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  • Objects won't render when Texture Compression + Mipmapping is Enabled

    - by felipedrl
    I'm optimizing my game and I've just implemented compressed (DXTn) texture loading in OpenGL. I've worked my way removing bugs but I can't figure out this one: objects w/ DXTn + mipmapped textures are not being rendered. It's not like they are appearing with a flat color, they just don't appear at all. DXTn textured objs render and mipmapped non-compressed textures render just fine. The texture in question is 256x256 I generate the mips all the way down 4x4, i.e 1 block. I've checked on gDebugger and it display all the levels (7) just fine. I'm using GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST for min filter and GL_LINEAR for mag one. The texture is being compressed and mipmaps being created offline with Paint.NET tool using super sampling method. (I also tried bilinear just in case) Source follow: [SNIPPET 1: Loading DDS into sys memory + Initializing Object] // Read header DDSHeader header; file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&header), sizeof(DDSHeader)); uint pos = static_cast<uint>(file.tellg()); file.seekg(0, std::ios_base::end); uint dataSizeInBytes = static_cast<uint>(file.tellg()) - pos; file.seekg(pos, std::ios_base::beg); // Read file data mData = new unsigned char[dataSizeInBytes]; file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(mData), dataSizeInBytes); file.close(); mMipmapCount = header.mipmapcount; mHeight = header.height; mWidth = header.width; mCompressionType = header.pf.fourCC; // Only support files divisible by 4 (for compression blocks algorithms) massert(mWidth % 4 == 0 && mHeight % 4 == 0); massert(mCompressionType == NO_COMPRESSION || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT1 || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT3 || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT5); // Allow textures up to 65536x65536 massert(header.mipmapcount <= MAX_MIPMAP_LEVELS); mTextureFilter = TextureFilter::LINEAR; if (mMipmapCount > 0) { mMipmapFilter = MipmapFilter::NEAREST; } else { mMipmapFilter = MipmapFilter::NO_MIPMAP; } mBitsPerPixel = header.pf.bitcount; if (mCompressionType == NO_COMPRESSION) { if (header.pf.flags & DDPF_ALPHAPIXELS) { // The only format supported w/ alpha is A8R8G8B8 massert(header.pf.amask == 0xFF000000 && header.pf.rmask == 0xFF0000 && header.pf.gmask == 0xFF00 && header.pf.bmask == 0xFF); mInternalFormat = GL_RGBA8; mFormat = GL_BGRA; mDataType = GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE; } else { massert(header.pf.rmask == 0xFF0000 && header.pf.gmask == 0xFF00 && header.pf.bmask == 0xFF); mInternalFormat = GL_RGB8; mFormat = GL_BGR; mDataType = GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE; } } else { uint blockSizeInBytes = 16; switch (mCompressionType) { case COMPRESSION_DXT1: blockSizeInBytes = 8; if (header.pf.flags & DDPF_ALPHAPIXELS) { mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT; } else { mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT; } break; case COMPRESSION_DXT3: mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT3_EXT; break; case COMPRESSION_DXT5: mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT5_EXT; break; default: // Not Supported (DXT2, DXT4 or any compression format) massert(false); } } [SNIPPET 2: Uploading into video memory] massert(mData != NULL); glGenTextures(1, &mHandle); massert(mHandle!=0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, mHandle); commitFiltering(); uint offset = 0; Renderer* renderer = Renderer::getInstance(); switch (mInternalFormat) { case GL_RGB: case GL_RGBA: case GL_RGB8: case GL_RGBA8: for (uint i = 0; i < mMipmapCount + 1; ++i) { uint width = std::max(1U, mWidth >> i); uint height = std::max(1U, mHeight >> i); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, i, mInternalFormat, width, height, mHasBorder, mFormat, mDataType, &mData[offset]); offset += width * height * (mBitsPerPixel / 8); } break; case GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT3_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT5_EXT: { uint blockSize = 16; if (mInternalFormat == GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT || mInternalFormat == GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT) { blockSize = 8; } uint width = mWidth; uint height = mHeight; for (uint i = 0; i < mMipmapCount + 1; ++i) { uint nBlocks = ((width + 3) / 4) * ((height + 3) / 4); // Only POT textures allowed for mipmapping massert(width % 4 == 0 && height % 4 == 0); glCompressedTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, i, mInternalFormat, width, height, mHasBorder, nBlocks * blockSize, &mData[offset]); offset += nBlocks * blockSize; if (width <= 4 && height <= 4) { break; } width = std::max(4U, width / 2); height = std::max(4U, height / 2); } break; } default: // Not Supported massert(false); } Also I don't understand the "+3" in the block size computation but looking for a solution for my problema I've encountered people defining it as that. I guess it won't make a differente for POT textures but I put just in case. Thanks.

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  • What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

    - by Jacek Ziabicki
    Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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  • High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

    - by BuckWoody
    Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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  • Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

    - by Rajesh Raheja
    Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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  • SQL Server - Rebuilding Indexes

    - by Renso
    Goal: Rebuild indexes in SQL server. This can be done one at a time or with the example script below to rebuild all index for a specified table or for all tables in a given database. Why? The data in indexes gets fragmented over time. That means that as the index grows, the newly added rows to the index are physically stored in other sections of the allocated database storage space. Kind of like when you load your Christmas shopping into the trunk of your car and it is full you continue to load some on the back seat, in the same way some storage buffer is created for your index but once that runs out the data is then stored in other storage space and your data in your index is no longer stored in contiguous physical pages. To access the index the database manager has to "string together" disparate fragments to create the full-index and create one contiguous set of pages for that index. Defragmentation fixes that. What does the fragmentation affect?Depending of course on how large the table is and how fragmented the data is, can cause SQL Server to perform unnecessary data reads, slowing down SQL Server’s performance.Which index to rebuild?As a rule consider that when reorganize a table's clustered index, all other non-clustered indexes on that same table will automatically be rebuilt. A table can only have one clustered index.How to rebuild all the index for one table:The DBCC DBREINDEX command will not automatically rebuild all of the indexes on a given table in a databaseHow to rebuild all indexes for all tables in a given database:USE [myDB]    -- enter your database name hereDECLARE @tableName varchar(255)DECLARE TableCursor CURSOR FORSELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tablesWHERE table_type = 'base table'OPEN TableCursorFETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @tableNameWHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0BEGINDBCC DBREINDEX(@tableName,' ',90)     --a fill factor of 90%FETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @tableNameENDCLOSE TableCursorDEALLOCATE TableCursorWhat does this script do?Reindexes all indexes in all tables of the given database. Each index is filled with a fill factor of 90%. While the command DBCC DBREINDEX runs and rebuilds the indexes, that the table becomes unavailable for use by your users temporarily until the rebuild has completed, so don't do this during production  hours as it will create a shared lock on the tables, although it will allow for read-only uncommitted data reads; i.e.e SELECT.What is the fill factor?Is the percentage of space on each index page for storing data when the index is created or rebuilt. It replaces the fill factor when the index was created, becoming the new default for the index and for any other nonclustered indexes rebuilt because a clustered index is rebuilt. When fillfactor is 0, DBCC DBREINDEX uses the fill factor value last specified for the index. This value is stored in the sys.indexes catalog view. If fillfactor is specified, table_name and index_name must be specified. If fillfactor is not specified, the default fill factor, 100, is used.How do I determine the level of fragmentation?Run the DBCC SHOWCONTIG command. However this requires you to specify the ID of both the table and index being. To make it a lot easier by only requiring you to specify the table name and/or index you can run this script:DECLARE@ID int,@IndexID int,@IndexName varchar(128)--Specify the table and index namesSELECT @IndexName = ‘index_name’    --name of the indexSET @ID = OBJECT_ID(‘table_name’)  -- name of the tableSELECT @IndexID = IndIDFROM sysindexesWHERE id = @ID AND name = @IndexName--Show the level of fragmentationDBCC SHOWCONTIG (@id, @IndexID)Here is an example:DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'Tickets' table...Table: 'Tickets' (1829581556); index ID: 1, database ID: 13TABLE level scan performed.- Pages Scanned................................: 915- Extents Scanned..............................: 119- Extent Switches..............................: 281- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 7.7- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 40.78% [115:282]- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 16.28%- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 99.16%- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 2457.0- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 69.64%DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.What's important here?The Scan Density; Ideally it should be 100%. As time goes by it drops as fragmentation occurs. When the level drops below 75%, you should consider re-indexing.Here are the results of the same table and clustered index after running the script:DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'Tickets' table...Table: 'Tickets' (1829581556); index ID: 1, database ID: 13TABLE level scan performed.- Pages Scanned................................: 692- Extents Scanned..............................: 87- Extent Switches..............................: 86- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 8.0- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 100.00% [87:87]- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 0.00%- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 22.99%- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 639.8- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 92.10%DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.What's different?The Scan Density has increased from 40.78% to 100%; no fragmentation on the clustered index. Note that since we rebuilt the clustered index, all other index were also rebuilt.

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  • Delight and Excite

    - by Applications User Experience
    Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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  • Documentation Changes in Solaris 11.1

    - by alanc
    One of the first places you can see Solaris 11.1 changes are in the docs, which have now been posted in the Solaris 11.1 Library on docs.oracle.com. I spent a good deal of time reviewing documentation for this release, and thought some would be interesting to blog about, but didn't review all the changes (not by a long shot), and am not going to cover all the changes here, so there's plenty left for you to discover on your own. Just comparing the Solaris 11.1 Library list of docs against the Solaris 11 list will show a lot of reorganization and refactoring of the doc set, especially in the system administration guides. Hopefully the new break down will make it easier to get straight to the sections you need when a task is at hand. Packaging System Unfortunately, the excellent in-depth guide for how to build packages for the new Image Packaging System (IPS) in Solaris 11 wasn't done in time to make the initial Solaris 11 doc set. An interim version was published shortly after release, in PDF form on the OTN IPS page. For Solaris 11.1 it was included in the doc set, as Packaging and Delivering Software With the Image Packaging System in Oracle Solaris 11.1, so should be easier to find, and easier to share links to specific pages the HTML version. Beyond just how to build a package, it includes details on how Solaris is packaged, and how package updates work, which may be useful to all system administrators who deal with Solaris 11 upgrades & installations. The Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages was also extended, including new sections on Relaxing Version Constraints Specified by Incorporations and Locking Packages to a Specified Version that may be of interest to those who want to keep the Solaris 11 versions of certain packages when they upgrade, such as the couple of packages that had functionality removed by an (unusual for an update release) End of Feature process in the 11.1 release. Also added in this release is a document containing the lists of all the packages in each of the major package groups in Solaris 11.1 (solaris-desktop, solaris-large-server, and solaris-small-server). While you can simply get the contents of those groups from the package repository, either via the web interface or the pkg command line, the documentation puts them in handy tables for easier side-by-side comparison, or viewing the lists before you've installed the system to pick which one you want to initially install. X Window System We've not had good X11 coverage in the online Solaris docs in a while, mostly relying on the man pages, and upstream X.Org docs. In this release, we've integrated some X coverage into the Solaris 11.1 Desktop Adminstrator's Guide, including sections on installing fonts for fontconfig or legacy X11 clients, X server configuration, and setting up remote access via X11 or VNC. Of course we continue to work on improving the docs, including a lot of contributions to the upstream docs all OS'es share (more about that another time). Security One of the things Oracle likes to do for its products is to publish security guides for administrators & developers to know how to build systems that meet their security needs. For Solaris, we started this with Solaris 11, providing a guide for sysadmins to find where the security relevant configuration options were documented. The Solaris 11.1 Security Guidelines extend this to cover new security features, such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Read-Only Zones, as well as adding additional guidelines for existing features, such as how to limit the size of tmpfs filesystems, to avoid users driving the system into swap thrashing situations. For developers, the corresponding document is the Developer's Guide to Oracle Solaris 11 Security, which has been the source for years for documentation of security-relevant Solaris API's such as PAM, GSS-API, and the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. For Solaris 11.1, a new appendix was added to start providing Secure Coding Guidelines for Developers, leveraging the CERT Secure Coding Standards and OWASP guidelines to provide the base recommendations for common programming languages and their standard API's. Solaris specific secure programming guidance was added via links to other documentation in the product doc set. In parallel, we updated the Solaris C Libary Functions security considerations list with details of Solaris 11 enhancements such as FD_CLOEXEC flags, additional *at() functions, and new stdio functions such as asprintf() and getline(). A number of code examples throughout the Solaris 11.1 doc set were updated to follow these recommendations, changing unbounded strcpy() calls to strlcpy(), sprintf() to snprintf(), etc. so that developers following our examples start out with safer code. The Writing Device Drivers guide even had the appendix updated to list which of these utility functions, like snprintf() and strlcpy(), are now available via the Kernel DDI. Little Things Of course all the big new features got documented, and some major efforts were put into refactoring and renovation, but there were also a lot of smaller things that got fixed as well in the nearly a year between the Solaris 11 and 11.1 doc releases - again too many to list here, but a random sampling of the ones I know about & found interesting or useful: The Privileges section of the DTrace Guide now gives users a pointer to find out how to set up DTrace privileges for non-global zones and what limitations are in place there. A new section on Recommended iSCSI Configuration Practices was added to the iSCSI configuration section when it moved into the SAN Configuration and Multipathing administration guide. The Managing System Power Services section contains an expanded explanation of the various tunables for power management in Solaris 11.1. The sample dcmd sources in /usr/demo/mdb were updated to include ::help output, so that developers like myself who follow the examples don't forget to include it (until a helpful code reviewer pointed it out while reviewing the mdb module changes for Xorg 1.12). The README file in that directory was updated to show the correct paths for installing both kernel & userspace modules, including the 64-bit variants.

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  • Oracle B2B - Synchronous Request Reply

    - by cdwright
    Introduction So first off, let me say I didn't create this demo (although I did modify it some). I got it from a member of the B2B development technical staff. Since it came with only a simple readme file, I thought I would take some time and write a more detailed explanation about how it works. Beginning with Oracle SOA Suite PS5 (11.1.1.6), B2B supports synchronous request reply over http using the b2b/syncreceiver servlet. I’m attaching the demo to this blog which includes a SOA composite archive that needs to be deployed using JDeveloper, a B2B repository with two agreements that need to be deployed using the B2B console, and a test xml file that gets sent to the b2b/syncreceiver servlet using your favorite SOAP test tool (I'm using Firefox Poster here). You can download the zip file containing the demo here. The demo works by sending the sample xml request file (req.xml) to http://<b2bhost>:8001/b2b/syncreceiver using the SOAP test tool.  The syncreceiver servlet keeps the socket connection open between itself and the test tool so that it can synchronously send the reply message back. When B2B receives the inbound request message, it is passed to the SOA composite through the default B2B Fabric binding. A simple reply is created in BPEL and returned to B2B which then sends the message back to the test tool using that same socket connection. I’ll show you the B2B configuration first, then we’ll look at the soa composite. Configuring B2B No additional configuration necessary in order to use the syncreceiver servlet. It is already running when you start SOA. After importing the GC_SyncReqRep.zip repository file into B2B, you’ll have the typical GlobalChips host trading partner and the Acme remote trading partner. Document Management The repository contains two very simple custom XML document definitions called Orders and OrdersResponse. In order to determine the trading partner agreement needed to process the inbound Orders document, you need to know two things about it; what is it and where it came from. So let’s look at how B2B identifies the appropriate document definition for the message. The XSD’s for these two document definitions themselves are not particularly interesting. Whenever you're dealing with custom XML documents, B2B identifies the appropriate document definition for each XML message using an XPath Identification Expression. The expression is entered for each of these document definitions under the document administration tab in the B2B console. The full XPATH expression for the Orders document is  //*[local-name()='shiporder']/*[local-name()='shipto']/*[local-name()='name']/text(). You can see this path in the XSD diagram below and how it uniquely identifies this message. The OrdersReponse document is identified in the same way. The XPath expression for it is //*[local-name()='Response']/*[local-name()='Status']/text(). You can see how it’s path differs uniquely identifying the reply from the request. Trading Partner Profile The trading partner profiles are very simple too. For GlobalChips, a generic identifier is being used to identify the sender of the response document using the host trading partner name. For Acme, a generic identifier is also being used to identify the sender of the inbound request using the remote trading partner name. The document types are added for the remote trading partner as usual. So the remote trading partner Acme is the sender of the Orders document, and it is the receiver of the OrdersResponse document. For the remote trading partner only, there needs to be a dummy channel which gets used in the outbound response agreement. The channel is not actually used. It is just a necessary place holder that needs to be there when creating the agreement. Trading Partner Agreement The agreements are equally simple. There is no validation and translation is not an option for a custom XML document type. For the InboundAgreement (request) the document definition is set to OrdersDef. In the Agreement Parameters section the generic identifiers have been added for the host and remote trading partners. That’s all that is needed for the inbound transaction. For the OutboundAgreement (response), the document definition is set to OrdersResponseDef and the generic identifiers for the two trading partners are added. The remote trading partner dummy delivery channel is also added to the agreement. SOA Composite Import the SOA composite archive into JDeveloper as an EJB JAR file. Open the composite and you should have a project that looks like this. In the composite, open the b2bInboundSyncSvc exposed service and advance through the setup wizard. Select your Application Server Connection and advance to the Operations window. Notice here that the B2B binding is set to Receive. It is not set for Synchronous Request Reply. Continue advancing through the wizard as you normally would and select finish at the end. Now open BPELProcess1 in the composite. The BPEL process is set as a Synchronous Request Reply as you can see below. The while loop is there just to give the process something to do. The actual reply message is prepared in the assignResponseValues assignment followed by an Invoke of the B2B binding. Open the replyResponse Invoke and go to the properties tab. You’ll see that the fromTradingPartnerId, toTradingPartner, documentTypeName, and documentProtocolRevision properties have been set. Testing the Configuration To test the configuration, I used Firefox Poster. Enter the URL for the b2b/syncreceiver servlet and browse for the req.xml file that contains the test request message. In the Headers tab, add the property ‘from’ and give it the value ‘Acme’. This is how B2B will know where the message is coming from and it will use that information along with the document type name to find the right trading partner agreement. Now post the message. You should get back a response with a status of ‘200 OK’. That’s all there is to it.

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  • What do the participants say about the Open Day in South Africa?

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On the 26th of September, a group of students who were specifically selected to attend an Open day at Oracle South Africa, joined us at our offices in Woodmead, Johannesburg. The Conference room was filled with inquisitive minds. What we had in store for them was a detailed presentation about Oracle which was delivered by Zuko - Cluster Leader: Tech GB South Africa. The student’s many questions were all answered especially when we started addressing the opportunities we have and detailed information on our Graduate Programme. Our employees then came to talk about their experience. This allowed all the students to have an integrated learning experience. By inviting the students to walk around our Oracle Offices allowed them to see, talk, experience a bit of the culture and ask more questions. Here is some of the feedback from the attendees: Maxwell Moloi: “The open day truly served its purpose and exceeded expectations in the sense that I got to find out more about Oracle and all the different opportunities it has to offer. The fact that Oracle supplies a full solution to a customer and not just part of it and how the company manages to setup professional development for their employees is what entices me to want to join the rapidly growing team of Oracle.” Nqobile Mabaso: “I found the open day to be quite informative and enlightening because coming from a marketing background I could apply the knowledge I got from varsity to the Company I was able to point out what they do as part of their corporate social responsibility (Oracle recently partnered with the department of education to build a school), how Oracle emphasizes on relationship building because they know they sell to people and not companies and how they offer the full stack of solutions which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.” Nondumiso Mvelase: “The Open Day was a wonderful experience for me especially because I have never been part of an Open Day before, so it was absolutely amazing for me. It gave me a good idea of how it is to be part of Oracle. We were served with lovely breakfast and lunch which I enjoyed. I wish the Open Day went on for a whole week. Seeing and hearing from 2013 Graduates, telling us about their experience within Oracle was very inspiring to me. They were encouraging us to work hard if we ever got the opportunity they had. After hearing this from them I will definitely not take it for granted.” Itumeleng Moraka: “Before I walked into the Oracle offices all that was in my mind was databases and cloud storage. I was then surrounded by passionate, enthusiastic and welcoming employees. I came across a positive energy within the multinational company. I realized that Oracle is not a company that operates in survival mode. This may sound idealistic, but they operate in a non-traditional way investing more into innovation, they stay focused on what matters most about where technology is going and at the same time they are not losing sight of how their products make a difference in the world.” For more information on how to be part of the Oracle Graduate Programme please follow us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/CampusAtOracle /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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;}

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  • The Best BPM Journey: More Exciting Destinations with Process Accelerators

    - by Cesare Rotundo
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Open World (OOW) earlier this month has been a great occasion to discuss with our BPM customers. It was interesting to hear definite patterns emerging from those conversations: “BPM is a journey”, “experiences to share”, “our organization now understands what BPM is”, and my favorite (with some caveats): “BPM is like wine tasting, once you start, you want to try more”. These customers have started their journey, climbed up the learning curve, and reached a vantage point that allows them to see their next BPM destination. They see the next few processes they are going to tackle and improve with BPM. These processes/destinations target both horizontal processes where BPM replaces or coordinates manual activities, and critical industry processes that the company needs to improve to compete and deliver increasing value. Each new destination generates value, allowing the organization to reduce the cost of manual processes that were not supported by apps/custom development, and increase efficiency of end-to-end processes partially covered by apps/custom dev. The question we wanted to answer is how to help organizations experience deeper success with BPM, by increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and equipping them with the right tools. We decided that we needed to identify destinations, and plot routes to show the fastest path to those destinations. In the end we want to enable customers to reach “Process Excellence”: continuously set new targets and consistently and efficiently reach them. The result is Oracle Process Accelerators (PA), solutions built using the rich functionality in Oracle BPM Suite. PAs offers a rapidly expanding list of exciting destinations. Our launch of the latest installment of Process Accelerators at Oracle Open World includes new Industry-focused solutions such as Public Sector Incident Reporting and Financial Services Loan Origination, and improved other horizontal PAs, including Travel Request Management, Document Routing and Approval, and Internal Service Requests. Just before OOW we had extended the Oracle deployment of Travel Request Management, riding the enthusiastic response from early adopters among travelers (employees), management and support (approvers). “Getting there first” means being among the first to extract value from the PA approach, while acquiring deeper insights into the customers’ perspective. This is especially noteworthy when it comes to PAs, a set of solutions designed to be quickly deployed and iteratively improved by customers. The OOW launch has generated immediate feedback from customers, non-customers, analysts, and partners. They all confirmed that both Business and IT at organizations benefit from PAs when it comes to exploring the potential for BPM to improve their business processes. PAs help customers visualize what can be done with BPM, and PAs are made to be extended: you can see your destination, change the path to fit your needs, and deploy. We're discovering new destinations/processes that the market wants us to support, generic enough across industries and within industries. We'll keep on building sets of requirements, deliver functional design, construct solutions using Oracle BPM, and test them not only functionally but for performance, scalability, clustering, making them robust, product-quality. Delivering BPM solutions with product-grade quality is the equivalent of following a tried-and-tested path on a map. Do you know of existing destinations in your industry? If yes, we can draw a path to innovative processes together.

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  • University teaches DOS-style C++, how to deal with it

    - by gaidal
    Half a year ago I had a look at available programming educations. I chose this one because unlike most of the choices: The majority of the courses seemed to be about something concrete and useful; the languages used are C++ and Java which are platform-independent; later courses include developing for mobile devices and a course on Android development, which seemed modern and relevant. Now after two introductory courses we're just starting with C++, and my programming professor seems a bit weird. He's tested us on things like "why should you use constants" and "why are globals bad" in a kind of mechanical way, without much context, before teaching actual programming. His handouts use system("pause"), system("cls"), and getch() from some conio.h that seems ancient according to what I've read. I just did a task that was about printing the "ASCII letters from 32 to 255" (huh?), with an example picture showing a table with Windows' Extended ASCII - of course I got other results for 128-255 on my Arch Linux that uses Unicode, and this isn't mentioned at all. I don't know, it just doesn't seem right... As if he is teaching programming because he has to, perhaps? Should I bring such things up? Hmm. I was looking forward to learning from someone who really knows stuff, and in an academic, rigorous way, like SICP or something. Aren't professors in programming supposed to be like that? I studied math for a while and every teacher and assistant there were really precise about what they said, but this is my second programming teacher that is sort of disappointing. Oh well. Now, question: Is this what to expect from universities or Not OK, and how do I deal with it? I have never touched the language C++ (or C) until now, and am not the right person to jump up and say "This is So Wrong!", so if I google something and find 10 people who say "xxx is blasphemy", how do I skillfully communicate this? I do think it would be better for those classmates who are total beginners not to learn bad habits (such as these vibes of total ignorance of other platforms!) during the upcoming courses, but don't want to disrespect the teacher. I don't know if it's reasonable or just cocky to bring up things like "what about other platforms?" or "but what about this article or stackoverflow answer that I read that said..." for every assignment? Or, if he keeps ignoring non-Windows-programming, should I give up and focus on my own projects or somehow argue that this really isn't OK nowadays? Are there any programming teachers out there, what do you think? By the way these are web-based courses, all interaction between teachers and students takes place in a forum. EDIT: A few answers seem to be making some incorrect assumptions, so maybe I should add a few things. I have been doing programming for fun on and off for 10 years, am pretty comfortable in 3 languages and read programming blogs et c regularly. Also, I feel kind of done being a student, having a degree in another field. I just need another, relevant diploma to work as a programmer, so I'm going back for that. Studying computer science for 5 years is not for me anymore, even though I enjoy learning and solving problems in my free time. Second, let me highlight that I don't expect it to be like the industry at all, quite the contrary. I expect it to be academic, dry and unnecessarily correct. No, it's not just math. Every professor I have had in math, or Japanese (major) or Chinese (minor) have been very very academic, discussing subtle points for hours with passion. But the courses I'm taking now and a previous one in programming don't seem serious. They neither resemble industry NOR academia. That is the problem. And it's not because I can't learn programming anyway. Third, I don't necessarily want to learn C++ or Android development, and I know I could teach myself those and anything else if I wanted to. But I am going back to school anyway, and those platform-independent languages and mobile stuff made me think that maybe they're serious about teaching something relevant here. Seems like I got this wrong, but we'll see.

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  • At times, you need to hire a professional.

    - by Phil Factor
    After months of increasingly demanding toil, the development team I belonged to was told that the project was to be canned and the whole team would be fired.  I’d been brought into the team as an expert in the data implications of a business re-engineering of a major financial institution. Nowadays, you’d call me a data architect, I suppose.  I’d spent a happy year being paid consultancy fees solving a succession of interesting problems until the point when the company lost is nerve, and closed the entire initiative. The IT industry was in one of its characteristic mood-swings downwards.  After the announcement, we met in the canteen. A few developers had scented the smell of death around the project already hand had been applying unsuccessfully for jobs. There was a sense of doom in the mass of dishevelled and bleary-eyed developers. After giving vent to anger and despair, talk turned to getting new employment. It was then that I perked up. I’m not an obvious choice to give advice on getting, or passing,  IT interviews. I reckon I’ve failed most of the job interviews I’ve ever attended. I once even failed an interview for a job I’d already been doing perfectly well for a year. The jobs I’ve got have mostly been from personal recommendation. Paradoxically though, from years as a manager trying to recruit good staff, I know a lot about what IT managers are looking for.  I gave an impassioned speech outlining the important factors in getting to an interview.  The most important thing, certainly in my time at work is the quality of the résumé or CV. I can’t even guess the huge number of CVs (résumés) I’ve read through, scanning for candidates worth interviewing.  Many IT Developers find it impossible to describe their  career succinctly on two sides of paper.  They leave chunks of their life out (were they in prison?), get immersed in detail, put in irrelevancies, describe what was going on at work rather than what they themselves did, exaggerate their importance, criticize their previous employers, aren’t  aware of the important aspects of a role to a potential employer, suffer from shyness and modesty,  and lack any sort of organized perspective of their work. There are many ways of failing to write a decent CV. Many developers suffer from the delusion that their worth can be recognized purely from the code that they write, and shy away from anything that seems like self-aggrandizement. No.  A resume must make a good impression, which means presenting the facts about yourself in a clear and positive way. You can’t do it yourself. Why not have your resume professionally written? A good professional CV Writer will know the qualities being looked for in a CV and interrogate you to winkle them out. Their job is to make order and sense out of a confused career, to summarize in one page a mass of detail that presents to any recruiter the information that’s wanted. To stand back and describe an accurate summary of your skills, and work-experiences dispassionately, without rancor, pity or modesty. You are no more capable of producing an objective documentation of your career than you are of taking your own appendix out.  My next recommendation was more controversial. This is to have a professional image overhaul, or makeover, followed by a professionally-taken photo portrait. I discovered this by accident. It is normal for IT professionals to face impossible deadlines and long working hours by looking more and more like something that had recently blocked a sink. Whilst working in IT, and in a state of personal dishevelment, I’d been offered the role in a high-powered amateur production of an old ex- Broadway show, purely for my singing voice. I was supposed to be the presentable star. When the production team saw me, the air was thick with tension and despair. I was dragged kicking and protesting through a succession of desperate grooming, scrubbing, dressing, dieting. I emerged feeling like “That jewelled mass of millinery, That oiled and curled Assyrian bull, Smelling of musk and of insolence.” (Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855) Section v1 stanza 6) I was then photographed by a professional stage photographer.  When the photographs were delivered, I was amazed. It wasn’t me, but it looked somehow respectable, confident, trustworthy.   A while later, when the show had ended, I took the photos, and used them for work. They went with the CV to job applications. It did the trick better than I could ever imagine.  My views went down big with the developers. Old rivalries were put immediately to one side. We voted, with a show of hands, to devote our energies for the entire notice period to getting employable. We had a team sourcing the CV Writer,  a team organising the make-overs and photographer, and a third team arranging  mock interviews. A fourth team determined the best websites and agencies for recruitment, with the help of friends in the trade.  Because there were around thirty developers, we were in a good negotiating position.  Of the three CV Writers we found who lived locally, one proved exceptional. She was an ex-journalist with an eye to detail, and years of experience in manipulating language. We tried her skills out on a developer who seemed a hopeless case, and he was called to interview within a week.  I was surprised, too, how many companies were experts at image makeovers. Within the month, we all looked like those weird slick  people in the ‘Office-tagged’ stock photographs who stare keenly and interestedly at PowerPoint slides in sleek chromium-plated high-rise offices. The portraits we used still adorn the entries of many of my ex-colleagues in LinkedIn. After a months’ worth of mock interviews, and technical Q&A, our stutters, hesitations, evasions and periphrastic circumlocutions were all gone.  There is little more to relate. With the résumés or CVs, mugshots, and schooling in how to pass interviews, we’d all got new and better-paid jobs well  before our month’s notice was ended. Whilst normally, an IT team under the axe is a sad and depressed place to belong to, this wonderful group of people had proved the power of organized group action in turning the experience to advantage. It left us feeling slightly guilty that we were somehow cheating, but I guess we were merely leveling the playing-field.

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  • Waiting for Windows 8: A Long, Hot Summer

    - by andrewbrust
    Microsoft has revealed some things about Windows 8, and revealed a part of the developer story for new Windows 8 “tailored,” “immersive” applications.  In retrospect, very little was shared.  The bit that was revealed to us is that those applications can be developed using a combination of HTML 5 and JavaScript.  Not much else was said, except that additional details would be revealed at Microsoft’s //Build/ conference in Anaheim, California in September. This has left a lot of people in suspense, and it seems that suspended state is going to last all summer.  The problem, of course, is that in the absence of hard information, people fill the void with Speculation, Rumor and Gloom.  That’s a bit like Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, except that it’s self-imposed by the Microsoft community and not planted by Microsoft’s competitors. This is a less-than-perfect situation.  Not only is it causing developers to worry about the value of their skill sets, but I am already hearing from consulting shops that customers are getting nervous too and, in extreme cases, opting for non-Microsoft tools for their projects as a result.  I’m also hearing from dev tool ISVs that sales have suffered as a result. It’s quite possible that the customers moving off .NET wanted to do so anyway and it’s also possible that dev tool ISVs are suffering slower sales this year due a slowed rate of economic recovery. Without hard information, tend to people interpret things negatively.  Actually, that’s the major point in all of this. While there is multitude of opinions about what the Windows 8 development platform will look like once fully revealed, there is an emerging consensus around one thing: it sure would help if Microsoft revealed more of its strategy…just enough to quash absurd rumors, stabilize the .NET ecosystem and get people to stay calm. We’ve had some reassurances thus far: there will be a Windows desktop mode; we’ll still have Windows Explorer, we’ll still run Office, we’ll still have a task bar, and all the skills and tools we use now will still work there.  But with reassurances like that…people still feel insecure.  Because telling us that Windows 8 will have what is essentially a “classic” mode sure makes it sound like today’s skill sets will soon be “classic” too…and then maybe they’ll just become obsolete. Humans find change scary; it’s natural.  And when left alone with their fears – because no one is saying anything to dispel them – people can go from frightened to paranoid, and can start to viewing things in a downright conspiratorial light.  It would be great if Microsoft stepped into the void now and told us what is coming – especially because whatever they tell us is bound to be at least a little better than what people think they are going to hear. I don’t know what the announcements will be, but I do have it on authority, from a number of sources, that Microsoft isn’t gong to talk until //Build/.  That means no news until September September 13th.  Nothing until after Labor Day.  You get zippo until after the Back-to-School sales are done. What to do?  Try not to let the dark voices of gloom and doom fill your head.  Even in the absence of answers, we still have some important facts: The .NET developer community is huge. Microsoft’s customers have major investments in .NET, and in .NET skills. Political infighting in Redmond might make for irrational decisions, but ultimately public companies can’t just alienate their advocates and piss off their customers.  Spite doesn’t trump fiduciary responsibility. The computing device markets are changing, software is changing, software business models are changing and developers are changing.  Microsoft has to keep up. The HTML + JavaScript community is huge too, and it includes many of the “changed” developers. Public companies can’t ignore new markets nor the popular standards that can help them enter those new markets.  Loyalty doesn’t trump fiduciary responsibility either. If Microsoft can appeal to new developers, then it should. If Microsoft can keep catering to its existing developers and customers -- not just through legacy support, but also through empowering futures -- then it probably will. You don’t have to shove your old friends out into the rain to make room for new ones; you can bring those new constituents in under a bigger tent.  I hope Microsoft will enlarge the tent, and I have trouble imagining why it would not.

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  • No More NCrunch For Me

    - by Steve Wilkes
    When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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  • Redirect Google crawler to different robots.txt via .htaccess

    - by user3474818
    I have googled for the answer all day and still couldn't find an answer. I have a virtual subdomain www.static.example.com which is a mirror site of www.example.com. It means I have just one root folder for subdomain and domain aswell. I want to redirect crawlers to different robots.txt file - robots_static.txt when they see .static in url in which I will forbid indexing via /disallow command. I want to do this because I have duplicated content in Google search results. Subdomain is showing the exact same content as the main domain. Does anyone know how could I achieve that crawlers sees robots_static.txt instead of robots.txt? What I have managed to find so far is this: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.static.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*robots\.txt.*\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^robots\.txt /robots_static.txt [NC,L] but when I check in webmaster tools, it still sees robots.txt as my robots file instead of robots_static.txt, so it crawls and index everything twice. What did I do wrong? Thanks EDIT: This is my .htaccess file ## # @package Joomla # @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2013 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. # @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt ## ## # READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! # # The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems # with some server configurations. It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already # be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in # your .htaccess file. If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to # beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's. If they work, # it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. ## ## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks ## Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.static.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*robots\.txt.*\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^robots\.txt /robots_static.txt [NC,L] ## Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. # If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below # This attempts to block the most common type of exploit `attempts` to Joomla! # # Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]*\([^)]*\) [OR] # Block out any script that includes a <script> tag in URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C)([^s]*s)+cript.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR] # Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR] # Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) # Return 403 Forbidden header and show the content of the root homepage RewriteRule .* index.php [F] # ## End - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. ## Begin - Custom redirects # # If you need to redirect some pages, or set a canonical non-www to # www redirect (or vice versa), place that code here. Ensure those # redirects use the correct RewriteRule syntax and the [R=301,L] flags. # ## End - Custom redirects ## # Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL # is not directly related to physical file paths. # Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root). ## # RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/system/.* RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET ## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section. # RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}] # # If the requested path and file is not /index.php and the request # has not already been internally rewritten to the index.php script RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php # and the request is for something within the component folder, # or for the site root, or for an extensionless URL, or the # requested URL ends with one of the listed extensions RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC] # and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical file RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f # and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical folder RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d # internally rewrite the request to the index.php script RewriteRule .* index.php [L] # ## End - Joomla! core SEF Section. <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|ttf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$"> Header set Expires "Wed, 15 Apr 2020 20:00:00 GMT" Header set Cache-Control "public" </FilesMatch> <ifModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </ifModule> ########## Begin - Remove Etags # FileETag none # ########## End - Remove Etags

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  • How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painfull

    - by Mr Happy
    I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painfull. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genious since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use an DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an indepth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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  • The Dreaded Startup Repair Loop on Win 7

    - by HighAltitudeCoder
    For most people, upgrading to Windows 7 has been a relatively painless process.  Not me.  I am in the unlucky 1% or less who had a somewhat less pleasant experience.  First, I cloned my entire onto a larger (and much faster) solid state hard drive, only experiencing minimal problems. Then, I bought the Retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate, took a deep breath and... oh yeah, I almost forgot - BACK UP THE COMPUTER.  The next morning I upgraded to Win 7 and everything seemed fine, until... I rebooted the system, the nice Windows 7 launch graphics come up, it's about to launch and AWWW, are you kidding me?!?!  Back to the BIOS splash screen?  Next comes the sequence of failure - attempt repair - unable to repair - do you want to wipe your hard drive decisions. Because I purchased the retail version, a number is provided where I could call Microsoft Tech support.  When I did, they instructed me to click "Install" from my installation CD, which did not work.  When I tried the "Upgrade" option, it reaches an impasse, telling you that yoiu have a newer version of Win 7, and thus cannot Upgrade.  If you choose "Install" you willl lose everything... files, programs, EVERYTHING.  Or at least this is what it tells you.  I was not willing to take the risk. To make things worse, I had installed a new antivirus software application before I realized my system was unstable (Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security), and this was causing additional problems. One interesting thing, and the only saving grace as it turns out, was that my system WOULD successfully reboot into the OS if I chose to restart it, rather than shut it down.  If I chose to shut down, I would have to go through the loop again until I was given the option to restart. As it turned out, I needed to update my BIOS.  I assumed that since I had updated my BIOS a long time ago to settings that were stable under Windows Vista Ultimate x64, I incorrectly expected Win 7 to adopt the same settings and didn't expect there to be any problems.  WRONG. My BIOS had a setting to halt the boot cycle if various kinds of errors were detected.  Windows Vista didn't care about this, but forget it under Windows 7.  I turned immediately corrected that BIOS setting.  Next, there were the two separate BIOS settings: enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard.  The only sequence of events that would work were to start my reboot process over from stratch with a hard-wired non-usb keyboard and mouse.  Whent the system booted under these settings, it doesn't detect any errors due to either the mouse or keyboard, and actually booted for the first time in a long while (let me tell ya, that's an amazing experience after fiddling with settings for two entire weekends!) Next step: leave your old mouse and keyboard connected, but also connect your other two devices (mouse, keyboard) that use USB connections.  During the boot cycle, the operating system will not fail due to missing requirements during startup, and it will then pick up the new drivers necessary to use your new hardware. If you think you are in the clear here, you are wrong.  The next VERY IMPORTANT step is to remember to change your settings in the BIOS upon next startup.  Specifically, yoiu will need ot change your BIOS to enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard input.  If you don't, Windows will detect an incompatibility upon the next startup, and you will be stuck once again in the endless cycle of reboot/Startup Repair/reboot/Startup Repair, without ever reaching a successful boot. Here's the thing - the BIOS and the drivers registered in Win 7 need to match.  If they don't, you're going to lose another weekend worrying and fiddling, all the while wondering if you've permanently damaged your hard drive beyond repair. (Sigh).  In the end, things worked out.  I must note that it is saddening to see how many posts there are out there that recommend just doing a clean install, as if it's the only option.  How many countless poor souls have lost their data, their backups, their pictures and videos, all for nothing other than the fact that the person giving advice just didn't know what to do at that point? My advice to you, try having a look at your BIOS settings first and making sure Win 7 can find your BIOS settings, and also disabling in your BIOS anything that might halt your system boot-up process if it encounters errors.

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  • Data Source Security Part 1

    - by Steve Felts
    I’ve written a couple of articles on how to store data source security credentials using the Oracle wallet.  I plan to write a few articles on the various types of security available to WebLogic Server (WLS) data sources.  There are more options than you might think! There have been several enhancements in this area in WLS 10.3.6.  There are a couple of more enhancements planned for release WLS 12.1.2 that I will include here for completeness.  This isn’t intended as a teaser.  If you call your Oracle support person, you can get them now as minor patches to WLS 10.3.6.   The current security documentation is scattered in a few places, has a few incorrect statements, and is missing a few topics.  It also seems that the knowledge of how to apply some of these features isn’t written down.  The goal of these articles is to talk about WLS data source security in a unified way and to introduce some approaches to using the available features.  Introduction to WebLogic Data Source Security Options By default, you define a single database user and password for a data source.  You can store it in the data source descriptor or make use of the Oracle wallet.  This is a very simple and efficient approach to security.  All of the connections in the connection pool are owned by this user and there is no special processing when a connection is given out.  That is, it’s a homogeneous connection pool and any request can get any connection from a security perspective (there are other aspects like affinity).  Regardless of the end user of the application, all connections in the pool use the same security credentials to access the DBMS.   No additional information is needed when you get a connection because it’s all available from the data source descriptor (or wallet). java.sql.Connection conn =  mydatasource.getConnection(); Note: You can enter the password as a name-value pair in the Properties field (this not permitted for production environments) or you can enter it in the Password field of the data source descriptor. The value in the Password field overrides any password value defined in the Properties passed to the JDBC Driver when creating physical database connections. It is recommended that you use the Password attribute in place of the password property in the properties string because the Password value is encrypted in the configuration file (stored as the password-encrypted attribute in the jdbc-driver-params tag in the module file) and is hidden in the administration console.  The Properties and Password fields are located on the administration console Data Source creation wizard or Data Source Configuration tab. The JDBC API can also be used to programmatically specify a database user name and password as in the following.  java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(“user”, “password”); According to the JDBC specification, it’s supposed to take a database user and associated password but different vendors implement this differently.  WLS, by default, treats this as an application server user and password.  The pair is authenticated to see if it’s a valid user and that user is used for WLS security permission checks.  By default, the user is then mapped to a database user and password using the data source credential mapper, so this API sort of follows the specification but database credentials are one-step removed from the application code.  More details and the rationale are described later. While the default approach is simple, it does mean that only one database user is doing all of the work.  You can’t figure out who actually did the update and you can’t restrict SQL operations by who is running the operation, at least at the database level.   Any type of per-user logic will need to be in the application code instead of having the database do it.  There are various WLS data source features that can be configured to provide some per-user information about the operations to the database. WebLogic Data Source Security Options This table describes the features available for WebLogic data sources to configure database security credentials and a brief description.  It also captures information about the compatibility of these features with one another. Feature Description Can be used with Can’t be used with User authentication (default) Default getConnection(user, password) behavior – validate the input and use the user/password in the descriptor. Set client identifier Proxy Session, Identity pooling, Use database credentials Use database credentials Instead of using the credential mapper, use the supplied user and password directly. Set client identifier, Proxy session, Identity pooling User authentication, Multi Data Source Set Client Identifier Set a client identifier property associated with the connection (Oracle and DB2 only). Everything Proxy Session Set a light-weight proxy user associated with the connection (Oracle-only). Set client identifier, Use database credentials Identity pooling, User authentication Identity pooling Heterogeneous pool of connections owned by specified users. Set client identifier, Use database credentials Proxy session, User authentication, Labeling, Multi-datasource, Active GridLink Note that all of these features are available with both XA and non-XA drivers. Currently, the Proxy Session and Use Database Credentials options are on the Oracle tab of the Data Source Configuration tab of the administration console (even though the Use Database Credentials feature is not just for Oracle databases – oops).  The rest of the features are on the Identity tab of the Data Source Configuration tab in the administration console (plan on seeing them all in one place in the future). The subsequent articles will describe these features in more detail.  Keep referring back to this table to see the big picture.

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  • 2012&ndash;The End Of The World Review

    - by Tim Murphy
    The end of the world must be coming.  Not because the Mayan calendar says so, but because Microsoft is innovating more than Apple.  It has been a crazy year, with pundits declaring not that the end of the world is coming, but that the end of Microsoft is coming.  Let’s take a look at what 2012 has brought us. The beginning of year is a blur.  I managed to get to TechEd in June which was the first time that I got to take a deep dive into Windows 8 and many other things that had been announced in 2011.  The promise I saw in these products was really encouraging.  The thought of being able to run Windows 8 from a thumb drive or have Hyper-V native to the OS told me that at least for developers good things were coming. I finally got my feet wet with Windows 8 with the developer preview just prior to the RTM.  While the initial experience was a bit of a culture shock I quickly grew to love it.  The media still seems to hold little love for the “reimagined” platform, but I think that once people spend some time with it they will enjoy the experience and what the FUD mongers say will fade into the background.  With the launch of the OS we finally got a look at the Surface.  I think this is a bold entry into the tablet market.  While I wish it was a little more affordable I am already starting to see them in the wild being used by non-techies. I was waiting for Windows Phone 8 at least as much as Windows 8, probably more.  The new hardware, better marketing and new OS features I think are going to finally push us to the point of having a real presence in the smartphone market.  I am seeing a number of iPhone users picking up a Nokia Lumia 920 and getting rid of their brand new iPhone 5.  The only real debacle that I saw around the launch was when they held back the SDK from general developers. Shortly after the launch events came Build 2012.  I was extremely disappointed that I didn’t make it to this year’s Build.  Even if they weren’t handing out Surface and Lumia devices I think the atmosphere and content were something that really needed to be experience in person.  Hopefully there will be a Build next year and it’s schedule will be announced soon.  As you would expect Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development were the mainstay of the conference, but improvements in Azure also played a key role.  This movement of services to the cloud will continue and we need to understand where it best fits into the solutions we build. Lower on the radar this year were Office 2013, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012.  Their glory stolen by the consumer OS and hardware announcements, these new releases are no less important.  Companies will see significant improvements in performance and capabilities if they upgrade.  At TechEd they had shown some of the new features of Windows Server 2012 around hardware integration and Hyper-V performance which absolutely blew me away.  It is our job to bring these important improvements to our company’s attention so that they can be leveraged. Personally, the consulting business in 2012 was the busiest it has been in a long time.  More companies were ready to attack new projects after several years of putting them on the back burner.  I also worked to bring back momentum to the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Both the community and clients are excited about the new technologies that have come out in 2012 and now it is time to deliver. What does 2013 have in store.  I don’t see it be quite as exciting as 2012.  Microsoft will be releasing the Surface Pro in January and it seems that we will see more frequent OS update for Windows.  There are rumors that we may see a Surface phone in 2013.  It has also been announced that there will finally be a rework of the XBox next fall.  The new year will also be a time for us in the development community to take advantage of these new tools and devices.  After all, it is what we build on top of these platforms that will attract more consumers and corporations to using them. Just as I am 99.999% sure that the world is not going to end this year, I am also sure that Microsoft will move on and that most of this negative backlash from the media is actually fear and jealousy.  In the end I think we have a promising year ahead of us. del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft,Pundits,Mayans,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Surface

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  • Solaris 11.1 changes building of code past the point of __NORETURN

    - by alanc
    While Solaris 11.1 was under development, we started seeing some errors in the builds of the upstream X.Org git master sources, such as: "Display.c", line 65: Function has no return statement : x_io_error_handler "hostx.c", line 341: Function has no return statement : x_io_error_handler from functions that were defined to match a specific callback definition that declared them as returning an int if they did return, but these were calling exit() instead of returning so hadn't listed a return value. These had been generating warnings for years which we'd been ignoring, but X.Org has made enough progress in cleaning up code for compiler warnings and static analysis issues lately, that the community turned up the default error levels, including the gcc flag -Werror=return-type and the equivalent Solaris Studio cc flags -v -errwarn=E_FUNC_HAS_NO_RETURN_STMT, so now these became errors that stopped the build. Yet on Solaris, gcc built this code fine, while Studio errored out. Investigation showed this was due to the Solaris headers, which during Solaris 10 development added a number of annotations to the headers when gcc was being used for the amd64 kernel bringup before the Studio amd64 port was ready. Since Studio did not support the inline form of these annotations at the time, but instead used #pragma for them, the definitions were only present for gcc. To resolve this, I fixed both sides of the problem, so that it would work for building new X.Org sources on older Solaris releases or with older Studio compilers, as well as fixing the general problem before it broke more software building on Solaris. To the X.Org sources, I added the traditional Studio #pragma does_not_return to recognize that functions like exit() don't ever return, in patches such as this Xserver patch. Adding a dummy return statement was ruled out as that introduced unreachable code errors from compilers and analyzers that correctly realized you couldn't reach that code after a return statement. And on the Solaris 11.1 side, I updated the annotation definitions in <sys/ccompile.h> to enable for Studio 12.0 and later compilers the annotations already existing in a number of system headers for functions like exit() and abort(). If you look in that file you'll see the annotations we currently use, though the forms there haven't gone through review to become a Committed interface, so may change in the future. Actually getting this integrated into Solaris though took a bit more work than just editing one header file. Our ELF binary build comparison tool, wsdiff, actually showed a large number of differences in the resulting binaries due to the compiler using this information for branch prediction, code path analysis, and other possible optimizations, so after comparing enough of the disassembly output to be comfortable with the changes, we also made sure to get this in early enough in the release cycle so that it would get plenty of test exposure before the release. It also required updating quite a bit of code to avoid introducing new lint or compiler warnings or errors, and people building applications on top of Solaris 11.1 and later may need to make similar changes if they want to keep their build logs similarly clean. Previously, if you had a function that was declared with a non-void return type, lint and cc would warn if you didn't return a value, even if you called a function like exit() or panic() that ended execution. For instance: #include <stdlib.h> int callback(int status) { if (status == 0) return status; exit(status); } would previously require a never executed return 0; after the exit() to avoid lint warning "function falls off bottom without returning value". Now the compiler & lint will both issue "statement not reached" warnings for a return 0; after the final exit(), allowing (or in some cases, requiring) it to be removed. However, if there is no return statement anywhere in the function, lint will warn that you've declared a function returning a value that never does so, suggesting you can declare it as void. Unfortunately, if your function signature is required to match a certain form, such as in a callback, you not be able to do so, and will need to add a /* LINTED */ to the end of the function. If you need your code to build on both a newer and an older release, then you will either need to #ifdef these unreachable statements, or, to keep your sources common across releases, add to your sources the corresponding #pragma recognized by both current and older compiler versions, such as: #pragma does_not_return(exit) #pragma does_not_return(panic) Hopefully this little extra work is paid for by the compilers & code analyzers being able to better understand your code paths, giving you better optimizations and more accurate errors & warning messages.

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  • How can I estimate the entropy of a password?

    - by Wug
    Having read various resources about password strength I'm trying to create an algorithm that will provide a rough estimation of how much entropy a password has. I'm trying to create an algorithm that's as comprehensive as possible. At this point I only have pseudocode, but the algorithm covers the following: password length repeated characters patterns (logical) different character spaces (LC, UC, Numeric, Special, Extended) dictionary attacks It does NOT cover the following, and SHOULD cover it WELL (though not perfectly): ordering (passwords can be strictly ordered by output of this algorithm) patterns (spatial) Can anyone provide some insight on what this algorithm might be weak to? Specifically, can anyone think of situations where feeding a password to the algorithm would OVERESTIMATE its strength? Underestimations are less of an issue. The algorithm: // the password to test password = ? length = length(password) // unique character counts from password (duplicates discarded) uqlca = number of unique lowercase alphabetic characters in password uquca = number of uppercase alphabetic characters uqd = number of unique digits uqsp = number of unique special characters (anything with a key on the keyboard) uqxc = number of unique special special characters (alt codes, extended-ascii stuff) // algorithm parameters, total sizes of alphabet spaces Nlca = total possible number of lowercase letters (26) Nuca = total uppercase letters (26) Nd = total digits (10) Nsp = total special characters (32 or something) Nxc = total extended ascii characters that dont fit into other categorys (idk, 50?) // algorithm parameters, pw strength growth rates as percentages (per character) flca = entropy growth factor for lowercase letters (.25 is probably a good value) fuca = EGF for uppercase letters (.4 is probably good) fd = EGF for digits (.4 is probably good) fsp = EGF for special chars (.5 is probably good) fxc = EGF for extended ascii chars (.75 is probably good) // repetition factors. few unique letters == low factor, many unique == high rflca = (1 - (1 - flca) ^ uqlca) rfuca = (1 - (1 - fuca) ^ uquca) rfd = (1 - (1 - fd ) ^ uqd ) rfsp = (1 - (1 - fsp ) ^ uqsp ) rfxc = (1 - (1 - fxc ) ^ uqxc ) // digit strengths strength = ( rflca * Nlca + rfuca * Nuca + rfd * Nd + rfsp * Nsp + rfxc * Nxc ) ^ length entropybits = log_base_2(strength) A few inputs and their desired and actual entropy_bits outputs: INPUT DESIRED ACTUAL aaa very pathetic 8.1 aaaaaaaaa pathetic 24.7 abcdefghi weak 31.2 H0ley$Mol3y_ strong 72.2 s^fU¬5ü;y34G< wtf 88.9 [a^36]* pathetic 97.2 [a^20]A[a^15]* strong 146.8 xkcd1** medium 79.3 xkcd2** wtf 160.5 * these 2 passwords use shortened notation, where [a^N] expands to N a's. ** xkcd1 = "Tr0ub4dor&3", xkcd2 = "correct horse battery staple" The algorithm does realize (correctly) that increasing the alphabet size (even by one digit) vastly strengthens long passwords, as shown by the difference in entropy_bits for the 6th and 7th passwords, which both consist of 36 a's, but the second's 21st a is capitalized. However, they do not account for the fact that having a password of 36 a's is not a good idea, it's easily broken with a weak password cracker (and anyone who watches you type it will see it) and the algorithm doesn't reflect that. It does, however, reflect the fact that xkcd1 is a weak password compared to xkcd2, despite having greater complexity density (is this even a thing?). How can I improve this algorithm? Addendum 1 Dictionary attacks and pattern based attacks seem to be the big thing, so I'll take a stab at addressing those. I could perform a comprehensive search through the password for words from a word list and replace words with tokens unique to the words they represent. Word-tokens would then be treated as characters and have their own weight system, and would add their own weights to the password. I'd need a few new algorithm parameters (I'll call them lw, Nw ~= 2^11, fw ~= .5, and rfw) and I'd factor the weight into the password as I would any of the other weights. This word search could be specially modified to match both lowercase and uppercase letters as well as common character substitutions, like that of E with 3. If I didn't add extra weight to such matched words, the algorithm would underestimate their strength by a bit or two per word, which is OK. Otherwise, a general rule would be, for each non-perfect character match, give the word a bonus bit. I could then perform simple pattern checks, such as searches for runs of repeated characters and derivative tests (take the difference between each character), which would identify patterns such as 'aaaaa' and '12345', and replace each detected pattern with a pattern token, unique to the pattern and length. The algorithmic parameters (specifically, entropy per pattern) could be generated on the fly based on the pattern. At this point, I'd take the length of the password. Each word token and pattern token would count as one character; each token would replace the characters they symbolically represented. I made up some sort of pattern notation, but it includes the pattern length l, the pattern order o, and the base element b. This information could be used to compute some arbitrary weight for each pattern. I'd do something better in actual code. Modified Example: Password: 1234kitty$$$$$herpderp Tokenized: 1 2 3 4 k i t t y $ $ $ $ $ h e r p d e r p Words Filtered: 1 2 3 4 @W5783 $ $ $ $ $ @W9001 @W9002 Patterns Filtered: @P[l=4,o=1,b='1'] @W5783 @P[l=5,o=0,b='$'] @W9001 @W9002 Breakdown: 3 small, unique words and 2 patterns Entropy: about 45 bits, as per modified algorithm Password: correcthorsebatterystaple Tokenized: c o r r e c t h o r s e b a t t e r y s t a p l e Words Filtered: @W6783 @W7923 @W1535 @W2285 Breakdown: 4 small, unique words and no patterns Entropy: 43 bits, as per modified algorithm The exact semantics of how entropy is calculated from patterns is up for discussion. I was thinking something like: entropy(b) * l * (o + 1) // o will be either zero or one The modified algorithm would find flaws with and reduce the strength of each password in the original table, with the exception of s^fU¬5ü;y34G<, which contains no words or patterns.

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  • Deduping your redundancies

    - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)
    Robin Harris of Storagemojo pointed to an interesting article about about deduplication and it's impact to the resiliency of your data against data corruption on ACM Queue. The problem in short: A considerable number of filesystems store important metadata at multiple locations. For example the ZFS rootblock is copied to three locations. Other filesystems have similar provisions to protect their metadata. However you can easily proof, that the rootblock pointer in the uberblock of ZFS for example is pointing to blocks with absolutely equal content in all three locatition (with zdb -uu and zdb -r). It has to be that way, because they are protected by the same checksum. A number of devices offer block level dedup, either as an option or as part of their inner workings. However when you store three identical blocks on them and the devices does block level dedup internally, the device may just deduplicated your redundant metadata to a block stored just once that is stored on the non-voilatile storage. When this block is corrupted, you have essentially three corrupted copies. Three hit with one bullet. This is indeed an interesting problem: A device doing deduplication doesn't know if a block is important or just a datablock. This is the reason why I like deduplication like it's done in ZFS. It's an integrated part and so important parts don't get deduplicated away. A disk accessed by a block level interface doesn't know anything about the importance of a block. A metadata block is nothing different to it's inner mechanism than a normal data block because there is no way to tell that this is important and that those redundancies aren't allowed to fall prey to some clever deduplication mechanism. Robin talks about this in regard of the Sandforce disk controllers who use a kind of dedup to reduce some of the nasty effects of writing data to flash, but the problem is much broader. However this is relevant whenever you are using a device with block level deduplication. It's just the point that you have to activate it for most implementation by command, whereas certain devices do this by default or by design and you don't know about it. However I'm not perfectly sure about that ? given that storage administration and server administration are often different groups with different business objectives I would ask your storage guys if they have activated dedup without telling somebody elase on their boxes in order to speak less often with the storage sales rep. The problem is even more interesting with ZFS. You may use ditto blocks to protect important data to store multiple copies of data in the pool to increase redundancy, even when your pool just consists out of one disk or just a striped set of disk. However when your device is doing dedup internally it may remove your redundancy before it hits the nonvolatile storage. You've won nothing. Just spend your disk quota on the the LUNs in the SAN and you make your disk admin happy because of the good dedup ratio However you can just fall in this specific "deduped ditto block"trap when your pool just consists out of a single device, because ZFS writes ditto blocks on different disks, when there is more than just one disk. Yet another reason why you should spend some extra-thought when putting your zpool on a single LUN, especially when the LUN is sliced and dices out of a large heap of storage devices by a storage controller. However I have one problem with the articles and their specific mention of ZFS: You can just hit by this problem when you are using the deduplicating device for the pool. However in the specifically mentioned case of SSD this isn't the usecase. Most implementations of SSD in conjunction with ZFS are hybrid storage pools and so rotating rust disk is used as pool and SSD are used as L2ARC/sZIL. And there it simply doesn't matter: When you really have to resort to the sZIL (your system went down, it doesn't matter of one block or several blocks are corrupt, you have to fail back to the last known good transaction group the device. On the other side, when a block in L2ARC is corrupt, you simply read it from the pool and in HSP implementations this is the already mentioned rust. In conjunction with ZFS this is more interesting when using a storage array, that is capable to do dedup and where you use LUNs for your pool. However as mentioned before, on those devices it's a user made decision to do so, and so it's less probable that you deduplicating your redundancies. Other filesystems lacking acapability similar to hybrid storage pools are more "haunted" by this problem of SSD using dedup-like mechanisms internally, because those filesystem really store the data on the the SSD instead of using it just as accelerating devices. However at the end Robin is correct: It's jet another point why protecting your data by creating redundancies by dispersing it several disks (by mirror or parity RAIDs) is really important. No dedup mechanism inside a device can dedup away your redundancy when you write it to a totally different and indepenent device.

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  • Data Source Security Part 4

    - by Steve Felts
    So far, I have covered Client Identity and Oracle Proxy Session features, with WLS or database credentials.  This article will cover one more feature, Identify-based pooling.  Then, there is one more topic to cover - how these options play with transactions.Identity-based Connection Pooling An identity based pool creates a heterogeneous pool of connections.  This allows applications to use a JDBC connection with a specific DBMS credential by pooling physical connections with different DBMS credentials.  The DBMS credential is based on either the WebLogic user mapped to a database user or the database user directly, based on the “use database credentials” setting as described earlier. Using this feature enabled with “use database credentials” enabled seems to be what is proposed in the JDBC standard, basically a heterogeneous pool with users specified by getConnection(user, password). The allocation of connections is more complex if Enable Identity Based Connection Pooling attribute is enabled on the data source.  When an application requests a database connection, the WebLogic Server instance selects an existing physical connection or creates a new physical connection with requested DBMS identity. The following section provides information on how heterogeneous connections are created:1. At connection pool initialization, the physical JDBC connections based on the configured or default “initial capacity” are created with the configured default DBMS credential of the data source.2. An application tries to get a connection from a data source.3a. If “use database credentials” is not enabled, the user specified in getConnection is mapped to a DBMS credential, as described earlier.  If the credential map doesn’t have a matching user, the default DBMS credential is used from the datasource descriptor.3b. If “use database credentials” is enabled, the user and password specified in getConnection are used directly.4. The connection pool is searched for a connection with a matching DBMS credential.5. If a match is found, the connection is reserved and returned to the application.6. If no match is found, a connection is created or reused based on the maximum capacity of the pool: - If the maximum capacity has not been reached, a new connection is created with the DBMS credential, reserved, and returned to the application.- If the pool has reached maximum capacity, based on the least recently used (LRU) algorithm, a physical connection is selected from the pool and destroyed. A new connection is created with the DBMS credential, reserved, and returned to the application. It should be clear that finding a matching connection is more expensive than a homogeneous pool.  Destroying a connection and getting a new one is very expensive.  If you can use a normal homogeneous pool or one of the light-weight options (client identity or an Oracle proxy connection), those should be used instead of identity based pooling. Regardless of how physical connections are created, each physical connection in the pool has its own DBMS credential information maintained by the pool. Once a physical connection is reserved by the pool, it does not change its DBMS credential even if the current thread changes its WebLogic user credential and continues to use the same connection. To configure this feature, select Enable Identity Based Connection Pooling.  See http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24329_01/apirefs.1211/e24401/taskhelp/jdbc/jdbc_datasources/EnableIdentityBasedConnectionPooling.html  "Enable identity-based connection pooling for a JDBC data source" in Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console Help. You must make the following changes to use Logging Last Resource (LLR) transaction optimization with Identity-based Pooling to get around the problem that multiple users will be accessing the associated transaction table.- You must configure a custom schema for LLR using a fully qualified LLR table name. All LLR connections will then use the named schema rather than the default schema when accessing the LLR transaction table.  - Use database specific administration tools to grant permission to access the named LLR table to all users that could access this table via a global transaction. By default, the LLR table is created during boot by the user configured for the connection in the data source. In most cases, the database will only allow access to this user and not allow access to mapped users. Connections within Transactions Now that we have covered the behavior of all of these various options, it’s time to discuss the exception to all of the rules.  When you get a connection within a transaction, it is associated with the transaction context on a particular WLS instance. When getting a connection with a data source configured with non-XA LLR or 1PC (using the JTS driver) with global transactions, the first connection obtained within the transaction is returned on subsequent connection requests regardless of the values of username/password specified and independent of the associated proxy user session, if any. The connection must be shared among all users of the connection when using LLR or 1PC. For XA data sources, the first connection obtained within the global transaction is returned on subsequent connection requests within the application server, regardless of the values of username/password specified and independent of the associated proxy user session, if any.  The connection must be shared among all users of the connection within a global transaction within the application server/JVM.

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  • Answers to Conference Revenue Tweet Questions

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2014/05/27/156612.aspxI tweeted this the other day… …and I had some people tweet back questioning/asking about the profit number. So here’s how I came to that figure. Total Revenue Let’s talk total revenue first. This conference has a huge list of companies/organizations paying some amount for sponsorship. Platinum ($1500) x 5 = $7500 Gold ($1000) x 3 = $3000 Silver ($500) x 9 = $4500 Bronze ($250) x 13 = $3250 There’s also a title sponsor level but there’s no mention of how much that is…more than $1500 though, so let’s just say $2500. Total Sponsorship Revenue: $20750.00 For registrations, this conference is claiming over 300 attendees. We’ll just calculate at 300 and the discounted “member rate” – $249. Total Registration Revenue: $74700.00 Booth space is also sold for a vendor area, but let’s just leave that out of the calculation. Total Event Revenue: $95450.00 Now that we know how much money we’re playing with, let’s knock out the costs for the event. Total Costs Hard Costs Audio/Visual Services $2000 Conference Rooms (4 Breakouts + Plenary) $2500 Insurance $700 Printing/Signage $1500 Travel/Hotel Rooms $2000 Keynotes $2000 So let’s talk about these hard costs first. First you may be asking about the Audio Visual. Yes those services can be that high, actually higher. But since there’s an A/V company touted as the official A/V provider, I gotta think there’s some discount for being branded as such. Conference rooms are actually an inflated amount of $500 per. Venues make money on the food they sell at events, not on room rentals. The more food, the cheaper the rooms tend to be offered at. Still, for the sake of argument, let’s set the rooms at $500 each knowing that they could be lower. For travel and hotel rooms…it appears that most of the speakers at this conference are local, meaning there’s no travel or hotel cost. But a few of them I wasn’t too sure…so let’s factor in enough to cover two outside speakers (airfare and hotel). There are two keynotes for this event and depending on the event those may be paid gigs. I’m not sure if they are or not, but considering the closing one is a comedian I’m going to add some funds here for that just in case. Total Hard Costs: $10700 Now that the hard costs are out of the way, let’s talk about the food costs. Food Costs The conference is providing a continental breakfast (YEEEESH!), some level of luncheon, and I have to assume coffee breaks in between. Let’s look at those costs. Continental Breakfast $12 per person Lunch Buffet $18 per person Coffee Breaks (2) $6 per person (or $3 a cup) Snacks (2) $10 per person (or $5 each) Note that the lunch buffet assumes a *good* lunch buffet – two entrees, starch, vegetable, salads, and bread. Not sure if there’ll be snacks during coffee breaks but let’s assume so. Total Food Cost Per Person: $46 Food Cost: $14950 Gratuity: $2691 Total Food Cost: $17641 Total food cost is based on the $46 per person cost x 325. 300 for attendance, 12 for speakers, extra 13 for volunteers/organizers. Gratuity is 18%. Grand Totals So let’s sum things up here. Total Costs Hard Costs: $10700.00 Food Costs: $17641.00 Total:          $28341.00 Taxes:         $3685.00 Grand Total  $32026.00 Total Revenue Sponsorship  $20750 Registration   $74700 Grand Total   $95450.00 Total Profit $63424.00 Now what if the registration numbers were lower and they only got 100 people to show up. In that scenario there’d still be a profit of just under $26000. Closing Comments A couple of things to note: - I haven’t factored in anything for prizes. Not sure if any will be given out - We didn’t add in the booth space revenue - We’re assuming speakers aren’t getting paid, but even if they were at the high end its $12000 ($1000 per session), which is probably an inflated number for local speakers. - Note that all registrations were set to the “member” discounted price. The non-member registration price is higher. There is also an option for those that just want to show up for the opening keynote. There you have it! Let me know if you have any questions. D

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  • Windows 8 for productivity?

    - by Charles Young
    At long last I’ve started using Windows 8.  I boot from a VHD on which I have installed Office, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.  For a week, now, I’ve been happily writing code and documents and using Visio and PowerPoint.  I am, very much, a ‘productivity’ user rather than a content consumer.   I spend my days flitting between countless windows and browser tabs displayed across dual monitors.  I need to access a lot of different functionality and information in as fluid a fashion as possible. With that in mind, and like so many others, I was worried about Windows 8.  The Metro interface is primarily about content consumption on touch-enabled screens, and not really geared for people like me sitting in front of an 8-core non-touch laptop and an additional Samsung monitor.  I still use a mouse, not my finger.  And I create more than I consume. Clearly, Windows 8 won’t be viable for people like me unless Metro keeps out of my hair when using productivity and development tools.  With this in mind, I had long expected Microsoft to provide some mechanism for switching Metro off.  There was a registry hack in last year’s Developer Preview, but this capability has been removed.   That’s brave.  So, how have things worked out so far? Well, I am really quite surprised.  When I played with the Developer Preview last year, it was clear that Metro was unfinished and didn’t play well enough with the desktop.  Obviously I expected things to improve, but the context switching from desktop to full-screen seemed a heavy burden to place on users.  That sense of abrupt change hasn’t entirely gone away (how could it), but after a few days, I can’t say that I find it burdensome or irritating.   I’ve got used very quickly to ‘gesturing’ with my mouse at the bottom or top right corners of the screen to move between applications, using the Windows key to toggle the Start screen and generally finding my way around.   I am surprised at how effective the Start screen is, given the rather basic grouping features it provides.  Of course, I had to take control of it and sort things the way I want.  If anything, though, the Start screen provides a better navigation and application launcher tool than the old Start menu. What I didn’t expect was the way that Metro enhances the productivity story.  As I write this, I’ve got my desktop open with a maximised Word window.  However, the desktop extends only across about 85% of the width of my screen.  On the left hand side, I have a column that displays the new Metro email client.  This is currently showing me a list of emails for my main work account.  I can flip easily between different accounts and read my email within that same column.  As I work on documents, I want to be able to monitor my inbox with a quick glance. The desktop, of course, has its own snap feature.  I could run the desktop full screen and bring up Outlook and Word side by side.  However, this doesn’t begin to approach the convenience of snapping the Metro email client.  Consider that when I snap a window on the desktop, it initially takes up 50% of the screen.  Outlook doesn’t really know anything about snap, and doesn’t adjust to make effective use of the limited screen estate.  Even at 50% screen width, it is difficult to use, so forget about trying to use it in a Metro fashion. In any case, I am left with the prospect of having to manually adjust everything to view my email effectively alongside Word.  Worse, there is nothing stopping another window from overlapping and obscuring my email.  It becomes a struggle to keep sight of email as it arrives.  Of course, there is always ‘toast’ to notify me when things arrive, but if Outlook is obscured, this just feels intrusive. The beauty of the Metro snap feature is that my email reader now exists outside of my desktop.   The Metro app has been crafted to work well in the fixed width column as well as in full-screen.  It cannot be obscured by overlapping windows.  I still get notifications if I wish.  More importantly, it is clear that careful attention has been given to how things work when moving between applications when ‘snapped’.  If I decide, say to flick over to the Metro newsreader to catch up with current affairs, my desktop, rather than my email client, obligingly makes way for the reader.  With a simple gesture and click, or alternatively by pressing Windows-Tab, my desktop reappears. Another pleasant surprise is the way Windows 8 handles dual monitors.  It’s not just the fact that both screens now display the desktop task bar.  It’s that I can so easily move between Metro and the desktop on either screen.  I can only have Metro on one screen at a time which makes entire sense given the ‘full-screen’ nature of Metro apps.  Using dual monitors feels smoother and easier than previous versions of Windows. Overall then, I’m enjoying the Windows 8 improvements.  Strangely, for all the hype (“Windows reimagined”, etc.), my perception as a ‘productivity’ user is more one of evolution than revolution.  It all feels very familiar, but just better.

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