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• Resources for Win32 C/C++ programming

  - by EricM

  I have experience in a variety of languages (Java, Perl, C#, PHP, javascript, ansi-C for microprocessors, Objective-C and others), with Win32 programming not being an area I've done a lot of work in. Now part of my job entails maintaining a large Win32 codebase that stretches back 15 years and includes everything from C written originally for Win95 to MFC to COM to 64-bit code for Win7 to C++ using Boost and so on. If there's a variation on how to do something it's in there. Are there any good Win32 C/C++ references that discuss both the proper way to do things today and give you a little sense of how things evolved? Something like this discussion of all the various boolean types, or how to approach the API monstrosity of simply copying a string. I don't see my career heading too far down this path, but I do like to understand what I'm working with and I think this is an important part of programming history. thanks, Eric

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• Can I have a type that's both, covariant and contravariant, i.e. fully fungible/changeable with sub

  - by Water Cooler v2

  Just a stupid question. I could try it out in 2 minutes, really. It's just that I have 1 GB RAM and have already got 2 instances of VS 2010 open on my desktop, with an instance of VS 2005, too. Opening another instance of VS 2010 would be an over kill. Can I have a type (for now forgetting its semantics) that can be covariant as well as contravariant? For e.g. public interface Foo<in out T> { void DoFooWith(T arg); } Off to Eric Lippert's blog for the meat and potatoes of variance in C# 4.0 as there's little else anywhere that covers adequate ground on the subject.

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• ASP: using existing Crystal Report with date parameter

  - by eric3141

  I have an existing Crystal Report done in Crystal Reports version 9. I need to display it via an ASP website created in Visual Studio 2008. I have put the Crystal data source and viewer controls on the design page and configured the controls to use the crystal report but cannot seem to figure out how to pass a date to the report which uses it as an input parameter for a SQL Server 2005 stored procedure. I have tried putting a calendar control on the design page but don't know how to use it to pass the date parameter. Thanks in advance for any help. Eric

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• The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

  - by Laila

  Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, the two .NET Rocks radio show hosts, have decided to set off to 15 cities in the US, between April 19th and May 7th, in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV). What for you'll ask me? Well, to drive around the US, meet up with .NET developers, and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Each evening, they stop in a city and host a three hour event in front of a 100 to 300 crowd of developers, where Carl is showing off media features in Silverlight 4 and their road trip tracking application, whilst Richard is demo-ing the web performance testing features of VS2010 using his portable server rig. But before they take to the stage, they have a special guest brought in - a rock star from the Visual Studio world - whom they interview for an hour as a .NET Rock episode. So far, they've had - amongst others - Phil Haack, a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on ASP.NET MVC, Dan Fernandez, an Evangelism Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft, and Beth Massi, Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft. I love the fact that the audience gets a chance to participate, ask questions and have a great laugh, as you can hear in the first episode! Along the way, the .NET Rocks guys are giving away great prizes (including .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler licenses, and "40" LCD TVs!). Even more out of the ordinary, at each stop on the road trip, one lucky attendee (who entered in the Ride Along competition) gets to jump in the RV with Carl and Richard and ride along with them to the next stop on the roadtrip. How cool is that! Richard told us: "Our first winner in Mountain View was Eric Ziko. I was looking for him to announce that he had won, when he found us and gave us a bottle of scotch he had brought just to say 'thanks for the great show'. We all had a toast from the bottle the next night when he headed back home." Cheeky! There's still space to a few of these events, so if you want to attend, register now, because it's first come first serve. We're grateful to Richard and Carl for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this major .NET event! A unique .NET adventure worth following for sure. Cheers, Laila

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• Java Space on Parleys

  - by Yolande Poirier

  Now available! A great selection of JavaOne 2010 and JVM Language Summit 2010 sessions as well as Oracle Technology Network TechCasts on the new Java Space on Parleys website. Oracle partnered with Stephan Janssen, founder of Parleys to make this happen. Parleys website offers a user friendly experience to view online content. You can download some of the talks to your desktop or watch them on the go on mobile devices. The current selection is a well of expertise from top Java luminaries and Oracle experts. JavaOne 2010 sessions: ·        Best practices for signing code by Sean Mullan   ·        Building software using rich client platforms by Rickard Thulin ·        Developing beyond the component libraries by Ryan Cuprak ·        Java API for keyhole markup language by Florian Bachmann ·        Avoiding common user experience anti-patterns by Burk Hufnagel ·        Accelerating Java workloads via GPUs by Gary Frost JVM Languages Summit 2010 sessions: ·      Mixed language project compilation in Eclipse by Andy Clement  ·      Gathering the threads by John Rose  ·      LINQ: language features for concurrency by Neal Gafter  ·      Improvements in OpenJDK useful for JVM languages by Eric Caspole  ·      Symmetric Multilanguage - VM Architecture by Oleg Pliss  Special interviews with Oracle experts on product innovations: ·      Ludovic Champenois, Java EE architect on Glassfish 3.1 and Java EE. ·      John Jullion-Ceccarelli and Martin Ryzl on NetBeans IDE 6.9 You can chose to listen to a section of talks using the agenda view and search for related content while watching a presentation.  Enjoy the Java content and vote on it! 

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• Fluid VS Responsive Website Development Questions

  - by Aditya P

  As I understand these form the basis for targeting a wide array of devices based on the browser size, given it would be a time consuming to generate different layouts targeting different/specific devices and their resolutions. Questions: Firstly right to the jargon, is there any actual difference between the two or do they mean the same? Is it safe to classify the current development mainly a html5/css3 based one? What popular frameworks are available to easily implement this? What testing methods used in this regard? What are the most common compatibility issues in terms of different browser types? I understand there are methods like this http://css-tricks.com/resolution-specific-stylesheets/ which does this come under?. Are there any external browser detection methods besides the API calls specific to the browser that are employed in this regard? Points of interest [Prior Research before asking these questions] Why shouldn't "responsive" web design be a consideration? Responsive Web Design Tips, Best Practices and Dynamic Image Scaling Techniques A recent list of tutorials 30 Responsive Web Design and Development Tutorials by Eric Shafer on May 14, 2012 Update Ive been reading that the basic point of designing content for different layouts to facilitate a responsive web design is to present the most relevant information. now obviously between the smallest screen width and the highest we are missing out on design elements. I gather from here http://flashsolver.com/2012/03/24/5-top-commercial-responsive-web-designs/ The top of the line design layouts (widths) are desktop layout (980px) tablet layout (768px) smartphone layout – landscape (480px) smartphone layout – portrait (320px) Also we have a popular responsive website testing site http://resizemybrowser.com/ which lists different screen resolutions. I've also come across this while trying to find out the optimal highest layout size to account for http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10538599/default-web-page-width-1024px-or-980px which brings to light seemingly that 1366x768 is a popular web resolution. Is it safe to assume that just accounting for proper scaling from width 980px onwards to the maximum size would be sufficient to accommodate this? given we aren't presenting any new information for the new size. Does it make sense to have additional information ( which conflicts with purpose of responsive web design) to utilize the top size and beyond?

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• C# Domain-Driven Design Sample Released

  - by Artur Trosin

  In the post I want to declare that NDDD Sample application(s) is released and share the work with you. You can access it here: http://code.google.com/p/ndddsample. NDDDSample from functionality perspective matches DDDSample 1.1.0 which is based Java and on joint effort by Eric Evans' company Domain Language and the Swedish software consulting company Citerus. But because NDDDSample is based on .NET technologies those two implementations could not be matched directly. However concepts, practices, values, patterns, especially DDD, are cross-language and cross-platform :). Implementation of .NET version of the application was an interesting journey because now as .NET developer I better understand the differences positive and negative between these two platforms. Even there are those differences they can be overtaken, in many cases it was not so hard to match a java libs\framework with .NET during the implementation. Here is a list of technology stack: 1. .net 3.5 - framework 2. VS.NET 2008 - IDE 3. ASP.NET MVC2.0 - for administration and tracking UI 4. WCF - communication mechanism 5. NHibernate - ORM 6. Rhino Commons - Nhibernate session management, base classes for in memory unit tests 7. SqlLite - database 8. Windsor - inversion of control container 9. Windsor WCF facility - for better integration with NHibernate 10. MvcContrib - and in particular its Castle WindsorControllerFactory in order to enable IoC for controllers 11. WPF - for incident logging application 12. Moq - mocking lib used for unit tests 13. NUnit - unit testing framework 14. Log4net - logging framework 15. Cloud based on Azure SDK These are not the latest technologies, tools and libs for the moment but if there are someone thinks that it would be useful to migrate the sample to latest current technologies and versions please comment. Cloud version of the application is based on Azure emulated environment provided by the SDK, so it hasn't been tested on ‘real' Azure scenario (we just do not have access to it). Thanks to participants, Eugen Gorgan who was involved directly in development, Ruslan Rusu and Victor Lungu spend their free time to discuss .NET specific decisions, Eugen Navitaniuc helped with Java related questions. Also, big thank to Cornel Cretu, he designed a nice logo and helped with some browser incompatibility issues. Any review and feedback are welcome! Thank you, Artur Trosin

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• Renault under threat from industrial espionage, intellectual property the target

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Last year we saw news of both General Motors and Ford losing a significant amount of valuable information to competitors overseas. Within weeks of the turn of 2011 we see the European car manufacturer, Renault, also suffering. In a recent news report, French Industry Minister Eric Besson warned the country was facing "economic war" and referenced a serious case of espionage which concerns information pertaining to the development of electric cars. Renault senior vice president Christian Husson told the AFP news agency that the people concerned were in a "particularly strategic position" in the company. An investigation had uncovered a "body of evidence which shows that the actions of these three colleagues were contrary to the ethics of Renault and knowingly and deliberately placed at risk the company's assets", Mr Husson said. A source told Reuters on Wednesday the company is worried its flagship electric vehicle program, in which Renault with its partner Nissan is investing 4 billion euros ($5.3 billion), might be threatened. This casts a shadow over the estimated losses of Ford ($50 million) and General Motors ($40 million). One executive in the corporate intelligence-gathering industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "It's really difficult to say it's a case of corporate espionage ... It can be carelessness." He cited a hypothetical example of an enthusiastic employee giving away too much information about his job on an online forum. While information has always been passed and leaked, inadvertently or on purpose, the rise of the Internet and social media means corporate spies or careless employees are now more likely to be found out, he added. We are seeing more and more examples of where companies like these need to invest in technologies such as Oracle IRM to ensure such important information can be kept under control. It isn't just the recent release of information into the public domain via the Wikileaks website that is of concern, but also the increasing threats of industrial espionage in cases such as these. Information rights management doesn't totally remove the threat, but abilities to control documents no matter where they exist certainly increases the capabilities significantly. Every single time someone opens a sealed document the IRM system audits the activity. This makes identifying a potential source for a leak much easier when you have an absolute record of every person who's had access to the documents. Oracle IRM can also help with accidental or careless loss. Often people use very sensitive information all the time and forget the importance of handling it correctly. With the ability to protect the information from screen shots and prevent people copy and pasting document information into social networks and other, unsecured documents, Oracle IRM brings a totally new level of information security that would have a significant impact on reducing the risk these organizations face of losing their most valuable information.

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• Oracle 'In Touch' PartnerCast - July 1, 2014

  - by Cinzia Mascanzoni

  27 May 2014 'In Touch' Webcast for Oracle EMEA Partners Invitation Stay Connected Oracle Media Network   OPN on PartnerCast   Oracle 'In Touch' PartnerCast (July 1, 2014)Be prepared for a year of growth Register Now! Dear partner, We would like to invite you to join David Callaghan, Senior Vice President Oracle EMEA Alliances and Channels, and his studio guests for the next broadcast of the Oracle ‘In Touch’ PartnerCast on Tuesday 1st July 2014 from 10:30am UK / 11:30am CET. In this cast, David’s studio guests and his regional reporters will be looking at your priorities as EMEA partners and how best to grow with Oracle. We also look forward to the broadcast covering topics on the following: Highlights of FY14 Strategic themes for FY15 HCM, CRM and ERP Oracle on Oracle Exclusive for ‘In Touch’ David Callaghan questions Rich Geraffo, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances & Channels, on how the FY15 partner Global kick off relates to EMEA. Plus David provides your chance to hear from some of the newly appointed Worldwide A&C Leadership team as he discusses with Bruce Chumley VP Oracle Channel Distribution Sales & Troy Richardson VP Oracle Strategic Alliances; their core focus and strategy of growth and what they intend on bringing to the table in their new role. Register Now! With lots of studio guests joining David, why not get in touch on Twitter using the hashtag #OracleInTouch or by emailing [email protected] to get your questions featured in the cast! To find out more information and to watch previous episodes on-demand, please visit our webpage here. Best regards, Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels Oracle 'In Touch' PartnerCast: be prepared for a year of growth July 01, 2014 10:30am UK / 11:30am CET Duration: 45 mins. Host David Callaghan Senior VP Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels Studio Guests Alistair Hopkins VP Sales & Strategy, Technology Solutions, Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels More to be announced shortly Features Contributors Rich Geraffo Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels Bruce Chumley Vice President Channel Distribution Sales, Oracle WW Alliances & Channels Steve Biondi VP Channel Distribution Sales, Oracle WW Alliances & Channels Regional Reporters Silvia Kaske VP Oracle A&C WCE North Will O'Brien VP Oracle A&C UK/IE Eric Fontaine VP Oracle A&C WCE South Janusz Naklicki VP Oracle A&C ECEMEA

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• Correct way to handle path-finding collision matrix

  - by Xander Lamkins

  Here is an example of me utilizing path finding. The red grid represents the grid utilized by my A* library to locate a distance. This picture is only an example, currently it is all calculated on the 1x1 pixel level (pretty darn laggy). I want to make it so that the farther I click, the less accurate it will be (split the map into larger grid pieces). Edit: as mentioned by Eric, this is not a required game mechanic. I am perfectly fine with any method that allows me to make this accurate while still fast. This isn't the really the topic of this question though. The problem I have is, my current library uses a two dimensional grid of integers. The higher the number in a cell, the more resistance for that grid tile. Currently I'm setting all unwalkable spots to Integer Max. Here is an example of what I want: I'm just not sure how I should set up the arrays of integers of the grid. Every time an element is added/removed to/from the game, it's collision details are updated in the table. Here is a picture of what the map looks like on my collision layer: I probably shouldn't be creating new arrays every time I have to do a path find because my game needs to support tons of PF at the same time. Should I have multiple arrays that are all updated when the dynamic elements are updated (a building is built/a building is destroyed). The problem I see with this is that it will probably make the creation and destruction of buildings a little more laggy than I would want because it would be setting the collision grid for each built in accuracy level. I would also have to add more/remove some arrays if I ever in the future changed the map size. Should I generate the new array based on an accuracy value every time I need to PF? The problem I see with this is that it will probably make any form of PF just as laggy because it will have to search through a MapWidth x MapHeight number of cells to shrink it all down. Or is there a better way? I'm certainly not the best at optimizing really anything. I've just started dealing with XNA so I'm not used to having optimization code really doing much of an affect until now... :( If you need code examples, please ask. I'll add it as an edit. EDIT: While this doesn't directly relate to the question, I figure the more information I provide, the better. To keep your units from moving as accurately to the players desired position, I've decided that once the unit PFs over to the less accurate grid piece, it will then PF on a more accurate level to the exact position requested.

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• How to force a clock update using ntp?

  - by ysap

  I am running Ubuntu on an ARM based embedded system that lacks a battery backed RTC. The wake-up time is somewhere during 1970. Thus, I use the NTP service to update the time to the current time. I added the following line to /etc/rc.local file: sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov However, after startup, it still takes a couple of minutes until the time is updated, during which period I cannot work effectively with tar and make. How can I force a clock update at any given time? UPDATE 1: The following (thanks to Eric and Stephan) works fine from command line, but fails to update the clock when put in /etc/rc.local: $ date ; sudo service ntp stop ; sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov ; sudo service ntp start ; date Thu Jan 1 00:00:58 UTC 1970 * Stopping NTP server ntpd [ OK ] * Starting NTP server [ OK ] Thu Feb 14 18:52:21 UTC 2013 What am I doing wrong? UPDATE 2: I tried following the few suggestions that came in response to the 1st update, but nothing seems to actually do the job as required. Here's what I tried: Replace the server to us.pool.ntp.org Use explicit paths to the programs Remove the ntp service altogether and leave just sudo ntpdate ... in rc.local Remove the sudo from the above command in rc.local Using the above, the machine still starts at 1970. However, when doing this from command line once logged in (via ssh), the clock gets updated as soon as I invoke ntpdate. Last thing I did was to remove that from rc.local and place a call to ntpdate in my .bashrc file. This does update the clock as expected, and I get the true current time once the command prompt is available. However, this means that if the machine is turned on and no user is logged in, then the time never gets updates. I can, of course, reinstall the ntp service so at least the clock is updated within a few minutes from startup, but then we're back at square 1. So, is there a reason why placing the ntpdate command in rc.local does not perform the required task, while doing so in .bashrc works fine?

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• Using Query Classes With NHibernate

  - by Liam McLennan

  Even when using an ORM, such as NHibernate, the developer still has to decide how to perform queries. The simplest strategy is to get access to an ISession and directly perform a query whenever you need data. The problem is that doing so spreads query logic throughout the entire application – a clear violation of the Single Responsibility Principle. A more advanced strategy is to use Eric Evan’s Repository pattern, thus isolating all query logic within the repository classes. I prefer to use Query Classes. Every query needed by the application is represented by a query class, aka a specification. To perform a query I: Instantiate a new instance of the required query class, providing any data that it needs Pass the instantiated query class to an extension method on NHibernate’s ISession type. To query my database for all people over the age of sixteen looks like this: [Test] public void QueryBySpecification() { var canDriveSpecification = new PeopleOverAgeSpecification(16); var allPeopleOfDrivingAge = session.QueryBySpecification(canDriveSpecification); } To be able to query for people over a certain age I had to create a suitable query class: public class PeopleOverAgeSpecification : Specification<Person> { private readonly int age; public PeopleOverAgeSpecification(int age) { this.age = age; } public override IQueryable<Person> Reduce(IQueryable<Person> collection) { return collection.Where(person => person.Age > age); } public override IQueryable<Person> Sort(IQueryable<Person> collection) { return collection.OrderBy(person => person.Name); } } Finally, the extension method to add QueryBySpecification to ISession: public static class SessionExtensions { public static IEnumerable<T> QueryBySpecification<T>(this ISession session, Specification<T> specification) { return specification.Fetch( specification.Sort( specification.Reduce(session.Query<T>()) ) ); } } The inspiration for this style of data access came from Ayende’s post Do You Need a Framework?. I am sick of working through multiple layers of abstraction that don’t do anything. Have you ever seen code that required a service layer to call a method on a repository, that delegated to a common repository base class that wrapped and ORMs unit of work? I can achieve the same thing with NHibernate’s ISession and a single extension method. If you’re interested you can get the full Query Classes example source from Github.

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• Debian/Ubuntu - No network connection

  - by leviathanus

  I have a very weird situation on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server. I can not access (ping) my gateway, although I believe my config is ok - I attach the outputs. Any hints where to look? (I changed the beginning of the IP to something different, just obfuscation) ping 5.9.10.129 PING 5.9.10.129 (5.9.10.129) 56(84) bytes of data. From 5.9.10.129 (5.9.10.129) icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable From 5.9.10.129 (5.9.10.129) icmp_seq=3 Destination Host Unreachable From 5.9.10.129 (5.9.10.129) icmp_seq=4 Destination Host Unreachable uname -r 3.2.0-29-generic ifconfig eth0 eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 3c:97:0e:0e:54:d7 inet addr:5.9.10.142 Bcast:5.9.10.159 Mask:255.255.255.224 inet6 addr: fe80::8e70:5aff:feda:c4ac/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1216 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:490 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:107470 (107.4 KB) TX bytes:34344 (34.3 KB) Interrupt:17 Memory:d2500000-d2520000 ip route default via 5.9.10.129 dev eth0 metric 100 5.9.10.128/27 via 5.9.10.129 dev eth0 5.9.10.128/27 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 5.9.10.142 route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 0.0.0.0 5.9.10.129 0.0.0.0 UG 1000 0 0 eth0 5.9.10.128 5.9.10.129 255.255.255.224 UG 0 0 0 eth0 5.9.10.128 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.224 U 0 0 0 eth0 iptables -L Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination UPD: Eric, this is how routing information looks on a working server: 0.0.0.0 78.47.198.49 0.0.0.0 UG 100 0 0 eth0 78.47.198.48 78.47.198.49 255.255.255.240 UG 0 0 0 eth0 78.47.198.48 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.240 U 0 0 0 eth0 As I understand it, Hetzner tries to ensure security by this, so I can not take over an IP by changing my MAC. But this is another server, which has another netmask (255.255.255.240) UPD2: BatchyX, on the working server: 78.47.198.49 dev eth0 src 78.47.198.60 cache on the broken: 5.9.10.129 dev eth0 src 5.9.10.142 cache

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• What are the steps needed to set up and use security for AWS command line tools?

  - by chris

  I've been trying to set up the AWS command-line tools following Eric's most useful guide at http://alestic.com/2012/09/aws-command-line-tools. I can't seem to find a good how-to for how to generate the x509 certificate and private key, and how that relates to the various security files the guide creates. Update: I have found a couple of links that describe the some steps. These steps seem to work, however I'm not sure if this is secure & the best way to do it: 1) Create a private key openssl genrsa -out my-private-key.pem 2048 2) Create x.509 cert openssl req -new -x509 -key my-private-key.pem -out my-x509-cert.pem -days 365 Hit enter to accept all of the defaults. Then, from the IAM Dashboard, User, select a user & click on the "Security Credentials" tab. Click on "Manage Signing Certificates", then "Upload Signing Certificate", paste in the contents of my-x509-cert.pem, click OK and it should be accepted. One step that is discussed, but not required for me, was the addition and subsequent removal of a pass phrase on the private key. Should I have been prompted for one, and is my cert potentially unsafe because of this?

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• Create image (EBS AMI) takes forever - possibly caused MySQL Server to break?

  - by fuzzybee

  I'm trying to create an EBS AMI from my running EC2 instance to reuse my LAMP fully configured (for my needs). I got my website up and running yesterday on this EC2 instance my MySQL was working fine until this morning (it's not that difficult to install LAMP thanks to yum so I can't see how I could go wrong with this; having said that, it's always difficult for one to realise his own errors) I have seen "Loading, please wait ..." for a few hours now. How do I know whether this is completed or its progress? Shortly after I tried to create the AMI image from my EC2 instance, I encountered database connection error can't connect to local mysql server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' I was able to restart mysqld at first. But database connection was down again. This time, I could not restart mysqld anymore. It shows MySQL Daemon failed to start. Could my attempt to create the AMI by any chance cause the MySQL server to reboot or corrupt? I did a lot of searched and have done the following although I think I shouldn't have to do any workaround for MySQL server to work here chown -R mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql/ I also found this workaround but I'm very reluctant to follow due to my belief and the fact I would need to understand this problem first. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Getting back to searching for a solution for the MySQL server problem ... Thanks, Eric

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• It&rsquo;s ok to throw System.Exception&hellip;

  - by Chris Skardon

  No. No it’s not. It’s not just me saying that, it’s the Microsoft guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229007.aspx  Do not throw System.Exception or System.SystemException. Also – as important: Do not catch System.Exception or System.SystemException in framework code, unless you intend to re-throw.. Throwing: Always, always try to pick the most specific exception type you can, if the parameter you have received in your method is null, throw an ArgumentNullException, value received greater than expected? ArgumentOutOfRangeException. For example: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("theInt", theInt, "theInt needs to be greater than zero."); if (theString == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("theString"); if (theString.Length == 0) throw new ArgumentException("theString needs to have content.", "theString"); } Why do we want to do this? It’s a lot of extra code when compared with a simple: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0 || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(theString)) throw new Exception("The parameters were invalid."); } It all comes down to a couple of things; the catching of the exceptions, and the information you are passing back to the calling code. Catching: Ok, so let’s go with introduction level Exception handling, taught by many-a-university: You do all your work in a try clause, and catch anything wrong in the catch clause. So this tends to give us code like this: try { /* All the shizzle */ } catch { /* Deal with errors */ } But of course, we can improve on that by catching the exception so we can report on it: try { } catch(Exception ex) { /* Log that 'ex' occurred? */ } Now we’re at the point where people tend to go: Brilliant, I’ve got exception handling nailed, what next??? and code gets littered with the catch(Exception ex) nastiness. Why is it nasty? Let’s imagine for a moment our code is throwing an ArgumentNullException which we’re catching in the catch block and logging. Ok, the log entry has been made, so we can debug the code right? We’ve got all the info… What about an OutOfMemoryException – what can we do with that? That’s right, not a lot, chances are you can’t even log it (you are out of memory after all), but you’ve caught it – and as such - have hidden it. So, as part of this, there are two things you can do one, is the rethrow method: try { /* code */ } catch (Exception ex) { //Log throw; } Note, it’s not catch (Exception ex) { throw ex; } as that will wipe all your important stack trace information. This does get your exception to continue, and is the only reason you would catch Exception (anywhere other than a global catch-all) in your code. The other preferred method is to catch the exceptions you can deal with. It may not matter that the string I’m passing in is null, and I can cope with it like this: try{ DoSomething(myString); } catch(ArgumentNullException){} And that’s fine, it means that any exceptions I can’t deal with (OutOfMemory for example) will be propagated out to other code that can deal with it. Of course, this is horribly messy, no one wants try / catch blocks everywhere and that’s why Microsoft added the ‘Try’ methods to the framework, and it’s a strategy we should continue. If I try: int i = (int) "one"; I will get an InvalidCastException which means I need the try / catch block, but I could mitigate this using the ‘TryParse’ method: int i; if(!Int32.TryParse("one", out i)) return; Similarly, in the ‘DoSomething’ example, it might be beneficial to have a ‘TryDoSomething’ that returns a boolean value indicating the success of continuing. Obviously this isn’t practical in every case, so use the ol’ common sense approach. Onwards Yer thanks Chris, I’m looking forward to writing tonnes of new code. Fear not, that is where helpers come into it… (but that’s the next post)

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• Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

  - by Michael Stephenson

  In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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• Big Data: Size isn’t everything

  - by Simon Elliston Ball

  Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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• Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

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• How to Set Up Your Enterprise Social Organization

  - by Mike Stiles

  The rush for business organizations to establish, grow, and adopt social was driven out of necessity and inevitability. The result, however, was a sudden, booming social presence creating touch points with customers, partners and influencers, but without any corporate social organization or structure in place to effectively manage it. Even today, many business leaders remain uncertain as to how to corral this social media thing so that it makes sense for their enterprise. Imagine their panic when they hear one of the most beneficial approaches to corporate use of social involves giving up at least some hierarchical control and empowering employees to publicly engage customers. And beyond that, they should also be empowered, regardless of their corporate status, to engage and collaborate internally, spurring “off the grid” innovation. An HBR blog points out that traditionally, enterprise organizations function from the top down, and employees work end-to-end, structured around business processes. But the social enterprise opens up structures that up to now have not exactly been embraced by turf-protecting executives and managers. The blog asks, “What if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy?” What if indeed? The social enterprise activates internal resources without the usual obsession with position. It is the dawn of mass collaboration. That does not, however, mean this mass collaboration has to lead to uncontrolled chaos. In an extended interview with Oracle, Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Oracle SVP Reggie Bradford paint a complete picture of today’s social enterprise, including internal organizational structures Altimeter Group has seen emerge. One sign of a mature social enterprise is the establishing of a social Center of Excellence (CoE), which serves as a hub for high-level social strategy, training and education, research, measurement and accountability, and vendor selection. This CoE is led by a corporate Social Strategist, most likely from a Marketing or Corporate Communications background. Reporting to them are the Community Managers, the front lines of customer interaction and engagement; business unit liaisons that coordinate the enterprise; and social media campaign/product managers, social analysts, and developers. With content rising as the defining factor for social success, Altimeter also sees a Content Strategist position emerging. Across the enterprise, Altimeter has seen 5 organizational patterns. Watching the video will give you the pros and cons of each. Decentralized - Anyone can do anything at any time on any social channel. Centralized – One central groups controls all social communication for the company. Hub and Spoke – A centralized group, but business units can operate their own social under the hub’s guidance and execution. Most enterprises are using this model. Dandelion – Each business unit develops their own social strategy & staff, has its own ability to deploy, and its own ability to engage under the central policies of the CoE. Honeycomb – Every employee can do social, but as opposed to the decentralized model, it’s coordinated and monitored on one platform. The average enterprise has a whopping 178 social accounts, nearly ¼ of which are usually semi-idle and need to be scrapped. The last thing any C-suite needs is to cope with fragmented technologies, solutions and platforms. It’s neither scalable nor strategic. The prepared, effective social enterprise has a technology partner that can quickly and holistically integrate emerging platforms and technologies, such that whatever internal social command structure you’ve set up can continue efficiently executing strategy without skipping a beat. @mikestiles

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• How to Set Up Your Enterprise Social Organization?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  By Mike Stiles on Dec 04, 2012 The rush for business organizations to establish, grow, and adopt social was driven out of necessity and inevitability. The result, however, was a sudden, booming social presence creating touch points with customers, partners and influencers, but without any corporate social organization or structure in place to effectively manage it. Even today, many business leaders remain uncertain as to how to corral this social media thing so that it makes sense for their enterprise. Imagine their panic when they hear one of the most beneficial approaches to corporate use of social involves giving up at least some hierarchical control and empowering employees to publicly engage customers. And beyond that, they should also be empowered, regardless of their corporate status, to engage and collaborate internally, spurring “off the grid” innovation. An HBR blog points out that traditionally, enterprise organizations function from the top down, and employees work end-to-end, structured around business processes. But the social enterprise opens up structures that up to now have not exactly been embraced by turf-protecting executives and managers. The blog asks, “What if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy?” What if indeed? The social enterprise activates internal resources without the usual obsession with position. It is the dawn of mass collaboration. That does not, however, mean this mass collaboration has to lead to uncontrolled chaos. In an extended interview with Oracle, Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Oracle SVP Reggie Bradford paint a complete picture of today’s social enterprise, including internal organizational structures Altimeter Group has seen emerge. One sign of a mature social enterprise is the establishing of a social Center of Excellence (CoE), which serves as a hub for high-level social strategy, training and education, research, measurement and accountability, and vendor selection. This CoE is led by a corporate Social Strategist, most likely from a Marketing or Corporate Communications background. Reporting to them are the Community Managers, the front lines of customer interaction and engagement; business unit liaisons that coordinate the enterprise; and social media campaign/product managers, social analysts, and developers. With content rising as the defining factor for social success, Altimeter also sees a Content Strategist position emerging. Across the enterprise, Altimeter has seen 5 organizational patterns. Watching the video will give you the pros and cons of each. Decentralized - Anyone can do anything at any time on any social channel. Centralized – One central groups controls all social communication for the company. Hub and Spoke – A centralized group, but business units can operate their own social under the hub’s guidance and execution. Most enterprises are using this model. Dandelion – Each business unit develops their own social strategy & staff, has its own ability to deploy, and its own ability to engage under the central policies of the CoE. Honeycomb – Every employee can do social, but as opposed to the decentralized model, it’s coordinated and monitored on one platform. The average enterprise has a whopping 178 social accounts, nearly ¼ of which are usually semi-idle and need to be scrapped. The last thing any C-suite needs is to cope with fragmented technologies, solutions and platforms. It’s neither scalable nor strategic. The prepared, effective social enterprise has a technology partner that can quickly and holistically integrate emerging platforms and technologies, such that whatever internal social command structure you’ve set up can continue efficiently executing strategy without skipping a beat. @mikestiles

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• Sweet and Sour Source Control

  - by Tony Davis

  Most database developers don't use Source Control. A recent anonymous poll on SQL Server Central asked its readers "Which Version Control system do you currently use to store you database scripts?" The winner, with almost 30% of the vote was...none: "We don't use source control for database scripts". In second place with almost 28% of the vote was Microsoft's VSS. VSS? Given its reputation for being buggy, unstable and lacking most of the basic features required of a proper source control system, answering VSS is really just another way of saying "I don't use Source Control". At first glance, it's a surprising thought. You wonder how database developers can work in a team and find out what changed, when the system worked before but is now broken; to work out what happened to their changes that now seem to have vanished; to roll-back a mistake quickly so that the rest of the team have a functioning build; to find instantly whether a suspect change has been deployed to production. Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask about the scale of the database development, and correlate the two questions. If there is only one database developer within a schema, who has an automated approach to regular generation of build scripts, then the need for a formal source control system is questionable. After all, a database stores far more about its metadata than a traditional compiled application. However, what is meat for a small development is poison for a team-based development. Here, we need a form of Source Control that can reconcile simultaneous changes, store the history of changes, derive versions and builds and that can cope with forks and merges. The problem comes when one borrows a solution that was designed for conventional programming. A database is not thought of as a "file", but a vast, interdependent and intricate matrix of tables, indexes, constraints, triggers, enumerations, static data and so on, all subtly interconnected. It is an awkward fit. Subversion with its support for merges and forks, and the tolerance of different work practices, can be made to work well, if used carefully. It has a standards-based architecture that allows it to be used on all platforms such as Windows Mac, and Linux. In the words of Erland Sommerskog, developers should "just do it". What's in a database is akin to a "binary file", and the developer must work only from the file. You check out the file, edit it, and save it to disk to compile it. Dependencies are validated at this point and if you've broken anything (e.g. you renamed a column and broke all the objects that reference the column), you'll find out about it right away, and you'll be forced to fix it. Nevertheless, for many this is an alien way of working with SQL Server. Subversion is the powerhouse, not the GUI. It doesn't work seamlessly with your existing IDE, and that usually means SSMS. So the question then becomes more subtle. Would developers be less reluctant to use a fully-featured source (revision) control system for a team database development if they had a turn-key, reliable system that fitted in with their existing work-practices? I'd love to hear what you think. Cheers, Tony.

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• Managing Operational Risk of Financial Services Processes – part 1/ 2

  - by Sanjeevio

  Financial institutions view compliance as a regulatory burden that incurs a high initial capital outlay and recurring costs. By its very nature regulation takes a prescriptive, common-for-all, approach to managing financial and non-financial risk. Needless to say, no longer does mere compliance with regulation will lead to sustainable differentiation.  Genuine competitive advantage will stem from being able to cope with innovation demands of the present economic environment while meeting compliance goals with regulatory mandates in a faster and cost-efficient manner. Let’s first take a look at the key factors that are limiting the pursuit of the above goal. Regulatory requirements are growing, driven in-part by revisions to existing mandates in line with cross-border, pan-geographic, nature of financial value chains today and more so by frequent systemic failures that have destabilized the financial markets and the global economy over the last decade.  In addition to the increase in regulation, financial institutions are faced with pressures of regulatory overlap and regulatory conflict. Regulatory overlap arises primarily from two things: firstly, due to the blurring of boundaries between lines-of-businesses with complex organizational structures and secondly, due to varying requirements of jurisdictional directives across geographic boundaries e.g. a securities firm with operations in US and EU would be subject different requirements of “Know-Your-Customer” (KYC) as per the PATRIOT ACT in US and MiFiD in EU. Another consequence and concomitance of regulatory change is regulatory conflict, which again, arises primarily from two things: firstly, due to diametrically opposite priorities of line-of-business and secondly, due to tension that regulatory requirements create between shareholders interests of tighter due-diligence and customer concerns of privacy. For instance, Customer Due Diligence (CDD) as per KYC requires eliciting detailed information from customers to prevent illegal activities such as money-laundering, terrorist financing or identity theft. While new customers are still more likely to comply with such stringent background checks at time of account opening, existing customers baulk at such practices as a breach of trust and privacy. As mentioned earlier regulatory compliance addresses both financial and non-financial risks. Operational risk is a non-financial risk that stems from business execution and spans people, processes, systems and information. Operational risk arising from financial processes in particular transcends other sources of such risk. Let’s look at the factors underpinning the operational risk of financial processes. The rapid pace of innovation and geographic expansion of financial institutions has resulted in proliferation and ad-hoc evolution of back-office, mid-office and front-office processes. This has had two serious implications on increasing the operational risk of financial processes: ·         Inconsistency of processes across lines-of-business, customer channels and product/service offerings. This makes it harder for the risk function to enforce a standardized risk methodology and in turn breaches harder to detect. ·         The proliferation of processes coupled with increasingly frequent change-cycles has resulted in accidental breaches and increased vulnerability to regulatory inadequacies. In summary, regulatory growth (including overlap and conflict) coupled with process proliferation and inconsistency is driving process compliance complexity In my next post I will address the implications of this process complexity on financial institutions and outline the role of BPM in lowering specific aspects of operational risk of financial processes.

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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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• Report Model; problem regarding many-to-many relations

  - by Koen

  I'm having trouble setting up a report model to create reports with report builder. I guess I'm doing something wrong when configuring the report model, but it might also due to change of primary entity in report builder. I have 3 tables: Client, Address and Product. The Client has PK ClientNumber. The Address and Product both have a FK relation on ClientNumber. The relation between Client and Address is 1-to-many and also between Client and Product: Product-(many:1)-Client-(1:many)-Address. I've created a report model (mostly auto generate) with these 3 tables, for each table I've made an Entity. Now on the Client Entity , I've got 2 roles, Address and Product. They both have a cardinality of 'OptionalMany', because Client can have multiple Addresses or Products. On both Address and Product I have a Client Role with cardinality 'One', because for each Address or Product, there has to be a Client (tried OptionalOne as well...). Now I'm trying to create a report in Report Builder (2.0) where I select fields from these three entities. I'd like an overview of Clients with their main address and their products, but I don't seem to be able to create a report with fields from both Address and Products in it. I start by selecting attributes from Client, and as soon as I add Product for example the Primary entity changes as if I'm selecting Products (instead of Clients). This is a basic example of a problem I'm facing in a much more complex model. I've tried lots of different things for 2 days, but I can't get it to work. Does anyone have an idea how to cope with this? (Using SSRS 2008)

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