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• Launching Ops Center 12c

  - by user12601629

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is most ambitious version of the Ops Center tooling that we've ever released. I think that make it appropriate that we launched it in grand style! When it became clear we were going to be complete with the 12c final release about this time of year, the marketing team proposed that we roll the launch of 12c into Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo.  I thought that sounded like a fine idea!  You see, I have always loved Japan.  I even studied a bit of Japanese language back in school. OpenWorld Tokyo was an outstanding even this year.  It was held in Roppongi, one of the most stylish districts in Tokyo. And, to make things even better, the Sakura (cherry blossoms) were blooming.  If you've never been in Japan for cherry blossom season, it's a must see!  Here are a couple of pics for you. Here is a picture from Roppongi, near the conference.  Here's a picture near the Imperial Palace.  A couple of friends from the local sales team took me here before my flight out. So, now back to the product launch! We choose to launch the product in John Fowler's "Engineered Systems" keynote address.  It made perfect sense because of the close ties of Ops Center to the Systems portfolio of products.  It was a packed house for the keynote.  Here's a picture I took just before we started -- there were also hundreds more people in "overflow" rooms in other parts of the venue. Here's a picture of me on stage during the launch. While there are countless new features in Ops Center 12c that customers will love, I had to limit myself to discussing just three. Mission Critical Clouds Solaris 11 Engineered Systems So, what does Mission Critical Cloud mean?  It means we've expanded EM's cloud capabilities in a couple of key areas. First, we've expanded the "self service provisioning" capabilities we have to include SPARC -- not just x86.  Now you can build clouds of Solaris Zones with ease!  Second, we've much more deeply integrated high-end storage and network management into the cloud layers.  These may our IaaS story is now much more powerful! For Solaris 11, we didn't simply port our monitoring agent to S11.  That would have been easy, but also boring! We support S11 deeply.  Full access to the power of the IPS packaging system, the new virtualized networking stack, new Zones features, the Auto Install framework.  If you're ready to try Solaris 11 then Ops Center is ready for you. Last is on the area of Engineered Systems.  These combinations of hardware and software are fast and powerful. However, we're also on a mission to make them ever easier to manage.  We've made major strides with Ops Center 12c. Manage these systems as racks, not individual components.  The new capabilities for the new engineered systems like Exalogic and SPARC SuperCluster and striking. You can read more here: Oracle Unveils Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c So, I'll wrap this up with one final bit of fun. One of my friends from the Oracle marketing department found a super cool place to get dinner.  It's a restaurant called Gonpachi. It turns out this is the place that inspired the scene in the Quentin Taratino movie Kill Bill where Uma Thurman fights 88 Ninjas.  Here is a picture I snapped while we were there. It was surely a good time. Check it out next time you're in Tokyo.

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• Seamless STP with Oracle SOA Suite

  - by user12339860

  STP stands for “Straight Through Processing”. Wikipedia describes STP as a solution that enables “the entire trade process for capital markets and payment transactions to be conducted electronically without the need for re-keying or manual intervention, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions” .I will deal with the later part of the definition i.e “payment transactions without manual intervention” in this article. The STP that I am writing about involves the interaction between a Bank and its’ corporate customers,to that extent this business case is also called “Corporate Payments”.Simply put a  Corporate Payment-STP solution needs to connect the payment transaction right from the Corporate ERP into the Bank’s Payment Hub. A SOA based STP solution can do a lot more than just process transaction. But before I get to the solution let me describe the perspectives of the two primary parties in this interaction. The Corporate customer and the Bank. Corporate's Interaction with Bank:  Typically it is the treasury department of an enterprise which interacts with the Bank on a daily basis. Here is how a day of interaction would look like from the treasury department of a corp. Corporate Cash Retrieve Beginning of day totals Monitor Cash Accounts Send or receive cash between accounts Supply chain payments Payment Settlements Calculate settlement positions Retrieve End of Day totals Assess Transaction Financial Impact Short Term Investment Desk Retrieve Current Account information Conduct Investment activities Bank’s Interaction with the Corporate :  From the Bank’s perspective, the interaction starts from the point of on boarding a corporate customer to billing the corporate for the value added services it provides. Once the corporate is on-boarded the daily interaction involves Handle the various formats of data arriving from customers Process Beginning of Day & End of Day reporting request from customers Meet compliance requirements Process Payments Transmit Payment Status Challenges with this Interaction :  Both the Bank & the Corporate face many challenges from these interactions. Some of the challenges include Keeping a consistent view of transaction data for various LOBs of the corporate & the Bank Corporate customers use different ERPs, hence the data formats are bound to be different Can the Bank’s IT systems convert the data formats that can be easily mapped to the corporate ERP How does the Bank manage the communication profiles of these customers?  Corporate customers are demanding near real time visibility on their corporate accounts Corporate customers can make better cash management decisions if they can analyse the impact. Can the Bank create opportunities to sell its products to the investment desks at corporate houses & manage their orders? How will the Bank bill the corporate customer for the value added services it provides. What does a SOA based Seamless STP solution bring to the table? Highlights of Oracle SOA based STP solution For the Corporate Customer: No Manual or Paper based banking transactions Secure Delivery of Payment data to the Bank from multiple ERPs without customization Single Portal for monitoring & administering payment transactions Rule based validation of payments Customer has data necessary for more effective handling of payment and cash management decisions  Business measurements track progress toward payment cost goals  For the Bank: Reduces time & complexity of transactions Simplifies the process of introducing new products to corporate customers Single Payment hub for all corporate ERP payments across multiple instruments New Revenue sources by delivering value added services to customers Leverages existing payment infrastructure Remove Inconsistent data formats and interchange between bank and corporate systems  Compliance and many other benefits

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• Use your own domain email and tired of SPAM? SPAMfighter FTW

  - by Dave Campbell

  I wouldn't post this if I hadn't tried it... and I paid for it myself, so don't anybody be thinking I'm reviewing something someone sent me! Long ago and far away I got very tired of local ISPs and 2nd phone lines and took the plunge and got hooked up to cable... yeah I know the 2nd phone line concept may be hard for everyone to understand, but that's how it was in 'the old days'. To avoid having to change email addresses all the time, I decided to buy a domain name, get minimal hosting, and use that for all email into the house. That way if I changed providers, all the email addresses wouldn't have to change. Of course, about a dozen domains later, I have LOTS of pop email addresses and even an exchange address to my client's server... times have changed. What also has changed is the fact that we get SPAM... 'back in the day' when I was a beta tester for the first ISP in Phoenix, someone tried sending an ad to all of us, and what he got in return for his trouble was a bunch of core dumps that locked up his email... if you don't know what a core dump is, ask your grandfather. But in today's world, we're all much more civilized than that, and as with many things, the criminals seem to have much more rights than we do, so we get inundated with email offering all sorts of wild schemes that you'd have to be brain-dead to accept, but yet... if people weren't accepting them, they'd stop sending them. I keep hoping that survival of the smartest would weed out the mental midgets that respond and then the jumk email stop, but that hasn't happened yet anymore than finding high-quality hearing aids at the checkout line of Safeway because of all the dimwits playing music too loud inside their car... but that's another whole topic and I digress. So what's the solution for all the spam? And I mean *all*... on that old personal email address, I am now getting over 150 spam messages a day! Yes I know that's why God invented the delete key, but I took it on as a challenge, and it's a matter of principle... why should I switch email addresses, or convert from [email protected] to something else, or have all my email filtered through some service just because some A-Hole somewhere has a site up trying to phish Ma & Pa Kettle (ask your grandfather about that too) out of their retirement money? Well... I got an email from my cousin the other day while I was writing yet another email rule, and there was a banner on the bottom of his email that said he was protected by SPAMfighter. SPAMfighter huh.... so I took a look at their site, and found yet one more of the supposed tools to help us. But... I read that they're a Microsoft Gold Partner... and that doesn't come lightly... so I took a gamble and here's what I found: I installed it, and had to do a couple things: 1) SPAMfighter stuffed the SPAMfighter folder into my client's exchange address... I deleted it, made a new SPAMfighter folder where I wanted it to go, then in the SPAMfighter Clients settings for Outlook, I told it to put all spam there. 2) It didn't seem to be doing anything. There's a ribbon button that you can select "Block", and I did that, wondering if I was 'training' it, but it wasn't picking up duplicates 3) I sent email to support, and wrote a post on the forum (not to self: reply to that post). By the time the folks from the home office responded, it was the next day, and first up, SPAMfighter knocked down everything that came through when Outlook opend... two thumbs up! I disabled my 'garbage collection' rule from Outlook, and told Outlook not to use the junk folder thinking it was interfering. 4) Day 2 seemed to go about like Day 1... but I hung in there. 5) Day 3 is now a whole new day... I had left Outlook open and hadn't looked at the PC since sometime late yesterday afternoon, and when I looked this morning, *every bit* of spam was in the SPAMfighter folder!! I'm a new paying customer After watching SPAMfighter work this morning, I've purchased a 1-year license, and I now can sit and watch as emails come in and disappear from my inbox into the SPAMfighter folder. No more continual tweaking of the rules. I've got SPAMfighter set to 'Very Hard' filtering... personally I'd rather pull the few real emails out of the SPAMfighter folder than pull spam out of the real folders. Yes this is simply another way of using the delete key, but you know what? ... it feels good :) Here's a screenshot of the stats after just about 48 hours of being onboard: Note that all the ones blocked by me were during Day 1 and 2... I've blocked none today, and everything is blocked. Stay in the 'Light!

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• Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

  - by tom

  Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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• How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

  - by alexrussell

  Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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• Relative cam movement and momentum on arbitrary surface

  - by user29244

  I have been working on a game for quite long, think sonic classic physics in 3D or tony hawk psx, with unity3D. However I'm stuck at the most fundamental aspect of movement. The requirement is that I need to move the character in mario 64 fashion (or sonic adventure) aka relative cam input: the camera's forward direction always point input forward the screen, left or right input point toward left or right of the screen. when input are resting, the camera direction is independent from the character direction and the camera can orbit the character when input are pressed the character rotate itself until his direction align with the direction the input is pointing at. It's super easy to do as long your movement are parallel to the global horizontal (or any world axis). However when you try to do this on arbitrary surface (think moving along complex curved surface) with the character sticking to the surface normal (basically moving on wall and ceiling freely), it seems harder. What I want is to achieve the same finesse of movement than in mario but on arbitrary angled surfaces. There is more problem (jumping and transitioning back to the real world alignment and then back on a surface while keeping momentum) but so far I didn't even take off the basics. So far I have accomplish moving along the curved surface and the relative cam input, but for some reason direction fail all the time (point number 3, the character align slowly to the input direction). Do you have an idea how to achieve that? Here is the code and some demo so far: The demo: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/flash%20build/litesonicengine/LiteSonicEngine5.html Camera code: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class CameraDrive : MonoBehaviour { public GameObject targetObject; public Transform camPivot, camTarget, camRoot, relcamdirDebug; float rot = 0; //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void Start() { this.transform.position = targetObject.transform.position; this.transform.rotation = targetObject.transform.rotation; } void FixedUpdate() { //the pivot system camRoot.position = targetObject.transform.position; //input on pivot orientation rot = 0; float mouse_x = Input.GetAxisRaw( "camera_analog_X" ); // rot = rot + ( 0.1f * Time.deltaTime * mouse_x ); // wrapAngle( rot ); // //when the target object rotate, it rotate too, this should not happen UpdateOrientation(this.transform.forward,targetObject.transform.up); camRoot.transform.RotateAround(camRoot.transform.up,rot); //debug the relcam dir RelativeCamDirection() ; //this camera this.transform.position = camPivot.position; //set the camera to the pivot this.transform.LookAt( camTarget.position ); // } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- public float wrapAngle ( float Degree ) { while (Degree < 0.0f) { Degree = Degree + 360.0f; } while (Degree >= 360.0f) { Degree = Degree - 360.0f; } return Degree; } private void UpdateOrientation( Vector3 forward_vector, Vector3 ground_normal ) { Vector3 projected_forward_to_normal_surface = forward_vector - ( Vector3.Dot( forward_vector, ground_normal ) ) * ground_normal; camRoot.transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation( projected_forward_to_normal_surface, ground_normal ); } float GetOffsetAngle( float targetAngle, float DestAngle ) { return ((targetAngle - DestAngle + 180)% 360) - 180; } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void OnDrawGizmos() { Gizmos.DrawCube( camPivot.transform.position, new Vector3(1,1,1) ); Gizmos.DrawCube( camTarget.transform.position, new Vector3(1,5,1) ); Gizmos.DrawCube( camRoot.transform.position, new Vector3(1,1,1) ); } void OnGUI() { GUI.Label(new Rect(0,80,1000,20*10), "targetObject.transform.up : " + targetObject.transform.up.ToString()); GUI.Label(new Rect(0,100,1000,20*10), "target euler : " + targetObject.transform.eulerAngles.y.ToString()); GUI.Label(new Rect(0,100,1000,20*10), "rot : " + rot.ToString()); } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void RelativeCamDirection() { float input_vertical_movement = Input.GetAxisRaw( "Vertical" ), input_horizontal_movement = Input.GetAxisRaw( "Horizontal" ); Vector3 relative_forward = Vector3.forward, relative_right = Vector3.right, relative_direction = ( relative_forward * input_vertical_movement ) + ( relative_right * input_horizontal_movement ) ; MovementController MC = targetObject.GetComponent<MovementController>(); MC.motion = relative_direction.normalized * MC.acceleration * Time.fixedDeltaTime; MC.motion = this.transform.TransformDirection( MC.motion ); //MC.transform.Rotate(Vector3.up, input_horizontal_movement * 10f * Time.fixedDeltaTime); } } Mouvement code: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class MovementController : MonoBehaviour { public float deadZoneValue = 0.1f, angle, acceleration = 50.0f; public Vector3 motion ; //-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void OnGUI() { GUILayout.Label( "transform.rotation : " + transform.rotation ); GUILayout.Label( "transform.position : " + transform.position ); GUILayout.Label( "angle : " + angle ); } void FixedUpdate () { Ray ground_check_ray = new Ray( gameObject.transform.position, -gameObject.transform.up ); RaycastHit raycast_result; Rigidbody rigid_body = gameObject.rigidbody; if ( Physics.Raycast( ground_check_ray, out raycast_result ) ) { Vector3 next_position; //UpdateOrientation( gameObject.transform.forward, raycast_result.normal ); UpdateOrientation( gameObject.transform.forward, raycast_result.normal ); next_position = GetNextPosition( raycast_result.point ); rigid_body.MovePosition( next_position ); } } //-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- private void UpdateOrientation( Vector3 forward_vector, Vector3 ground_normal ) { Vector3 projected_forward_to_normal_surface = forward_vector - ( Vector3.Dot( forward_vector, ground_normal ) ) * ground_normal; transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation( projected_forward_to_normal_surface, ground_normal ); } private Vector3 GetNextPosition( Vector3 current_ground_position ) { Vector3 next_position; // //-------------------------------------------------------------------- // angle = 0; // Vector3 dir = this.transform.InverseTransformDirection(motion); // angle = Vector3.Angle(Vector3.forward, dir);// * 1f * Time.fixedDeltaTime; // // if(angle > 0) this.transform.Rotate(0,angle,0); // //-------------------------------------------------------------------- next_position = current_ground_position + gameObject.transform.up * 0.5f + motion ; return next_position; } } Some observation: I have the correct input, I have the correct translation in the camera direction ... but whenever I attempt to slowly lerp the direction of the character in direction of the input, all I get is wild spin! Sad Also discovered that strafing to the right (immediately at the beginning without moving forward) has major singularity trapping on the equator!! I'm totally lost and crush (I have already done a much more featured version which fail at the same aspect)

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• PASS Summit 2013 Review

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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• A Knights Tale

  - by Phil Factor

  There are so many lessons to be learned from the story of Knight Capital losing nearly half a billion dollars as a result of a deployment gone wrong. The Knight Capital Group (KCG N) was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. According to the recent order (File No.3.15570) against Knight Capital by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission?, Knight had, for many years used some software which broke up incoming “parent” orders into smaller “child” orders that were then transmitted to various exchanges or trading venues for execution. A tracking ‘cumulative quantity’ function counted the number of ‘child’ orders and stopped the process once the total of child orders matched the ‘parent’ and so the parent order had been completed. Back in the mists of time, some code had been added to it  which was excuted if a particular flag was set. It was called ‘power peg’ and seems to have had a similar design and purpose, but, one guesses, would have shared the same tracking function. This code had been abandoned in 2003, but never deleted. In 2005, The tracking function was moved to an earlier point in the main process. It would seem from the account that, from that point, had that flag ever been set, the old ‘Power Peg’ would have been executed like Godzilla bursting from the ice, making child orders without limit without any tracking function. It wasn’t, presumably because the software that set the flag was removed. In 2012, nearly a decade after ‘Power Peg’ was abandoned, Knight prepared a new module to their software to cope with the imminent Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) for the New York Stock Exchange. By this time, the flag had remained unused and someone made the fateful decision to reuse it, and replace the old ‘power peg’ code with this new RLP code. Had the two actions been done together in a single automated deployment, and the new deployment tested, all would have been well. It wasn’t. To quote… “Beginning on July 27, 2012, Knight deployed the new RLP code in SMARS in stages by placing it on a limited number of servers in SMARS on successive days. During the deployment of the new code, however, one of Knight’s technicians did not copy the new code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers. Knight did not have a second technician review this deployment and no one at Knight realized that the Power Peg code had not been removed from the eighth server, nor the new RLP code added. Knight had no written procedures that required such a review.” (para 15) “On August 1, Knight received orders from broker-dealers whose customers were eligible to participate in the RLP. The seven servers that received the new code processed these orders correctly. However, orders sent with the repurposed flag to the eighth server triggered the defective Power Peg code still present on that server. As a result, this server began sending child orders to certain trading centers for execution. Because the cumulative quantity function had been moved, this server continuously sent child orders, in rapid sequence, for each incoming parent order without regard to the number of share executions Knight had already received from trading centers. Although one part of Knight’s order handling system recognized that the parent orders had been filled, this information was not communicated to SMARS.” (para 16) SMARS routed millions of orders into the market over a 45-minute period, and obtained over 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares. By the time that Knight stopped sending the orders, Knight had assumed a net long position in 80 stocks of approximately $3.5 billion and a net short position in 74 stocks of approximately $3.15 billion. Knight’s shares dropped more than 20% after traders saw extreme volume spikes in a number of stocks, including preferred shares of Wells Fargo (JWF) and semiconductor company Spansion (CODE). Both stocks, which see roughly 100,000 trade per day, had changed hands more than 4 million times by late morning. Ultimately, Knight lost over $460 million from this wild 45 minutes of trading. Obviously, I’m interested in all this because, at one time, I used to write trading systems for the City of London. Obviously, the US SEC is in a far better position than any of us to work out the failings of Knight’s IT department, and the report makes for painful reading. I can’t help observing, though, that even with the breathtaking mistakes all along the way, that a robust automated deployment process that was ‘all-or-nothing’, and tested from soup to nuts would have prevented the disaster. The report reads like a Greek Tragedy. All the way along one wants to shout ‘No! not that way!’ and ‘Aargh! Don’t do it!’. As the tragedy unfolds, the audience weeps for the players, trapped by a cruel fate. All application development and deployment requires defense in depth. All IT goes wrong occasionally, but if there is a culture of defensive programming throughout, the consequences are usually containable. For financial systems, these defenses are required by statute, and ignored only by the foolish. Knight’s mistakes weren’t made by just one hapless sysadmin, but were progressive errors by an  IT culture spanning at least ten years.  One can spell these out, but I think they’re obvious. One can only hope that the industry studies what happened in detail, learns from the mistakes, and draws the right conclusions.

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• From the Classroom to the Boardroom

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pens and Paper...these are the only things being a student and being a graduate / professional have in common. Walking in to the offices of Oracle South Africa as a graduate the first thing you notice is how polished and sleek all the people who work here look. 80% of the ladies wear sky-scraper heels and walk with the greatest grace. This was the first of many rude awakenings to remind me that I am no longer a student but a graduate. My first struggle was having to wake up at wee hours of the morning to prepare for work. As a student going to class was almost an optional thing, if you missed a morning class you could always attend an evening class to make up for it or simply attend with another group. But in the workplace, you HAVE to show up every single morning at the same time, with no option of coming in when it suits you and there is definitely no coming in with the evening class/shift. As a student, the earliest hour I ever woke up was 7:00am, anything earlier than that was considered inhumane torture. My reason for waking up every morning as a student was “you have a degree to go get” but as a graduate having to go to work I have to say to myself “here’s to a new day of learning and growing”. My second struggle has come in having to change my beloved wardrobe. Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about fashion and shopping. For me Shopping is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, that should not be messed with. Therefore it was with great sadness that I swopped my rippled skinny jeans for pin-striped formal pants, my long chandelier earrings for simple studs, my flat shoes for heels, my sheer blouses for crisp white shirts, even my beloved wild hair had to make way for a simple ponytail. Our looks as ladies also came under great scrutiny, we had to acquaint ourselves with some serious grooming tools: the mascara, blush, lip-gloss, blush, a touch of lipstick and a manicure set. Language was a struggle of its own as well. Being a student you learn to relate to your peers in a informal way. In the workplace you have to address everyone with the same respect, including your peers. Words like “Hey buddy” had to make way for “good morning friend”. The month long winter school holiday was one of the things I looked forward to as a student. This was a time where we got to be at home and avoid the coldest month of the year, July. It was the most amazing thing ever, just sleeping and snuggling up to all sorts of warm things but sadly it is now a thing of the past. It is currently winter in South Africa and going to work has become the most unfashionable thing with all the jackets, boots, scarves and gloves. But summer is coming and I will miss those holidays too. As a student the school holidays were like a gift for us to catch a break and not think for a while which was why it was imaginable how someone would go on for the entire year without a break, with only the promise of a mere 21 days annual leave!! Right now I am sure we are all looking forward to taking that annual leave when the time is right. The worst rude awakening I must say, has to be presenting in front of clients and managers. As a student you have the same class mates for almost four years therefore presenting in front of them becomes the norm over the years and your lecturer will always go gently on you. What they don’t tell you at University is that in the real world, time is money and clients pay money to see you present therefore there is no room for error. Clients are not there to give you a score and boost your ego, they expect nothing less than 100% and they will let you know without a second thought. For a graduate this can feel like you are being fed to the sharks, you either get eaten or you swim for your life. At the end of the day, it is all an experience that is meant to groom us into better professional and make us a part of the Red Team. All the sacrifices are worth it and they lead us to being better and more polished professionals. So if you are interested in joining the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for more information and for our latest vacancies and internships. /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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;}

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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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• I.T. Chargeback : Core to Cloud Computing

  - by Anand Akela

  Contributed by Mark McGill Consolidation and Virtualization have been widely adopted over the years to help deliver benefits such as increased server utilization, greater agility and lower cost to the I.T. organization. These are key enablers of cloud, but in themselves they do not provide a complete cloud solution. Building a true enterprise private cloud involves moving from an admin driven world, where the I.T. department is ultimately responsible for the provisioning of servers, databases, middleware and applications, to a world where the consumers of I.T. resources can provision their infrastructure, platforms and even complete application stacks on demand. Switching from an admin-driven provisioning model to a user-driven model creates some challenges. How do you ensure that users provisioning resources will not provision more than they need? How do you encourage users to return resources when they have finished with them so that others can use them? While chargeback has existed as a concept for many years (especially in mainframe environments), it is the move to this self-service model that has created a need for a new breed of chargeback applications for cloud. Enabling self-service without some form of chargeback is like opening a shop where all of the goods are free. A successful chargeback solution will be able to allocate the costs of shared I.T. infrastructure based on the relative consumption by the users. Doing this creates transparency between the I.T. department and the consumers of I.T. When users are able to understand how their consumption translates to cost they are much more likely to be prudent when it comes to their use of I.T. resources. This also gives them control of their I.T. costs, as moderate usage will translate to a lower charge at the end of the month. Implementing Chargeback successfully create a win-win situation for I.T. and the consumers. Chargeback can help to ensure that I.T. resources are used for activities that deliver business value. It also improves the overall utilization of I.T. infrastructure as I.T. resources that are not needed are not left running idle. Enterprise Manager 12c provides an integrated metering and chargeback solution for Enterprise Manager Targets. This solution is built on top of the rich configuration and utilization information already available in Enterprise Manager. It provides metering not just for virtual machines, but also for physical hosts, databases and middleware. Enterprise Manager 12c provides metering based on the utilization and configuration of the following types of Enterprise Manager Target: Oracle VM Host Oracle Database Oracle WebLogic Server Using Enterprise Manager Chargeback, administrators are able to create a set of Charge Plans that are used to attach prices to the various metered resources. These plans can contain fixed costs (eg. $10/month/database), configuration based costs (eg. $10/month if OS is Windows) and utilization based costs (eg. $0.05/GB of Memory/hour) The self-service user provisioning these resources is then able to view a report that details their usage and helps them understand how this usage translates into cost. Armed with this information, the user is able to determine if the resources are delivering adequate business value based on what is being charged. Figure 1: Chargeback in Self-Service Portal Enterprise Manager 12c provides a variety of additional interfaces into this data. The administrator can access summary and trending reports. Summary reports allow the administrator to drill-down through the cost center hierarchy to identify, for example, the top resource consumers across the organization. Figure 2: Charge Summary Report Trending reports can be used for I.T. planning and budgeting as they show utilization and charge trends over a period of time. Figure 3: CPU Trend Report We also provide chargeback reports through BI Publisher. This provides a way for users who do not have an Enterprise Manager login (such as Line of Business managers) to view charge and usage information. For situations where a bill needs to be produced, chargeback can be integrated with billing applications such as Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM). Further information on Enterprise Manager 12c’s integrated metering and chargeback: White Paper Screenwatch Cloud Management on OTN

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• What do you need to know to be a world-class master software developer? [closed]

  - by glitch

  I wanted to bring up this question to you folks and see what you think, hopefully advise me on the matter: let's say you had 30 years of learning and practicing software development in front of you, how would you dedicate your time so that you'd get the biggest bang for your buck. What would you both learn and work on to be a world-class software developer that would make a large impact on the industry and leave behind a legacy? I think that most great developers end up being both broad generalists and specialists in one-two areas of interest. I'm thinking Bill Joy, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, K&R and so on. I'm thinking that perhaps one approach would be to break things down by categories and establish a base minimum of "software development" greatness. I'm thinking: Operating Systems: completely internalize the core concepts of OS, perhaps gain a lot of familiarity with an OSS one such as Linux. Anything from memory management to device drivers has to be complete second nature. Programming Languages: this is one of those topics that imho has to be fully grokked even if it might take many years. I don't think there's quite anything like going through the process of developing your own compiler, understanding language design trade-offs and so on. Programming Language Pragmatics is one of my favorite books actually, I think you want to have that internalized back to back, and that's just the start. You could go significantly deeper, but I think it's time well spent, because it's such a crucial building block. As a subset of that, you want to really understand the different programming paradigms out there. Imperative, declarative, logic, functional and so on. Anything from assembly to LISP should be at the very least comfortable to write in. Contexts: I believe one should have experience working in different contexts to truly be able to appreciate the trade-offs that are being made every day. Embedded, web development, mobile development, UX development, distributed, cloud computing and so on. Hardware: I'm somewhat conflicted about this one. I think you want some understanding of computer architecture at a low level, but I feel like the concepts that will truly matter will be slightly higher level, such as CPU caching / memory hierarchy, ILP, and so on. Networking: we live in a completely network-dependent era. Having a good understanding of the OSI model, knowing how the Web works, how HTTP works and so on is pretty much a pre-requisite these days. Distributed systems: once again, everything's distributed these days, it's getting progressively harder to ignore this reality. Slightly related, perhaps add solid understanding of how browsers work to that, since the world seems to be moving so much to interfacing with everything through a browser. Tools: Have a really broad toolset that you're familiar with, one that continuously expands throughout the years. Communication: I think being a great writer, effective communicator and a phenomenal team player is pretty much a prerequisite for a lot of a software developer's greatness. It can't be overstated. Software engineering: understanding the process of building software, team dynamics, the requirements of the business-side, all the pitfalls. You want to deeply understand where what you're writing fits from the market perspective. The better you understand all of this, the more of your work will actually see the daylight. This is really just a starting list, I'm confident that there's a ton of other material that you need to master. As I mentioned, you most likely end up specializing in a bunch of these areas as you go along, but I was trying to come up with a baseline. Any thoughts, suggestions and words of wisdom from the grizzled veterans out there who would like to share their thoughts and experiences with this? I'd really love to know what you think!

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• Unclear pricing of Windows Azure

  - by Dirk

  How do you people think about the Windows Azure pricing model and the way it is presented to the user? I just found out that Azure keeps charging hours for STOPPED instances. I just received a bill from more than 100 euro for 3 STOPPED instances (not) running "HelloAzure". I the past I also played around with Amazon Web Services. Amazon doesn't charge for stopped instances. I was wondering: "Should I have known this before, or is Microsoft doing a bad job in clear communication in the pricing model?" Quote from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/ : Compute time, measured in service hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Partial compute hours are billed as full hours. I read this, so I stopped all instances after a few hours playing around. Now it seems I should have deleted them, not just "stopped". Strictly speaking, all depends on the definition of the word "deployed". If you upload an application, but it is not running, can it still be regarded as being "deployed"? May be, but when you read this for the first time, with AWS experience in mind, I don't think it's 100% clear what this means. Technically speaking, an uploaded application only uses (read: should only use / needs only) a few MB harddrive space. It doesn't require any CPU time. If Azure wants to reserve CPU's for not running instances.. well, that's Azure's choice, not mine. I don't want to spread a hate campaign at all, but I do want to know how people think about this subject. Should Microsoft be more clear about their pricing model or do you think it's clear enough? Second question: did anyone got refunded for a similar case? Thanks in advance! UPDATE 27-01-2011 I sent an email to customer support a few days ago, but I guess that didn't reach anu human being because I didn't hear anything from it. So, I made a telephone call today with a Dutch customer support representative (I live in Holland). She totally understood the problem and she's trying to get a refund for me. However, she mentioned that "usually these refund requests are denied", but she's going to try. She also mentioned that I'm not the first one with this (or similar) problem. UPDATE 28-01-2011 I just received a phonecall from Microsoft support. The lady told me some good news: the money will refunded. However, the invoice has not been made yet, and my creditcard will first be chardged, after which it will be refunded, but hey, that's no problem for me! I'm glad the way it's solved! Thanks everybody!

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• possible UDP attack on BIND?

  - by Waleed Hamra

  hello everyone, i was surprised last month when my EC2 instance (ubuntu precise server), that is supposed to be under the free tier still, accumulated lots of traffic... today, while checking my current billing statement, i noticed i already have tons of traffic, while still in the middle of the month, and i'm fearing what my bill by the end of the month is going to be... i installed bandwidthd, and after few minutes, i noticed lots of UDP traffic to "108.162.233.15". this is apparently a cloudflare IP, and i don't have anything using cloudflare (as far as i know). so i ran "iftop" to see what ports are being used, and i saw the UDP traffic coming from port 80 to my port 53... why would a webserver query dns? so i stopped bind on my server, and ran it in foreground debugging mode, and saw the following query, being repeated continuously: 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: UDP request 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: request is not signed 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: recursion available 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: query 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: query (cache) 'isc.org/ANY/IN' approved 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: send 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: sendto 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: senddone 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.217 client 108.162.233.15#80: next 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.217 client 108.162.233.15#80: endrequest 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.217 client @0x7fbee05126e0: udprecv 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: UDP request 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: request is not signed 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: recursion available 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: query 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: query (cache) 'isc.org/ANY/IN' approved 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: send 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: sendto 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: senddone 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: next 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: endrequest my question is... is this normal? should i be worried? or is this completely irrelevant to my data charges, and i should wait to see more data from bandwidthd? thank you in advance.

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• How to get same cookie to control two different folders on same site.

  - by Incandescent

  I am using the below cookie javascript to run a background color changer on my site. I want to also use it for the background color of my forum which is in a separate folder (http://lightbulbchoice.com/forum). I currently have it working on both the site and forum but you have to set each separately, i.e., each is setting it's own cookie. How do I get the forum to locate the main site cookie and not set it's own? // Cookie Functions - Second Helping (21-Jan-96) // Written by: Bill Dortch, hIdaho Design // The following functions were released to the public domain by him. function getCookieVal (offset) { var endstr = document.cookie.indexOf (";", offset); if (endstr == -1) endstr = document.cookie.length; return unescape(document.cookie.substring(offset, endstr)); } function GetCookie (name) { var arg = name + "="; var alen = arg.length; var clen = document.cookie.length; var i = 0; while (i < clen) { var j = i + alen; if (document.cookie.substring(i, j) == arg) return getCookieVal (j); i = document.cookie.indexOf(" ", i) + 1; if (i == 0) break; } return null; } function SetCookie (name, value) { var argv = SetCookie.arguments; var argc = SetCookie.arguments.length; var expires = (argc > 2) ? argv[2] : null; var path = (argc > 3) ? argv[3] : null; var domain = (argc > 4) ? argv[4] : null; var secure = (argc > 5) ? argv[5] : false; document.cookie = name + "=" + escape (value) + ((expires == null) ? "" : ("; expires=" + expires.toGMTString())) + ((path == null) ? "" : ("; path=" + path)) + ((domain == null) ? "" : ("; domain=" + domain)) + ((secure == true) ? "; secure" : ""); } // --> </script>

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• Local admin password recovery: Windows Vista

  - by Jim Dennis

  I am faced with an unsettling situation. A friend of my father's has rather suddenly become a widower. Naturally they've taken care of the bank accounts and all the normal mundane things that people have been doing for a century or so. However, she was the computer user of the household. He was aware that they had some online banking stuff and bill paying stuff ... and that she spent lots of time on FaceBook and stuff like that. However, he doesn't know what her local passwords were (actually only vaguely aware that her couple of desktop and couple of laptop system even had passwords). He's never heard of "admin" passwords so that's no good either. In the past I've used KNOPPIX and the old LinuxCare "bootable business card" to recover NT passwords. I've never done this with MS Windows Vista. So, I'm looking for the best advice on how to do this. Naturally I do have physical access to the systems (the two laptops are charging across the room from me; and her old desktop systems are, naturally, still back at his place). Getting it right is much more important than fast or easy (I don't want to mess up those filesystems and possibly lose some photos or other stuff that he or his kids or grandkids will want). (BTW: if anyone things this is some social engineering hack to play upon the sympathies of the community to get the information I'm asking for ... think about it for a minute. I know about IRC and the "warez" boards. I know I can find this stuff out there if I dig enough. I'm just asking here because it'll hopefully be faster and, secondarily to raise awareness. As more of us put more of our lives online ... as we get older and as places like FaceBook continue to widen the appeal of computing to a broader segment of older people ... we are, as computer nerds, going to see a lot more of this. Survivors will needs us to be careful, sensitive and ethically responsible as they try to recover those bits of legacy during their bereavement. I can now tell you, first hand, it sucks!)

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• Asterisk server firewall script allows 2-way audio from incoming calls, but not on outgoing?

  - by cappie

  I'm running an Asterisk PBX on a virtual machine directly connected to the Internet and I really want to prevent script kiddies, l33t h4x0rz and actual hackers access to my server. The basic way I protect my calling-bill now is by using 32 character passwords, but I would much rather have a way to protect The firewall script I'm currently using is stated below, however, without the established connection firewall rule (mentioned rule #1), I cannot receive incoming audio from the target during outgoing calls: #!/bin/bash # first, clean up! iptables -F iptables -X iptables -t nat -F iptables -t nat -X iptables -t mangle -F iptables -t mangle -X iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT iptables -P FORWARD DROP # we're not a router iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT # don't allow invalid connections iptables -A INPUT -m state --state INVALID -j DROP # always allow connections that are already set up (MENTIONED RULE #1) iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT # always accept ICMP iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT # always accept traffic on these ports #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT # always allow DNS traffic iptables -A INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT # allow return traffic to the PBX iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 50000:65536 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 10000:20000 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p udp --destination-port 5060:5061 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --destination-port 5060:5061 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -m multiport -p udp --dports 10000:20000 iptables -A INPUT -m multiport -p tcp --dports 10000:20000 # IP addresses of the office iptables -A INPUT -s 95.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 -j ACCEPT # accept everything from the trunk IP's iptables -A INPUT -s 195.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -s 195.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 -j ACCEPT # accept everything on localhost iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT # accept all outgoing traffic iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT # DROP everything else #iptables -A INPUT -j DROP I would like to know what firewall rule I'm missing for this all to work.. There is so little documentation on which ports (incoming and outgoing) asterisk actually needs.. (return ports included). Are there any firewall/iptables specialists here that see major problems with this firewall script? It's so frustrating not being able to find a simple firewall solution that enabled me to have a PBX running somewhere on the Internet which is firewalled in such a way that it can ONLY allows connections from and to the office, the DNS servers and the trunk(s) (and only support SSH (port 22) and ICMP traffic for the outside world). Hopefully, using this question, we can solve this problem once and for all.

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• getting autodiscover URL from Exchange email address

  - by Anthony

  I'm starting with an address for an Exchange 2007 server: [email protected] And I attempted to send an autodiscover request, as documented at MSDN. I attempted to use the generic autodiscover address documented at the TechNet White Paper. So, using curl on PHP, I sent the following request: <Autodiscover xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/outlook/requestschema/2006"> <Request> <EMailAddress>[email protected]</EMailAddress> <AcceptableResponseSchema> http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/autodiscover/outlook/responseschema/2006a </AcceptableResponseSchema> </Request> </Autodiscover> to the following URL: https://domain.exchangeserver.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml But got no response, just an eventual timeout. I also tried: https://autodiscover.domain.exchangeserver.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml With the same result. Now, since my larger goal is to use Autodiscover with Exchange Web Services, and since all of the EWS URLs start with the same sub-domain as the Outlook Web Access address, I thought I'd give that a try: OWA: https://wmail.domain.exchangeserver.org So I tried: https://wmail.domain.exchangeserver.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml And sure enough, I got back the expected response. However, I only knew the OWA sub-domain because it's the server I have access to and that I'm using to test everything. I would not know it for sure or be able to guess it if this were a live app and the user was entering in their own Exchange email. I know that whatever generic autodiscover settings must be turned on, because I can enter: [email protected] into Apple Mail on Snow Leopard and it finds everything without trouble. So the question is... Should https://domain.exchangeserver.org/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml have worked, and I just missed a step when trying to connect to it? Or, Is there some trick (maybe involving pinging the email address?) that Apple Mail and other clients use to resolve the address to the OWA subdomain before sending the autodiscover request? Thanks to anyone who knows or can take a wild guess.

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• Mysql password hashing method old vs new

  - by The Disintegrator

  I'm trying to connect to a mysql server at dreamhost from a php scrip located in a server at slicehost (two different hosting companies). I need to do this so I can transfer new data at slicehost to dreamhost. Using a dump is not an option because the table structures are different and i only need to transfer a small subset of data (100-200 daily records) The problem is that I'm using the new MySQL Password Hashing method at slicehost, and dreamhost uses the old one, So i get $link = mysql_connect($mysqlHost, $mysqlUser, $mysqlPass, FALSE); Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: OK packet 6 bytes shorter than expected Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: mysqlnd cannot connect to MySQL 4.1+ using old authentication Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: Access denied for user 'nodari'@'localhost' (using password: NO) facts: I need to continue using the new method at slicehost and i can't use an older php version/library The database is too big to transfer it every day with a dump Even if i did this, the tables have different structures I need to copy only a small subset of it, in a daily basis (only the changes of the day, 100-200 records) Since the tables are so different, i need to use php as a bridge to normalize the data Already googled it Already talked to both support stafs The more obvious option to me would be to start using the new MySQL Password Hashing method at dreamhost, but they will not change it and i'm not root so i can't do this myself. Any wild idea? By VolkerK sugestion: mysql> SET SESSION old_passwords=0; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) mysql> SELECT @@global.old_passwords,@@session.old_passwords, Length(PASSWORD('abc')); +------------------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+ | @@global.old_passwords | @@session.old_passwords | Length(PASSWORD('abc')) | +------------------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+ | 1 | 0 | 41 | +------------------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) The obvious thing now would be run a mysql SET GLOBAL old_passwords=0; But i need SUPER privilege to do that and they wont give it to me if I run the query SET PASSWORD FOR 'nodari'@'HOSTNAME' = PASSWORD('new password'); I get the error ERROR 1044 (42000): Access denied for user 'nodari'@'67.205.0.0/255.255.192.0' to database 'mysql' I'm not root... The guy at dreamhost support insist saying thet the problem is at my end. But he said he will run any query I tell him since it's a private server. So, I need to tell this guy EXACTLY what to run. So, telling him to run SET SESSION old_passwords=0; SET GLOBAL old_passwords=0; SET PASSWORD FOR 'nodari'@'HOSTNAME' = PASSWORD('new password'); grant all privileges on *.* to nodari@HOSTNAME identified by 'new password'; would be a good start?

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• UIScrollView works as expected but scrollRectToVisible: does nothing

  - by mahboudz

  HI. I have used UIScrollView before, and am using it now, and never had a problem. I'm now adding it to an old app, and while it works as expected (I can look at the contents, scroll around with my finger, all the bounds and sizes are setup right so there is no empty space in the content, etc.), I just can't get scrollToRectVisible to work. I have even simplified the call so that it merely moves to the 0,0 position: [scrollView scrollRectToVisible:CGRectMake(0, 0, 10, 10) animated:YES]; or move it to 0,200: [scrollView scrollRectToVisible:CGRectMake(0, 200, 10, 10) animated:YES]; I even made a quick app to test this and I can get scrollRectToVisible to work there as I expect. But in my old app, I can't seem to make it do anything. I can make the scrollView scroll with setContentOffset:, but that's not what I want. This scrollView and its contents are defined in the nib by IB and used with an IBOutlet. The only code I am using in my app to handle the scrollView is [scrollView setContentSize:CGSizeMake(scrollView.contentSize.width, imageView.frame.size.height)]; (I'm only interested in vertical scrolling not horizontal). Has anyone run into a problem like this? I have compared the scrollView attributes in both apps and they are identical. ADDENDUM: My scrollViews frame is: 0.000000 0.000000 480.000000 179.000000 My scrollViews contentSize is: 0.000000 324.000000 It still acts like the rect I want to scroll to is already visible and no scrolling is needed. Not sure if that is what is happening. This is just the darnest thing. Seems like such an easy thing to resolve... ADDENDUM #2: This is how I am making do without scrollRectToVisible: CGPoint point = myRect.origin; if (![clefScrollView pointInside:point withEvent:nil]) { point.x = 0; if (point.y > clefScrollView.contentSize.height - clefScrollView.bounds.size.height) point.y = clefScrollView.contentSize.height - clefScrollView.bounds.size.height; [clefScrollView setContentOffset:point animated: YES]; } Everything else about this scrollView works as expected, but scrollRectToVisible. WHY?!? Any wild guesses?

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• Would Ruby on Rails be appropriate for this Foreign Language project?

  - by Lynne Overesch-Maister

  I'm a Spanish professor & computer groupie. About 15 years ago, I authored in HyperCard a series of verb conjugation programs that are now completely out of date with respect to System OS X. I would like to redo these programs myself because I had a lot of fun doing them last time (mostly I coded while my son played in Leaps and Bounds, you know, one of those places where parents take their kids & let them run wild through the tubes...). Colleagues have mentioned using Flash, Director, and various other solutions, but I saw a presentation on RoR at our SIDLIT conference today, and was inspired. I will be parsing and comparing strings (and there are other features on top of that, but that is the main one), "adding" strings relationally indexed in some kind of database(s). It will also have to handle various foreign characters (accents, upside down question marks, etc.). On top of the main process of the program, it will have to provide a practice vs. test mode, keep track of specific answers as well as totals right/wrong, and print a report. Would this be either easier and/or more efficiently done in RoR than in other languages. I am pretty sure that it will work on a Microsoft server, right? Because I think that is where most of our stuff is. I would be programming either on a Mac or a PC, whichever you think is easier. So, in summary, is RoR the way for me to go with this project? If I have some (little) experience programming in Hypercard and C, should I be able to pick RoR up fairly quickly? What things will I need to start (I already saw something called Redhills foreign key migration plugin, which I assume would be beneficial)? I still have my old scripts from hypercard, however what I would really like to do is to combine all six of my former tense-specific programs into one larger program. I figure that it wouldn't be too hard to reference the individual tenses in some way--could that be a class? Many thanks for any help you can give me on this forum.

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• What could cause this difference in behaviour from iphone OS3.0 to iOS4.0?

  - by frankodwyer

  I am getting a strange EXC_BAD_ACCESS error when running my app on iOS4. The app has been pretty solid on OS3.x for some time - not even seeing crash logs in this area of the code (or many at all) in the wild. I've tracked the error down to this code: main class: - (void) sendPost:(PostRequest*)request { NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; NSURLResponse* response; NSError* error; NSData *serverReply = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request.request returningResponse:&response error:&error]; ServerResponse* serverResponse=[[ServerResponse alloc] initWithResponse:response error:error data:serverReply]; [request.objectToNotifyWhenDone performSelectorOnMainThread:request.targetToNotifyWhenDone withObject:serverResponse waitUntilDone:YES]; [pool drain]; } (Note: sendPost is run on a separate thread for each invocation of it. PostRequest is just a class to encapsulate a request and a selector to notify when complete) ServerResponse.m: @synthesize response; @synthesize replyString; @synthesize error; @synthesize plist; - (ServerResponse*) initWithResponse:(NSURLResponse*)resp error:(NSError*)err data:(NSData*)serverReply { self.response=resp; self.error=err; self.plist=nil; self.replyString=nil; if (serverReply) { self.replyString = [[[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[serverReply bytes] length:[serverReply length] encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding] autorelease]; NSPropertyListFormat format; NSString *errorStr; plist = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:serverReply mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable format:&format errorDescription:&errorStr]; } return self; } ServerResponse.h: @property (nonatomic, retain) NSURLResponse* response; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSString* replyString; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSError* error; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSDictionary* plist; - (ServerResponse*) initWithResponse:(NSURLResponse*)response error:(NSError*)error data:(NSData*)serverReply; This reliably crashes with a bad access in the line: self.error=err; ...i.e. in the synthesized property setter! I'm stumped as to why this should be, given the code worked on the previous OS and hasn't changed since (even the binary compiled with the previous SDK crashes the same way, but not on OS3.0) - and given it is a simple property method. Any ideas? Could the NSError implementation have changed between releases or am I missing something obvious?

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• Jquery Ajax Call In For Loop Only Runs Once - Possible Issue with Timing & Exit Condition?

  - by Grumps

  Background I'm building a form that uses autocomplete against the EchoNest API. First the users picks an artist, using the Artist Suggest call. Next they select a song but the Song and/Or Artist song search doesn't provide a "wild card" search. It only returns exact matches. So based on the forums they suggest building an array of the songs and using auto complete on the array. I can only get a maximum of 100 responses at a time. I do know based on the initial response the number of songs. My Plan: Wrap the ajax call in a for loop ('runonceloop'). Amend the loop exit condition after the first response with the total number of songs. Challenge I'm having: The 'runonceloop' only completes a singe loop because or at least that's what I believe: The exit condition is satisfied before the first response [1] is received. I've tried to adjust the 'exit condition' and 'counter' such that they are set and and increased at the end of the success block. This seems to lock up my browser. Can someone provide some guidance on this situation?[2] I'd really appreciate it. I also don't think turning async off is a good idea because it locks the browser. Response[1]: { "response": { "status": { "code": "0", "message": "Success", "version": "4.2" }, "start": 0, "total": 121, //Used for "songs": [ { "id": "SOXZYYG127F3E1B7A2", "title": "Karma police" }, { "id": "SOXZABD127F3E1B7A2", "title" : "Creep" } ] } } } Code[2] var songsList = []; function getSongs() { var numsongs = 2; //at least 2 runs. var startindex = 0; runonceloop: //<~~~~Referenced in question for (var j = 0;j >= numsongs;) { console.log('numsongs' + numsongs); $.ajax({ url: "http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/artist/songs", dataType: "jsonp", data: { results: 100, api_key: "XXXXXXXXXXX", format: "jsonp", name: $("#artist").val(), start: startindex }, success: function (data) { var songs = data.response.songs; numsongs = data.response.total; //modify exit condition for (var i = 0; i < songs.length; i++) { songsList.push(songs[i].title); } j +=100;// increase by 100 to match number of responses. } }); }};

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• Is Java assert broken?

  - by BlairHippo

  While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn't already know! A more efficient way for me to check the validity of input parameters! Yay learning! But then I took a closer look, and my enthusiasm was not so much "tempered" as "snuffed-out completely" by one simple fact: you can turn assertions off.* This sounds like a nightmare. If I'm asserting that I don't want the code to keep going if the input listOfStuff is null, why on earth would I want that assertion ignored? It sounds like if I'm debugging a piece of production code and suspect that listOfStuff may have been erroneously passed a null but don't see any logfile evidence of that assertion being triggered, I can't trust that listOfStuff actually got sent a valid value; I also have to account for the possibility that assertions may have been turned off entirely. And this assumes that I'm the one debugging the code. Somebody unfamiliar with assertions might see that and assume (quite reasonably) that if the assertion message doesn't appear in the log, listOfStuff couldn't be the problem. If your first encounter with assert was in the wild, would it even occur to you that it could be turned-off entirely? It's not like there's a command-line option that lets you disable try/catch blocks, after all. All of which brings me to my question (and this is a question, not an excuse for a rant! I promise!): What am I missing? Is there some nuance that renders Java's implementation of assert far more useful than I'm giving it credit for? Is the ability to enable/disable it from the command line actually incredibly valuable in some contexts? Am I misconceptualizing it somehow when I envision using it in production code in lieu of statements like if (listOfStuff == null) barf();? I just feel like there's something important here that I'm not getting. *Okay, technically speaking, they're actually off by default; you have to go out of your way to turn them on. But still, you can knock them out entirely.

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