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  • When buying hardware, what sites do you trust for information? [closed]

    - by Matt Dawdy
    I won't ask "what laptop should I buy" since the information is likely to change very quickly. However, I am about to buy a laptop, and I honestly don't know where to begin researching this based on my needs. I am hoping that asking about specific sites that do reviews/recommendations that this will still be on topic. I read the 6 guidelines for subjective questions and believe that this question scores favorably. I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, and they want to know what specific laptop to purchase. I'd like to get the most for their money and get a machine that will not need to be replaced in a year. When looking at a site like Dell, it's hard to get a full picture of the performance of a laptop. Does it work with a docking station, and if so, what kinds of video outs are on it? Will it work well when compiling several large projects in .Net? Has anyone had any issues with the machine getting flaky when dragging it from work to home and back all the time? etc. So, if people would enter in their preferred sites they use when researching hardware, and why they prefer that site (x is great for laptop comparisons, y is great for gaming machine reviews, etc) the I hope that this can be a question with valuable answers to others than just myself.

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  • computer randomly restarting. both in game and out of game

    - by eric
    first my specs are. AMD Phenom II x4 955 processor 3.2ghz 20gb ddr3 ram 4Gb Nvidia Geforce GTX 770 850w Corsair tx850w psu Gigabyte ud3 mobo Windows 7 professional I recently uprgraded my vid card to gtx770 and upgraded my psu to the 850w thats in it now. i did a reformat with the installation of the new gpu and psu and started fresh and only have a couple programs installed (diablo3, nvidia control panel, wow, and steam). all drivers are up to date and everything is hooked up correctly. the problem is it will randomly shut down. no blue screen. just turns itself straight off and reboots after a couple seconds. occasionally i will have to unplug the power cable from the psu for a few minutes then reconnect and it will start up. it seems pretty random. sometimes it does it when my pc is just sitting there on the home screen. and sometimes it does it during games. and sometimes it doesnt do it for days at a time. i noticed the psu felt hot so i put an extra fan blowing straight onto both the psu and gpu and neither feel overly hot after it shuts down now. could it just be that it is a psu problem. the psu was taken from another machine but wasnt having this problem in that machine. i have seen a few articles online about gtx770 doing the same thing. but i havent found any answers or solutions. any help will be appreciated. im sure the 850w is enough to power my machine, im just stumped and ran out of ideas to fix it. i have even returned the video card for another thinking it might have been an issue with that particular card, but still gettin the same problem.

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  • ZFS Data Loss Scenarios

    - by Obtuse
    I'm looking toward building a largish ZFS Pool (150TB+), and I'd like to hear people experiences about data loss scenarios due to failed hardware, in particular, distinguishing between instances where just some data is lost vs. the whole filesystem (of if there even is such a distinction in ZFS). For example: let's say a vdev is lost due to a failure like an external drive enclosure losing power, or a controller card failing. From what I've read the pool should go into a faulted mode, but if the vdev is returned the pool should recover? or not? or if the vdev is partially damaged, does one lose the whole pool, some files, etc.? What happens if a ZIL device fails? Or just one of several ZILs? Truly any and all anecdotes or hypothetical scenarios backed by deep technical knowledge are appreciated! Thanks! Update: We're doing this on the cheap since we are a small business (9 people or so) but we generate a fair amount of imaging data. The data is mostly smallish files, by my count about 500k files per TB. The data is important but not uber-critical. We are planning to use the ZFS pool to mirror 48TB "live" data array (in use for 3 years or so), and use the the rest of the storage for 'archived' data. The pool will be shared using NFS. The rack is supposedly on a building backup generator line, and we have two APC UPSes capable of powering the rack at full load for 5 mins or so.

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  • Gitosis problems

    - by user49884
    I've spent the last 14 days on git and gitosis problems. I did always find a way around my problems but now I'm stuck. To briefly summarize the situation: I have setup gitosis, created a project and I can check in and out of it. Then I added another uses, giving him access to the project by adding him to gitosis.conf, but he can not even clone project. Then I added yet another user for the same project (following same procedure), he has access to everything (clone, pull and push). Finally, I added one more user who can not do anything either. I could live with all of this, because I have access to work on the project. Now I have added a new project, or have I? To my best believe, I have done everything the exact same way as with the first project. I do not get a repository in the repository folder on my server (when doing "git remote add..." and push). I have tried following ALL the guides google gave me on "how to create a new repository gitosis" (is up to page 7 before not ALL hits are marked as visited). I have also tried to follow a different path, starting with "git init --bare" on the server, and then try to clone it. Didn't work either. I get the following error no matter what I try: ERROR: gitosis.serve.main: Repository read access denied fatal: The remote than hung up unexpectedly (But it works fine for accessing gitosis-admin and my first project) Then I read about debugging of gitosis. I have tried with -v, --verbose and adding LogLevel = DEBUG in gitosis.conf, none of these give me extra information. Project setup gitosis.conf: [group project] writable = project members = me LogLevel = DEBUG To my best believe, everything is done the exact same way, as I did when setting up my first project. I'm really stuck, how do I proceed now?

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  • What is the best time to set the IP address for a server headed to a server colocation facility?

    - by jim_m_somewhere
    What is the best time to set the IP address for a server? I have a server that I am going to install the OS on and then I am going to send it to a server colocation facility. The server is going to have Internet facing services (www, email, etc.) I can set up a "fake" IP address during install (by fake I mean private as in RFC 1918) and change the "fake" IPs to the real IPs once I set up the colocation service. The other option is to set up the colocation service...wait for them to give me the "real" IPs and use them during the OS install. The ramification are that...if I use "fake" IPs during install...I will have to wait before I set up things like SSL certs. If I wait for IPs from the colocation provider...then I can set up SSL certs that use the "correct" (as in "real") IP addresses...no changes to the certs until they expire. Do the "gotchas" of changing an IP address on a server outweigh the benefits of a quick install? The other danger with using "fake" IPs is that I could make a mistake when I go through the various files to change the IP address to the "live" IP address. Server OS: CentOS 6.2 or CentOS 6.3, 64 bit. Apps: Apache 2.4.X httpd, MySQL 5.X (will eventually use replication)

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  • How do I use a list of filenames to find a folder on my hard drive, that contains most matches of these filenames?

    - by Web Master
    I need a program that will use a list of file names to find a folder on my hard drive that contains the most of these filenames. Long story short I made a giant map. This map was live and got ruined. New map data files have been generated, and previous map data files have been altered. What does this mean? This means file sizes have been changed, and there will be new files that have never been in the backup folder. Some files map files could also have been generated in other projects. So there could be filenames on my computer not associated with this due to the way the files are named when created. So If I take an indidual file for example "r.-1.-1.mca" This file could show up on my hard drive 10 times. Anyway, the goal is to take 100 map files, turn them into a list, and then search the hard drive and find the folder that has the highest count of matching map file names. Can anyone figure out a way to do this? I am thinking about manually searching for every single file.

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  • Show (copy) data at "X" time and stop update

    - by Anka
    I have two sheets. In the first sheet, cell F4, I have 00:00:00 (countdown). G9, G10 and G11 are cells that receive live data (decimal numbers). In the second sheet, I have three cells linked from sheet1, G9 ='Sheet1'!G9, G10 ='Sheet1'!G10, G11 ='Sheet1'!G11 (which update themselves when data is modified in the first sheet). Now I want to set in sheet 2, (assume) cells B9, B10 and B11 to show me (copy) the values from G9, G10 and G11 from sheet 1 when the countdown was 00:00:05 (5 seconds before Start) and not update again if the data changes in the cell it pulled the data from. Like G9 ='Sheet1'!G9 at 00:00:05 and stop here, do not update anything. OK? I can do a part, but the real problem is: I can not make it stop cells to update. Stand frozen, freeze, not move, calm .. however. I do not want to seem pretentious (but my knowledge in excel is limited), the most appropriate would be a formula, not macro or VBA, if possible. I want to post a picture but I can not because of my restrictions. Well, if this is not possible with a formula is just fine with (not really) VBA.

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  • Comparing 128MB GeForce 8600GT and 512MB Radeon X1650

    - by Synetech inc.
    Hi, I'm trying to determine which is the better of these two video cards: 128MB Nvidia GeForce 8600GT card while the other has a 512MB ATI Radeon X1650 card. Both cards are the upper-level mid-range versions of their respective series. On the one hand, the ATI has substantially more VRAM, but the Nvidia supports D3D 10 and SM4.0 as opposed to D3D 9.0c/SM3.0 that the ATI supports. Also, I have always heard better things about Nvidia cards compared to ATI cards. I'm trying to find some advice on which one is better, but I can't find any actual comparisons or anything for these specific cards (the comparisons I can find are only similar ones like the X1650 Pro or 8600GT PCI-E), so I figure that what I need to know is whether the extra VRAM is that important. Looking at the ATI table and the Nvidia table seems to indicate that the Nvidia is better, but then again, the Nvidia table also says that the GeForce 8600GT is a PCI-E card with at least 256MB even though the card in question is an AGP with 128MB. (:-?) (It looks like the ATI card is not supported in Windows 7 while the Nvidia card is, which I suppose is also a factor, though not quite as immediately relevant as performance.) Any ideas? Thanks a lot.

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  • some HTTPS sites getting blocked on one machine in network

    - by shadowfoxmi
    I have a few computers connected to the internet via a router. I have been having some trouble with this one Windows 7 desktop. I can browse most of the sites without any trouble but some sites where the sign in page switches to a secure connection (https), the page does not load. It's not all of the sites though. I'm able to sign into gmail and a few other services that I know use https . The sites I'm having trouble with; yahoo's sign in page and the one that I have been using to test across different systems, http://iforgot.apple.com (which switchs to https) ;this particular site, i can access from other computers on the network and my phone. I only have windows firewall running and AVG. I even tried to stopping windows firewall but it did not help. Everything was fine last week. All I have installed in the past week is VOIP softwares namely skype, ooVoo and windows live messenger. I'm not sure how to find out what's being blocked and why and how to unblock it? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Is there any any merit to routinely restore a linux system, even if unnecessary?

    - by field_guy
    I do fieldwork with a number of computers running ubuntu performing critical tasks doing fieldwork. The computers are similarly configured with slight variations. Since we've had some configuration issues in the past, my boss is pressing for us to take an image of the installation on each computer, and restore each computer to that image before they are to go into the field. My preferred solution would be to write a common script that checks to ensure that the configuration of the system is correct and that the system is operational. If the computer has been verified, isn't restoring it to that configuration redundant? And are there any inherent problems with doing so? My reluctance stems from the fact that our software and configuration is subject to change in the field, but these changes must be made across all the computers. That means that when a change is made, all the restoration images have to be updated as well. The differences in the configuration of each of the computers live in /etc. In the event that restoration is required, I would prefer to keep a single image containing everything that is common to all machines, and have a snapshot of each computer's /etc directory to be used for restoring the state of that particular machine. What's the better approach?

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  • Does VLC Player work well on Windows 7 64-bit?

    - by ????
    I tried VLC Player on Windows 7 64-bit version and the playback was fine, but when the video is maximized the image is very pixelated. I tried this on a Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card as well as a computer with an Intel graphics chipset and both have the same result. If I use VLC Player on Windows 7 32-bit instead of 64-bit, there is no pixelation. Is this a known problem or is there any method to fix it on Windows 7 64-bit? Update: there isn't a 32-bit vs 64-bit version of VLC player, is there? (unlike 7-Zip) I also tried GOM Player and it doesn't have the problem on Windows 7 64-bit. Update: Nov 4, 2009 VLC displays an update notice: VLC 1.0.3 is a minor release fixing many bugs, especially for Windows Vista and 7, but it also introduces 2 new modes for deinterlacing, and a new udev module. Major fixes are about WMA Pro support, Dolby tracks in 4.0, v4l/v4l2 and atsc and a crash in mjpeg demuxer. Update of translations are also part of this release.

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  • Diagnosing PC crashes (most often while using shared folders or torrents)

    - by Dyppl
    For the last few weeks my PC (pretty old P4 with WinXP SP3) has been crashing randomly. It just suddenly reboots instanteneously. It feels hardware-related but I wasn't able to determine wether it's software or hardware that causes it. I did notice a pattern though: it's more likely to crash when I copy a lot of files over network or have uTorrent running, but sometimes it crashes when I am not doing anything with it. Copying files from it over network causes it to crash in 1 to 10 minutes almost every time. Using torrents causes it to crash every 1-3 hours. With neither or that on it crashes every 24 hours or so. I ruled out the following probable causes: PSU (I bought a new one and turned off most of the drives so the power is sufficient 100%) Bad HDD or interface cable on my SATA disk from which I was originally copying the data over network (bought new SATA cable and later yanked out the HDD completely, PC still crashes without it) Video adapter (AGP slot is now empty, using the onboard VGA at the moment) Network adapter (removed it from PCI, using onboard LAN) CPU (I think: I changed the termopaste and it's temperature is below 50C) RAM (I think: I ran Memtest86 and it didn't show any errors) At the moment I only have only one system HDD and DVD drives, a mouse and a keyboard plugged in. The fact that it crashes most often when I use network extensively makes me think that maybe it's software related (I removed the network adapter from PCI and now am using an onboard one, so network hardware is unlikely to cause problems). I am now pondering system reinstall but it's not a pleasant solution so I decided to ask wether there are better ideas first. If someone can share a good diagnostic tool it would be great because I didn't find anything good. Thanks in advance, I hope that "help to diagnose" questions aren't entirely banned here. EDIT: Motherboard is actually ~4 years old as I replaced it back in 2007

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  • Picasa duplicates everything into a `$My Pictures` folder.

    - by Barend
    My parents have a Windows XP laptop running Picasa, Dutch version of both. It's configured to put imported photos in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Mijn documenten\Mijn afbeeldingen, which is Windows XP's default My Pictures folder localized to Dutch. A while back I noticed disk space was going much faster than it should be. Turns out there was a Documents and Settings\user\Mijn documenten\$My Pictures pretty much the same size as the original one. This was well over a year ago. I figured it to be an internationalization bug, the $My Pictures thing looks like a placeholder that didn't get resolved. I figured it'd get fixed soon. It didn't. I threw out Picasa, tediously cleaned up the mess it left behind and replaced it by Windows Live Photo Gallery. My parents found WLPG to be unworkable and asked to get Picasa back. I reinstalled it, by now it's at 3.8.0 (build 117.29, 0). Wouldn't you have it, the mystery $My Pictures folder is back, 25GB of disk space has evaporated and it's the same mess it used to be. What's going on here? How do I stop it doing this?

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  • Do email providers have to tell me which (inter)national agencies/institutes are requesting legal access to my account data?

    - by Juve
    I know this question is not technical, but i did not find the "stackoverflow for legal issues" and I guess all you super users out there might know the answer. Here is my (potential) problem: I have a free email account at a (inter)national email provider. I used the words "wikileaks" and "twitter" lately in my email. Some over-ambitious national security organization legally requests access to all accounts that behaved similarly. Q1: Can I request the who-, when-, and why-information related to this legal request from my provider? Does he have to tell me which (inter)national organizations (legally) requested my account data? Q2: Does the situation change if I live in Germany (and have a German provider)? I guess here are some German users. And I know that such a legal policy exists for our national credit rating agency. I can request who got access to my data, they have to tell me. Please answer only if you know a good answer, I don't want to start a long discussion on this none-technical question. Best regards, Juve

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  • Compare images after canny edge detection in OpenCV (C++)

    - by typoknig
    Hi all, I am working on an OpenCV project and I need to compare some images after canny has been applied to both of them. Before the canny was applied I had the gray scale images populating a histogram and then I compared the histograms, but when canny is added to the images the histogram does not populate. I have read that a canny image can populate a histogram, but have not found a way to make it happen. I do not necessairly need to keep using the histograms, I just want to know the best way to compare two canny images. SSCCE below for you to chew on. I have poached and patched about 75% of this code from books and various sites on the internet, so props to those guys... // SLC (Histogram).cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. #include "stdafx.h" #include <cxcore.h> #include <cv.h> #include <cvaux.h> #include <highgui.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <sstream> #include <iostream> using namespace std; IplImage* image1= 0; IplImage* imgHistogram1 = 0; IplImage* gray1= 0; CvHistogram* hist1; int main(){ CvCapture* capture = cvCaptureFromCAM(0); if(!cvQueryFrame(capture)){ cout<<"Video capture failed, please check the camera."<<endl; } else{ cout<<"Video camera capture successful!"<<endl; }; CvSize sz = cvGetSize(cvQueryFrame(capture)); IplImage* image = cvCreateImage(sz, 8, 3); IplImage* imgHistogram = 0; IplImage* gray = 0; CvHistogram* hist; cvNamedWindow("Image Source",1); cvNamedWindow("gray", 1); cvNamedWindow("Histogram",1); cvNamedWindow("BG", 1); cvNamedWindow("FG", 1); cvNamedWindow("Canny",1); cvNamedWindow("Canny1", 1); image1 = cvLoadImage("image bin/use this image.jpg");// an image has to load here or the program will not run //size of the histogram -1D histogram int bins1 = 256; int hsize1[] = {bins1}; //max and min value of the histogram float max_value1 = 0, min_value1 = 0; //value and normalized value float value1; int normalized1; //ranges - grayscale 0 to 256 float xranges1[] = { 0, 256 }; float* ranges1[] = { xranges1 }; //create an 8 bit single channel image to hold a //grayscale version of the original picture gray1 = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(image1), 8, 1 ); cvCvtColor( image1, gray1, CV_BGR2GRAY ); IplImage* canny1 = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(gray1), 8, 1 ); cvCanny( gray1, canny1, 55, 175, 3 ); //Create 3 windows to show the results cvNamedWindow("original1",1); cvNamedWindow("gray1",1); cvNamedWindow("histogram1",1); //planes to obtain the histogram, in this case just one IplImage* planes1[] = { canny1 }; //get the histogram and some info about it hist1 = cvCreateHist( 1, hsize1, CV_HIST_ARRAY, ranges1,1); cvCalcHist( planes1, hist1, 0, NULL); cvGetMinMaxHistValue( hist1, &min_value1, &max_value1); printf("min: %f, max: %f\n", min_value1, max_value1); //create an 8 bits single channel image to hold the histogram //paint it white imgHistogram1 = cvCreateImage(cvSize(bins1, 50),8,1); cvRectangle(imgHistogram1, cvPoint(0,0), cvPoint(256,50), CV_RGB(255,255,255),-1); //draw the histogram :P for(int i=0; i < bins1; i++){ value1 = cvQueryHistValue_1D( hist1, i); normalized1 = cvRound(value1*50/max_value1); cvLine(imgHistogram1,cvPoint(i,50), cvPoint(i,50-normalized1), CV_RGB(0,0,0)); } //show the image results cvShowImage( "original1", image1 ); cvShowImage( "gray1", gray1 ); cvShowImage( "histogram1", imgHistogram1 ); cvShowImage( "Canny1", canny1); CvBGStatModel* bg_model = cvCreateFGDStatModel( image ); for(;;){ image = cvQueryFrame(capture); cvUpdateBGStatModel( image, bg_model ); //Size of the histogram -1D histogram int bins = 256; int hsize[] = {bins}; //Max and min value of the histogram float max_value = 0, min_value = 0; //Value and normalized value float value; int normalized; //Ranges - grayscale 0 to 256 float xranges[] = {0, 256}; float* ranges[] = {xranges}; //Create an 8 bit single channel image to hold a grayscale version of the original picture gray = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(image), 8, 1); cvCvtColor(image, gray, CV_BGR2GRAY); IplImage* canny = cvCreateImage(cvGetSize(gray), 8, 1 ); cvCanny( gray, canny, 55, 175, 3 );//55, 175, 3 with direct light //Planes to obtain the histogram, in this case just one IplImage* planes[] = {canny}; //Get the histogram and some info about it hist = cvCreateHist(1, hsize, CV_HIST_ARRAY, ranges,1); cvCalcHist(planes, hist, 0, NULL); cvGetMinMaxHistValue(hist, &min_value, &max_value); //printf("Minimum Histogram Value: %f, Maximum Histogram Value: %f\n", min_value, max_value); //Create an 8 bits single channel image to hold the histogram and paint it white imgHistogram = cvCreateImage(cvSize(bins, 50),8,3); cvRectangle(imgHistogram, cvPoint(0,0), cvPoint(256,50), CV_RGB(255,255,255),-1); //Draw the histogram for(int i=0; i < bins; i++){ value = cvQueryHistValue_1D(hist, i); normalized = cvRound(value*50/max_value); cvLine(imgHistogram,cvPoint(i,50), cvPoint(i,50-normalized), CV_RGB(0,0,0)); } double correlation = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_CORREL); double chisquare = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_CHISQR); double intersection = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_INTERSECT); double bhattacharyya = cvCompareHist (hist1, hist, CV_COMP_BHATTACHARYYA); double difference = (1 - correlation) + chisquare + (1 - intersection) + bhattacharyya; printf("correlation: %f\n", correlation); printf("chi-square: %f\n", chisquare); printf("intersection: %f\n", intersection); printf("bhattacharyya: %f\n", bhattacharyya); printf("difference: %f\n", difference); cvShowImage("Image Source", image); cvShowImage("gray", gray); cvShowImage("Histogram", imgHistogram); cvShowImage( "Canny", canny); cvShowImage("BG", bg_model->background); cvShowImage("FG", bg_model->foreground); //Page 19 paragraph 3 of "Learning OpenCV" tells us why we DO NOT use "cvReleaseImage(&image)" in this section cvReleaseImage(&imgHistogram); cvReleaseImage(&gray); cvReleaseHist(&hist); cvReleaseImage(&canny); char c = cvWaitKey(10); //if ASCII key 27 (esc) is pressed then loop breaks if(c==27) break; } cvReleaseBGStatModel( &bg_model ); cvReleaseImage(&image); cvReleaseCapture(&capture); cvDestroyAllWindows(); }

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  • actionscript3: reflect-class applied on rotationY

    - by algro
    Hi, I'm using a class which applies a visual reflection-effect to defined movieclips. I use a reflection-class from here: link to source. It works like a charm except when I apply a rotation to the movieclip. In my case the reflection is still visible but only a part of it. What am I doing wrong? How could I pass/include the rotation to the Reflection-Class ? Thanks in advance! This is how you apply the Reflection Class to your movieclip: var ref_mc:MovieClip = new MoviClip(); addChild(ref_mc); var r1:Reflect = new Reflect({mc:ref_mc, alpha:50, ratio:50,distance:0, updateTime:0,reflectionDropoff:1}); Now I apply a rotation to my movieclip: ref_mc.rotationY = 30; And Here the Reflect-Class: package com.pixelfumes.reflect{ import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.display.DisplayObject; import flash.display.BitmapData; import flash.display.Bitmap; import flash.geom.Matrix; import flash.display.GradientType; import flash.display.SpreadMethod; import flash.utils.setInterval; import flash.utils.clearInterval; public class Reflect extends MovieClip{ //Created By Ben Pritchard of Pixelfumes 2007 //Thanks to Mim, Jasper, Jason Merrill and all the others who //have contributed to the improvement of this class //static var for the version of this class private static var VERSION:String = "4.0"; //reference to the movie clip we are reflecting private var mc:MovieClip; //the BitmapData object that will hold a visual copy of the mc private var mcBMP:BitmapData; //the BitmapData object that will hold the reflected image private var reflectionBMP:Bitmap; //the clip that will act as out gradient mask private var gradientMask_mc:MovieClip; //how often the reflection should update (if it is video or animated) private var updateInt:Number; //the size the reflection is allowed to reflect within private var bounds:Object; //the distance the reflection is vertically from the mc private var distance:Number = 0; function Reflect(args:Object){ /*the args object passes in the following variables /we set the values of our internal vars to math the args*/ //the clip being reflected mc = args.mc; //the alpha level of the reflection clip var alpha:Number = args.alpha/100; //the ratio opaque color used in the gradient mask var ratio:Number = args.ratio; //update time interval var updateTime:Number = args.updateTime; //the distance at which the reflection visually drops off at var reflectionDropoff:Number = args.reflectionDropoff; //the distance the reflection starts from the bottom of the mc var distance:Number = args.distance; //store width and height of the clip var mcHeight = mc.height; var mcWidth = mc.width; //store the bounds of the reflection bounds = new Object(); bounds.width = mcWidth; bounds.height = mcHeight; //create the BitmapData that will hold a snapshot of the movie clip mcBMP = new BitmapData(bounds.width, bounds.height, true, 0xFFFFFF); mcBMP.draw(mc); //create the BitmapData the will hold the reflection reflectionBMP = new Bitmap(mcBMP); //flip the reflection upside down reflectionBMP.scaleY = -1; //move the reflection to the bottom of the movie clip reflectionBMP.y = (bounds.height*2) + distance; //add the reflection to the movie clip's Display Stack var reflectionBMPRef:DisplayObject = mc.addChild(reflectionBMP); reflectionBMPRef.name = "reflectionBMP"; //add a blank movie clip to hold our gradient mask var gradientMaskRef:DisplayObject = mc.addChild(new MovieClip()); gradientMaskRef.name = "gradientMask_mc"; //get a reference to the movie clip - cast the DisplayObject that is returned as a MovieClip gradientMask_mc = mc.getChildByName("gradientMask_mc") as MovieClip; //set the values for the gradient fill var fillType:String = GradientType.LINEAR; var colors:Array = [0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF]; var alphas:Array = [alpha, 0]; var ratios:Array = [0, ratio]; var spreadMethod:String = SpreadMethod.PAD; //create the Matrix and create the gradient box var matr:Matrix = new Matrix(); //set the height of the Matrix used for the gradient mask var matrixHeight:Number; if (reflectionDropoff<=0) { matrixHeight = bounds.height; } else { matrixHeight = bounds.height/reflectionDropoff; } matr.createGradientBox(bounds.width, matrixHeight, (90/180)*Math.PI, 0, 0); //create the gradient fill gradientMask_mc.graphics.beginGradientFill(fillType, colors, alphas, ratios, matr, spreadMethod); gradientMask_mc.graphics.drawRect(0,0,bounds.width,bounds.height); //position the mask over the reflection clip gradientMask_mc.y = mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").y - mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").height; //cache clip as a bitmap so that the gradient mask will function gradientMask_mc.cacheAsBitmap = true; mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").cacheAsBitmap = true; //set the mask for the reflection as the gradient mask mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").mask = gradientMask_mc; //if we are updating the reflection for a video or animation do so here if(updateTime > -1){ updateInt = setInterval(update, updateTime, mc); } } public function setBounds(w:Number,h:Number):void{ //allows the user to set the area that the reflection is allowed //this is useful for clips that move within themselves bounds.width = w; bounds.height = h; gradientMask_mc.width = bounds.width; redrawBMP(mc); } public function redrawBMP(mc:MovieClip):void { // redraws the bitmap reflection - Mim Gamiet [2006] mcBMP.dispose(); mcBMP = new BitmapData(bounds.width, bounds.height, true, 0xFFFFFF); mcBMP.draw(mc); } private function update(mc):void { //updates the reflection to visually match the movie clip mcBMP = new BitmapData(bounds.width, bounds.height, true, 0xFFFFFF); mcBMP.draw(mc); reflectionBMP.bitmapData = mcBMP; } public function destroy():void{ //provides a method to remove the reflection mc.removeChild(mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP")); reflectionBMP = null; mcBMP.dispose(); clearInterval(updateInt); mc.removeChild(mc.getChildByName("gradientMask_mc")); } } }

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  • sage pay testing error

    - by Phil Jackson
    Hi, im trying to test my sage pay integration but to no avail. Here is my code: private function init_sagepay(){ extract( static::$post ); $settings = global_data::get_settings(); $strConnectTo = "TTEST"; $strVirtualDir = "VSPForm-Kit"; $strYourSiteFQDN = global_data::get_web_root(); $strVSPVendorName = $settings->sagepay_vendor; $strEncryptionPassword = "z5p************"; $strCurrency = static::$currency; $strVendorEMail = $settings->sagepay_email; $strTransactionType = "PAYMENT"; $strProtocol = "2.23"; if ( $strConnectTo == "LIVE" ) $strPurchaseURL = "https://live.sagepay.com/gateway/service/vspform-register.vsp"; elseif ( $strConnectTo == "TEST" ) $strPurchaseURL = "https://test.sagepay.com/gateway/service/vspform-register.vsp"; elseif( $strConnectTo == 'TTEST' ) $strPurchaseURL = 'https://test.sagepay.com/Simulator/VSPServerGateway.asp?Service=VendorRegisterTx'; else $strPurchaseURL = "https://test.sagepay.com/Simulator/VSPDirectGateway.asp"; $details = self::get_member_details(); $thisOrderDeteails = 'order details...'; $ThisVendorTxCode = 'fdsdgfd'; $ThisAmount = $total; $ThisCurrency = static::$currency; $ThisDescription = "description..."; $ThisCustomerEmail = $details->email; $ThisCustomerName = $details->first_name . " " . $details->last_name; $ThisVendorEmail = $strVendorEMail; $ThisApplyAVSCV2 = 1; $ThisApply3DSecure = 1; $ThisDeliveryAddress = $address_line_1 . ", " . $address_line_2 . ", " . $address_line_3 . ", " . $address_line_4 . ", " . $country; $ThisDeliveryPostCode = $postcode; $address_full = $ThisDeliveryAddress . ' ' . $ThisDeliveryPostCode; $ThisBillingAddress = $details->address_line_1 . ", " . $details->address_line_2 . ", " . $details->address_line_3 . ", " . $details->address_line_4 . ", " . $details->country; $ThisBillingPostCode = $details->postcode; // new 2.22 fields $ThisContactNumber = $details->home_number; $ThisContactFax = $details->fax_number; $ThisAllowGiftAid = ''; //$ThisApplyAVSCV2 = $_REQUEST[ 'ApplyAVSCV2' ]; //$ThisApply3DSecure = $_REQUEST[ 'Apply3DSecure' ]; $ShoppingBasket = array(); $x = 0; foreach( $items as $item ) { preg_match( "#^\[([^\]]+)\]\[([^\]]+)\]$#is", $item, $match ); $item = $match[1]; $price = $match[2]; $ShoppingBasket[$x][0] = $item; $ShoppingBasket[$x][1] = $price; $x++; } if ( isset( $ShoppingBasket ) ) { $ThisShoppingBasket = $ShoppingBasket; }else{ $ThisShoppingBasket = "OFF"; } //** Build the crypt string plaintext ** $stuff = "VendorTxCode=" . $ThisVendorTxCode . "&"; $stuff .= "Amount=" . $ThisAmount . "&"; $stuff .= "Currency=" . $ThisCurrency . "&"; $stuff .= "Description=" . $ThisDescription . "&"; $stuff .= "SuccessURL=" . $strYourSiteFQDN . "completed.php&"; $stuff .= "FailureURL=" . $strYourSiteFQDN . "notcompleted.php&"; if ($ThisCustomerEmail) { $stuff .= "CustomerEmail=" . $ThisCustomerEmail . "&"; } if ($ThisVendorEmail) { $stuff .= "VendorEmail=" . $ThisVendorEmail . "&"; } if ($ThisCustomerName) { $stuff .= "CustomerName=" . $ThisCustomerName . "&"; } if ($ThisDeliveryAddress) { $stuff .= "DeliveryAddress=" . $ThisDeliveryAddress . "&"; } if ($ThisDeliveryPostCode) { $stuff .= "DeliveryPostCode=" . $ThisDeliveryPostCode . "&"; } if ($ThisBillingAddress) { $stuff .= "BillingAddress=" . $ThisBillingAddress . "&"; } if ($ThisBillingPostCode) { $stuff .= "BillingPostCode=" . $ThisBillingPostCode . "&"; } // new 2.22 fields if ($ThisContactNumber) { $stuff .= "ContactNumber=" . $ThisContactNumber . "&"; } if ($ThisContactFax) { $stuff .= "ContactFax=" . $ThisContactFax . "&"; } if ($ThisAllowGiftAid) { $stuff .= "AllowGiftAid=" . $ThisAllowGiftAid . "&"; } if ($ThisApplyAVSCV2) { $stuff .= "ApplyAVSCV2=" . $ThisApplyAVSCV2 . "&"; } if ($ThisApply3DSecure) { $stuff .= "Apply3DSecure=" . $ThisApply3DSecure . "&"; } //echo $stuff; if ($ThisShoppingBasket=="ON") { $stuff .= "Basket=3:Sony SV-234 DVD Player:1:£170.20:£29.79:£199.99:£199.99:The Fast and The Furious Region 2 DVD:2:£17.01:£2.98:£19.99:£39.98:Delivery:1:£4.99:----:£4.99:£4.99&"; } $stuff .= "EMailMessage=For an update on the status of your order please email us at $ThisVendorEmail"; $crypt = self::base64Encode( self::SimpleXor( $stuff,$strEncryptionPassword ) ); $ThisDate = date('U'); ob_start(); ?> <form action="<?php echo $strPurchaseURL; ?>" method="post" id="sageForm" name="form1"> <input TYPE="hidden" name="VPSProtocol" value="<?php echo $strProtocol; ?>"> <input TYPE="hidden" name="TxType" value="<?php echo $strTransactionType; ?>"> <input TYPE="hidden" name="Vendor" value="<?php echo $strVSPVendorName; ?>"> <input TYPE="hidden" name="Crypt" value="<?php echo $crypt; ?>"> <input name="sbbutton" type="submit" value="Checkout" class="wpcf7-submit"> </form> <?php return ob_get_clean(); } when using "TEST" im getting an error: Status Detail: 5005 : The Vendor configuration is missing or invalid when using "TTEST" im getting an error: VPSProtocol=2.23 Status=INVALID StatusDetail=The VendorTxCode you supplied is an invalid length. VendorTxCodes should be between 1 to 40 characters long I cannot seem to figure this out at all. If anyone has any ideas it would be greatfuly appreciated. EDIT: $stuff echos out: VendorTxCode=fdsdgfd&Amount=45.60&Currency=GBP&Description=description...&SuccessURL=http://localhost/ecom_framework/&FailureURL=http://localhost/ecom_framework/&[email protected]&[email protected]&CustomerName=Luke Snowden&DeliveryAddress=mansfield, nottinghamshire, mansfield, nottinghamshire, United Kingdom&DeliveryPostCode=ng19 8pw&BillingAddress=mansfield, nottinghamshire, mansfield, nottinghamshire, United Kingdom&BillingPostCode=ng19 8pw&ContactNumber=0165656567&ApplyAVSCV2=1&Apply3DSecure=1&Basket=3:Blue Hat - black :2:£2£:0.00:£4.00:Blue Hat - brown :3:£3£:0.00:£9.00:Blue Hat - grey :4:£4£:0.00:£16.00:Delivery:1:£4.99EMailMessage=For an update on the status of your order please email us at [email protected]

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  • Would anyone tell me how to fetch the media:thumb element's attribute from a json feed?

    - by ash
    I made a yahoo pipe that pulls up the atoms as json format; however, I can fetch and display all the elements in my html page except for the element's attribute. Would anyone tell me how to fetch the media:thumb element's attribute from a json feed? I am pasting the html page's code with javascript. If you save the html page and then view it in browser, you will see that all the necessary elements get output at html page except for the media:thumb as I cannot display the attribute of media:thumb when the feed is formatted as json. I am also pasting the some portion of the json feed so that you can have an idea what i am talking about. Please tell me how to retrieve attribute from media:thumb element of a json feed by using plain javascript but no server side code or javascript library. Thank you. function getFeed(feed){ var newScript = document.createElement('script'); newScript.type = 'text/javascript'; newScript.src = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=40616620df99780bceb3fe923cecd216&_render=json&_callback=piper'; document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newScript); } function piper(feed){ var tmp=''; for (var i=0; i'; tmp+=feed.value.items[i].title+''; tmp+=feed.value.items[i].author.name+''; tmp+=feed.value.items[i].published+''; if (feed.value.items[i].description) { tmp+=feed.value.items[i].description+''; } tmp+='<hr>'; } document.getElementById('rssLayer').innerHTML=tmp; } </script> bchnbc .............................................................. Some portion of the json feed that gets generated by yahoo pipe .............................................................. piper({"count":2,"value":{"title":"myPipe","description":"Pipes Output","link":"http:\/\/pipes.yahoo.com\/pipes\/pipe.info?_id=f7f4175d493cf1171aecbd3268fea5ee","pubDate":"Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:59:22 -0700","generator":"http:\/\/pipes.yahoo.com\/pipes\/","callback":"piper", "items": [{ "rights":"Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works", "link":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/mixtape1", "y:id":{"value":null,"permalink":"true"}, "content":{"content":"We're proud to be releasing this first VODO MIXTAPE. Actual tape might be a thing of the past, but before P2P, mixtapes were the most popular way of sharing popular culture the world had known -- and once called the 'most widely practiced American art form'. We want to resuscitate the spirit of the mixtape for this VODO MIXTAPE series: compilations of our favourite shorts, the weird, the wild and the wonky, all brought together in a temporary and uncomfortable company.","type":"text"}, "author": {"name":"Various"}, "description":"We're proud to be releasing this first VODO MIXTAPE. Actual tape might be a thing of the past, but before P2P, mixtapes were the most popular way of sharing popular culture the world had known -- and once called the 'most widely practiced American art form'. We want to resuscitate the spirit of the mixtape for this VODO MIXTAPE series: compilations of our favourite shorts, the weird, the wild and the wonky, all brought together in a temporary and uncomfortable company.", "media:thumbnail": { "url":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/\/thumbnails\/Mixtape1.jpg" }, "published":"2010-03-08-09:20:20 PM", "format": { "audio_bitrate":null, "width":"608", "xmlns":"http:\/\/xmlns.transmission.cc\/FileFormat", "channels":"2", "samplerate":"44100.0", "duration":"3092.36", "height":"352", "size":"733925376.0", "framerate":"25.0", "audio_codec":"mp3", "video_bitrate":"1898.0", "video_codec":"XVID", "pixel_aspect_ratio":"16:9" }, "y:title":"Mixtape #1: VODO's favourite short films", "title":"Mixtape #1: VODO's favourite short films", "id":null, "pubDate":"2010-03-08-09:20:20 PM", "y:published":{"hour":"3","timezone":"UTC","second":"0","month":"4","minute":"10","utime":"1270264200","day":"3","day_of_week":"6","year":"2010" }}, {"rights":"Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works","link":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/gilbert","y:id":{"value":"cd6584e06ea4ce7fcd34172f4bbd919e295f8680","permalink":"true"},"content":{"content":"A documentary short about Gilbert, the Beacon Hill \"town crier.\" For the last 9 years, since losing his job and becoming homeless, Gilbert has delivered the weather, sports, and breaking headlines from his spot on the Boston Common. Music (used with permission) in this piece is called \"Blue Bicycle\" by Dusseldorf-based pianist \/ composer Volker Bertelmann also known as Hauschka. Artistic Statement: This is the first in a series of profiles of people who I think are interesting, and who I see on almost a daily basis. I don't want to limit the series to people who live \"on the fringe,\" but it would be appropriate to say that most of the people I interview are eclectic, eccentric, and just a little bit unique. The art is in the viewing - but I hope to turn my lens on individuals that don't always color in the lines, whether they can help it or not.","type":"text"},"author":{"name":"Nathaniel Hansen"},"description":"A documentary short about Gilbert, the Beacon Hill \"town crier.\" For the last 9 years, since losing his job and becoming homeless, Gilbert has delivered the weather, sports, and breaking headlines from his spot on the Boston Common. Music (used with permission) in this piece is called \"Blue Bicycle\" by Dusseldorf-based pianist \/ composer Volker Bertelmann also known as Hauschka. Artistic Statement: This is the first in a series of profiles of people who I think are interesting, and who I see on almost a daily basis. I don't want to limit the series to people who live \"on the fringe,\" but it would be appropriate to say that most of the people I interview are eclectic, eccentric, and just a little bit unique. The art is in the viewing - but I hope to turn my lens on individuals that don't always color in the lines, whether they can help it or not.","media:thumbnail":{"url":"http:\/\/vodo.net\/\/thumbnails\/gilbert.jpeg"},"published":"2010-03-03-10:37:05 AM","format":{"audio_bitrate":null,"width":"624","xmlns":"http:\/\/xmlns.transmission.cc\/FileFormat","channels":"2","samplerate":null,"duration":"373.673","height":"352","size":"123321266.0","framerate":null,"audio_codec":"mp3","video_bitrate":null,"video_codec":"XVID","pixel_aspect_ratio":"16:9"},"y:title":"Gilbert","title":"Gilbert","id":"cd6584e06ea4ce7fcd34172f4bbd919e295f8680","pubDate":"2010-03-03-10:37:05 AM","y:published":{"hour":"3","timezone":"UTC","second":"0","month":"4","minute":"10","utime":"1270264200","day":"3","day_of_week":"6","year":"2010" }} ] }})

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  • Managing the layout of a Java MainFrame of Canvas3d

    - by John N
    Hi, Im trying to organise the layout of four canvas3d objects in a single MainFrame. Iv tried using some layout managers but none are working (or im doing it wrong). Can anyone give me advice or point me to a way to get this to display the four canvas's as a grid of four? Thanks, John public class Main { public static void Main(){ Window win = new Window(); } } import javax.media.j3d.BranchGroup; import javax.media.j3d.Canvas3D; import javax.media.j3d.Locale; import javax.media.j3d.PhysicalBody; import javax.media.j3d.PhysicalEnvironment; import javax.media.j3d.Transform3D; import javax.media.j3d.TransformGroup; import javax.media.j3d.View; import javax.media.j3d.ViewPlatform; import javax.media.j3d.VirtualUniverse; import javax.vecmath.Vector3f; import com.sun.j3d.utils.picking.PickCanvas; public class Universe { boolean camera = true; Canvas3D canvas1, canvas2, canvas3, canvas4; VirtualUniverse universe; Locale locale; TransformGroup vpTrans1, vpTransRight, vpTransFront, vpTransPers; TransformGroup mouseTransform = null; View view1, view2, view3, view4; BranchGroup scene; PickCanvas pickCanvas1 = null; PickCanvas pickCanvas2 = null; PickCanvas pickCanvas3 = null; PickCanvas pickCanvas4 = null; BranchGroup obj = new BranchGroup(); // Create a BranchGroup node for the view platform BranchGroup vpRoot = new BranchGroup(); //Temp vars for cam movement public Universe(Canvas3D c1, Canvas3D c2, Canvas3D c3, Canvas3D c4, BranchGroup scene) { this.canvas1 = c1; this.canvas2 = c2; this.canvas3 = c3; this.canvas4 = c4; this.scene = scene; // Establish a virtual universe that has a single // hi-res Locale universe = new VirtualUniverse(); locale = new Locale(universe); // Create a PhysicalBody and PhysicalEnvironment object PhysicalBody body = new PhysicalBody(); PhysicalEnvironment environment = new PhysicalEnvironment(); // Create a View and attach the Canvas3D and the physical // body and environment to the view. view1 = new View(); view1.addCanvas3D(c1); view1.addCanvas3D(c2); view1.addCanvas3D(c3); view1.addCanvas3D(c4); view1.setPhysicalBody(body); view1.setPhysicalEnvironment(environment); // Create a BranchGroup node for the view platform BranchGroup vpRoot = new BranchGroup(); // Create a ViewPlatform object, and its associated // TransformGroup object, and attach it to the root of the // subgraph. Attach the view to the view platform. Transform3D t = new Transform3D(); t.set(new Vector3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 2.0f)); ViewPlatform vp = new ViewPlatform(); vpTrans1 = new TransformGroup(t); vpTrans1.addChild(vp); vpRoot.addChild(vpTrans1); vpRoot.addChild(scene); view1.attachViewPlatform(vp); // Attach the branch graph to the universe, via the // Locale. The scene graph is now live! locale.addBranchGraph(vpRoot); } } import javax.media.j3d.BranchGroup; import javax.media.j3d.Canvas3D; import javax.media.j3d.Locale; import javax.media.j3d.PhysicalBody; import javax.media.j3d.PhysicalEnvironment; import javax.media.j3d.Transform3D; import javax.media.j3d.TransformGroup; import javax.media.j3d.View; import javax.media.j3d.ViewPlatform; import javax.media.j3d.VirtualUniverse; import javax.vecmath.Vector3f; import com.sun.j3d.utils.picking.PickCanvas; public class Universe { boolean camera = true; Canvas3D canvas1, canvas2, canvas3, canvas4; VirtualUniverse universe; Locale locale; TransformGroup vpTrans1, vpTransRight, vpTransFront, vpTransPers; TransformGroup mouseTransform = null; View view1, view2, view3, view4; BranchGroup scene; PickCanvas pickCanvas1 = null; PickCanvas pickCanvas2 = null; PickCanvas pickCanvas3 = null; PickCanvas pickCanvas4 = null; BranchGroup obj = new BranchGroup(); // Create a BranchGroup node for the view platform BranchGroup vpRoot = new BranchGroup(); //Temp vars for cam movement public Universe(Canvas3D c1, Canvas3D c2, Canvas3D c3, Canvas3D c4, BranchGroup scene) { this.canvas1 = c1; this.canvas2 = c2; this.canvas3 = c3; this.canvas4 = c4; this.scene = scene; // Establish a virtual universe that has a single // hi-res Locale universe = new VirtualUniverse(); locale = new Locale(universe); // Create a PhysicalBody and PhysicalEnvironment object PhysicalBody body = new PhysicalBody(); PhysicalEnvironment environment = new PhysicalEnvironment(); // Create a View and attach the Canvas3D and the physical // body and environment to the view. view1 = new View(); view1.addCanvas3D(c1); view1.addCanvas3D(c2); view1.addCanvas3D(c3); view1.addCanvas3D(c4); view1.setPhysicalBody(body); view1.setPhysicalEnvironment(environment); // Create a BranchGroup node for the view platform BranchGroup vpRoot = new BranchGroup(); // Create a ViewPlatform object, and its associated // TransformGroup object, and attach it to the root of the // subgraph. Attach the view to the view platform. Transform3D t = new Transform3D(); t.set(new Vector3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 2.0f)); ViewPlatform vp = new ViewPlatform(); vpTrans1 = new TransformGroup(t); vpTrans1.addChild(vp); vpRoot.addChild(vpTrans1); vpRoot.addChild(scene); view1.attachViewPlatform(vp); // Attach the branch graph to the universe, via the // Locale. The scene graph is now live! locale.addBranchGraph(vpRoot); } }

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  • Adapting a HTML/CSS dropdown menu to multi-level

    - by Adam Nygate
    Ive been trying to make the original dropdown into multi level for a site im working on. All of my attempts have failed (. For some reason i can only do "margin-right" to align the elements, and this causes some problems. I think it has something to do with the position attribute. Here is my HTML: <ol id="nav"> <li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li> <li class="dropdown_alignedLeft"> <a href="">Products</a> <ul><li class="dropdown_alignedRight"> <a href="">iPoP</a> <ul style="margin-right:-400px; top:0px;-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;border-top-right-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;"><li><a href="customers.php?category=ipop">iPoP - Network Solutions for Vessels</a></li></ul><li class="dropdown_alignedRight"> <a href="">Cameras</a> <ul style="margin-right:-400px; top:0px;-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;border-top-right-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;"><li><a href="customers.php?category=icam">iCam 501 Ultra - Intrinsically Safe Digital Camera with Flash</a></li></ul><li class="dropdown_alignedRight"> <a href="">BNWAS</a> <ul style="margin-right:-400px; top:0px;-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;border-top-right-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;"><li><a href="customers.php?category=bnwas">BNWAS - Bridge Navigation Watch Alarm System</a></li></ul><li class="dropdown_alignedRight"> <a href="">Lighting</a> <ul style="margin-right:-400px; top:0px;-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;border-top-right-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;"><li><a href="customers.php?category=peli">Peli 2690 - Intrinsically Safe LED Head Lamp</a></li></ul><li class="dropdown_alignedRight"> <a href="">Communication</a> <ul style="margin-right:-400px; top:0px;-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;border-top-right-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;"><li><a href="customers.php?category=handy">Ex-Handy 06 - Intrinsically Safe Cell Phone</a></li></ul> </ul> <li class="dropdown_alignedLeft"> <a href="">Customers</a> <ul> <li><a href="customers.php?category=maritime">Maritime</a></li> <li><a href="customers.php?category=non">Non-Maritime</a></li> <li class="dropdown_lastItem"><a href="customers.php?category=organizations">Regulatory Organizations</a></li> </ul> <li><a href="order.php">Product Enquiry</a></li> <li><a href="contact.php">Contact Us</a></li> <li class="dropdown_alignedLeft"> <a href="">Company</a> <ul> <!-- <li><a href="">About Us</a></li> --> <li><a href="newsandpr.php?category=News">News</a></li> <li class="dropdown_lastItem"><a href="newsandpr.php?category=Press Release">Press Releases</a></li> </ul> </ol> And my CSS: #nav { float:right; margin:15px 0 0; } #nav li { float:left; } #nav li a { display:block; font-family:"PT Sans","Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif; font-size:16px; text-decoration:none; color:#2B95C8; padding:10px 20px 20px; } .dropdown_alignedLeft,.dropdown_alignedRight { position:relative; } #nav .dropdown_alignedLeft>a,#nav .dropdown_alignedRight>a { background:url(../images/dropdown_arrow_blue.png) no-repeat top right; padding:10px 30px 20px 20px; } #nav .dropdown_alignedLeft:hover>a,#nav .dropdown_alignedRight:hover>a { -moz-border-radius-topleft:5px; -moz-border-radius-topright:5px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright:0; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft:0; -webkit-border-top-left-radius:5px; -webkit-border-top-right-radius:5px; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius:0; -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius:0; border-top-left-radius:5px; border-top-right-radius:5px; border-bottom-right-radius:0; border-bottom-left-radius:0; color:#FFF; background:#2378A1 url(../images/dropdown_arrow_blue.png) no-repeat bottom right; } .dropdown_alignedLeft ul,.dropdown_alignedRight ul { display:none; } #nav .dropdown_alignedLeft:hover>ul,#nav .dropdown_alignedRight:hover>ul { display:block; z-index:100; position:absolute; top:50px; -moz-border-radius-topleft:0; -moz-border-radius-topright:0; -moz-border-radius-bottomright:5px; -moz-border-radius-bottomleft:5px; -webkit-border-top-left-radius:0; -webkit-border-top-right-radius:0; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius:5px; -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius:5px; border-top-left-radius:0; border-top-right-radius:0; border-bottom-right-radius:5px; border-bottom-left-radius:5px; background:#2378A1; padding:0 0 6px; } #nav .dropdown_alignedRight:hover>ul { top:50px; right:0; text-align:right; } #nav li ul li { float:none; border-bottom:1px dashed #2B95C8; margin:0 20px; } #nav li ul li.dropdown_innerTitle { border:none; font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif; font-size:15px; white-space:nowrap; color:#C8DDE7; margin:10px 20px 0; padding:10px 0; } #nav li ul li.dropdown_lastItem { border:none; } #nav li ul li a { font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif; font-size:13px; color:#FFF; white-space:nowrap; padding:10px 0 9px; } #nav>li:hover>a,#nav li .current_page { color:#2378A1; background:url(../images/current_page_arrow_blue.png) no-repeat center bottom; } #nav li ul li a:hover { color: #C8DDE7; } For a live version of the menu, please go here: JSFiddle - Live Menu

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  • http server implentation, the page does not show properly

    - by none
    well, as i am doing a small project of coding an http server. the code is at http://code.google.com/p/reactor/ the current puzzle is when asked to parse a page with java script and css. As an http server it just sends a page (copied from another website) and it parsed inproperly. when a simple html page is been parse , by my firefox, it shows ok, however when parsing a more complex page(css+javascript) the page is all wired like this : ???? ????? if(getCookie('pais999')==null){varisToplayerDouble="True";isToplayerDouble=(isToplayerDouble=="True")?true:falsevarToplayerCookieName='pais999';varTopLayerCookieExpiredDays=1;varToplayerLink='http://xads.zedo.com/ads2/c?a=239671;g=0;c=455000000;i=0;x=7168;n=455;s=0;k=http://www.pais.co.il/Pais/Games/Lotto/';varToplayerImpression='http://l4.zedo.com/log/p.gif?a=239671;c=455000000;x=7168;n=455;e=i;i=0;s=0;z='+Math.random();varToplayerBigPath='pais/January2007/98one_toplayer.swf';varToplayerSmallPath='pais/January2007/98one_reminder.swf';varToplayerBigWidth=1005;varToplayerBigHeight=500;varToplayerSmallWidth=100;varToplayerSmallHeight=100;varToplayerBigLeft=(0==0)?resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2:resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2+0varToplayerBigTop=0;varToplayerSmallLeft=resWidth-ToplayerSmallWidth-0;varToplayerSmallTop=0;varSecondsToChangeBigToSmall=15;}elseif(getCookie('NF999')==null){varisToplayerDouble="True";isToplayerDouble=(isToplayerDouble=="True")?true:falsevarToplayerCookieName='NF999';varTopLayerCookieExpiredDays=1;varToplayerLink='http://xads.zedo.com/ads2/c?a=238663;g=0;c=455000000;i=0;x=7168;n=455;s=0;k=http://www.new-pharm.co.il/SkiGame/?ToolID=OLJD8O';varToplayerImpression='http://l4.zedo.com/log/p.gif?a=238663;c=455000000;x=7168;n=455;e=i;i=0;s=0;z='+Math.random();varToplayerBigPath='NewFarm/Ski/995ONE_TopLayer_550x360.swf';varToplayerSmallPath='NewFarm/Ski/995ONE_Reminder_100x100.swf';varToplayerBigWidth=550;varToplayerBigHeight=360;varToplayerSmallWidth=100;varToplayerSmallHeight=100;varToplayerBigLeft=(0==0)?resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2:resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2+0varToplayerBigTop=0;varToplayerSmallLeft=resWidth-ToplayerSmallWidth-0;varToplayerSmallTop=0;varSecondsToChangeBigToSmall=15;}elseif(1==0){}$("divToplayerBig").style.width=ToplayerBigWidth;$("divToplayerBig").style.height=ToplayerBigHeight;$("divToplayerBig").style.left=resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2;$("divToplayerSmall").style.width=ToplayerSmallWidth;$("divToplayerSmall").style.height=ToplayerSmallHeight;$("divToplayerSmall").style.right=ToplayerSmallWidthvartopOff=0;if(ToplayerBigTop0)topOff=resHeight-ToplayerBigHeight+ToplayerBigTop;varisMain=false;#divToplayerBig{position:absolute;right:20px;bottom:1px;}bodydiv#divToplayerBig{position:fixed;}#divToplayerSmall{position:absolute;right:20px;bottom:10px;}bodydiv#divToplayerSmall{position:fixed;}????|??????LIVE|???????????|ONE???????|ONETV |????'??|BigONE|?????????| CrazyONE | where the source code of the html is : ONE:???:??????????????????????????? ????  ????? if(getCookie('pais999')==null){varisToplayerDouble="True";isToplayerDouble=(isToplayerDouble=="True")?true:falsevarToplayerCookieName='pais999';varTopLayerCookieExpiredDays=1;varToplayerLink='http://xads.zedo.com/ads2/c?a=239671;g=0;c=455000000;i=0;x=7168;n=455;s=0;k=http://www.pais.co.il/Pais/Games/Lotto/';varToplayerImpression='http://l4.zedo.com/log/p.gif?a=239671;c=455000000;x=7168;n=455;e=i;i=0;s=0;z='+Math.random();varToplayerBigPath='pais/January2007/98one_toplayer.swf';varToplayerSmallPath='pais/January2007/98one_reminder.swf';varToplayerBigWidth=1005;varToplayerBigHeight=500;varToplayerSmallWidth=100;varToplayerSmallHeight=100;varToplayerBigLeft=(0==0)?resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2:resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2+0varToplayerBigTop=0;varToplayerSmallLeft=resWidth-ToplayerSmallWidth-0;varToplayerSmallTop=0;varSecondsToChangeBigToSmall=15;}elseif(getCookie('NF999')==null){varisToplayerDouble="True";isToplayerDouble=(isToplayerDouble=="True")?true:falsevarToplayerCookieName='NF999';varTopLayerCookieExpiredDays=1;varToplayerLink='http://xads.zedo.com/ads2/c?a=238663;g=0;c=455000000;i=0;x=7168;n=455;s=0;k=http://www.new-pharm.co.il/SkiGame/?ToolID=OLJD8O';varToplayerImpression='http://l4.zedo.com/log/p.gif?a=238663;c=455000000;x=7168;n=455;e=i;i=0;s=0;z='+Math.random();varToplayerBigPath='NewFarm/Ski/995ONE_TopLayer_550x360.swf';varToplayerSmallPath='NewFarm/Ski/995ONE_Reminder_100x100.swf';varToplayerBigWidth=550;varToplayerBigHeight=360;varToplayerSmallWidth=100;varToplayerSmallHeight=100;varToplayerBigLeft=(0==0)?resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2:resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2+0varToplayerBigTop=0;varToplayerSmallLeft=resWidth-ToplayerSmallWidth-0;varToplayerSmallTop=0;varSecondsToChangeBigToSmall=15;}elseif(1==0){}$("divToplayerBig").style.width=ToplayerBigWidth;$("divToplayerBig").style.height=ToplayerBigHeight;$("divToplayerBig").style.left=resWidth/2-ToplayerBigWidth/2;$("divToplayerSmall").style.width=ToplayerSmallWidth;$("divToplayerSmall").style.height=ToplayerSmallHeight;$("divToplayerSmall").style.right=ToplayerSmallWidthvartopOff=0;if(ToplayerBigTop0)topOff=resHeight-ToplayerBigHeight+ToplayerBigTop;varisMain=false;#divToplayerBig{position:absolute;right:20px;bottom:1px;}bodydiv#divToplayerBig{position:fixed;}div#divToplayerBig{right:auto;bottom:auto;left:expression((-20-divToplayerBig.offsetWidth+(document.documentElement.clientWidth?document.documentElement.clientWidth:document.body.clientWidth)+(ignoreMe2=document.documentElement.scrollLeft?document.documentElement.scrollLeft:document.body.scrollLeft))+'px');top:expression((0-divToplayerBig.offsetHeight-topOff+(document.documentElement.clientHeight?document.documentElement.clientHeight:document.body.clientHeight)+(ignoreMe=document.documentElement.scrollTop?document.documentElement.scrollTop:document.body.scrollTop))+'px');}#divToplayerSmall{position:absolute;right:20px;bottom:10px;}bodydiv#divToplayerSmall{position:fixed;}div#divToplayerSmall{right:auto;bottom:auto;left:expression((-20-divToplayerSmall.offsetWidth+(document.documentElement.clientWidth?document.documentElement.clientWidth:document.body.clientWidth)+(ignoreMe2=document.documentElement.scrollLeft?document.documentElement.scrollLeft:document.body.scrollLeft))+'px');top:expression((0-divToplayerSmall.offsetHeight+(document.documentElement.clientHeight?document.documentElement.clientHeight:document.body.clientHeight)+(ignoreMe=document.documentElement.scrollTop?document.documentElement.scrollTop:document.body.scrollTop))+'px');}varisTopTrans=(ToplayerBigPath.indexOf("transparent")-1)?false:true;varisRemTrans=(ToplayerSmallPath.indexOf("transparent")-1)?false:true;vartop1session=3;vartop2session=5;InitToplayer(isTopTrans,isRemTrans);window.onload=StartToplayer;????|??????LIVE|???????????|ONE???????|ONETV |????'??|BigONE|?????????|  CrazyONE |????????????????????????????????????????????????????????19/01/07  19:30?????????????????????-?????:?????????????????????????19/01/07  18:43??????????????:??????????????????????19/01/07  17:41???:??????????????????????????????????19/01/07  16:49?????:??????"?????????????/?????1:2,??????"??????19/01/07  16:45????????????????????????????,?????2.5???????????????19/01/07  16:37???????:???"?????????????????-19:30?????????????19/01/07  14:32?????"?????????-18:30?????????"????????,????'??????19/01/07  14:45????????????????????????????????"?:??????????????19/01/07  14:37??????????:??????????????????????????????0:019/01/07  13:46varswfPeleSmall=newSWFObject("http://images.one.co.il/images/PeleEmulator/emulator_pelephone_01a.swf","peleSmall",160,470,"6","#FFFFFF");swfPeleSmall.addParam("quality","high");swfPeleSmall.addParam("wmode","transparent");swfPeleSmall.write("divPeleSmall");varswfPeleBig=newSWFObject("http://images.one.co.il/images/PeleEmulator/emulator_pelephone_02d.swf","peleBig",400,470,"6","#FFFFFF");swfPeleBig.addParam("quality","high");swfPeleBig.addParam("wmode","transparent");swfPeleBig.write("divWithBig");???:???????????????????????????????????????-ONE????????????????????????????????????????????.????????,???????????1:2,?????????????:"???????????"DisplayFlash("W_S_round_border_pic.swf","156","201","1","style=position:absolute");?????????????????????????(??????)?????????                          19/01/20077:26???????????????(????)????????????????????????????6:3,5:7?-5:7???????????????????????,???????23?????.?????,????????????????????????????????,???????????????????????????????????????????,????????????????????.??????????????????????????,??????????????????????????.????????????????????????????-1:1?????????.?????????????????????????????'?????????????????????????????.?????????????.???????????????????????????????(16???????),???????????????????????????????????????3???????,???????????????????????.????????- (only part of of the page presentation in firefox and page source html) why is it happening? what is midding in the http response? StringBuffer tResponse = new StringBuffer(); tResponse.append("HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n"); tResponse.append("Date: "+new Date().toString() +'\n'); tResponse.append("server: http-reactor/0.1-dev\n"); tResponse.append("last-Modified:"+ d.toString() +'\n'); tResponse.append("Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1255\n"); tResponse.append("Accept-Language: he; q=1.0, en; q=0.5:); tResponse.append("Content-Length: "+tFileContent.length()+'\n'); tResponse.append('\n'); tResponse.append(tFileContent); public StringBuffer FetchData(String FileName) throws FileNotFoundException{ StringBuffer tFileContent = new StringBuffer(); if (FileName.contains("../")) throw new SecurityException(); if (FileName.equals("/")) FileName = "\\index.html"; FileName.replace('/', '\\'); File f = new File(_root + FileName); Scanner scanner = new Scanner(f); while(scanner.hasNext()) tFileContent.append(scanner.next()); return generateResponse(tFileContent,f.lastModified()); } private StringBuffer generateResponse(StringBuffer tFileContent, long l) { StringBuffer tResponse = new StringBuffer(); Date d = new Date(l); tResponse.append("HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n"); tResponse.append("Date: "+new Date().toString() +'\n'); tResponse.append("server: http-reactor/0.1-dev\n"); tResponse.append("last-Modified:"+ d.toString() +'\n'); tResponse.append("Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1255\n"); tResponse.append("Accept-Language: he; q=1.0, en; q=0.5:); tResponse.append("Content-Length: "+tFileContent.length()+'\n'); tResponse.append('\n'); tResponse.append(tFileContent); return tResponse; }

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  • (PHP) Validation, Security and Speed - Does my app have these?

    - by Devner
    Hi all, I am currently working on a building community website in PHP. This contains forms that a user can fill right from registration to lot of other functionality. I am not an Object-oriented guy, so I am using functions most of the time to handle my application. I know I have to learn OOPS, but currently need to develop this website and get it running soon. Anyway, here's a sample of what I let my app. do: Consider a page (register.php) that has a form where a user has 3 fields to fill up, say: First Name, Last Name and Email. Upon submission of this form, I want to validate the form and show the corresponding errors to the users: <form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>"> <label for="name">Name:</label> <input type="text" name="name" id="name" /><br /> <label for="lname">Last Name:</label> <input type="text" name="lname" id="lname" /><br /> <label for="email">Email:</label> <input type="text" name="email" id="email" /><br /> <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Submit" /> </form> This form will POST the info to the same page. So here's the code that will process the POST'ed info: <?php require("functions.php"); if( isset($_POST['submit']) ) { $errors = fn_register(); if( count($errors) ) { //Show error messages } else { //Send welcome mail to the user or do database stuff... } } ?> <?php //functions.php page: function sql_quote( $value ) { if( get_magic_quotes_gpc() ) { $value = stripslashes( $value ); } else { $value = addslashes( $value ); } if( function_exists( "mysql_real_escape_string" ) ) { $value = mysql_real_escape_string( $value ); } return $value; } function clean($str) { $str = strip_tags($str, '<br>,<br />'); $str = trim($str); $str = sql_quote($str); return $str; } foreach ($_POST as &$value) { if (!is_array($value)) { $value = clean($value); } else { clean($value); } } foreach ($_GET as &$value) { if (!is_array($value)) { $value = clean($value); } else { clean($value); } } function validate_name( $fld, $min, $max, $rule, $label ) { if( $rule == 'required' ) { if ( trim($fld) == '' ) { $str = "$label: Cannot be left blank."; return $str; } } if ( isset($fld) && trim($fld) != '' ) { if ( isset($fld) && $fld != '' && !preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z\ ]+$/", $fld)) { $str = "$label: Invalid characters used! Only Lowercase, Uppercase alphabets and Spaces are allowed"; } else if ( strlen($fld) < $min or strlen($fld) > $max ) { $curr_char = strlen($fld); $str = "$label: Must be atleast $min character &amp; less than $max char. Entered characters: $curr_char"; } else { $str = 0; } } else { $str = 0; } return $str; } function validate_email( $fld, $min, $max, $rule, $label ) { if( $rule == 'required' ) { if ( trim($fld) == '' ) { $str = "$label: Cannot be left blank."; return $str; } } if ( isset($fld) && trim($fld) != '' ) { if ( !eregi('^[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})$', $fld) ) { $str = "$label: Invalid format. Please check."; } else if ( strlen($fld) < $min or strlen($fld) > $max ) { $curr_char = strlen($fld); $str = "$label: Must be atleast $min character &amp; less than $max char. Entered characters: $curr_char"; } else { $str = 0; } } else { $str = 0; } return $str; } function val_rules( $str, $val_type, $rule='required' ){ switch ($val_type) { case 'name': $val = validate_name( $str, 3, 20, $rule, 'First Name'); break; case 'lname': $val = validate_name( $str, 10, 20, $rule, 'Last Name'); break; case 'email': $val = validate_email( $str, 10, 60, $rule, 'Email'); break; } return $val; } function fn_register() { $errors = array(); $val_name = val_rules( $_POST['name'], 'name' ); $val_lname = val_rules( $_POST['lname'], 'lname', 'optional' ); $val_email = val_rules( $_POST['email'], 'email' ); if ( $val_name != '0' ) { $errors['name'] = $val_name; } if ( $val_lname != '0' ) { $errors['lname'] = $val_lname; } if ( $val_email != '0' ) { $errors['email'] = $val_email; } return $errors; } //END of functions.php page ?> OK, now it might look like there's a lot, but lemme break it down target wise: 1. I wanted the foreach ($_POST as &$value) and foreach ($_GET as &$value) loops to loop through the received info from the user submission and strip/remove all malicious input. I am calling a function called clean on the input first to achieve the objective as stated above. This function will process each of the input, whether individual field values or even arrays and allow only tags and remove everything else. The rest of it is obvious. Once this happens, the new/cleaned values will be processed by the fn_register() function and based on the values returned after the validation, we get the corresponding errors or NULL values (as applicable). So here's my questions: 1. This pretty much makes me feel secure as I am forcing the user to correct malicious data and won't process the final data unless the errors are corrected. Am I correct? Does the method that I follow guarantee the speed (as I am using lots of functions and their corresponding calls)? The fields of a form differ and the minimum number of fields I may have at any given point of time in any form may be 3 and can go upto as high as 100 (or even more, I am not sure as the website is still being developed). Will having 100's of fields and their validation in the above way, reduce the speed of application (say upto half a million users are accessing the website at the same time?). What can I do to improve the speed and reduce function calls (if possible)? 3, Can I do something to improve the current ways of validation? I am holding off object oriented approach and using FILTERS in PHP for the later. So please, I request you all to suggest me way to improve/tweak the current ways and suggest me if the script is vulnerable or safe enough to be used in a Live production environment. If not, what I can do to be able to use it live? Thank you all in advance.

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  • 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Michael Snow
    Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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  • SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

    - by pinaldave
    TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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  • SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

    - by pinaldave
    TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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