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• User Experience Fundamentals

  - by ultan o'broin

  Understanding what user experience means in the modern work environment is central to building great-looking usable applications on the desktop or mobile devices. What better place to start a series of blog posts on such Applications User Experience team enablement for customers and partners than by sharing what the term really means, writes team member Karen Scipi. Applications UX have gained valuable insights into developing a user experience that reflects the experience of today’s worker. We have observed real workers performing real tasks in real work environments, and we have developed a set of new standards of application design that have been scientifically proven to be beneficial to enable today’s workers. We share such expertise to enable our customers and partners to benefit from our insights and to further their return on investment when building Oracle applications. So, What is User Experience? ?The user interface (UI) is about the on-screen user context provided by the layout of widgets (such as icons, fields, and buttons and more) and the visual impact of colors, typographic choices, and so on. The UI comprises the “look and feel” of the application that users interact with, and reflects, in essence, the most immediate aspects of usability we can now all relate to.  User experience, on the other hand, is about understanding the whole context of the world of work, how workers go about completing tasks, crossing all sorts of boundaries along the way. It is a study of how business processes and workers goals coincide, how users work with technology or other tools to get their jobs done, their interactions with other users, and their response to the technical, physical, and cultural environment around them. User experience is all about how users work—their work environments, office layouts, desk tools, types of devices, their working day, and more. Even their job aids, such as sticky notes, offer insight for UX innovation. User experience matters because businesses needs to be efficient, work must be productive, and users now demand to be satisfied by the applications they work with. In simple terms, tasks finished quickly and accurately for a business evokes organization and worker satisfaction, which in turn makes workers feel good and more than willing to use the application again tomorrow. Design Principles for the Enterprise Worker The consumerization of information technology has raised the bar for enterprise applications. Applications must be consistent, simple, intuitive, but above all contextual, reflecting how and when workers work, in the office or on the go. For example, the Google search experience with its type-ahead keyword-prompting feature is how workers expect to be able to discover enterprise information, too. Type-ahead in PeopleSoft 9.1 To build software that enables workers to be productive, our design principles meet modern work requirements about consistency, with well-organized, context-driven information, geared for a working world of discovery and collaboration. Our applications must also behave in a simple, web-like way just like Amazon, Google, and Apple products that workers use at home or on the go. Our user experience must also reflect workers’ needs for flexibility and well-loved enterprise practices such as using popular desktop tools like Microsoft Excel or Outlook as required. Building User Experience Productively The building blocks of Oracle Fusion Applications are the user experience design patterns. Based on the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology used to build Oracle Fusion Applications, the patterns are reusable solutions to common usability challenges that ADF developers typically face as they build applications, extensions, and integrations. Developers use the patterns as part of their Oracle toolkits to realize great usability consistently and in a productive way. Our design pattern creation process is informed by user experience research and science, an understanding of our technology’s capabilities, the demands for simplification and intuitiveness from users, and the best of Oracle’s acquisitions strategy (an injection of smart people and smart innovation). The patterns are supported by usage guidelines and are tested in our labs and assembled into a library of proven resources we used to build own Oracle Fusion Applications and other Oracle applications user experiences. The design patterns library is now available to the ADF community and to our partners and customers, for free. Developers with ADF skills and other technology skills can now offer more than just coding and functionality and still use the best in enterprise methodologies to ensure that a great user experience is easily applied, scaled, and maintained, whether it be for SaaS or on-premise deployments for Oracle Fusion Applications, for applications coexistence, or for partner integrations scenarios.  Oracle partners and customers already using our design patterns to build solutions and win business in smart and productive ways are now sharing their experiences and insights on pattern use to benefit your entire business. Applications UX is going global with the message and the means. Our hands-on user experience enablement through ADF  is expanding. So, stay tuned to Misha Vaughan's Voice of User Experience (VOX) blog and follow along on Twitter at @usableapps for news of outreach events and other learning opportunities. Interested in Learning More? Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Patterns and Guidelines Library Shout-outs for Oracle UX Design Patterns Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Design Patterns: Productivity Realized

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• FairScheduling Conventions in Hadoop

  - by dan.mcclary

  While scheduling and resource allocation control has been present in Hadoop since 0.20, a lot of people haven't discovered or utilized it in their initial investigations of the Hadoop ecosystem. We could chalk this up to many things: Organizations are still determining what their dataflow and analysis workloads will comprise Small deployments under tests aren't likely to show the signs of strains that would send someone looking for resource allocation options The default scheduling options -- the FairScheduler and the CapacityScheduler -- are not placed in the most prominent position within the Hadoop documentation. However, for production deployments, it's wise to start with at least the foundations of scheduling in place so that you can tune the cluster as workloads emerge. To do that, we have to ask ourselves something about what the off-the-rack scheduling options are. We have some choices: The FairScheduler, which will work to ensure resource allocations are enforced on a per-job basis. The CapacityScheduler, which will ensure resource allocations are enforced on a per-queue basis. Writing your own implementation of the abstract class org.apache.hadoop.mapred.job.TaskScheduler is an option, but usually overkill. If you're going to have several concurrent users and leverage the more interactive aspects of the Hadoop environment (e.g. Pig and Hive scripting), the FairScheduler is definitely the way to go. In particular, we can do user-specific pools so that default users get their fair share, and specific users are given the resources their workloads require. To enable fair scheduling, we're going to need to do a couple of things. First, we need to tell the JobTracker that we want to use scheduling and where we're going to be defining our allocations. We do this by adding the following to the mapred-site.xml file in HADOOP_HOME/conf: <property> <name>mapred.jobtracker.taskScheduler</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.mapred.FairScheduler</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.fairscheduler.allocation.file</name> <value>/path/to/allocations.xml</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.fairscheduler.poolnameproperty</name> <value>pool.name</value> </property> <property> <name>pool.name</name> <value>${user.name}</name> </property> What we've done here is simply tell the JobTracker that we'd like to task scheduling to use the FairScheduler class rather than a single FIFO queue. Moreover, we're going to be defining our resource pools and allocations in a file called allocations.xml For reference, the allocation file is read every 15s or so, which allows for tuning allocations without having to take down the JobTracker. Our allocation file is now going to look a little like this <?xml version="1.0"?> <allocations> <pool name="dan"> <minMaps>5</minMaps> <minReduces>5</minReduces> <maxMaps>25</maxMaps> <maxReduces>25</maxReduces> <minSharePreemptionTimeout>300</minSharePreemptionTimeout> </pool> <mapreduce.job.user.name="dan"> <maxRunningJobs>6</maxRunningJobs> </user> <userMaxJobsDefault>3</userMaxJobsDefault> <fairSharePreemptionTimeout>600</fairSharePreemptionTimeout> </allocations> In this case, I've explicitly set my username to have upper and lower bounds on the maps and reduces, and allotted myself double the number of running jobs. Now, if I run hive or pig jobs from either the console or via the Hue web interface, I'll be treated "fairly" by the JobTracker. There's a lot more tweaking that can be done to the allocations file, so it's best to dig down into the description and start trying out allocations that might fit your workload.

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• Five Reasons to Attend PLM Summit 2013: The Conference Formerly Known as AGILITY

  - by Terri Hiskey

  As we approach the end of 2012, we are also closing in on the last couple of weeks that Agile customers and prospects can register for the upcoming PLM Summit 2013 for the bargain early bird rate of $195. Register now to secure your spot! The Conference Formerly Known as AGILITY... Long-time Agile customers may remember AGILITY, which was Agile's PLM customer conference that was held on an annual basis prior to Oracle's acquisiton of Agile in 2007. In February 2012, due to feedback we received from our Agile PLM community, we successfully resurrected the AGILITY conference and renamed it the PLM Summit. The PLM Summit was so well received and well-attended, that we are doing it again in 2013. This upcoming PLM Summit is being co-located in San Francisco under the overarching banner of the Oracle Value Chain Summit, and will be held alongside several other Oracle customer conferences that cover a range of value chain solutions, including Value Chain Planning, Value Chain Execution, Procurement, Maintenance and Manufacturing. This setup offers PLM attendees the best of all worlds--the opportunity to participate and learn about PLM in smaller, focused sessions by product and by industry, while also giving attendees the chance to see how PLM works together with other critical enterprise applications that address other important aspects of the value chain. Top Five Reasons to Attend the PLM Summit 2013 In the spirit of all of the end-of-the-year lists that are currently popping up, here is a list of the top five reasons to attend the PLM Summit for anyone out there needs a little extra encouragement to register: 1. The Best Opportunities for Customer Networking   The PLM Summit offers attendees numerous opportunities to learn and network with fellow Agile users. Customer stories are featured in keynote and breakout presentations and the schedule allows for plenty of networking time during breakfasts, lunches, breaks and dinners. Customer networking is the number one reason that Agile users attend the PLM Summit. Read what attendees thought of the most recent PLM Summit: "Hearing about the implementation of Agile products from a customers’ perspective is invaluable." - Director of Quality Assurance & Regulatory Affairs, leading medical device manufacturer "Understanding the scope of other companies’ projects and the lessons learned made attending this event well worth my time." - Director of Test Engineering, global industrial manufacturer "The most beneficial thing about attending this event is the opportunity to network with other customers with similar experiences." - Director of Business Process Improvement, leading high technology company Come to the PLM Summit and play an active role within the PLM community: swap war stories and business cards, connect on LinkedIn and Facebook, share your stories and discuss the sessions from each day. Register now! 2. It's Educational! The PLM Summit is the premier educational event for anyone in the Agile PLM community. There are nearly 40 PLM-focused in-depth educational sessions led by Agile PLM experts, customers and partners that will cover a range of specific product and industry-focused topics. Keynotes will give attendees a broad overview of the entire Agile PLM footprint, while sessions will delve deeply into specific product functionality and customer case studies. There is truly something for everyone. Check out the latest agenda for view of all the sessions. 3. Visit with the PLM Partner Community Our partners play a significant and important role within the Agile PLM community. At the PLM Summit, attendees will be able to meet and mingle with several of the top Oracle Agile PLM partners including: Deloitte, Domain, GoEngineer, Hitachi Consulting, IBM, Kalypso, KPIT Cummins (CPG Solutions), Perception Software, Verdant, Xavor and ZeroWaitState. Go here for a complete list of all the Value Chain Summit sponsors. 4. See Agile PLM in Action at our Dedicated PLM Demo Pods At the PLM Summit, attendees will have the chance to see Agile PLM in action at dedicated PLM demo pods, manned by expert members of our Agile PLM team. If you would like to see up close specific Agile PLM functionality, or if you have a question on how to extend the scope of your current implemention or if you want a better understanding of how to leverage Agile PLM to address specific use-cases, stop by one of the Agile PLM demo pods and engage the Agile PLM experts on hand at the PLM Summit. 5. Spend Some Time in Lovely San Francisco Still on the fence about the upcoming PLM Summit? Remember that it is being held in San Francisco, which is a fantastic city for a getaway. After spending time learning and networking about PLM, take an extra day or two to escape the dreary winter and enjoy the beautiful scenery and the unique actitivies offered only by the City by the Bay. You will walk away from the conference not only with renewed excitement about Agile PLM, but feeling rejuvenated in general.

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• Windows Azure End to End Examples

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into practice, however, especially in the technical realm. I immediately look for examples where I can start trying out the concepts. But I often want a “real” example – not just something that represents the concept, but something that is real-world, showing some feature I could actually use. And it’s no different with the Windows Azure platform – I like finding things I can do now, and actually use. So when I started learning Windows Azure, I of course began with the Windows Azure Training Kit – which has lots of examples and labs, presentations and so on. But from there, I wanted more examples I could learn from, and eventually teach others with. I was asked if I would write a few of those up, so here are the ones I use. CodePlex CodePlex is Microsoft’s version of an “Open Source” repository. Anyone can start a project, add code, documentation and more to it and make it available to the world, free of charge, using various licenses as they wish. Microsoft also uses this location for most of the examples we publish, and sample databases for SQL Server. If you search in CodePlex for “Azure”, you’ll come back with a list of projects that folks have posted, including those of us at Microsoft. The source code and documentation are there, so you can learn using actual examples of code that will do what you need. There’s everything from a simple table query to a full project that is sort of a “Corporate Dropbox” that uses Windows Azure Storage. The advantage is that this code is immediately usable. It’s searchable, and you can often find a complete solution to meet your needs. The disadvantage is that the code is pretty specific – it may not cover a huge project like you’re looking for. Also, depending on the author(s), you might not find the documentation level you want. Link: http://azureexamples.codeplex.com/site/search?query=Azure&ac=8    Tailspin Microsoft Patterns and Practices is a group here that does an amazing job at sharing standard ways of doing IT – from operations to coding. If you’re not familiar with this resource, make sure you read up on it. Long before I joined Microsoft I used their work in my daily job – saved a ton of time. It has resources not only for Windows Azure but other Microsoft software as well. The Patterns and Practices group also publishes full books – you can buy these, but many are also online for free. There’s an end-to-end example for Windows Azure using a company called “Tailspin”, and the work covers not only the code but the design of the full solution. If you really want to understand the thought that goes into a Platform-as-a-Service solution, this is an excellent resource. The advantages are that this is a book, it’s complete, and it includes a discussion of design decisions. The disadvantage is that it’s a little over a year old – and in “Cloud” years that’s a lot. So many things have changed, improved, and have been added that you need to treat this as a resource, but not the only one. Still, highly recommended. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff728592.aspx Azure Stock Trader Sometimes you need a mix of a CodePlex-style application, and a little more detail on how it was put together. And it would be great if you could actually play with the completed application, to see how it really functions on the actual platform. That’s the Azure Stock Trader application. There’s a place where you can read about the application, and then it’s been published to Windows Azure – the production platform – and you can use it, explore, and see how it performs. I use this application all the time to demonstrate Windows Azure, or a particular part of Windows Azure. The advantage is that this is an end-to-end application, and online as well. The disadvantage is that it takes a bit of self-learning to work through.  Links: Learn it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684 Use it: https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net/

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• How does one find out which application is associated with an indicator icon?

  - by Amos Annoy

  It is trivial to do this in Ubuntu 10.04. The question is specific to Ubuntu 12.04. some pertinent references (src: answer to What is the difference between indicators and a system tray?: Here is the documentation for indicators: Application indicators | Ubuntu App Developer libindicate Reference Manual libappindicator Reference Manual also DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators - Ubuntu Wiki ref: How can the application that makes an indicator icon be identified? bookmark: How does one find out which application is associated with an indicator icon in Ubuntu 12.04? is a serious question for reasons & problems outlined below and for which a significant investment has been made and is necessary for remedial purposes. reviewing refs. to find an orchestrated resolution ... (an indicator ap. indicator maybe needed) This has nothing to do (does it?) with right click. How can an indicator's icon in Ubuntu 12.04 be matched with the program responsible for it's manifestation on the top panel? A list of running applications can include all processes using System Monitor. How is the correct matching process found for an indicator? How are the sub-indicator applications identified? These are the aps associated with the components of an indicators drop-down menu. (This was to be a separate question and quite naturally follows up the progression. It is included here as it is obvious there is no provisioning to track down offending either sub or indicator aps. easily.) (The examination of SM points out a rather poignant factor in the faster battery depletion and shortened run time - the ambient quiescent CPU rate in 12.04 is now well over 20% when previously, in 10.04, it was well under 10%, between 5% and 7%! - the huge inordinate cpu overhead originates from Xorg and compiz - after booting the system, only SM is run and All Processes are selected, sorting on %CPU - switching between Resources and Processes profiles the execution overhead problem - running another ap like gedit "Text Editor" briefly gives it CPU priority - going back to S&M several aps. are at the top of the list in order: gnome-system-monitor as expected, then: Xorg, compiz, unity-panel-service, hud-service, with dbus-daemon and kworker/x:y's mixed in with some expected daemons and background tasks like nm-applet - not only do Xorg and compiz require excessive CPU time but their entourage has to come along too! further exacerbating the problem - our compute bound tasks no longer work effectively in the field - reduced battery life, reduced CPU time for custom ap.s etc. - and all this precipitated from an examination of what is going on with the battery ap. indicator - this was and is not a flippant, rhetorical or idle musing but has consequences for the credible deployment of 12.04 to reduce the negative impact of its overhead in a production environment) (I have a problem with the battery indicator - it sometimes has % and other times hh:mm - it is necessary to know the ap. & v. to get more info on controlling same. ditto: There are issues with other indicator aps.: NM vs. iwlist/iwconfig conflict, BT ap. vs RF switch, Battery ap. w/ no suspend/sleep for poor battery runtime, ... the list goes on) Details from: How can I find Application Indicator ID's? suggests looking at: file:///usr/share/indicator-application/ordering-override.keyfile [Ordering Index Overrides] nm-applet=1 gnome-power-manager=2 ibus=3 gst-keyboard-xkb=4 gsd-keyboard-xkb=5 which solves the battery ap. identification, and presumably nm is NetworkManager for the rf icon, but the envelope, blue tooth and speaker indicator aps. are still a mystery. (Also, the ordering is not correlated.) Mind you, it was simple in the past to simply right click to get the About option to find the ap. & v. info. browsing around and about: file:///usr/share/indicator-application/ordering-override.keyfile examined: file:///usr/share/indicators file:///usr/share/indicators/messages/applications/ ... perhaps?/presumably? the information sought may be buried in file:///usr/share/indicators A reference in the comments was given to: What is the difference between indicators and a system tray? quoting from that source ... Unfortunately desktop indicators are not well documented yet: I couldn't find any specification doc ... Well ... the actual document https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators#Summary does not help much but it's existential information provides considerable insight ...

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• SQL Cruise Alaska 2011

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I had the extreme good fortune to get sent on the last SQL Cruise to Alaska. I love my job. In case you don't what this is, SQL Cruise is a trip on a cruise ship during which you get to attend classes while on the boat, learning all about SQL Server and related topics as well as network with the instructors and the other Cruisers. Frankly, it's amazing. Classes ran from Monday, 5/30, to Saturday, 6/4. The networking was constant, between classes, at night on cruise ship, out on excursions in Alaskan rainforests and while snorkeling in ocean waters. Here's a run down of the experience from my point of view. Because I couldn't travel out 2 days early, I missed the BBQ that occurred the day before the cruise when many of the Cruisers received their swag bags. Some of that swag came from Red Gate. I researched what was useful on a cruise like this and purchased small flashlights and binoculars for all the Cruisers. The flashlights were because, depending on your cabin, ships can be very dark. The binoculars were so that the cruisers could watch all the beautiful landscape as it flowed by. I would have liked to have been there when the bags were opened, but I heard from several people that they appreciated the gifts. Cruisers "In" the hot tub. Pictured: Marjory Woody, Michele Grondin, Kyle Brandt, Grant Fritchey, John Halunen Sunday I went to board the ship with my wife. We had a bit of an adventure because I messed up our documents. It all worked out and we got on board to meet up at the back of the boat at one of the outdoor bars with the other Cruisers, thanks to tweets letting everyone know where to go. That was the end of electronic coordination on the trip (connectivity in Alaska was horrible for everyone except AT&T). The Cruisers were a great bunch of people and it was a real honor to meet them and get to spend time with them. After everyone settled into their cabins, our very first activity was a contest, sponsored by Red Gate. The Cruisers, in an effort to get to know each other and the ship, were required to go all over taking various photographs, some of them hilarious. The winning team of three would all win prizes. Some of the significant others helped out and I tagged along with a team that tied for first but lost the coin toss. The winning team consisted of Christina Leo (blog|twitter), Ryan Malcom (twitter), Neil Hambly (blog|twitter). They then had to do math and identify the cabin with the lowest prime number, oh, and get a picture of it and be the first to get back up to the bar where we were waiting. Christina came in first and very happily carried home an Ipad2. Ryan won a 1TB portable hard drive and Neil won a wireless mouse (picture below, note my special SQL Server Central Friday Shirt. Thanks Steve (blog|twitter)). Winners: Christina Leo, Neil Hambly, Ryan Malcolm. Just Lucky: Grant Fritchey Monday morning classes started. Buck Woody (blog|twitter) was a special guest speaker on this cruise. His theme was "Three C's on the High Seas: Career, Communication and Cloud." The first session was all on Career. I'm not going to type out all my notes from the session, but let's just say, if you get the chance to hear Buck talk about how to manage your career, I suggest you attend. I have a ton of blog posts that I'll be putting together over the next several months (yes, months) both here and over on ScaryDBA. I also have a bunch of work I'm going to be doing to get my career performance bumped up a notch or two (and let's face it, that won't be easy). Later on Monday, Tim Ford (blog|twitter) did a session on DMOs. Specifically the session was on Tim's Period Table of DMOs that he has put together, and how to use some of the more interesting DMOs in your day to day job. It was a great session, packed with good information. Next, Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) did a session on how to monitor and guide SAN configuration for the DBA that doesn't have access to the SAN. That was some seriously useful information. Tuesday morning we only had a single class. Kendra Little (blog|twitter) taught us all about "No Lock for Yes Fun".  It was all about the different transaction isolation levels and how they work. There is so often confusion in this area and Kendra does a great job in clarifying the information. Also, she tosses in her excellent drawings to liven up the presentation. Then it was excursion time in Juneau. My wife and I, along with several other Cruisers, took a hike up around the Mendenhall Glacier. It was absolutely beautiful weather and walking through the Alaskan rain forest was a treat. Our guide, Jason, was a great guy and it was a good day of hiking. Wednesday was an all day excursion in Skagway. My wife and I took the "Ghost and Good Time Girls" walking tour that ended up at a bar that used to be a brothel, the Red Onion. It was a great history of the town. We went back out and hit a few museums and exhibits. We also hiked up the side of the mountain to see the Dewey Lake and some great views of the town. Finally we hiked out to the far side of town to see the Gold Rush cemetery. Hiking done we went back to the boat and had a quiet dinner on our own. Thursday we cruised through Glacier Bay and saw at least four different glaciers including sitting next to the Marjory Glacier for  about an hour. It was amazing. Then it got better. We went into class with Buck again, this time to talk about Communication. Again, I've got pages of notes that I'm going to be referring back to for some time to come. This was an excellent opportunity to learn. Snorkelers: Nicole Bertrand, Aaron Bertrand, Grant Fritchey, Neil Hambly, Christina Leo, John Robel, Yanni Robel, Tim Ford Friday we pulled into Ketchikan. A bunch of us went snorkeling. Yes, snorkeling. Yes, in Alaska. Yes, snorkeling in the ocean in Alaska. It was fantastic. They had us put on 7mm thick wet suits (an adventure all by itself) so it was basically warm the entire time we were in the water (except for the occasional squirt of cold water down my back). Before we got in the water a bald eagle flew up and landed about 15 feet in front of us, which was just an incredible event. Then our guide pointed out about 14 other eagles in the area, hanging out in the trees. Wow! The water was pretty clear and there was a ton of things to see. That was absolutely a blast. Back on the boat I presented a session called Execution Plans: The Deep Dive (note the nautical theme). It seemed to go over well and I had several good questions come out of the session that will lead to new blog posts. After I presented, it was Aaron Bertrand's (blog|twitter) turn. He did a session on "What's New in Denali" that provided a lot of great information. He was able to incorporate new things straight out of Tech-Ed, so this was expanded beyond his usual presentation. The man really knows what he's talking about and communicates it well. Saturday we were travelling so there was time for a bunch of classes. Jeremiah Peschka (blog|twitter) did a great overview of some of the NoSQL databases and what they should be used for. The session was called "The Database is Dead" but it was really about how there are specific uses for these databases that SQL Server doesn't fill, but also that these databases can't replace SQL Server in other areas. Again, good material. Brent Ozar presented again with a session on Defensive Indexing. It was an overview of how indexes work and a deep dive into how to apply them appropriately in your databases to better support access. A good session, as you would expect. Then we pulled into Victoria, BC, in Canada and had a nice dinner with several of the Cruisers, including Denny Cherry (blog|twitter). After that it was back to Seattle on Sunday. By the way, the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle isn't a Science Fiction Museum any more. I was very disappointed to discover this. Overall, it was a great experience. I'm extremely appreciative of Red Gate for sending me and for Tim, Brent, Kendra and Jeremiah for having me. The other Cruisers were all amazing people and it was an honor & privilege to meet them and spend time with them. While this was a seriously fun time, it was also a very serious training opportunity with solid information coming from seasoned industry pros.

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• Web Site Performance and Assembly Versioning – Part 2 Versioning Combined Files Using Subversion

  - by capgpilk

  Ok so it took a while to post this second part. Many apologies, we had a big roll out of a new platform at work and many things had to get sidelined. So this is the second part in a short series of website performance and using versioning to help improve it. Minification and Concatination of JavaScript and CSS Files Versioning Combined Files Using Subversion – this post Versioning Combined Files Using Mercurial – published shortly In the previous post we used AjaxMin to shrink js and css files then concatenated them into one file each which had the file name of site-script.combined.min.js and site-style.combined.min.css. These file names are fine, but you can configure IIS 7 to cache these static files and so lower the amount of data transferred between server and client. This is done by editing the response headers in IIS. 1. In IIS7 Manager, choose the directory where these files are located and select HTTP Response Headers. 2. Check the Expire Web Content and set a time period well into the future. 3. When refreshing the web page, the server will respond with HTTP 304 forcing the browser to retrieve the file from its cache. 4. As can be seen in FireBug, the Cache-Control header has a max age of 31536000 seconds which equates to 365 days.   The server will always send this HTTP 304 message unless the file changes forcing it to send new content. To help force this we can change the file name based on the latest build using the SVN revision number in the filename. So we have lowered data transfer on content that hasn’t changed, but forced it to be sent when you have made a change to the css or js files. Now to get the SVN revision number in to the file name. 1. Import the MSBuildCommunityTasks targets which can be dowloaded from here. 1: <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath) 2: \MSBuildCommunityTasks 3: \MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets" /> 2. Edit the BeforeBuild target to call out to svn and get the latest revision 1: <SvnVersion LocalPath="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)" 2: ToolPath="$(ProgramFiles)\VisualSVN Server\bin"> 3: <Output TaskParameter="Revision" PropertyName="Revision" /> 4: </SvnVersion> 3. Set it to update the project AssemblyInfo.cs file for the svn revision. 1: <FileUpdate Files="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" 2: Regex="(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)" 3: ReplacementText="$1.$2.$3.$(Revision)" /> 4. Now edit the AfterBuild target to get the full dll version. You could combine these two steps and just get the version from svn, I am working on one project that updates the AssemblyInfo file and another project that allows manual editing of the file, but needs that version within the file name; so I just combined the two for this post. 1: <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Framework.Assembly 2: TaskAction="GetInfo" 3: NetAssembly="$(OutputPath)\mydll.dll"> 4: <Output TaskParameter="OutputItems" ItemName="Info" /> 5: </MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Framework.Assembly> 6: <Message Text="Version: %(Info.AssemblyVersion)" 7: Importance="High" /> 5. Use this Info.AssemblyVersion to write out the combined css and js files as described in the last post. 1: <WriteLinestoFile File="Scripts\site-%(Info.AssemblyVersion).combined.min.js" 2: Lines="@(JSLinesSite)" Overwrite="true" />   In the next post I will cover doing the same, but for a Mercurial repository.

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• BizTalk 2009 - Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on XP for Development

  - by StuartBrierley

  At my previous employer, when developing for BizTalk Server 2004 using Visual Studio 2003, we made use of separate development and deployment environments; developing in Visual Studio on our client PCs and then deploying to a seperate shared BizTalk 2004 Server from there.  This server was part of a multi-server Standard BizTalk environment comprising of separate BizTalk Server 2004 and SQL Server 2000 servers.  This environment was implemented a number of years ago by an outside consulting company, and while it worked it did occasionally cause contention issues with three developers deploying to the same server to carry out unit testing! Now that I am making the design and implementation decisions about the environment that BizTalk will be developed in and deployed to, I have chosen to create a single "server" installation on my development PC, installling SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009 on a single system.  The client PC in use is actually a MacBook Pro running Windows XP; not the most powerful of systems for high volume processing but it should be powerful enough to allow development and initial unit testing to take place. I did not need to, and so chose not to, install all of the components detailed in the Microsoft guide for installing BizTalk 2009 on Windows XP but I did follow the basics of the procedures detailed within.  Outlined below are the highlights of this process and any details of what choices I made.   Install IIS I had previsouly installed Windows XP, including all current service packs and critical updates.  At the time of installation this included Service Pack 3, the .Net Framework 3.5 and MS Windows Installer 3.1.  Having a running XP system, my first step was to install IIS - this is quite straightforward and posed no difficulties. Install Visual Studio 2008 The next step for me was to install Visual Studio 2008.  Making sure to select a custom installation is crucial at this point, as you need to make sure that you deselect SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it can cause the BizTalk installation to fail.  The installation guide suggests that you only select Visual C# when selecting features to install, but  I decided that due to some legacy systems I have code for that I would also select the VB and ASP options. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Following the completion of the installation of Visual Studio itself you should then install the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition The next step before intalling BizTalk Server 2009 itself is to install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. On the feature selection screen make sure that you select the follwoing options: Database Engine Services SQL Server Replication Full-Text Search Analysis Services Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio Client Tools Connectivity Integration Services Management Tools Basic and Complete Use the default instance and the same accounts for all SQL server instances - in my case I used the Network Service and Local Service accounts for the two sets of accounts. On the database engine configuration screen I selected windows authentication and added the current user, adding the same user again on the Analysis services Configuration screen.  All other screens were left on the default settings. The SQL Server 2008 installation also included the installation of hotfix for XP KB942288-v3, the Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable. System Configuration At this stage I took a moment to disable the SQL Server shared memory protocol and enable the Named Pipes and TCP/IP protocols.  These can be found in the SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLServer.  I also made sure that the DTC settings were configured correctley.   BizTalk Server 2009 The penultimate step is to install BizTalk Server 2009 Standard Edition. I had previsouly downloaded the redistributable prerequisites as a CAB file so was able to make use of this when carrying out the installation. When selecting which components to install I selected: Server Runtime BizTalk EDI/AS2 Runtime WCF Adapter Runtime Portal Components Administrative Tools WFC Administartion Tools Developer Tools and SDK, Enterprise SSO Administration Module Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server Business Rules Components BAM Alert Provider BAM Client BAM Eventing Once installation has completed clear the launch BizTalk Server Configuration check box and select finish. Verify the Installation Before configuring BizTalk Server it is a good idea to check that BizTalk Server 2009 is installed and that SQL Server 2008 has started correctly.  The easiest way to verify the BizTalk installation is check the Programs and Features in Control panel.  Check that SQL is started by looking in the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Configure BizTalk Server 2009 Finally we are ready to configure BizTalk Server 2009.  To start this I opted for a custom configuration that allowed me to choose in more detail the settings to be used. For all databases I selected the local server and default database names. For all Accounts I used a local account that had been created specifically for the BizTalk Services. For all windows groups I allowed the configuration wizard to create the default local groups. The configuration wizard then ran:   Upon completion you will be presented with a screen detailing the success or failure of the configuration.  If your configuration failed you will need to sort out the issues and try again (it is possible to save the configuration settings for later use if you want too - except passwords of course!).  If you see lots of nice green ticks - congratulations BizTalk Server 2009 on XP is now installed and configured ready for development.

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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• Making your WCF Web Apis to speak in multiple languages

  - by cibrax

  One of the key aspects of how the web works today is content negotiation. The idea of content negotiation is based on the fact that a single resource can have multiple representations, so user agents (or clients) and servers can work together to chose one of them. The http specification defines several “Accept” headers that a client can use to negotiate content with a server, and among all those, there is one for restricting the set of natural languages that are preferred as a response to a request, “Accept-Language”. For example, a client can specify “es” in this header for specifying that he prefers to receive the content in spanish or “en” in english. However, there are certain scenarios where the “Accept-Language” header is just not enough, and you might want to have a way to pass the “accepted” language as part of the resource url as an extension. For example, http://localhost/ProductCatalog/Products/1.es” returns all the descriptions for the product with id “1” in spanish. This is useful for scenarios in which you want to embed the link somewhere, such a document, an email or a page.  Supporting both scenarios, the header and the url extension, is really simple in the new WCF programming model. You only need to provide a processor implementation for any of them. Let’s say I have a resource implementation as part of a product catalog I want to expose with the WCF web apis. [ServiceContract][Export]public class ProductResource{ IProductRepository repository;  [ImportingConstructor] public ProductResource(IProductRepository repository) { this.repository = repository; }  [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{id}")] public Product Get(string id, HttpResponseMessage response) { var product = repository.GetById(int.Parse(id)); if (product == null) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotFound; response.Content = new StringContent(Messages.OrderNotFound); }  return product; }} The Get method implementation in this resource assumes the desired culture will be attached to the current thread (Thread.CurrentThread.Culture). Another option is to pass the desired culture as an additional argument in the method, so my processor implementation will handle both options. This method is also using an auto-generated class for handling string resources, Messages, which is available in the different cultures that the service implementation supports. For example, Messages.resx contains “OrderNotFound”: “Order Not Found” Messages.es.resx contains “OrderNotFound”: “No se encontro orden” The processor implementation bellow tackles the first scenario, in which the desired language is passed as part of the “Accept-Language” header. public class CultureProcessor : Processor<HttpRequestMessage, CultureInfo>{ string defaultLanguage = null;  public CultureProcessor(string defaultLanguage = "en") { this.defaultLanguage = defaultLanguage; this.InArguments[0].Name = HttpPipelineFormatter.ArgumentHttpRequestMessage; this.OutArguments[0].Name = "culture"; }  public override ProcessorResult<CultureInfo> OnExecute(HttpRequestMessage request) { CultureInfo culture = null; if (request.Headers.AcceptLanguage.Count > 0) { var language = request.Headers.AcceptLanguage.First().Value; culture = new CultureInfo(language); } else { culture = new CultureInfo(defaultLanguage); }  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture; Messages.Culture = culture;  return new ProcessorResult<CultureInfo> { Output = culture }; }}   As you can see, the processor initializes a new CultureInfo instance with the value provided in the “Accept-Language” header, and set that instance to the current thread and the auto-generated resource class with all the messages. In addition, the CultureInfo instance is returned as an output argument called “culture”, making possible to receive that argument in any method implementation   The following code shows the implementation of the processor for handling languages as url extensions.   public class CultureExtensionProcessor : Processor<HttpRequestMessage, Uri>{ public CultureExtensionProcessor() { this.OutArguments[0].Name = HttpPipelineFormatter.ArgumentUri; }  public override ProcessorResult<Uri> OnExecute(HttpRequestMessage httpRequestMessage) { var requestUri = httpRequestMessage.RequestUri.OriginalString;  var extensionPosition = requestUri.LastIndexOf(".");  if (extensionPosition > -1) { var extension = requestUri.Substring(extensionPosition + 1);  var query = httpRequestMessage.RequestUri.Query;  requestUri = string.Format("{0}?{1}", requestUri.Substring(0, extensionPosition), query); ;  var uri = new Uri(requestUri);  httpRequestMessage.Headers.AcceptLanguage.Clear();  httpRequestMessage.Headers.AcceptLanguage.Add(new StringWithQualityHeaderValue(extension));  var result = new ProcessorResult<Uri>();  result.Output = uri;  return result; }  return new ProcessorResult<Uri>(); }} The last step is to inject both processors as part of the service configuration as it is shown bellow, public void RegisterRequestProcessorsForOperation(HttpOperationDescription operation, IList<Processor> processors, MediaTypeProcessorMode mode){ processors.Insert(0, new CultureExtensionProcessor()); processors.Add(new CultureProcessor());} Once you configured the two processors in the pipeline, your service will start speaking different languages :). Note: Url extensions don’t seem to be working in the current bits when you are using Url extensions in a base address. As far as I could see, ASP.NET intercepts the request first and tries to route the request to a registered ASP.NET Http Handler with that extension. For example, “http://localhost/ProductCatalog/products.es” does not work, but “http://localhost/ProductCatalog/products/1.es” does.

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• The Unspoken - The Why of GC Ergonomics

  - by jonthecollector

  Do you use GC ergonomics, -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, with the UseParallelGC collector? The jist of GC ergonomics for that collector is that it tries to grow or shrink the heap to meet a specified goal. The goals that you can choose are maximum pause time and/or throughput. Don't get too excited there. I'm speaking about UseParallelGC (the throughput collector) so there are definite limits to what pause goals can be achieved. When you say out loud "I don't care about pause times, give me the best throughput I can get" and then say to yourself "Well, maybe 10 seconds really is too long", then think about a pause time goal. By default there is no pause time goal and the throughput goal is high (98% of the time doing application work and 2% of the time doing GC work). You can get more details on this in my very first blog. GC ergonomics The UseG1GC has its own version of GC ergonomics, but I'll be talking only about the UseParallelGC version. If you use this option and wanted to know what it (GC ergonomics) was thinking, try -XX:AdaptiveSizePolicyOutputInterval=1 This will print out information every i-th GC (above i is 1) about what the GC ergonomics to trying to do. For example, UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 GC ergonomics tries to meet (in order) Pause time goal Throughput goal Minimum footprint The first line says that it's trying to meet the throughput goal. UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** This run has the default pause time goal (i.e., no pause time goal) so it is trying to reach a 98% throughput. The lines Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) say that we're currently spending about 16% of the time doing young GC's and about 5% of the time doing full GC's. These percentages are a decaying, weighted average (earlier contributions to the average are given less weight). The source code is available as part of the OpenJDK so you can take a look at it if you want the exact definition. GC ergonomics is trying to increase the throughput by growing the heap (so says the "attempted to grow"). The last line Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 says that the ergonomics is trying to balance the GC times between young GC's and full GC's by decreasing the tenuring threshold. During a young collection the younger objects are copied to the survivor spaces while the older objects are copied to the tenured generation. Younger and older are defined by the tenuring threshold. If the tenuring threshold hold is 4, an object that has survived fewer than 4 young collections (and has remained in the young generation by being copied to the part of the young generation called a survivor space) it is younger and copied again to a survivor space. If it has survived 4 or more young collections, it is older and gets copied to the tenured generation. A lower tenuring threshold moves objects more eagerly to the tenured generation and, conversely a higher tenuring threshold keeps copying objects between survivor spaces longer. The tenuring threshold varies dynamically with the UseParallelGC collector. That is different than our other collectors which have a static tenuring threshold. GC ergonomics tries to balance the amount of work done by the young GC's and the full GC's by varying the tenuring threshold. Want more work done in the young GC's? Keep objects longer in the survivor spaces by increasing the tenuring threshold. This is an example of the output when GC ergonomics is trying to achieve a pause time goal UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** pause time goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 20.74 (no change) Tenured generation: 31.70 (attempted to shrink) The pause goal was set at 50 millisecs and the last GC was 0.415: [Full GC (Ergonomics) [PSYoungGen: 2048K-0K(26624K)] [ParOldGen: 26095K-9711K(28992K)] 28143K-9711K(55616K), [Metaspace: 1719K-1719K(2473K/6528K)], 0.0758940 secs] [Times: user=0.28 sys=0.00, real=0.08 secs] The full collection took about 76 millisecs so GC ergonomics wants to shrink the tenured generation to reduce that pause time. The previous young GC was 0.346: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 26624K-2048K(26624K)] 40547K-22223K(56768K), 0.0136501 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.02 secs] so the pause time there was about 14 millisecs so no changes are needed. If trying to meet a pause time goal, the generations are typically shrunk. With a pause time goal in play, watch the GC overhead numbers and you will usually see the cost of setting a pause time goal (i.e., throughput goes down). If the pause goal is too low, you won't achieve your pause time goal and you will spend all your time doing GC. GC ergonomics is meant to be simple because it is meant to be used by anyone. It was not meant to be mysterious and so this output was added. If you don't like what GC ergonomics is doing, you can turn it off with -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, but be pre-warned that you have to manage the size of the generations explicitly. If UseAdaptiveSizePolicy is turned off, the heap does not grow. The size of the heap (and the generations) at the start of execution is always the size of the heap. I don't like that and tried to fix it once (with some help from an OpenJDK contributor) but it unfortunately never made it out the door. I still have hope though. Just a side note. With the default throughput goal of 98% the heap often grows to it's maximum value and stays there. Definitely reduce the throughput goal if footprint is important. Start with -XX:GCTimeRatio=4 for a more modest throughput goal (%20 of the time spent in GC). A higher value means a smaller amount of time in GC (as the throughput goal).

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• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response – Part 2

  - by Michael Stephenson

  To follow up a previous article about timeouts and how they can affect your application I have extended the sample we were using to include WCF. I will execute some test scenarios and discuss the results. The sample We begin by consuming exactly the same web service which is sitting on a remote server. This time I have created a .net 3.5 application which will consume the web service using the basichttp binding. To show you the configuration for the consumption of this web service please refer to the below diagram. You can see like before we also have the connectionManagement element in the configuration file. I have added a WCF service reference (also using the asynchronous proxy methods) and have the below code sample in the application which will asynchronously make the web service calls and handle the responses on a call back method invoked by a delegate. If you have read the previous article you will notice that the code is almost the same.   Sample 1 – WCF with Default Timeouts In this test I set about recreating the same scenario as previous where we would run the test but this time using WCF as the messaging component. For the first test I would use the default configuration settings which WCF had setup when we added a reference to the web service. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client-side trace is as follows:   The server-side trace is as follows: Some observations on the results are as follows: The timeouts happened quicker than in the previous tests because some calls were timing out before they attempted to connect to the server The first few calls that timed out did actually connect to the server and did execute successfully on the server   Test 2 – Increase Open Connection Timeout & Send Timeout In this test I wanted to increase both the send and open timeout values to try and give everything a chance to go through. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The client side trace for this test was   The server-side trace for this test was: Some observations on this test are: This test proved if the timeouts are high enough everything will just go through   Test 3 – Increase just the Send Timeout In this test we wanted to increase just the send timeout. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The below is the client side trace The below is the server side trace Some observations on this test are: In this test from both the client and server perspective everything ran through fine The open connection timeout did not seem to have any effect   Test 4 – Increase Just the Open Connection Timeout In this test I wanted to validate the change to the open connection setting by increasing just this on its own. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: In this test you can see that the open connection which relates to opening the channel timeout increase was not the thing which stopped the calls timing out It's the send of data which is timing out On the server you can see that the successful few calls were fine but there were also a few calls which hit the server but timed out on the client You can see that not all calls hit the server which was one of the problems with the WSE and ASMX options   Test 5 – Smaller Increase in Send Timeout In this test I wanted to make a smaller increase to the send timeout than previous just to prove that it was the key setting which was controlling what was timing out. The timeout values for this test are: openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:02:30"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was   The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: You can see that most of the calls got through fine On the client you can see that call 20 timed out but still hit the server and executed fine.   Summary At this point between the two articles we have quite a lot of scenarios showing the different way the timeout setting have played into our original performance issue, and now we can see how WCF could offer an improved way to handle the problem. To summarise the differences in the timeout properties for the three technology stacks: ASMX The timeout value only applies to the execution time of your request on the server. The timeout does not consider how long your code might be waiting client side to get a connection. WSE The timeout value includes both the time to obtain a connection and also the time to execute the request. A timeout will not be thrown as an error until an attempt to connect to the server is made. This means a 40 second timeout setting may not throw the error until 60 seconds when the connection to the server is made. If the connection to the server is made you should be aware that your message will be processed and you should design for this. WCF The WCF send timeout is the setting most equivalent to the settings we were looking at previously. Like WSE this setting the counter includes the time to get a connection as well as the time to execute on a server. Unlike WSE and ASMX an error will be thrown as soon as the send timeout from making your call from user code has elapsed regardless of whether we are waiting for a connection or have an open connection to the server. This may to a user appear to have better latency in getting an error response compared to WSE or ASMX.

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• ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful.   Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience.   Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide   About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management.  She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Bezzotech

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. I’ve covered all the entries we had for the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge, the winners, Dimitri and Martin, HarQen, TEAM Informatics and John Sim from Fishbowl Solutions, and today, I’m giving you bonus coverage. Friend of the ‘Lab, Bex Huff (@bex) from Bezzotech (@bezzotech), had an interesting OpenWorld. He rebounded from an allergic reaction to finish his entry, Honey Badger, only to have his other OpenWorld commitments make him unable to present his work. Still, he did a bunch of work, and I want to make sure everyone knows about the Honey Badger. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s a meme; “honey badger don’t care.” Bex tackled a common problem with social tools by adding game mechanics to create an incentive for people to keep their profiles updated. He used a Hot-or-Not style comparison app that poses expertise questions and awards a badge to the winner. Questions are based on whatever attributes the business wants to emphasize. The goal is to find the mavens in an organization, give them praise and recognition, ideally creating incentive for everyone to raise their games. In his own words: There is a real information quality problem in social networks. In last year’s keynote, Larry Elison demonstrated how to use the social network to track down resources that have the skill sets needed for specific projects. But how well would that work in real life? People usually update that information with the basic profile information, but they rarely update their profiles with latest news items, projects, customers, or skills. It’s a pain. Or, put another way, when was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Enter the Honey Badger! This is a example of a comparator app that gamifies the way people keep their profiles updated, which ensures higher quality data in the social network. An administrator comes up with a series of important questions: Who is a better communicator? Who is a better Java programmer? Who is a better team player? And people would have a space in their profile to give a justification as to why they have these skills. The second part of the app is the comparator. It randomly shows two people, their names, and their justification for why they have these skills. You will click on one of them to “vote” for them, then on the next page you will see the results from the previous match, and get 2 new people to vote on. Anybody with a winning score wins a “Honey Badge” to be displayed on their profile page, which proudly states that their peers agree that this person has those skills. Once a badge is won, it will be jealously guarded. The longer your go without updating your profile, the more likely it is that you will lose your badge. This “loss aversion” is well known in psychology, and is a strong incentive for people to keep their profiles up to date. If a user sees their rank drop from 90% to 60%, they will find the time to update their justification! Unfortunately, during the hackathon we were not allowed to modify the schema to allow for additional fields such as “justification.” So this hack is limited to just the one basic question: who is the bigger Honey Badger? Here are some shots of the Honey Badger application: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } Thanks to Bex and everyone for participating in our challenge. Despite very little time to promote this event, we had a great turnout and creative and useful entries. The amount of work required to put together these final entries was significant, especially during a conference, and the judges and all of us involved were impressed at how much work everyone was able to do. Congrats to everyone, pat yourselves on the back. Stay tuned if you’re interested in challenges like these. We’ll likely be running similar events in the not-so-distant future.

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• How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  Have a huge folder of images needing tweaks? A few hundred adjustments may seem like a big, time consuming job—but read one to see how Photoshop can do repetitive tasks automatically, even if you don’t know how to program! Photoshop Actions are a simple way to program simple routines in Photoshop, and are a great time saver, allowing you to re-perform tasks over and over, saving you minutes or hours, depending on the job you have to work on. See how any bunch of images and even some fairly complicated photo tweaking can be done automatically to even hundreds of images at once. When Can I use Photoshop Actions? Photoshop actions are a way of recording the tools, menus, and keys pressed while using the program. Each time you use a tool, adjust a color, or use the brush, it can be recorded and played back over any file Photoshop can open. While it isn’t perfect and can get very confused if not set up correctly, it can automate editing hundreds of images, saving you hours and hours if you have big jobs with complex edits. The image illustrated above is a template for a polaroid-style picture frame. If you had several hundred images, it would actually be a simple matter to use Photoshop Actions to create hundreds of new images inside the frame in almost no time at all. Let’s take a look at how a simple folder of images and some Image editing automation can turn lots of work into a simple and easy job. Creating a New Action Actions is a default part of the “Essentials” panel set Photoshop begins with as a default. If you can’t see the panel button under the “History” button, you can find Actions by going to Window > Actions or pressing Alt + F9. Click the in the Actions Panel, pictured in the previous illustration on the left. Choose to create a “New Set” in order to begin creating your own custom Actions. Name your action set whatever you want. Names are not relevant, you’ll simply want to make it obvious that you have created it. Click OK. Look back in the layers panel. You’ll see your new Set of actions has been added to the list. Click it to highlight it before going on. Click the again to create a “New Action” in your new set. If you care to name your action, go ahead. Name it after whatever it is you’re hoping to do—change the canvas size, tint all your pictures blue, send your image to the printer in high quality, or run multiple filters on images. The name is for your own usage, so do what suits you best. Note that you can simplify your process by creating shortcut keys for your actions. If you plan to do hundreds of edits with your actions, this might be a good idea. If you plan to record an action to use every time you use Photoshop, this might even be an invaluable step. When you create a new Action, Photoshop automatically begins recording everything you do. It does not record the time in between steps, but rather only the data from each step. So take your time when recording and make sure you create your actions the way you want them. The square button stops recording, and the circle button starts recording again. With these basics ready, we can take a look at a sample Action. Recording a Sample Action Photoshop will remember everything you input into it when it is recording, even specific photographs you open. So begin recording your action when your first photo is already open. Once your first image is open, click the record button. If you’re already recording, continue on. Using the File > Place command to insert the polaroid image can be easier for Actions to deal with. Photoshop can record with multiple open files, but it often gets confused when you try it. Keep your recordings as simple as possible to ensure your success. When the image is placed in, simply press enter to render it. Select your background layer in your layers panel. Your recording should be following along with no trouble. Double click this layer. Double clicking your background layer will create a new layer from it. Allow it to be renamed “Layer 0” and press OK. Move the “polaroid” layer to the bottom by selecting it and dragging it down below “Layer 0” in the layers panel. Right click “Layer 0” and select “Create Clipping Mask.” The JPG image is cropped to the layer below it. Coincidentally, all actions described here are being recorded perfectly, and are reproducible. Cursor actions, like the eraser, brush, or bucket fill don’t record well, because the computer uses your mouse movements and coordinates, which may need to change from photo to photo. Click the to set your Photograph layer to a “Screen” blending mode. This will make the image disappear when it runs over the white parts of the polaroid image. With your image layer (Layer 0) still selected, navigate to Edit > Transform > Scale. You can use the mouse to resize your Layer 0, but Actions work better with absolute numbers. Visit the Width and Height adjustments in the top options panel. Click the chain icon to link them together, and adjust them numerically. Depending on your needs, you may need to use more or less than 30%. Your image will resize to your specifications. Press enter to render, or click the check box in the top right of your application. + Click on your bottom layer, or “polaroid” in this case. This creates a selection of the bottom layer. Navigate to Image > Crop in order to crop down to your bottom layer selection Your image is now resized to your bottommost layer, and Photoshop is still recording to that effect. For additional effect, we can navigate to Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary to rotate our image by a small tilt. Choosing 3 degrees clockwise , we click OK to render our choice. Our image is rotated, and this step is recorded. Photoshop will even record when you save your files. With your recording still going, find File > Save As. You can easily tell Photoshop to save in a new folder, other than the one you have been working in, so that your files aren’t overwritten. Navigate to any folder you wish, but do not change the filename. If you change the filename, Photoshop will record that name, and save all your images under whatever you type. However, you can change your filetype without recording an absolute filename. Use the pulldown tab and select a different filetype—in this instance, PNG. Simply click “Save” to create a new PNG based on your actions. Photoshop will record the destination and the change in filetype. If you didn’t edit the name of your file, it will always use the variable filename of any image you open. (This is very important if you want to edit hundreds of images at once!) Click File > Close or the red “X” in the corner to close your filetype. Photoshop can record that as well. Since we have already saved our image as a JPG, click “NO” to not overwrite your original image. Photoshop will also record your choice of “NO” for subsequent images. In your Actions panel, click the stop button to complete your action. You can always click the record button to add more steps later, if you want. This is how your new action looks with its steps expanded. Curious how to put it into effect? Read on to see how simple it is to use that recording you just made. Editing Lots of Images with Your New Action Open a large number of images—as many as you care to work with. Your action should work immediately with every image on screen, although you may have to test and re-record, depending on how you did. Actions don’t require any programming knowledge, but often can get confused or work in a counter-intuitive way. Record your action until it is perfect. If it works once without errors, it’s likely to work again and again! Find the “Play” button in your Actions Panel. With your custom action selected, click “Play” and your routine will edit, save, and close each file for you. Keep bashing “Play” for each open file, and it will keep saving and creating new files until you run out of work you need to do. And in mere moments, a complicated stack of work is done. Photoshop actions can be very complicated, far beyond what is illustrated here, and can even be combined with scripts and other actions, creating automated creation of potentially very complex files, or applying filters to an entire portfolio of digital photos. Have questions or comments concerning Graphics, Photos, Filetypes, or Photoshop? Send your questions to [email protected], and they may be featured in a future How-To Geek Graphics article. Image Credits: All images copyright Stephanie Pragnell and author Eric Z Goodnight, protected under Creative Commons. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar

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• SPARC T4-4 Delivers World Record First Result on PeopleSoft Combined Benchmark

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 servers running Oracle's PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 combined online and batch benchmark achieved World Record 18,000 concurrent users while executing a PeopleSoft Payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 43.32 minutes and maintaining online users response time at < 2 seconds. This world record is the first to run online and batch workloads concurrently. This result was obtained with a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Database 11g Release 2, a SPARC T4-4 server running PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 application server and a SPARC T4-2 server running Oracle WebLogic Server in the web tier. The SPARC T4-4 server running the application tier used Oracle Solaris Zones which provide a flexible, scalable and manageable virtualization environment. The average CPU utilization on the SPARC T4-2 server in the web tier was 17%, on the SPARC T4-4 server in the application tier it was 59%, and on the SPARC T4-4 server in the database tier was 35% (online and batch) leaving significant headroom for additional processing across the three tiers. The SPARC T4-4 server used for the database tier hosted Oracle Database 11g Release 2 using Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) for database files management with I/O performance equivalent to raw devices. This is the first three tier mixed workload (online and batch) PeopleSoft benchmark also processing PeopleSoft payroll batch workload. Performance Landscape PeopleSoft HR Self-Service and Payroll Benchmark Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) SPARC T4-2 (db) 18,000 0.944 0.503 43.32 64 Configuration Summary Application Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 512 GB memory 5 x 300 GB SAS internal disks 1 x 100 GB and 2 x 300 GB internal SSDs 2 x 10 Gbe HBA Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 PeopleTools 8.52 PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Oracle Tuxedo, Version 10.3.0.0, 64-bit, Patch Level 031 Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 6 Update 32 Database Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 256 GB memory 3 x 300 GB SAS internal disks Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Web Tier Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-2 server with 2 x SPARC T4 processors, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory 2 x 300 GB SAS internal disks 1 x 100 GB internal SSD Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 PeopleTools 8.52 Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.4 Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 6 Update 32 Storage Configuration: 1 x Sun Server X2-4 as a COMSTAR head for data 4 x Intel Xeon X7550, 2.0 GHz 128 GB memory 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (80 flash modules) 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 as a COMSTAR head for redo logs 12 x 2 TB SAS disks with Niwot Raid controller Benchmark Description This benchmark combines PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 HR Self Service online and PeopleSoft Payroll batch workloads to run on a unified database deployed on Oracle Database 11g Release 2. The PeopleSoft HRSS benchmark kit is a Oracle standard benchmark kit run by all platform vendors to measure the performance. It's an OLTP benchmark where DB SQLs are moderately complex. The results are certified by Oracle and a white paper is published. PeopleSoft HR SS defines a business transaction as a series of HTML pages that guide a user through a particular scenario. Users are defined as corporate Employees, Managers and HR administrators. The benchmark consist of 14 scenarios which emulate users performing typical HCM transactions such as viewing paycheck, promoting and hiring employees, updating employee profile and other typical HCM application transactions. All these transactions are well-defined in the PeopleSoft HR Self-Service 9.1 benchmark kit. This benchmark metric is the weighted average response search/save time for all the transactions. The PeopleSoft 9.1 Payroll (North America) benchmark demonstrates system performance for a range of processing volumes in a specific configuration. This workload represents large batch runs typical of a ERP environment during a mass update. The benchmark measures five application business process run times for a database representing large organization. They are Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation, Payroll Confirmation, Print Advice forms, and Create Direct Deposit File. The benchmark metric is the cumulative elapsed time taken to complete the Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation and Payroll Confirmation business application processes. The benchmark metrics are taken for each respective benchmark while running simultaneously on the same database back-end. Specifically, the payroll batch processes are started when the online workload reaches steady state (the maximum number of online users) and overlap with online transactions for the duration of the steady state. Key Points and Best Practices Two Oracle PeopleSoft Domain sets with 200 application servers each on a SPARC T4-4 server were hosted in 2 separate Oracle Solaris Zones to demonstrate consolidation of multiple application servers, ease of administration and performance tuning. Each Oracle Solaris Zone was bound to a separate processor set, each containing 15 cores (total 120 threads). The default set (1 core from first and third processor socket, total 16 threads) was used for network and disk interrupt handling. This was done to improve performance by reducing memory access latency by using the physical memory closest to the processors and offload I/O interrupt handling to default set threads, freeing up cpu resources for Application Servers threads and balancing application workload across 240 threads. See Also Oracle PeopleSoft Benchmark White Papers oracle.com SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management oracle.com OTN PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management (Payroll) oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Oracle's PeopleSoft HR and Payroll combined benchmark, www.oracle.com/us/solutions/benchmark/apps-benchmark/peoplesoft-167486.html, results 09/30/2012.

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• Justifiable Perks.

  - by Phil Factor

      I was once the director of a start-up IT Company, and had the task of recruiting a proportion of the management team. As my background was in IT management, I was rather more familiar with recruiting Geeks for technology jobs, but here, one of my early tasks was interviewing a Marketing Director.  The small group of financiers had suggested a rather strange Irishman called  Halleran.  From my background in City of London dealing-rooms, I was slightly unprepared for the experience of interviewing anyone wearing a pink suit. Many of my older City colleagues would have required resuscitation after seeing his white leather shoes. However, nobody will accuse me of prejudging an interviewee. After all, many Linux experts who I’ve come to rely on have appeared for interview dressed as hobbits. In fact, the interview went well, and we had even settled his salary.  I was somewhat unprepared for the coda.    ‘And I will need to be provided with a Ferrari  by the company.’    ‘Hmm. That seems reasonable.’    Initially, he looked startled, and then a slow smile of victory spread across his face.    ‘What colour would you like?’ I asked genially.    ‘It has to be red.’ He looked very earnest on this point.    ‘Fine. I have to go past Hamleys on the way home this evening, so I’ll pick one up then for you.’    ‘Er.. Hamley’s is a toyshop, not a Ferrari Dealership.’    I stared at him in bafflement for a few seconds. ‘You’re not seriously asking for a real Ferrari are you?’     ‘Well, yes. Not for my own sake, you understand. I’d much prefer a simple run-about, but my position demands it. How could I maintain the necessary status in the office without one? How could I do my job in marketing when my grey Datsun was all too visible in the car Park? It is a tool of the job.’    ‘Excuse me a moment, but I must confer with the MD’    I popped out to see Chris, the MD. ‘Chris, I’m interviewing a lunatic in a pink suit who is trying to demand that a Ferrari is a precondition of his employment. I tried the ‘misunderstanding trick’ but it didn’t faze him.’     ‘Sorry, Phil, but we’ve got to hire him. The VCs insist on it. You’ve got to think of something that doesn’t involve committing to the purchase of a Ferrari. Current funding barely covers the rent for the building.’    ‘OK boss. Leave it to me.’    On return, I slapped O’Halleran’s file on the table with a genial, paternalistic smile. ‘Of course you should have a Ferrari. The only trouble is that it will require a justification document that can be presented to the board. I’m sure you’ll have no problem in preparing this document in the required format.’ The initial look of despair was quickly followed by a bland look of acquiescence. He had, earlier in the interview, argued with great eloquence his skill in preparing the tiresome documents that underpin the essential corporate and government deals that were vital to the success of this new enterprise. The justification of a Ferrari should be a doddle.     After the interview, Chris nervously asked how I’d fared.     ‘I think it is all solved.’    ‘… without promising a Ferrari, I hope.’    ‘Well, I did actually; on condition he justified it in writing.’    Chris issued a stream of invective. The strain of juggling the resources in an underfunded startup was beginning to show.    ‘Don’t worry. In the unlikely event of him coming back with the required document, I’ll give him mine.’    ‘Yours?’ He strode over to the window to stare down at the car park.    He needn’t have worried: I knew that his breed of marketing man could more easily lay an ostrich egg than to prepare a decent justification document. My Ferrari is still there at the back of my garage. Few know of the Ferrari cultivator, a simple inexpensive motorized device designed for the subsistence farmers of southern Italy. It is the very devil to start, but it creates a perfect tilth for the seedbed.

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• Mixed Emotions: Humans React to Natural Language Computer

  - by Applications User Experience

  There was a big event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, November 15. Watson, the natural language computer developed at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and its inventor and principal research investigator, David Ferrucci, were guests at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for another round of the television game Jeopardy. You may have read about or watched on YouTube how Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two top Jeopardy competitors, last February. This time, Watson swept the floor with two Silicon Valley high-achievers, one a venture capitalist with a background  in math, computer engineering, and physics, and the other a technology and finance writer well-versed in all aspects of culture and humanities. Watson is the product of the DeepQA research project, which attempts to create an artificially intelligent computing system through advances in natural language processing (NLP), among other technologies. NLP is a computing strategy that seeks to provide answers by processing large amounts of unstructured data contained in multiple large domains of human knowledge. There are several ways to perform NLP, but one way to start is by recognizing key words, then processing  contextual  cues associated with the keyword concepts so that you get many more “smart” (that is, human-like) deductions,  rather than a series of “dumb” matches.  Jeopardy questions often require more than key word matching to get the correct answer; typically several pieces of information put together, often from vastly different categories, to come up with a satisfactory word string solution that can be rephrased as a question.  Smarter than your average search engine, but is it as smart as a human? Watson was especially fast at descrambling mixed-up state capital names, and recalling and pairing movie titles where one started and the other ended in the same word (e.g., Billion Dollar Baby Boom, where both titles used the word Baby). David said they had basically removed the variable of how fast Watson hit the buzzer compared to human contestants, but frustration frequently appeared on the faces of the contestants beaten to the punch by Watson. David explained that top Jeopardy winners like Jennings achieved their success with a similar strategy, timing their buzz to the end of the reading of the clue,  and “running the board”, being first to respond on about 60% of the clues.  Similar results for Watson. It made sense that Watson would be good at the technical and scientific stuff, so I figured the venture capitalist was toast. But I thought for sure Watson would lose to the writer in categories such as pop culture, wines and foods, and other humanities. Surprisingly, it held its own. I was amazed it could recognize a word definition of a syllogism in the category of philosophy. So what was the audience reaction to all of this? We started out expecting our formidable human contestants to easily run some of their categories; however, they started off on the wrong foot with the state capitals which Watson could unscramble so efficiently. By the end of the first round, contestants and the audience were feeling a little bit, well, …. deflated. Watson was winning by about $13,000, and the humans had gone into negative dollars. The IBM host said he was going to “slow Watson down a bit,” and the humans came back with respectable scores in Double Jeopardy. This was partially thanks to a very sympathetic audience (and host, also a human) providing “group-think” on many questions, especially baseball ‘s most valuable players, which by the way, couldn’t have been hard because even I knew them.  Yes, that’s right, the humans cheated. Since Watson could speak but not hear us (it didn’t have speech recognition capability), it was probably unaware of this. In Final Jeopardy, the single question had to do with law. I was sure Watson would blow this one, but all contestants were able to answer correctly about a copyright law. In a career devoted to making computers more helpful to people, I think I may have seen how a computer can do too much. I’m not sure I’d want to work side-by-side with a Watson doing my job. Certainly listening and empathy are important traits we humans still have over Watson.  While there was great enthusiasm in the packed room of computer scientists and their friends for this standing-room-only show, I think it made several of us uneasy (especially the poor human contestants whose egos were soundly bashed in the first round). This computer system, by the way , only took 4 years to program. David Ferrucci mentioned several practical uses for Watson, including medical diagnoses and legal strategies. Are you “the expert” in your job? Imagine NLP computing on an Oracle database.   This may be the user interface of the future to enable users to better process big data. How do you think you’d like it? Postscript: There were three little boys sitting in front of me in the very first row. They looked, how shall I say it, … unimpressed!

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• Monitoring your WCF Web Apis with AppFabric

  - by cibrax

  The other day, Ron Jacobs made public a template in the Visual Studio Gallery for enabling monitoring capabilities to any existing WCF Http service hosted in Windows AppFabric. I thought it would be a cool idea to reuse some of that for doing the same thing on the new WCF Web Http stack. Windows AppFabric provides a dashboard that you can use to dig into some metrics about the services usage, such as number of calls, errors or information about different events during a service call. Those events not only include information about the WCF pipeline, but also custom events that any developer can inject and make sense for troubleshooting issues.      This monitoring capabilities can be enabled on any specific IIS virtual directory by using the AppFabric configuration tool or adding the following configuration sections to your existing web app, <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> <diagnostics etwProviderId="3e99c707-3503-4f33-a62d-2289dfa40d41"> <endToEndTracing propagateActivity="true" messageFlowTracing="true" /> </diagnostics> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name=""> <etwTracking profileName="EndToEndMonitoring Tracking Profile" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel>   <microsoft.applicationServer> <monitoring> <default enabled="true" connectionStringName="ApplicationServerMonitoringConnectionString" monitoringLevel="EndToEndMonitoring" /> </monitoring> </microsoft.applicationServer> Bad news is that none of the configuration above can be easily set on code by using the new configuration model for WCF Web stack.  A good thing is that you easily disable it in the configuration when you no longer need it, and also uses ETW, a general-purpose and high-speed tracing facility provided by the operating system (it’s part of the windows kernel). By adding that configuration section, AppFabric will start monitoring your service automatically and providing some basic event information about the service calls. You need some custom code for injecting custom events in the monitoring data. What I did here is to copy and refactor the “WCFUserEventProvider” class provided as sample in the Ron’s template to make it more TDD friendly when using IoC. I created a simple interface “ILogger” that any service (or resource) can use to inject custom events or monitoring information in the AppFabric database. public interface ILogger { bool WriteError(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteWarning(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteInformation(string name, string format, params object[] args); } The “WCFUserEventProvider” class implements this interface by making possible to send the events to the AppFabric monitoring database. The service or resource implementation can receive an “ILogger” as part of the constructor. [ServiceContract] [Export] public class OrderResource { IOrderRepository repository; ILogger logger;   [ImportingConstructor] public OrderResource(IOrderRepository repository, ILogger logger) { this.repository = repository; this.logger = logger; }   [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{id}")] public Order Get(string id, HttpResponseMessage response) { var order = this.repository.All.FirstOrDefault(o => o.OrderId == int.Parse(id, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)); if (order == null) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotFound; response.Content = new StringContent("Order not found"); }   this.logger.WriteInformation("Order Requested", "Order Id {0}", id);   return order; } } The example above uses “MEF” as IoC for injecting a repository and the logger implementation into the service. You can also see how the logger is used to write an information event in the monitoring database. The following image illustrates how the custom event is injected and the information becomes available for any user in the dashboard. An issue that you might run into and I hope the WCF and AppFabric teams fixed soon is that any WCF service that uses friendly URLs with ASP.NET routing does not get listed as a available service in the WCF services tab in the AppFabric console. The complete example is available to download from here.

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

  Since a while I'm considering to pick up my activities as a student and I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science. Personal motivation I mean after all this years as a professional software (and database) developer I have the personal urge to complete this part of my education. Having various certifications by Microsoft and being awarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) twice looks pretty awesome on a resume but having a "proper" degree would just complete my package. During the last couple of years I already got in touch with C-SAC (local business school with degree courses), the University of Mauritius and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT to check the options to enroll as an experienced software developer. Quite frankly, it was kind of alienating to receive that feedback: Start from scratch! No seriously? Spending x amount of years to sit for courses that might be outdated and form part of your daily routine? Probably being in an awkward situation in which your professional expertise might exceed the lecturers knowledge? I don't know... but if that's path to walk... Well, then I might have to go for it. SUPINFO International University Some weeks ago I was contacted by the General Manager, Education Recruitment and Development of Medine Education Village, Yamal Matabudul, to have a chat on how the local IT scene, namely the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC), could assist in their plans to promote their upcoming campus. Medine went into partnership with the French-based SUPINFO International University and Mauritius will be the 36th location world-wide for SUPINFO. Actually, the concept of SUPINFO is very likely to the common understanding of an apprenticeship in Germany. Not only does a student enroll into the programme but will also be placed into various internships as part of the curriculum. It's a big advantage in my opinion as the person stays in touch with the daily procedures and workflows in the real world of IT. Statements like "We just received a 'crash course' of information and learned new technology which is equivalent to 1.5 months of lectures at the university" wouldn't form part of the experience of such an education. Open Day at the Medine Education Village Last Saturday, Medine organised their Open Day and it was the official inauguration of the SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. It's now listed on their website, too - but be warned, the site is mainly in French language although the courses are all done in English. Not only was it a big opportunity to "hang out" on the campus of Medine but it was great to see the first professional partners for their internship programme, too. Oh, just for the records, IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. will also be among the future employers for SUPINFO students. More about that in an upcoming blog entry. Open Day at Medine Education Village - SUPINFO International University in Mauritius Mr Alick Mouriesse, President of SUPINFO, arrived the previous day and he gave all attendees a great overview of the roots of SUPINFO, the general development of the educational syllabus and their high emphasis on their partnerships with local IT companies in order to assist their students to get future jobs but also feel the heartbeat of technology live. Something which is completely missing in classic institutions of tertiary education in Computer Science. And since I was on tour with my children, as usual during weekends, he also talked about the outlook of having a SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. Apart from the close connection to IT companies and providing internships to students, SUPINFO clearly works on an international level. Meaning students of SUPINFO can move around the globe and can continue their studies seamlessly. For example, you might enroll for your first year in France, then continue to do 2nd and 3rd year in Canada or any other country with a SUPINFO campus to earn your bachelor degree, and then live and study in Mauritius for the next 2 years to achieve a Master degree. Having a chat with Dale Smith, Expand Technologies, after his interesting session on Technological Entrepreneurship - TechPreneur More questions by other craftsmen of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community And of course, this concept works in any direction, giving Mauritian students a huge (!) opportunity to live, study and work abroad. And thanks to this, Medine already announced that there will be new facilities near Cascavelle to provide dormitories and other facilities to international students coming to our island. Awesome! Okay, but why SUPINFO? Well, coming back to my original statement - I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science - SUPINFO has a process called Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) which is tailor-made for employees in the field of IT, and allows you to enroll in their course programme. I already got in touch with their online support chat but was only redirected to some FAQs on their website, unfortunately. So, during the Open Day I seized the opportunity to have an one-on-one conversation with Alick Mouriesse, and he clearly encouraged me to gather my certifications and working experience. SUPINFO does an individual evaluation prior to their assignment regarding course level, and hopefully my chances of getting some modules ahead of studies are looking better than compared to the other institutes. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go down the easy route but why should someone sit for "Database 101" or "Principles of OOP" when applying and preaching database normalisation and practicing Clean Code Developer are like flesh and blood? Anyway, I'll be off to get my transcripts of certificates together with my course assignments from the old days at the university. Yes, I studied Applied Chemistry for a couple of years before intersecting into IT and software development particularly... ;-)

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• Monitoring Events in your BPEL Runtime - RSS Feeds?

  - by Ramkumar Menon

  @10g - It had been a while since I'd tried something different. so here's what I did this week!Whenever our Developers deployed processes to the BPEL runtime, or perhaps when a process gets turned off due to connectivity issues, or maybe someone retired a process, I needed to know. So here's what I did. Step 1: Downloaded Quartz libraries and went through the documentation to understand what it takes to schedule a recurring job. Step 2: Cranked out two components using Oracle JDeveloper. [Within a new Web Project] a) A simple Java Class named FeedUpdater that extends org.quartz.Job. All this class does is to connect to your BPEL Runtime [via opmn:ormi] and fetch all events that occured in the last "n" minutes. events? - If it doesn't ring a bell - its right there on the BPEL Console. If you click on "Administration > Process Log" - what you see are events.The API to retrieve the events is //get the locator reference for the domain you are interested in.Locator l = .... //Predicate to retrieve events for last "n" minutesWhereCondition wc = new WhereCondition(...) //get all those events you needed.BPELProcessEvent[] events = l.listProcessEvents(wc); After you get all these events, write out these into an RSS Feed XML structure and stream it into a file that resides either in your Apache htdocs, or wherever it can be accessed via HTTP.You can read all about RSS 2.0 here. At a high level, here is how it looks like. <?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?><rss version="2.0">  <channel>    <title>Live Updates from the Development Environment</title>    <link>http://soadev.myserver.com/feeds/</link>    <description>Live Updates from the Development Environment</description>    <lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:03:00 PST</lastBuildDate>    <language>en-us</language>    <ttl>1</ttl>    <item>      <guid>1290213724692</guid>      <title>Process compiled</title>      <link>http://soadev.myserver.com/BPELConsole/mdm_product/administration.jsp?mode=processLog&amp;processName=&amp;dn=all&amp;eventType=all&amp;eventDate=600&amp;Filter=++Filter++</link>      <pubDate>Fri Nov 19 00:00:37 PST 2010</pubDate>      <description>SendPurchaseOrderRequestService: 3.0 Time : Fri Nov 19 00:00:37                   PST 2010</description>    </item>   ...... </channel> </rss> For writing ut XML content, read through Oracle XML Parser APIs - [search around for oracle.xml.parser.v2] b) Now that my "Job" was done, my job was half done. Next, I wrote up a simple Scheduler Servlet that schedules the above "Job" class to be executed ever "n" minutes. It is very straight forward. Here is the primary section of the code.           try {        Scheduler sched = StdSchedulerFactory.getDefaultScheduler();         //get n and make a trigger that executes every "n" seconds        Trigger trigger = TriggerUtils.makeSecondlyTrigger(n);        trigger.setName("feedTrigger" + System.currentTimeMillis());        trigger.setGroup("feedGroup");                JobDetail job = new JobDetail("SOA_Feed" + System.currentTimeMillis(), "feedGroup", FeedUpdater.class);        sched.scheduleJob(job,trigger);         }catch(Exception ex) {            ex.printStackTrace();            throw new ServletException(ex.getMessage());        } Look up the Quartz API and documentation. It will make this look much simpler.   Now that both components were ready, I packaged the Application into a war file and deployed it onto my Application Server. When the servlet initialized, the "n" second schedule was set/initialized. From then on, the servlet kept populating the RSS Feed file. I just ensured that my "Job" code keeps only 30 latest events within it, so that the feed file is small and under control. [a few kbs]   Next I opened up the feed xml on my browser - It requested a subscription - and Here I was - watching new deployments/life cycle events all popping up on my browser toolbar every 5 (actually n)  minutes!   Well, you could do it on a browser/reader of your choice - or perhaps read them like you read an email on your thunderbird!.      

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• I have a problem with a AE1200 Cisco/Linksys Wireless-N USB adapter having stopped working after I ran the update manager in Ubuntu 12.04

  - by user69670

  Here is the problem, I use a Cisco/Linksys AE1200 wireless network adapter to connect my desktop to a public wifi internet connection. I use ndiswrapper to use the windows driver and it had been working fine for me untill I ran the update manager overnight a few days ago. When I woke up it was asking for the normal computer restart to implement the changes but after rebooting the computer, the wireless adapter did not work, the status light on the adapter did not light up even though ubuntu recognizes it is there and according to ndiswrapper the drivers are loaded and the hardware is present. the grep command is being a bitch for some unknown reason today so this will be long sorry Output from "lspci": 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Host Bridge (rev 01) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge 00:12.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA 00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI0) 00:13.1 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI1) 00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI2) 00:13.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI3) 00:13.4 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI4) 00:13.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB Controller (EHCI) 00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 13) 00:14.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 IDE 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge 00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200] 02:02.0 Communication controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. HSF 56k Data/Fax Modem 02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs CA0106 Soundblaster 02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) Output from "lsusb": Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 009: ID 13b1:0039 Linksys AE1200 802.11bgn Wireless Adapter [Broadcom BCM43235] Bus 003 Device 002: ID 045e:0053 Microsoft Corp. Optical Mouse Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1043:8006 iCreate Technologies Corp. Flash Disk 32-256 MB Output from "ifconfig": eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:21:b6:af:7c UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:20 Base address:0xb400 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:13232 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:13232 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1084624 (1.0 MB) TX bytes:1084624 (1.0 MB) Output from "iwconfig": lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. Output from "lsmod": Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 12617 1 nls_cp437 12751 1 vfat 17308 1 fat 55605 1 vfat uas 17828 0 usb_storage 39646 1 nls_utf8 12493 1 udf 84366 1 crc_itu_t 12627 1 udf snd_ca0106 39279 2 snd_ac97_codec 106082 1 snd_ca0106 ac97_bus 12642 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm 80845 2 snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec rfcomm 38139 0 snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25424 2 snd_ca0106,snd_seq_midi bnep 17830 2 parport_pc 32114 0 bluetooth 158438 10 rfcomm,bnep ppdev 12849 0 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 51567 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 28931 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 62064 11 snd_ca0106, snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawj9fe snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device soundcore 14635 1 snd snd_page_alloc 14108 2 snd_ca0106,snd_pcm sp5100_tco 13495 0 i2c_piix4 13093 0 radeon 733693 3 ttm 65344 1 radeon drm_kms_helper 45466 1 radeon drm 197692 5 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13199 1 radeon mac_hid 13077 0 shpchp 32325 0 ati_agp 13242 0 lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp usbhid 41906 0 hid 77367 1 usbhid 8139too 23283 0 8139cp 26759 0 pata_atiixp 12999 1 Output from "sudo lshw -C network": *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:02:05.0 logical name: eth0 version: 10 serial: 00:19:21:b6:af:7c size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 10 0bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=8139too driverversion=0.9.28 duplex=half latency=64 link=no maxlatency=64 mingnt=32 multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:20 ioport:b400(size=256) memory:ff5fdc00-ff5fdcff Output from "iwlist scan": lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. Output from "lsb_release -d": Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Output from "uname -mr": 3.2.0-24-generic-pae i686 Output from "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart": * Running /etc/init.d/networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces * Reconfiguring network interfaces... [ OK ]

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• Using Hadooop (HDInsight) with Microsoft - Two (OK, Three) Options

  - by BuckWoody

  Microsoft has many tools for “Big Data”. In fact, you need many tools – there’s no product called “Big Data Solution” in a shrink-wrapped box – if you find one, you probably shouldn’t buy it. It’s tempting to want a single tool that handles everything in a problem domain, but with large, complex data, that isn’t a reality. You’ll mix and match several systems, open and closed source, to solve a given problem. But there are tools that help with handling data at large, complex scales. Normally the best way to do this is to break up the data into parts, and then put the calculation engines for that chunk of data right on the node where the data is stored. These systems are in a family called “Distributed File and Compute”. Microsoft has a couple of these, including the High Performance Computing edition of Windows Server. Recently we partnered with Hortonworks to bring the Apache Foundation’s release of Hadoop to Windows. And as it turns out, there are actually two (technically three) ways you can use it. (There’s a more detailed set of information here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/big-data.aspx, I’ll cover the options at a general level below)  First Option: Windows Azure HDInsight Service  Your first option is that you can simply log on to a Hadoop control node and begin to run Pig or Hive statements against data that you have stored in Windows Azure. There’s nothing to set up (although you can configure things where needed), and you can send the commands, get the output of the job(s), and stop using the service when you are done – and repeat the process later if you wish. (There are also connectors to run jobs from Microsoft Excel, but that’s another post)   This option is useful when you have a periodic burst of work for a Hadoop workload, or the data collection has been happening into Windows Azure storage anyway. That might be from a web application, the logs from a web application, telemetrics (remote sensor input), and other modes of constant collection.   You can read more about this option here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/10/24/getting-started-with-windows-azure-hdinsight-service.aspx Second Option: Microsoft HDInsight Server Your second option is to use the Hadoop Distribution for on-premises Windows called Microsoft HDInsight Server. You set up the Name Node(s), Job Tracker(s), and Data Node(s), among other components, and you have control over the entire ecostructure.   This option is useful if you want to  have complete control over the system, leave it running all the time, or you have a huge quantity of data that you have to bulk-load constantly – something that isn’t going to be practical with a network transfer or disk-mailing scheme. You can read more about this option here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/big-data.aspx Third Option (unsupported): Installation on Windows Azure Virtual Machines  Although unsupported, you could simply use a Windows Azure Virtual Machine (we support both Windows and Linux servers) and install Hadoop yourself – it’s open-source, so there’s nothing preventing you from doing that.   Aside from being unsupported, there are other issues you’ll run into with this approach – primarily involving performance and the amount of configuration you’ll need to do to access the data nodes properly. But for a single-node installation (where all components run on one system) such as learning, demos, training and the like, this isn’t a bad option. Did I mention that’s unsupported? :) You can learn more about Windows Azure Virtual Machines here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/virtual-machines/ And more about Hadoop and the installation/configuration (on Linux) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop And more about the HDInsight installation here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appid=HDINSIGHT-PREVIEW Choosing the right option Since you have two or three routes you can go, the best thing to do is evaluate the need you have, and place the workload where it makes the most sense.  My suggestion is to install the HDInsight Server locally on a test system, and play around with it. Read up on the best ways to use Hadoop for a given workload, understand the parts, write a little Pig and Hive, and get your feet wet. Then sign up for a test account on HDInsight Service, and see how that leverages what you know. If you're a true tinkerer, go ahead and try the VM route as well. Oh - there’s another great reference on the Windows Azure HDInsight that just came out, here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2012/11/16/hadoop-on-azure-introduction.aspx  

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