Development Projects with Integrated Project Management; United Networks Increases Accounting Flexibility and Boosts System Performance with ERP Applications Upgrade; Ziggo Rapidly Creates Applications That Accelerate Communications-Service Orders l How to ...: The Role of Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Linux Containers in a Virtualization Strategy; How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1; Using svcbundle to Create Manifests and Profiles in Oracle Solaris 11.1; How to Migrate Your Data to Oracle Solaris 11 Using Shadow Migration; How to Script Oracle Solaris 11.1 Zones for Easy Cloning; How to Script Oracle Solaris 11 Zones Creation for a Network-in-a-Box Configuration; How to Know Whether T4 Crypto Accelerators Are in Use; Fault Handling and Prevention – Part 1; Transforming and Consolidating Web Data with Oracle Database; Looking Under the Hood at Networking in Oracle VM Server for x86; Best Way to Migrate Data from Legacy File System to ZFS in Oracle Solaris 11; Special Year End Article: The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 You find the Newsletter on our portal under eSTEP News ---> Latest Newsletter. You will need to provide your email address and the pin below to get access. Link to the portal is shown below.URL: http://launch.oracle.com/PIN: eSTEP_2011Previous published Newsletters can be found under the Archived Newsletters section and more useful information under the Events, Download and Links tab. Feel free to explore and any feedback is appreciated to help us improve the service and information we deliver.Thanks and best regards,Partner HW Enablement EMEA

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• How do I take responsibility for my code when colleague makes unnecessary improvements without notice?

  - by Jesslyn

  One of my teammates is a jack of all trades in our IT shop and I respect his insight. However, sometimes he reviews my code (he's second in command to our team leader, so that's expected) without a heads up. So sometimes he reviews my changes before they complete the end goal and makes changes right away... and has even broken my work once. Other times, he has made unnecessary improvements to some of my code that is 3+ months old. This annoys me for a few reasons: I am not always given a chance to fix my mistakes He has not taken the time to ask me what I was trying to accomplish when he is confused, which could affect his testing or changes I don't always think his code is readable Deadlines are not an issue and his current workload doesn't require any work in my projects other than reviewing my code changes. Anyways, I have told him in the past to please keep me posted if he sees something in my work that he wants to change so that I could take ownership of my code (maybe I should have said "shortcomings") and he's not been responsive. I fear that I may come off as aggressive when I ask him to explain his changes to me. He's just a quiet person who keeps to himself, but his actions continue. I don't want to banish him from making code changes (not like I could), because we are a team--but I want to do my part to help our team. Added clarifications: We share 1 development branch. I do not wait until all my changes complete a single task because I risk losing some significant work--so I make sure my changes build and do not break anything. My concern is that my teammate doesn't explain the reason or purpose behind his changes. I don't think he should need my blessing, but if we disagree on an approach I thought it would be best to discuss the pros and cons and make a decision once we both understand what is going on. I have not discussed this with our team lead yet as I would prefer to resolve personal disagreements without getting management involved unless it is necessary. Since my concern seemed more of personal issue than a threat to our work, I chose to not bother the team lead. I am working on code review process ideas--to help promote the benefits of more organized code reviews without making it all about my pet peeves.

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• Comparing Apples and Pairs

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent study, High Costs and Negative Value of Pair Programming, by Capers Jones, pulls no punches in its assessment of the costs-to- benefits ratio of pair programming, two programmers working together, at a single computer, rather than separately. He implies that pair programming is a method rushed into production on a wave of enthusiasm for Agile or Extreme Programming, without any real regard for its effectiveness. Despite admitting that his data represented a far from complete study of the economics of pair programming, his conclusions were stark: it was 2.5 times more expensive, resulted in a 15% drop in productivity, and offered no significant quality benefits. The author provides a more scientific analysis than Jon Evans’ Pair Programming Considered Harmful, but the theme is the same. In terms of upfront-coding costs, pair programming is surely more expensive. The claim of productivity loss is dubious and contested by other studies. The third claim, though, did surprise me. The author’s data suggests that if both the pair and the individual programmers employ static code analysis and testing, then there is no measurable difference in the resulting code quality, in terms of defects per function point. In other words, pair programming incurs a massive extra cost for no tangible return in investment. There were, inevitably, many criticisms of his data and his conclusions, a few of which are persuasive. Firstly, that the driver/observer model of pair programming, on which the study bases its findings, is far from the most effective. For example, many find Ping-Pong pairing, based on use of test-driven development, far more productive. Secondly, that it doesn’t distinguish between “expert” and “novice” pair programmers– that is, independently of other programming skills, how skilled was an individual at pair programming. Thirdly, that his measure of quality is too narrow. This point rings true, certainly at Red Gate, where developers don’t pair program all the time, but use the method in short bursts, while tackling a tricky problem and needing a fresh perspective on the best approach, or more in-depth knowledge in a particular domain. All of them argue that pair programming, and collective code ownership, offers significant rewards, if not in terms of immediate “bug reduction”, then in removing the likelihood of single points of failure, and improving the overall quality and longer-term adaptability/maintainability of the design. There is also a massive learning benefit for both participants. One developer told me how he once worked in the same team over consecutive summers, the first time with no pair programming and the second time pair-programming two-thirds of the time, and described the increased rate of learning the second time as “phenomenal”. There are a great many theories on how we should develop software (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.), but woefully little scientific research in their effectiveness. For a group that spends so much time crunching other people’s data, I wonder if developers spend enough time crunching data about themselves. Capers Jones’ data may be incomplete, but should cause a pause for thought, especially for any large IT departments, supporting commerce and industry, who are considering pair programming. It certainly shouldn’t discourage teams from exploring new ways of developing software, as long as they also think about how to gather hard data to gauge their effectiveness.

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• Am I deluding myself? Business analyst transition to programmer

  - by Ryan

  Current job: Working as the lead business analyst for a Big 4 firm, leading a team of developers and testers working on a large scale re-platforming project (4 onshore dev, 4 offshore devs, several onshore/offshore testers). Also work in a similar capacity on other smaller scale projects. Extent of my role: Gathering/writing out requirements, creating functional specifications, designing the UI (basically mapping out all front-end aspects of the system), working closely with devs to communicate/clarify requirements and come up with solutions when we hit roadblocks, writing test cases (and doing much of the testing), working with senior management and key stakeholders, managing beta testers, creating user guides and leading training sessions, providing key technical support. I also write quite a few macros in Excel using VBA (several of my macros are now used across the entire firm, so there are maybe around 1000 people using them) and use SQL on a daily basis, both on the SQL compact files the program relies on, our SQL Server data and any Access databases I create. The developers feel that I am quite good in this role because I understand a lot about programming, inherent system limitations, structure of the databases, etc so it's easier for me to communicate ideas and come up with suggestions when we face problems. What really interests me is developing software. I do a fair amount of programming in VBA and have been wanting to learn C# for awhile (the dev team uses C# - I review code occasionally for my own sake but have not had any practical experience using it). I'm interested in not just the business process but also the technical side of things, so the traditional BA role doesn't really whet my appetite for the kind of stuff I want to do. Right now I have a few small projects that managers have given me and I'm finding new ways to do them (like building custom Access applications), so there's a bit here and there to keep me interested. My question is this: what I would like to do is create custom Excel or Access applications for small businesses as a freelance business (working as a one-man shop; maybe having an occasional contractor depending on a project's complexity). This would obviously start out as a part-time venture while I have a day job, but eventually become a full-time job. Am I deluding myself to thinking I can go from BA/part-time VBA programmer to making a full-time go of a freelance business (where I would be starting out just writing custom Excel/Access apps in VBA)? Or is this type of thing not usually attempted until someone gains years of full-time programming experience? And is there even a market for these types of applications amongst small businesses (and maybe medium-sized) businesses?

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• Quickly Copy Movie Files to Individually Named Folders

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Some HTPC media manager applications require movie files to be in stored in separate folders to properly store information such as cover art images and other metadata. Here we look at copying movie files to individual folders. If you already have a large movie collection stored in a single folder, we’ll show you how to quickly move those files into their own individually named folders. File2Folder FIle2folder is a handy portable app that automatically creates and moves movie files into a folder of the same filename. There is no installation needed. Simply download and run the .exe file (link below). Enter the current movie directory, or browse for the folder. File2folder now supports both local and network shares. When you are ready to create the folders and move the files, click Move! You’ll see the move progress displayed in the window. When the process is finished, you’ll have all your movie file in individual folders.   Change your mind? Just click the Undo! button…   …and the move and folder creation process will be undone. If you would like to have the folder monitored for new files, click the Start button. File2folder will process any new files it discovers every 180 seconds. To turn it off, click Stop. This simple little program is a huge timesaver for those looking to organize movie collections for their HTPC. We should also note that this will work with any files, not just videos. Download file2folder Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Hack: Turn Off Debug Mode in VMWare Workstation 6 BetaAdd Images and Metadata to Windows 7 Media Center Movie LibraryAdd Folders to the Movie Library in Windows 7 Media CenterAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterMove the Public Folder in Windows Vista 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician

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• Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon support

  - by Robottinosino

  I am considering selling my Mac to get money towards a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 because what I really want to do is to be running an Ubuntu system all the time. Is this machine completely supported in Ubuntu, with no tiny little feature missing just because I am "going Linux"? Optional user story section, skip to the question below if you don't have time: I have a friend who bought a "works on Ubuntu" system a year ago and has hated the fact ever since: battery lasts less than if he boots in Windows (which he despises) and he ascribes that to "no good OS/harware integration and support for advanced chipset power management features", odd behaviour on suspend/resume/hibernate (says: "when it works 90% of the time and the other 10% it makes you lose your work is as good as broken - 90% is the same as 0% he says), some occasional graphics card glitches he can perfectly well live with and has almost grown affectionate to, and finally, and that is what would make him undo his choice if he could, bad "input device drivers". He says: trackpoint and trackpad just "feel different", "so much better" on Windows and that was impossible to know from the website brochure. That story makes me very doubtful... but I want to abandon this "walled garden" of prison that is my Mac and go Ubuntu all the way, no doubt about that! My dilemma at this time is just: "I don't want to live with those eternal frustrations for sure"! Here's a directly answerable phrasing of my question: Is the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 supported on Ubuntu? Yes/no, which version? Which hardware features are not supported? Provide a list Optionally: sort the list in descending order of frustration from your experience Optionally: mention if there are acceptable workarounds to the "out-of-the-box" condition described in the earlier points and whether this ameliorates frustration at least to "tolerable" levels Comment: the Ubuntu hardware certification page is so not-for-end-users it's unreal. Whoa. What would make it end-user friendly is: Link to "buy here and you'll be just fine, this is the right configuration for you, it'll work as long as you press BUY on that page and don't browse further" Remove mentions of may and might not work. Just tell it straight: press buy here and you will get a working system with the exception of A, B, C (so that I can decide whether the philosophical "freedom pleasure" I get from escaping an Apple world is enough to off-balance the loss, for instance, of Bluetooth capabilities (something that I of course use on my Mac) but "could" lose to use free (as in freedom) software The certification page fails to dispel doubts in me as an end-user. I don't feel "eased into Ubuntu", I feel "partially informed".

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• Zenoss Setup for Windows Servers

  - by Jay Fox

  Recently I was saddled with standing up Zenoss for our enterprise.  We're running about 1200 servers, so manually touching each box was not an option.  We use LANDesk for a lot of automated installs and patching - more about that later.The steps below may not necessarily have to be completed in this order - it's just the way I did it.STEP ONE:Setup a standard AD user.  We want to do this so there's minimal security exposure.  Call the account what ever you want "domain/zenoss" for our examples.***********************************************************STEP TWO:Make the following local groups accessible by your zenoss account.Distributed COM UsersPerformance Monitor UsersEvent Log Readers (which doesn't exist on pre-2008 machines)Here's the Powershell script I used to setup access to these local groups:# Created to add Active Directory account to local groups# Must be run from elevated prompt, with permissions on the remote machine(s).# Create txt file should contain the names of the machines that need the account added, one per line.# Script will process machines line by line.foreach($i in (gc c:\tmp\computers.txt)){# Add the user to the first group$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Distributed COM Users")$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)# Add the user to the second group$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Performance Monitor Users")$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)# Add the user to the third group - Group doesn't exist on < Server 2008#$objUser=[ADSI]("WinNT://domain/zenoss")#$objGroup=[ADSI]("WinNT://$i/Event Log Readers")#$objGroup.PSBase.Invoke("Add",$objUser.PSBase.Path)}**********************************************************STEP THREE:Setup security on the machines namespace so our domain/zenoss account can access itThe default namespace for zenoss is:  root/cimv2Here's the Powershell script:#Grant account defined below (line 11) access to WMI Namespace#Has to be run as account with permissions on remote machinefunction get-sid{Param ($DSIdentity)$ID = new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount($DSIdentity)return $ID.Translate( [System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier] ).toString()}$sid = get-sid "domain\zenoss"$SDDL = "A;;CCWP;;;$sid" $DCOMSDDL = "A;;CCDCRP;;;$sid"$computers = Get-Content "c:\tmp\computers.txt"foreach ($strcomputer in $computers){    $Reg = [WMIClass]"\\$strcomputer\root\default:StdRegProv"    $DCOM = $Reg.GetBinaryValue(2147483650,"software\microsoft\ole","MachineLaunchRestriction").uValue    $security = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $strcomputer -Namespace root/cimv2 -Class __SystemSecurity    $converter = new-object system.management.ManagementClass Win32_SecurityDescriptorHelper    $binarySD = @($null)    $result = $security.PsBase.InvokeMethod("GetSD",$binarySD)    $outsddl = $converter.BinarySDToSDDL($binarySD[0])    $outDCOMSDDL = $converter.BinarySDToSDDL($DCOM)    $newSDDL = $outsddl.SDDL += "(" + $SDDL + ")"    $newDCOMSDDL = $outDCOMSDDL.SDDL += "(" + $DCOMSDDL + ")"    $WMIbinarySD = $converter.SDDLToBinarySD($newSDDL)    $WMIconvertedPermissions = ,$WMIbinarySD.BinarySD    $DCOMbinarySD = $converter.SDDLToBinarySD($newDCOMSDDL)    $DCOMconvertedPermissions = ,$DCOMbinarySD.BinarySD    $result = $security.PsBase.InvokeMethod("SetSD",$WMIconvertedPermissions)     $result = $Reg.SetBinaryValue(2147483650,"software\microsoft\ole","MachineLaunchRestriction", $DCOMbinarySD.binarySD)}***********************************************************STEP FOUR:Get the SID for our zenoss account.Powershell#Provide AD User get SID$objUser = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount("domain", "zenoss") $strSID = $objUser.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) $strSID.Value******************************************************************STEP FIVE:Modify the Service Control Manager to allow access to the zenoss AD account.This command can be run from an elevated command line, or through Powershellsc sdset scmanager "D:(A;;CC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;SU)(A;;CCLCRPWPRC;;;SY)(A;;KA;;;BA)(A;;CCLCRPRC;;;PUT_YOUR_SID_HERE_FROM STEP_FOUR)S:(AU;FA;KA;;;WD)(AU;OIIOFA;GA;;;WD)"******************************************************************In step two the script plows through a txt file that processes each computer listed on each line.  For the other scripts I ran them on each machine using LANDesk.  You can probably edit those scripts to process a text file as well.That's what got me off the ground monitoring the machines using Zenoss.  Hopefully this is helpful for you.  Watch the line breaks when copy the scripts.

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• We have our standards, and we need them

  - by Tony Davis

  The presenter suddenly broke off. He was midway through his section on how to apply to the relational database the Continuous Delivery techniques that allowed for rapid-fire rounds of development and refactoring, while always retaining a “production-ready” state. He sighed deeply and then launched into an astonishing diatribe against Database Administrators, much of his frustration directed toward Oracle DBAs, in particular. In broad strokes, he painted the picture of a brave new deployment philosophy being frustratingly shackled by the relational database, and by especially by the attitudes of the guardians of these databases. DBAs, he said, shunned change and “still favored tools I’d have been embarrassed to use in the ’80′s“. DBAs, Oracle DBAs especially, were more attached to their vendor than to their employer, since the former was the primary source of their career longevity and spectacular remuneration. He contended that someone could produce the best IDE or tool in the world for Oracle DBAs and yet none of them would give a stuff, unless it happened to come from the “mother ship”. I sat blinking in astonishment at the speaker’s vehemence, and glanced around nervously. Nobody in the audience disagreed, and a few nodded in assent. Although the primary target of the outburst was the Oracle DBA, it made me wonder. Are we who work with SQL Server, database professionals or merely SQL Server fanbois? Do DBAs, in general, have an image problem? Is it a good career-move to be seen to be holding onto a particular product by the whites of our knuckles, to the exclusion of all else? If we seek a broad, open-minded, knowledge of our chosen technology, the database, and are blessed with merely mortal powers of learning, then we like standards. Vendors of RDBMSs generally don’t conform to standards by instinct, but by customer demand. Microsoft has made great strides to adopt the international SQL Standards, where possible, thanks to considerable lobbying by the community. The implementation of Window functions is a great example. There is still work to do, though. SQL Server, for example, has an unusable version of the Information Schema. One cast-iron rule of any RDBMS is that we must be able to query the metadata using the same language that we use to query the data, i.e. SQL, and we do this by running queries against the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Developers who’ve attempted to apply a standard query that works on MySQL, or some other database, but doesn’t produce the expected results on SQL Server are advised to shun the Standards-based approach in favor of the vendor-specific one, using the catalog views. The argument behind this is sound and well-documented, and of course we all use those catalog views, out of necessity. And yet, as database professionals, committed to supporting the best databases for the business, whatever they are now and in the future, surely our heart should sink somewhat when we advocate a vendor specific approach, to a developer struggling with something as simple as writing a guard clause. And when we read messages on the Microsoft documentation informing us that we shouldn’t rely on INFORMATION_SCHEMA to identify reliably the schema of an object, in SQL Server!

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