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• From Pocket to Instapaper

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced-  1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped,  but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in  InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2.  Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that  a full screen popup was  implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on  http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper  or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should  provide  a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment  explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper.  I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought  RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

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• Subterranean IL: Exception handling 1

  - by Simon Cooper

  Today, I'll be starting a look at the Structured Exception Handling mechanism within the CLR. Exception handling is quite a complicated business, and, as a result, the rules governing exception handling clauses in IL are quite strict; you need to be careful when writing exception clauses in IL. Exception handlers Exception handlers are specified using a .try clause within a method definition. .try <TryStartLabel> to <TryEndLabel> <HandlerType> handler <HandlerStartLabel> to <HandlerEndLabel> As an example, a basic try/catch block would be specified like so: TryBlockStart: // ... leave.s CatchBlockEndTryBlockEnd:CatchBlockStart: // at the start of a catch block, the exception thrown is on the stack callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString() call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s CatchBlockEnd CatchBlockEnd: // method code continues... .try TryBlockStart to TryBlockEnd catch [mscorlib]System.Exception handler CatchBlockStart to CatchBlockEnd There are four different types of handler that can be specified: catch <TypeToken> This is the standard exception catch clause; you specify the object type that you want to catch (for example, [mscorlib]System.ArgumentException). Any object can be thrown as an exception, although Microsoft recommend that only classes derived from System.Exception are thrown as exceptions. filter <FilterLabel> A filter block allows you to provide custom logic to determine if a handler block should be run. This functionality is exposed in VB, but not in C#. finally A finally block executes when the try block exits, regardless of whether an exception was thrown or not. fault This is similar to a finally block, but a fault block executes only if an exception was thrown. This is not exposed in VB or C#. You can specify multiple catch or filter handling blocks in each .try, but fault and finally handlers must have their own .try clause. We'll look into why this is in later posts. Scoped exception handlers The .try syntax is quite tricky to use; it requires multiple labels, and you've got to be careful to keep separate the different exception handling sections. However, starting from .NET 2, IL allows you to use scope blocks to specify exception handlers instead. Using this syntax, the example above can be written like so: .try { // ... leave.s EndSEH}catch [mscorlib]System.Exception { callvirt instance string [mscorlib]System.Object::ToString() call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s EndSEH}EndSEH:// method code continues... As you can see, this is much easier to write (and read!) than a stand-alone .try clause. Next time, I'll be looking at some of the restrictions imposed by SEH on control flow, and how the C# compiler generated exception handling clauses.

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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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• Checking if an Unloaded Collection Contains Elements

  - by Ricardo Peres

  If you want to know if an unloaded collection in an entity contains elements, or count them, without actually loading them, you need to use a custom query; that is because the Count property (if the collection is not mapped with lazy=”extra”) and the LINQ Count() and Any() methods force the whole collection to be loaded. You can use something like these two methods, one for checking if there are any values, the other for actually counting them: 1: public static Boolean Exists(this ISession session, IEnumerable collection) 2: { 3: if (collection is IPersistentCollection) 4: { 5: IPersistentCollection col = collection as IPersistentCollection; 6:  7: if (col.WasInitialized == false) 8: { 9: String[] roleParts = col.Role.Split('.'); 10: String ownerTypeName = String.Join(".", roleParts, 0, roleParts.Length - 1); 11: String ownerCollectionName = roleParts.Last(); 12: String hql = "select 1 from " + ownerTypeName + " it where it.id = :id and exists elements(it." + ownerCollectionName + ")"; 13: Boolean exists = session.CreateQuery(hql).SetParameter("id", col.Key).List().Count == 1; 14:  15: return (exists); 16: } 17: } 18:  19: return ((collection as IEnumerable).OfType<Object>().Any()); 20: } 21:  22: public static Int64 Count(this ISession session, IEnumerable collection) 23: { 24: if (collection is IPersistentCollection) 25: { 26: IPersistentCollection col = collection as IPersistentCollection; 27:  28: if (col.WasInitialized == false) 29: { 30: String[] roleParts = col.Role.Split('.'); 31: String ownerTypeName = String.Join(".", roleParts, 0, roleParts.Length - 1); 32: String ownerCollectionName = roleParts.Last(); 33: String hql = "select count(elements(it." + ownerCollectionName + ")) from " + ownerTypeName + " it where it.id = :id"; 34: Int64 count = session.CreateQuery(hql).SetParameter("id", col.Key).UniqueResult<Int64>(); 35:  36: return (count); 37: } 38: } 39:  40: return ((collection as IEnumerable).OfType<Object>().Count()); 41: } Here’s how: 1: MyEntity entity = session.Load(100); 2:  3: if (session.Exists(entity.SomeCollection)) 4: { 5: Int32 count = session.Count(entity.SomeCollection); 6: //... 7: }

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• Do I need to create my own or use a commercial server for the features and matchmaking options I want my game to support?

  - by baptzmoffire

  So I'm developing an indie turn-based game for iOS and, in coding up a Game Center matchmaking class, I'm starting to question whether Game Center is even the best choice for what I want this game to do. I need to figure out whether I need to create my own server, invest in a preexisting client or server service, or if I even need to use a server at all. If I do need to use a ready-made service other than Game Center, which server would accomodate my game's needs best? I have limited resources and funds. Here is the list of features I want my game to support, ideally: Turn-based gameplay (a la "with Friends" and "with Buddies" games) Smart matchmaking (matching users up with other players of comparable skill/achievements) Random matchmaking Facebook matchmaking Specific username matchmaking Contact list matchmaking A way to select what "type" of match you want to challenge an opponent to. (In random, smart, and Facebook matchmaking, there will be different "wagers" the player can make. [e.g. "I wanna play a random opponent for 1000 points. Now, I wanna play my Facebook buddy for 1,000,000 points."] There will be a predetermined range of amounts you can play for. It won't be customizable.) Buddies list capability (Game-buddies, as opposed to contacts and Facebook) A higher concurrent game cap than Game Center offers (which I still can't really find a straight answer on) Scalability (it should support 2 or 20,000,000 players) Objective-C compatibility Flexibility (for all the stuff I haven't thought of yet) Am I dreaming, here? Is there even a service that can handle all of these features? Do I need to invest months in learning a networking language to build my own? If so, how much would I need to spend on hardware? I've been looking around all morning and, so far, the only seemingly viable option is SmartFox. Under "Everything and the kitchen sink" section here, it says they support "virtual world with Zones, Rooms and RoomGroups, create complex game challenges, send invitations, manage buddy lists, create custom permission profiles, oversee the security aspects and tons more." http://www.smartfoxserver.com/overview/platform Is there an option that Im just overlooking? Thanks for any help anyone can provide. Sorry for the long poast. One last question: Does anyone know which server Dice with Buddies uses? I was experimenting with how many concurrent games I could get going and my ADHD kicked in at about 80 games. 80 concurrent games would be great for my game, but again, I need the other features I mentioned too. Thanks again.

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• Joomla Hide Menu Item, or: Using Rich Content as part of the navigation

  - by chiccodoro

  In my Joomla based web site, I have a two layer main menu. The page layout contains two sections whereas the left one displays the content and the right one displays some other kind of content which at the same time serves as a menu. For example, if the user clicks on the "Products" - "SomeCategory" 2nd level menu item, the left section displays an image. The right section lists all products of that category. Each product is represented by an image and text. The content is scrollable. This section is implemented by means of a custom module (mod_custom) assigned to the menu. The content is rich text (HTML). Each product is entered manually by adding a picture and a text in the WYSIWYG editor, and by inserting a link for the picture and text. Now the issue: When the user clicks on a product, I want to display the corresponding product description article ("SomeProduct") to the left, accounting for the following requirements: The bread crumb now displays "Products - SomeCategory - SomeProduct" The main menu still displays the 2nd level for "Products", and "SomeCategory" is still marked as selected. (I would love if the right section which lists the product would remain in the exact same scroll state, but that's a completely different story.) If I link the product entry from the right hand side directly to the article "SomeProduct", then the article appears to the left, but the breadcrumb and menu are reset. So I wanted to create a hidden menu item "SomeProduct" beneath "SomeCategory", and to link the product entry to that menu item. This way, if I click on the product entry, the article appears to the left, the breadcrumb behaves correctly, and the menu state is preserved. However, it is not possible to configure the SomeProduct menu item as "hidden", therefore it appears in the main menu. I found some resources that suggest to create another menu, called "hidden", which does not use any modules, and to create the "SomeProduct" menu item in that menu. Unfortunately this did not work for me: If I link that menu item from the product entry, and click on that entry, then the article appears to the left, but the menu is reset, and the breadcrumb displays "SomeProduct" instead of "Products SomeCategory SomeProduct". Lucky me! I found an appropriate stackexchange site where I can pour out my heart to you guys. Sure you can help me :-)

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• HDMI sound gone, can't figure out how to turn it back on

  - by Oli

  I have had an Acer Revo box as a media centre for a while. I recently installed Ubuntu Server (10.10) on it and polished it up with nodm (one of the most simple ways to launch an X session) and installed boxee. It's been working fine for over a month. It's just running ALSA. I've had problems with PulseAudio/Boxee/HDMI before so I wanted to keep it simple. And that worked. It pushed both PCM and digital (AAC and various Dolby codecs) over HDMI perfectly. But I restarted it the other day after mucking around with some nfs configuration and now there isn't any sound. The hardware is an ION chipset. Nvidia 9400M graphics with Nvidia MCP79/7A audio. One thing I have noticed is there doesn't appear to be any sign of a IEC958 device. A traditional fix in the past for fresh installs has been to load alsamixer, find the IEC device and toggle its mute but I can't. I'm certain this used to represent the HDMI output. It just doesn't seem to exist any more unless I run sudo alsa-utils restart while boxee is running, when I see it in an error message: * Shutting down ALSA... [ OK ] * Setting up ALSA... * warning: 'alsactl restore' failed with error message 'alsactl: set_control:1388: Cannot write control '2:0:0:IEC958 Playback Default:0' : Operation not permitted'... ...done. When nodm (and thus boxee) aren't running, I don't see this error but alsamixer still doesn't show the IEC channel. aplay -l gives: card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC662 rev1 Analog [ALC662 rev1 Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 0/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Its section in lshw reads: *-multimedia description: Audio device product: MCP79 High Definition Audio vendor: nVidia Corporation physical id: 8 bus info: pci@0000:00:08.0 version: b1 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 maxlatency=5 mingnt=2 resources: irq:22 memory:fae78000-fae7bfff I was running on the stock PAE kernel but now it's running on 2.6.37.1. I upgraded to see if that fixed things; it didn't. I'm considering a reinstall but I hate doing that because a) there's a bit of custom configuration in getting X and Boxee to start on boot and b) I don't know what the problem is. If I reinstall this time, I'll end up doing that every time the sound breaks. I love Ubuntu but I don't want to install it once a month. Is there any way to forcibly reset all alsa settings and restart from scratch (without doing a reinstall)? Any other tips? If you need more information, just ask.

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• Configuring keyboard input to eliminate unused diacritics

  - by David Cesarino

  I'd like to change the way diacritics work under Xubuntu. My problem My native language is pt-BR and my notebook has an american keyboard. Thus, I use ' and " followed by keys like u and c to achieve things like ú, ç and ü. It all works well. However, in the case of apostrophes and quotes, that creates a problem when I use ' followed by: letters that won't accept the acute accent ( ´ , ACUTE ACCENT -- 0x00B4) at all, like t; and letters that won't accept the acute in pt-BR, like r. In 1, ' with t does absolutely nothing. In 2, ' with r creates r (LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH ACUTE -- 0x0155), which is used, afaik, for some eastern european languages like slovak. It isn't used in portuguese, just like ?, s, z, ?, ?, ?, n and all consonants (portuguese do not take diacritics in consonants). Question That said, is there a way to better support the portuguese-brazilian language using an american keyboard? It is very common here --- I actually prefer the american keyboard to our own, known as “ABNT”. Desired solution I'd like to deactivate unused diacritics, so case 2 would behave just like case 1. Additionally, if possible, I'd like case 1 to behave like it does under Windows. As an example, typing ' followed by t should write 't (acute followed by T) instead of doing nothing. About 2, in my humble opinion, doing nothing is counterproductive. I realize the behavior is reasonable according to logic ("there isn't t-acute, so please tell the computer to typeset apostrophe --- ', SPACE --- instead of acute). But from a human, practical point of view, I think it makes more sense (to me, at least). Additional comments I believe this also applies to spanish, french, italian and other western european latin languages. On the console (Ctrl+Alt+F?), case 1 is not a problem. I don't need to press space as apostrophes are automatically added. However, there, I'm unable to access cedilla (ç). Two completely different behaviors. If it's just a matter of customizing text config files (possibly creating a custom layout or whatever), I'd be glad to share my efforts. I just need guide on the "howto" part. Somehow Google only points me to the "enough" people (those who cope with the situation and think that it works "well enough"). And since I have definitely migrated to Linux/Xubuntu after years, I'd like to leave just as I like it (and I'm sure others as well). For example, if there is some kind of scripting or definition to tell the computer to do what I described, so be it.

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• iwlwifi on lenovo z570 disabled by hardware switch

  - by Kevin Gallagher

  It was working fine with windows 7. The hardware switch is not disabled. I've toggled it back and forth dozens of times. The wifi light never turns on and it always lists as hardware disabled. I have the latest updates installed. I've been searching for solutions, but none of them seem to work for me. I've tried removing acer-wmi. I've tried setting 11n_disable=1. I've tried resetting the bios. I've tried using rfkill to unblock (only removes soft block). I've rebooted dozens of times. The wifi light turns off as soon as grub loads. Edit: I have a usb edimax wireless nic. It shows hardware disabled as well (although rfkill lists as unblocked). If I unload iwlwifi the usb nic works fine. uname -a `Linux xxx-Ideapad-Z570 3.2.0-55-generic #85-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 2 12:29:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linu`x rfkill list 19: phy18: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes dmesg [43463.022996] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, in-tree: [43463.023002] Copyright(c) 2003-2011 Intel Corporation [43463.023107] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [43463.023190] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [43463.023253] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: pci_resource_len = 0x00002000 [43463.023257] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: pci_resource_base = ffffc900057c8000 [43463.023261] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: HW Revision ID = 0x0 [43463.023797] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: irq 43 for MSI/MSI-X [43463.024013] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 1000 BGN, REV=0x6C [43463.024250] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Enabled; Disabling L0S [43463.045496] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: device EEPROM VER=0x15d, CALIB=0x6 [43463.045501] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Device SKU: 0X50 [43463.045504] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Valid Tx ant: 0X1, Valid Rx ant: 0X3 [43463.045542] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 0 802.11a channels [43463.045744] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: RF_KILL bit toggled to disable radio. [43463.047652] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: loaded firmware version 39.31.5.1 build 35138 [43463.047823] Registered led device: phy18-led [43463.047895] cfg80211: Ignoring regulatory request Set by core since the driver uses its own custom regulatory domain [43463.048037] ieee80211 phy18: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-agn-rs' [43463.055533] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready nm-tool State: connected (global) - Device: wlan0 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Type: 802.11 WiFi Driver: iwlwifi State: unavailable Default: no HW Address: 74:E5:0B:4A:9F:C2 Capabilities: Wireless Properties WEP Encryption: yes WPA Encryption: yes WPA2 Encryption: yes Wireless Access Points lshw -C network *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface product: Centrino Wireless-N 1000 [Condor Peak] vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 00 serial: 74:e5:0b:4a:9f:c2 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.2.0-55-generic firmware=39.31.5.1 build 35138 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg resources: irq:43 memory:f1500000-f1501fff lspci 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000 [Condor Peak]

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• Annoying flickering of vertices and edges (possible z-fighting)

  - by Belgin

  I'm trying to make a software z-buffer implementation, however, after I generate the z-buffer and proceed with the vertex culling, I get pretty severe discrepancies between the vertex depth and the depth of the buffer at their projected coordinates on the screen (i.e. zbuffer[v.xp][v.yp] != v.z, where xp and yp are the projected x and y coordinates of the vertex v), sometimes by a small fraction of a unit and sometimes by 2 or 3 units. Here's what I think is happening: Each triangle's data structure holds the plane's (that is defined by the triangle) coefficients (a, b, c, d) computed from its three vertices from their normal: void computeNormal(Vertex *v1, Vertex *v2, Vertex *v3, double *a, double *b, double *c) { double a1 = v1 -> x - v2 -> x; double a2 = v1 -> y - v2 -> y; double a3 = v1 -> z - v2 -> z; double b1 = v3 -> x - v2 -> x; double b2 = v3 -> y - v2 -> y; double b3 = v3 -> z - v2 -> z; *a = a2*b3 - a3*b2; *b = -(a1*b3 - a3*b1); *c = a1*b2 - a2*b1; } void computePlane(Poly *p) { double x = p -> verts[0] -> x; double y = p -> verts[0] -> y; double z = p -> verts[0] -> z; computeNormal(p -> verts[0], p -> verts[1], p -> verts[2], &p -> a, &p -> b, &p -> c); p -> d = p -> a * x + p -> b * y + p -> c * z; } The z-buffer just holds the smallest depth at the respective xy coordinate by somewhat casting rays to the polygon (I haven't quite got interpolation right yet so I'm using this slower method until I do) and determining the z coordinate from the reversed perspective projection formulas (which I got from here: double z = -(b*Ez*y + a*Ez*x - d*Ez)/(b*y + a*x + c*Ez - b*Ey - a*Ex); Where x and y are the pixel's coordinates on the screen; a, b, c, and d are the planes coefficients; Ex, Ey, and Ez are the eye's (camera's) coordinates. This last formula does not accurately give the exact vertices' z coordinate at their projected x and y coordinates on the screen, probably because of some floating point inaccuracy (i.e. I've seen it return something like 3.001 when the vertex's z-coordinate was actually 2.998). Here is the portion of code that hides the vertices that shouldn't be visible: for(i = 0; i < shape.nverts; ++i) { double dist = shape.verts[i].z; if(z_buffer[shape.verts[i].yp][shape.verts[i].xp].z < dist) shape.verts[i].visible = 0; else shape.verts[i].visible = 1; } How do I solve this issue? EDIT I've implemented the near and far planes of the frustum, with 24 bit accuracy, and now I have some questions: Is this what I have to do this in order to resolve the flickering? When I compare the z value of the vertex with the z value in the buffer, do I have to convert the z value of the vertex to z' using the formula, or do I convert the value in the buffer back to the original z, and how do I do that? What are some decent values for near and far? Thanks in advance.

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• Application Integration Future &ndash; BizTalk Server &amp; Windows Azure (TechEd 2012)

  - by SURESH GIRIRAJAN

  I am really excited to see lot of new news around BizTalk in TechEd 2012. I was recently watching the session presented by Sriram and Rajesh on “Application Integration Futures: The Road Map and What's Next on Windows Azure”. It was great session and lot of interesting stuff about the feature updates for BizTalk and Azure integration. I have highlighted them below, definitely customers who haven’t started using Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit should start using them which is going to be part of the core BizTalk product in future release, which is cool… BizTalk Server feature enhancements Manageability: ESB Tool Kit is going to be part of the core BizTalk product and Setup. Visualize BizTalk artifact dependencies in BizTalk administration console. HIS administration using configuration files. Performance: Improvements in ordered send port scenarios Improved performance in dynamic send ports and ESB, also to configure BizTalk host handler for dynamic send ports. Right now it runs under default host, which does not enable to scale. MLLP adapter enhancements and DB2 client transaction load balancing / client bulk insert. Platform Support: Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 Server, SQL Server 2012, Office 15 and System Center 2012. B2B enhancements to support latest industry standards natively. Connectivity Improvements: Consume REST service directly in BizTalk SharePoint integration made easier. Improvements to SMTP adapter, to add macros for sending same email with different content to different parties. Connectivity to Azure Service Bus relay, queues and topics. DB2 client connectivity to SQL Server and SQL Server connectivity to Informix. CICS Http client connectivity to Windows. Azure: Use Azure as IaaS/PaaS for BizTalk environment. Use Azure to provision BizTalk environment for test environment / development. Later move to On-premises or build a Hybrid cloud approach. Eliminate HW procurement for BizTalk environment for testing / demos / development etc. Enable to create BizTalk farm easily and remove/add more servers as needed. EAI Service: EAI Bridge Protocol transformation Message Transformation Running custom code Message Enrichment Hybrid Connectivity LOB Applications On-premises Application On-premises Connectivity to Applications in the cloud Queues/ Topics Ftp Devices Web Services Bridge can be customized based on the service needs to provide different capabilities needed as part of the bridge. Look at the sample for EDI bridge for EDI service sample. Also with Tracking enabled through the portal. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh674490 Adapters: Service Bus Messaging adapter - New adapter added. WebHttp adapter - For REST services. NetTcpRelay adapter - New adapter added. I will start posting more and once I start playing with this…

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• C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

  - by Jonathan Mitchem

  After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

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• Upgrading to Code Based Migrations EF 4.3.1 with Connector/Net 6.6

  - by GABMARTINEZ

  Entity Framework 4.3.1 includes a new feature called code first migrations.  We are adding support for this feature in our upcoming 6.6 release of Connector/Net.  In this walk-through we'll see the workflow of code-based migrations when you have an existing application and you would like to upgrade to this EF 4.3.1 version and use this approach, so you can keep track of the changes that you do to your database.   The first thing we need to do is add the new Entity Framework 4.3.1 package to our application. This should via the NuGet package manager.  You can read more about why EF is not part of the .NET framework here. Adding EF 4.3.1 to our existing application  Inside VS 2010 go to Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Console, this will open the Power Shell Host Window where we can work with all the EF commands. In order to install this library to your existing application you should type Install-Package EntityFramework This will make some changes to your application. So Let's check them. In your .config file you'll see a  <configSections> which contains the version you have from EntityFramework and also was added the <entityFramework> section as shown below. This section is by default configured to use SQL Express which won't be necesary for this case. So you can comment it out or leave it empty. Also please make sure you're using the Connector/Net 6.6.x version which is the one that has this support as is shown in the previous image. At this point we face one issue; in order to be able to work with Migrations we need the __MigrationHistory table that we don't have yet since our Database was created with an older version. This table is used to keep track of the changes in our model. So we need to get it in our existing Database. Getting a Migration-History table into an existing database First thing we need to do to enable migrations in our existing application is to create our configuration class which will set up the MySqlClient Provider as our SQL Generator. So we have to add it with the following code: using System.Data.Entity.Migrations;     //add this at the top of your cs file public class Configuration : DbMigrationsConfiguration<NameOfYourDbContext>  //Make sure to use the name of your existing DBContext { public Configuration() { this.AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = false; //Set Automatic migrations to false since we'll be applying the migrations manually for this case. SetSqlGenerator("MySql.Data.MySqlClient", new MySql.Data.Entity.MySqlMigrationSqlGenerator());     }   }  This code will set up our configuration that we'll be using when executing all the migrations for our application. Once we have done this we can Build our application so we can check that everything is fine. Creating our Initial Migration Now let's add our Initial Migration. In Package Manager Console, execute "add-migration InitialCreate", you can use any other name but I like to set this as our initial create for future reference. After we run this command, some changes were done in our application: A new Migrations Folder was created. A new class migration call InitialCreate which in most of the cases should have empty Up and Down methods as long as your database is up to date with your Model. Since all your entities already exists, delete all duplicated code to create any entity which exists already in your Database if there is any. I found this easier when you don't have any pending updates to do to your database. Now we have our empty migration that will make no changes in our database and represents how are all the things at the begining of our migrations.  Finally, let's create our MigrationsHistory table. Optionally you can add SQL code to delete the edmdata table which is not needed anymore. public override void Up() { // Just make sure that you used 4.1 or later version         Sql("DROP TABLE EdmMetadata"); } From our Package Manager Console let's type: Update-database; If you like to see the operations made on each Update-database command you can use the flag -verbose after the Update-database. This will make two important changes.  It will execute the Up method in the initial migration which has no changes in the database. And second, and very important,  it will create the __MigrationHistory table necessary to keep track of your changes. And next time you make a change to your database it will compare the current model to the one stored in the Model Column of this table. Conclusion The important thing of this walk through is that we must create our initial migration before we start doing any changes to our model. This way we'll be adding the necessary __MigrationsHistory table to our existing database, so we can keep our database up to date with all the changes we do in our context model using migrations. Hope you have found this information useful. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, also please check our forums here where we keep answering questions in general for the community.  Happy MySQL/Net Coding!

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• Oracle NoSQL Database Exceeds 1 Million Mixed YCSB Ops/Sec

  - by Charles Lamb

  We ran a set of YCSB performance tests on Oracle NoSQL Database using SSD cards and Intel Xeon E5-2690 CPUs with the goal of achieving 1M mixed ops/sec on a 95% read / 5% update workload. We used the standard YCSB parameters: 13 byte keys and 1KB data size (1,102 bytes after serialization). The maximum database size was 2 billion records, or approximately 2 TB of data. We sized the shards to ensure that this was not an "in-memory" test (i.e. the data portion of the B-Trees did not fit into memory). All updates were durable and used the "simple majority" replica ack policy, effectively 'committing to the network'. All read operations used the Consistency.NONE_REQUIRED parameter allowing reads to be performed on any replica. In the past we have achieved 100K ops/sec using SSD cards on a single shard cluster (replication factor 3) so for this test we used 10 shards on 15 Storage Nodes with each SN carrying 2 Rep Nodes and each RN assigned to its own SSD card. After correcting a scaling problem in YCSB, we blew past the 1M ops/sec mark with 8 shards and proceeded to hit 1.2M ops/sec with 10 shards.  Hardware Configuration We used 15 servers, each configured with two 335 GB SSD cards. We did not have homogeneous CPUs across all 15 servers available to us so 12 of the 15 were Xeon E5-2690, 2.9 GHz, 2 sockets, 32 threads, 193 GB RAM, and the other 3 were Xeon E5-2680, 2.7 GHz, 2 sockets, 32 threads, 193 GB RAM.  There might have been some upside in having all 15 machines configured with the faster CPU, but since CPU was not the limiting factor we don't believe the improvement would be significant. The client machines were Xeon X5670, 2.93 GHz, 2 sockets, 24 threads, 96 GB RAM. Although the clients had 96 GB of RAM, neither the NoSQL Database or YCSB clients require anywhere near that amount of memory and the test could have just easily been run with much less. Networking was all 10GigE. YCSB Scaling Problem We made three modifications to the YCSB benchmark. The first was to allow the test to accommodate more than 2 billion records (effectively int's vs long's). To keep the key size constant, we changed the code to use base 32 for the user ids. The second change involved to the way we run the YCSB client in order to make the test itself horizontally scalable.The basic problem has to do with the way the YCSB test creates its Zipfian distribution of keys which is intended to model "real" loads by generating clusters of key collisions. Unfortunately, the percentage of collisions on the most contentious keys remains the same even as the number of keys in the database increases. As we scale up the load, the number of collisions on those keys increases as well, eventually exceeding the capacity of the single server used for a given key.This is not a workload that is realistic or amenable to horizontal scaling. YCSB does provide alternate key distribution algorithms so this is not a shortcoming of YCSB in general. We decided that a better model would be for the key collisions to be limited to a given YCSB client process. That way, as additional YCSB client processes (i.e. additional load) are added, they each maintain the same number of collisions they encounter themselves, but do not increase the number of collisions on a single key in the entire store. We added client processes proportionally to the number of records in the database (and therefore the number of shards). This change to the use of YCSB better models a use case where new groups of users are likely to access either just their own entries, or entries within their own subgroups, rather than all users showing the same interest in a single global collection of keys. If an application finds every user having the same likelihood of wanting to modify a single global key, that application has no real hope of getting horizontal scaling. Finally, we used read/modify/write (also known as "Compare And Set") style updates during the mixed phase. This uses versioned operations to make sure that no updates are lost. This mode of operation provides better application behavior than the way we have typically run YCSB in the past, and is only practical at scale because we eliminated the shared key collision hotspots.It is also a more realistic testing scenario. To reiterate, all updates used a simple majority replica ack policy making them durable. Scalability Results In the table below, the "KVS Size" column is the number of records with the number of shards and the replication factor. Hence, the first row indicates 400m total records in the NoSQL Database (KV Store), 2 shards, and a replication factor of 3. The "Clients" column indicates the number of YCSB client processes. "Threads" is the number of threads per process with the total number of threads. Hence, 90 threads per YCSB process for a total of 360 threads. The client processes were distributed across 10 client machines. Shards KVS Size Clients Mixed (records) Threads OverallThroughput(ops/sec) Read Latencyav/95%/99%(ms) Write Latencyav/95%/99%(ms) 2 400m(2x3) 4 90(360) 302,152 0.76/1/3 3.08/8/35 4 800m(4x3) 8 90(720) 558,569 0.79/1/4 3.82/16/45 8 1600m(8x3) 16 90(1440) 1,028,868 0.85/2/5 4.29/21/51 10 2000m(10x3) 20 90(1800) 1,244,550 0.88/2/6 4.47/23/53

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• Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

  - by JoshReuben

  About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial   Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx   2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand.   Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity.     support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3  skinnable hooks,  remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities  – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees,  Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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• Hiring New IT Employees versus Promoting Internally for IT Positions

  Recently I was asked my opinion regarding the hiring of IT professionals in regards to the option of hiring new IT employees versus promoting internally for IT positions. After thinking a little more about this question regarding staffing, specifically pertaining to promoting internally verses new employees; I think my answer to this question is that it truly depends on the situation. However, in most cases I would side with promoting internally. The key factors in this decision should be based on a company/department’s current values, culture, attitude, and existing priorities.  For example if a company values retaining all of its hard earned business knowledge then they would tend to promote existing employees internal over hiring a new employee. Moreover, the company will have to pay to train an existing employee to learn a new technology and the learning curve for some technologies can be very steep. Conversely, if a company values new technologies and technical proficiency over business knowledge then a company would tend to hire new employees because they may already have experience with a technology that the company is planning on using. In this scenario, the company would have to take on the additional overhead of allowing a new employee to learn how the business operates prior to them being fully effective. To illustrate my points above let us look at contractor that builds in ground pools for example.  He has the option to hire employees that are very strong but use small shovels to dig, or employees weak in physical strength but use large shovels to dig. Which employee should the contractor use to dig a hole for a new in ground pool? If we compare the possible candidates for this job we will find that they are very similar to hiring someone internally verses a new hire. The first example represents the existing workers that are very strong regarding the understanding how the business operates and the reasons why in a specific manner. However this employee could be potentially weaker than an outsider pertaining to specific technologies and would need some time to build their technical prowess for a new position much like the strong worker upgrading their shovels in order to remove more dirt at once when digging. The other employee is very similar to hiring a new person that may already have the large shovel but will need to increase their strength in order to use the shovel properly and efficiently so that they can move a maximum amount of dirt in a minimal amount of time. This can be compared to new employ learning how a business operates before they can be fully functional and integrated in the company/department. Another key factor in this dilemma pertains to existing employee and their passion for their work, their ability to accept new responsibility when given, and the willingness to take on responsibilities when they see a need in the business. As much as possible should be considered in this decision down to the mood of the team, the quality of existing staff, learning cure for both technology and business, and the potential side effects of the existing staff.  In addition, there are many more consideration based on the current team/department/companies culture and mood. There are several factors that need to be considered when promoting an individual or hiring new blood for a team. They both can provide great benefits as well as create controversy to a group. Personally, staffing especially in the IT world is like building a large scale system in that all of the components and modules must fit together and preform as one cohesive system in the same way a team must come together using their individually acquired skills so that they can work as one team.  If a module is out of place or is nonexistent then the rest of the team will suffer until the all of its issues are addressed and resolved. Benefits of Promoting Internally Internal promotions give employees a reason to constantly upgrade their technology, business, and communication skills if they want to further their career Employees can control their own destiny based on personal desires Employee already knows how the business operates Companies can save money by promoting internally because the initial overhead of allowing new hires to learn how a company operates is very expensive Newly promoted employees can assist in training their replacements while transitioning to their new role within a company. Existing employees already have a proven track record in regards fitting in with the business culture; this is always an unknown with all new hires Benefits of a New Hire New employees can energize and excite existing employees New employees can bring new ideas and advancements in technology New employees can offer a different perspective on existing issues based on their past experience. As you can see the decision to promote an existing employee from within a company verses hiring a new person should be based on several factors that should ultimately place the business in the best possible situation for the immediate and long term future. How would you handle this situation? Would you hire a new employee or promote from within?

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• Java Embedded Releases

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Oracle today announced a new product in its Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) product portfolio, Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2, a complete client Java runtime Optimized for resource-constrained, connected, embedded systems.  Also, Oracle is releasing Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2, Oracle Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK) 3.2. Oracle also announced Oracle Java Embedded Suite 7.0 for larger embedded devices, providing a middleware stack for embedded systems. Small is the new big! Introducing Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2  Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is designed and optimized to meet the unique requirements of small embedded, low power devices such as micro-controllers and other resource-constrained hardware without screens or user interfaces. These include: On-the-fly application downloads and updates Remote operation, often in challenging environments Ability to add new capabilities without impacting the existing functions Support for hardware with as little as 130 kB RAM and 350 kB ROM Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2 Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2 is built around an optimized Java ME implementation that delivers a feature-rich application environment for mass-market mobile devices. This new release: Leverages standard JSRs, Oracle optimizations/APIs and a flexible porting layer for device specific customizations, which are tuned to device/chipset requirements Supports advanced tooling functions, such as memory and network monitoring and on-device tooling Offers new support for dual SIM functionality, which is highly useful for mass-market devices supported by multiple carriers with multiple phone connections Oracle Java ME SDK 3.2 Oracle Java ME SDK 3.2 provides a complete development environment for both Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 and Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2. Available for download from OTN, The latest version includes: Small embedded device support In-field and remote administration and debugging Java ME SDK plug-ins for Eclipse and the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE), enabling more application development environments for Java ME developers. A new device skin creator that developers can use to generate their custom device skins for testing their applications. Oracle Embedded Suite 7.0 The Oracle Java Embedded Suite is a new packaged solution from Oracle (including Java DB, GlassFish for Embedded Suite, Jersey Web Services Framework, and Oracle Java SE Embedded 7 platform), created to provide value added services for collecting, managing, and transmitting data to and from other embedded devices.The Oracle Java Embedded Suite is a complete device-to-data center solution subset for embedded systems.  See Java Me and Java Embedded in Action Java ME and Java Embedded technologies will be showcased for developers at JavaOne 2012 in over 60 conference sessions and BOFs, as well as in the JavaOne Exhibition Hall. For business decision makers, the new event Java Embedded @ JavaOne you learn more about Java Embedded technologies and solutions.

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• How to Implement Single Sign-On between Websites

  - by hmloo

  Introduction Single sign-on (SSO) is a way to control access to multiple related but independent systems, a user only needs to log in once and gains access to all other systems. a lot of commercial systems that provide Single sign-on solution and you can also choose some open source solutions like Opensso, CAS etc. both of them use centralized authentication and provide more robust authentication mechanism, but if each system has its own authentication mechanism, how do we provide a seamless transition between them. Here I will show you the case. How it Works The method we’ll use is based on a secret key shared between the sites. Origin site has a method to build up a hashed authentication token with some other parameters and redirect the user to the target site. variables Status Description ssoEncode required hash(ssoSharedSecret + , + ssoTime + , + ssoUserName) ssoTime required timestamp with format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS used to prevent playback attacks ssoUserName required unique username; required when a user is logged in Note : The variables will be sent via POST for security reasons Building a Single Sign-On Solution Origin Site has function to 1. Create the URL for your Request. 2. Generate required authentication parameters 3. Redirect to target site. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string postbackUrl = "http://www.targetsite.com/sso.aspx"; string ssoTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss"); string ssoUserName = User.Identity.Name; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string ssoHash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); string value = string.Format("{0}:{1},{2}", ssoHash,ssoTime, ssoUserName); Response.Clear(); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<html>"); sb.AppendFormat(@"<body onload='document.forms[""form""].submit()'>"); sb.AppendFormat("<form name='form' action='{0}' method='post'>", postbackUrl); sb.AppendFormat("<input type='hidden' name='t' value='{0}'>", value); sb.Append("</form>"); sb.Append("</body>"); sb.Append("</html>"); Response.Write(sb.ToString()); Response.End(); } } Target Site has function to 1. Get authentication parameters. 2. Validate the parameters with shared secret. 3. If the user is valid, then do authenticate and redirect to target page. 4. If the user is invalid, then show errors and return. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { Response.Redirect("~/Default.aspx"); } } if (Request.Params.Get("t") != null) { string ticket = Request.Params.Get("t"); char[] delimiters = new char[] { ':', ',' }; string[] ssoVariable = ticket.Split(delimiters, StringSplitOptions.None); string ssoHash = ssoVariable[0]; string ssoTime = ssoVariable[1]; string ssoUserName = ssoVariable[2]; DateTime appTime = DateTime.MinValue; int offsetTime = 60; // get this from config or similar try { appTime = DateTime.ParseExact(ssoTime, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", null); } catch { //show error return; } if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } bool isValid = false; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string hash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); if (string.Compare(ssoHash, hash, true) == 0) { if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } else { isValid = true; } } if (isValid) { //Do authenticate; } else { //show error return; } } else { //show error } } } Summary This is a very simple and basic SSO solution, and its main advantage is its simplicity, only needs to add a single page to do SSO authentication, do not need to modify the existing system infrastructure.

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• Start Time & Calculated Column Wonkiness in a SharePoint Event Calendar

  - by _zekeMouseOver

  I was creating some custom rollups on some of our event calendars and came across a very odd bug when trying to grab only the date component of the built-in Start Time field. One's first inclination will be to create a calculated column and give it the formula... =[Start Time]... and then assign its output type to be "Date Only." This works well until a user adds an All Day Event. For reasons unexplainable, the All Day Event flag causes your =[Start Time] to display the date minus one day. Here is an example of this in action:  Start Date and Time, Duration, Start Date Value and Start Day are all calculated fields. Notice how the Start Date and Time (=[Start Time]) is reporting 6:00PM of the previous day. The Start Date Value (=[Start Time] - Output Type: Number) confirms this (.75 = 6:00 PM.) Curiously enough, the Duration (=[End Time]-[Start Time]) is properly reporting the duration between 12:00AM and 11:59PM. Why? I don't know. Perhaps it's somehow bound to the regional settings on the site, but I'm not interested in changing a global site setting for the sake of one calculated field.With this information at our disposal, our calculated column to display the date part of the start date needs to be modified to add one day to the [Start Time] field if an All Day Event is selected. To determine this, we use the Duration above to assume the item is an all-day event and change our formula to be:=IF(TEXT(([End Time]-[Start Time])-TRUNC(([End Time]-[Start Time]),0),"0.000000000")="0.999305556",[Start Time] + 1, [Start Time])This will work, but what happens when the user de-selects the "All Day Event" checkbox? The duration stays the same, but all other values begin reporting the correct time: Since our formula above is strictly based on an expected duration, it will add one to the correct date, causing the date 5/11/2010 to appear. Notice though that the raw value of the start time (in this case) is a non-fractional number (40,308) whereas the all-day event was being represented as 6:00 PM (.75) of the previous day. We can use this to add one more nested branch of logic to our calculation:=IF(TEXT(([End Time]-[Start Time])-TRUNC(([End Time]-[Start Time]),0),"0.000000000")="0.999305556",IF([Start Time]=ROUND([Start Time],0),[Start Time],[Start Time]+1),[Start Time]) I feel somewhat... dirty about having to resort to this kind of calculation in what SHOULD have been a simple =[Start Time] to extract the date part of the Start Time field, but there you have it. Make sure to shower extra longer after having used it.

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• cocos2d-x simple shader usage [on hold]

  - by Narek

  I want to obtain color ramp effect from this tutorial: http://www.raywenderlich.com/10862/how-to-create-cool-effects-with-custom-shaders-in-opengl-es-2-0-and-cocos2d-2-x Here is my code in cocos2d-x 3: bool HelloWorld::init() { ////////////////////////////// // 1. super init first if ( !Layer::init() ) { return false; } Vec2 origin = Director::getInstance()->getVisibleOrigin(); sprite = Sprite::create("HelloWorld.png"); sprite->setAnchorPoint(Vec2(0, 0)); sprite->setRotation(3); sprite->setPosition(origin); addChild(sprite); std::string str = FileUtils::getInstance()->getStringFromFile("CSEColorRamp.fsh"); const GLchar * fragmentSource = str.c_str(); GLProgram* p = GLProgram::createWithByteArrays(ccPositionTextureA8Color_vert, fragmentSource); p->bindAttribLocation(GLProgram::ATTRIBUTE_NAME_POSITION, GLProgram::VERTEX_ATTRIB_POSITION); p->bindAttribLocation(GLProgram::ATTRIBUTE_NAME_TEX_COORD, GLProgram::VERTEX_ATTRIB_TEX_COORD); p->link(); p->updateUniforms(); sprite->setGLProgram(p); // 3 colorRampUniformLocation = glGetUniformLocation(sprite->getGLProgram()->getProgram(), "u_colorRampTexture"); glUniform1i(colorRampUniformLocation, 1); // 4 colorRampTexture = Director::getInstance()->getTextureCache()->addImage("colorRamp.png"); colorRampTexture->setAliasTexParameters(); // 5 sprite->getGLProgram()->use(); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE1); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, colorRampTexture->getName()); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0); return true; } And here is the fragment shader as it is in the tutorial: #ifdef GL_ES precision mediump float; #endif // 1 varying vec2 v_texCoord; uniform sampler2D u_texture; uniform sampler2D u_colorRampTexture; void main() { // 2 vec3 normalColor = texture2D(u_texture, v_texCoord).rgb; // 3 float rampedR = texture2D(u_colorRampTexture, vec2(normalColor.r, 0)).r; float rampedG = texture2D(u_colorRampTexture, vec2(normalColor.g, 0)).g; float rampedB = texture2D(u_colorRampTexture, vec2(normalColor.b, 0)).b; // 4 gl_FragColor = vec4(rampedR, rampedG, rampedB, 1); } As a result I get a black screen with 2 draw calls. What is wrong? Do I miss something?

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• Building SANE from git-source produce backend missmatch on 12.04 even if built locally

  - by deinonychusaur

  It seems to me that with Ubuntu Precise Pangolin it is all but easy to do a proper install of SANE from source (git-repo). I've found other scanning issues trying to find an answer to this, where the output people posted seems to indicate they suffer the same issue (unknowingly). If I run on a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 with compiled SANE source from the git I get: $ scanimage -V scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.24git; backend version 1.0.22 (I basically followed the instructions on http://ubuntuportal.com/2012/02/how-to-get-an-canon-canoscan-lide-100-scanner-to-work-in-ubuntu-11-10linux-mint-12.html since I didn't find any other information making sure that sane was not installed prior to installation.) My primary interest is the epson2-backend. In 1.0.22 it offers the wrong TPU settings for Epson V700 (TPU2-mode wasn't supported in 1.0.22, and the scanner is useless to me if I don't have the TPU2-support). Since if I ask it to enter transparency mode, it shows 1.0.22 behaviour, it implies that the epson2-backend comes from 1.0.22 and not 1.0.24 even though I just built it. If I install SANE with prefix to a local folder and run that version of scanimage it still produces the mismatch. However, on another computer where I installed a custom 1.0.22 build of SANE prior to upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04, I can build and install the same SANE-git locally and have it correctly match backends: $ ./SANE/bin/scanimage -V scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.24git; backend version 1.0.24 $ scanimage -V scanimage (sane-backends) 1.0.22; backend version 1.0.22 On this computer the 1.0.24 works correctly in finding TPU2 on Epson V700. So what am I missing/doing wrong? (And I want to replace 1.0.22 with 1.0.24 for the whole system, the local build was just debugging.) Any help would be much appreciated. Edit 1: Just tried compiling SANE using this instruction on Ubuntu 10.04 and it worked like a charm. However, when I upgraded to 12.04 (really would like to run 12.04), SANE was downgraded to 1.0.22. When trying the same set of instructions on 12.04 I was still out of luck -- the backend missmatch was there again (and I do have libusb-dev installed) Edit 2: I updated to Ubuntu 12.10 which now has the 1.0.23 SANE drivers. I haven't dared trying to compile from source on 12.10 since 1.0.23 is good enough for me. This is just a work-around and I would still like to know what's up with Ubuntu 12.04.

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• Lookup Viewer

  - by Geertjan

  The Maven integrated view that I showed yesterday I was able to create because I happened to know that an implementation of SubprojectProvider and LogicalViewProvider are in the Lookup of Maven projects. With that knowledge, I was able to use and even delegate to those implementations. But what if you don't know that those implementations are in the Lookup of the Project object? In the case of the Maven Project implementation, you could look in the source code of the Maven Project implementation, at the "getLookup" method. However, any other module could be putting its own objects into that Lookup, dynamically, i.e., at runtime. So there's no way of knowing what's in the Lookup of any Project object or any other object with a Lookup. But now imagine that you have a Lookup Viewer, as a tool during development, which you would exclude when distributing the application. Whenever new objects are found in the Lookup, the viewer displays them. You could install the Lookup Viewer into NetBeans IDE, or any other NetBeans Platform application, and then get a quick impression of what's actually in the Lookup when you select a different item in the application during development. Here it is (though I vaguely remember someone else writing something similar): Above, a Maven Project is selected. The Lookup Window shows that, among many other classes, an implementation of SubprojectProvider and LogicalViewProvider are found in the Lookup when the Maven Project is selected. If an item in the Lookup Window has its own Lookup, the content of that Lookup is displayed as child nodes of the Lookup, etc, i.e., you can explore all the way down the Lookup of each item found within objects found within the current selection. (What's especially fun is seeing the SaveCookieImpl being added and removed from the Lookup Window when you make/save a change in a document.) Another example is below, showing the Lookup Window installed in a custom application created during a course at MIT in Boston: A small trick I had to apply is that I always show the previous Lookup, since the current Lookup, when you select one of the Nodes in the Lookup Window, would be the Lookup of the Lookup Window itself! If anyone is interested in this, I can publish the NetBeans module providing the above window to the NetBeans update center. 

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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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• 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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