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• Enable wireless on Dell Inspiron 1300

  - by Simon

  As per subject, I've looked at various resources and attempted ndiswrapper solutions, found a one-click solution that lead to a 404 and this but none works. I've run all updates. Once I managed to lose my wired connection as well and had to reinstall. This is my first hour with Linux. iwconfig gives this before I do anything: lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on eth0 no wireless extens Thanks for responding lspci returns 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort+ >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16 Region 0: Memory at dff00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K] Region 1: I/O ports at eff8 [size=8] Region 2: Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] Region 3: Memory at dfec0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K] Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: intelfb, i915 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Region 0: Memory at dff80000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K] Capabilities: <access denied> 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42 Region 0: Memory at dfebc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes Bus: primary=00, secondary=0b, subordinate=0b, sec-latency=0 I/O behind bridge: 00002000-00002fff Memory behind bridge: 30000000-301fffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 0000000030200000-00000000303fffff Secondary status: 66MHz- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- <SERR- <PERR- BridgeCtl: Parity- SERR+ NoISA- VGA- MAbort- >Reset- FastB2B- PriDiscTmr- SecDiscTmr- DiscTmrStat- DiscTmrSERREn- Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes Bus: primary=00, secondary=0c, subordinate=0d, sec-latency=0 I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff Memory behind bridge: dfc00000-dfdfffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000d0000000-00000000d01fffff Secondary status: 66MHz- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- <SERR- <PERR- BridgeCtl: Parity- SERR+ NoISA- VGA- MAbort- >Reset- FastB2B- PriDiscTmr- SecDiscTmr- DiscTmrStat- DiscTmrSERREn- Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16 Region 4: I/O ports at bf80 [size=32] Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 17 Region 4: I/O ports at bf60 [size=32] Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin C routed to IRQ 18 Region 4: I/O ports at bf40 [size=32] Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.3 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [UHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin D routed to IRQ 19 Region 4: I/O ports at bf20 [size=32] Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 20 [EHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16 Region 0: Memory at b0000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=02, sec-latency=32 I/O behind bridge: 0000f000-00000fff Memory behind bridge: dfb00000-dfbfffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000fff00000-00000000000fffff Secondary status: 66MHz- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort+ <SERR- <PERR- BridgeCtl: Parity- SERR+ NoISA- VGA- MAbort- >Reset- FastB2B- PriDiscTmr- SecDiscTmr- DiscTmrStat- DiscTmrSERREn- Capabilities: <access denied> 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Kernel modules: iTCO_wdt, intel-rng 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP]) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O+ Mem- BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16 Region 0: I/O ports at 01f0 [size=8] Region 1: I/O ports at 03f4 [size=1] Region 2: I/O ports at 0170 [size=8] Region 3: I/O ports at 0374 [size=1] Region 4: I/O ports at bfa0 [size=16] Kernel driver in use: ata_piix 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02) Subsystem: Dell Device 01c9 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 64 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 18 Region 0: Memory at dfbfc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: b44 Kernel modules: b44 02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI Card Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 64 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 17 Region 0: Memory at dfbfe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge Kernel modules: ssb and the rfkill shows 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no Just checking addtional drivers. Says no additional driver installed in this system

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Find Table without Clustered Index – Find Table with no Primary Key Clustered index is very important concept for any table. They impact the performance very heavily. Here is a quick script to find tables without a clustered index. Replace TEXT with VARCHAR(MAX) – Stop using TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE Data Types Question: “Is VARCHAR (MAX) big enough to store the TEXT field?” Answer: “Yes, VARCHAR(MAX) is big enough to accommodate TEXT field. TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE data types of SQL Server 2000 will be deprecated in a future version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility to data types but it is recommended to use new data types which are VARHCAR (MAX), NVARCHAR (MAX) and VARBINARY (MAX).” Limiting Result Sets by Using TABLESAMPLE – Examples Introduced in SQL Server 2005, TABLESAMPLE allows you to extract a sampling of rows from a table in the FROM clause. The rows retrieved are random and they are are not in any order. This sampling can be based on a percentage of number of rows. You can use TABLESAMPLE when only a sampling of rows is necessary for the application instead of a full result set. User Defined Functions (UDF) Limitations UDF have its own advantage and usage but in this article we will see the limitation of UDF. Things UDF can not do and why Stored Procedure are considered as more flexible then UDFs. Stored Procedure are more flexibility then User Defined Functions(UDF). However, this blog post is a good read to know what are the limitations of UDF. Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility For a long time SQL Server stayed on the compatibility level of 80 which is of SQL Server 2000. However, as soon as SQL Server 2005 introduced the issue of compatibility was quite a major issue. Since that time MS has been releasing the versions at every 2-3 years, changing compatibility is a ever popular topic. In this blog post, we learn how we can do the same using T-SQL. We can also do the same using SSMS and here is the blog post for the same: Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility – Part 2 – Management Studio. Constraint on VARCHAR(MAX) Field To Limit It Certain Length How can I limit the VARCHAR(MAX) field with maximum length of 12500 characters only. His Question was valid as our application was allowed 12500 characters. First of all – this requirement is bit strange but if someone wants to do the same, they can do it as described in this blog post. 2008 UNPIVOT Table Example Understanding UNPIVOT can be very complicated at times. In this blog post, I have attempted to explain the same concept in very simple words. Create Default Constraint Over Table Column A simple straight to script blog post – I still use this blog quite many times for my own reference. UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function It took me 4 iteration to find this very simple function which can immediately get the day of the week in a single line. 2009 Find Hostname and Current Logged In User Name There are two tricks listed in this blog post where users can find out the hostname and current logged user name immediately and very easily. Interesting Observation of Logon Trigger On All Servers When I was doing a project, I made an interesting observation of executing a logon trigger multiple times. It was absolutely unexpected for me! As I was logging only once, naturally, I was expecting the entry only once. However, it did it multiple times on different threads – indeed an eccentric phenomenon at first sight! Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key One needs to be very careful in selecting the Primary Key as an incorrect selection can adversely impact the database architect and future normalization. For a Candidate Key to qualify as a Primary Key, it should be Non-NULL and unique in any domain. I have observed quite often that Primary Keys are seldom changed. I would like to have your feedback on not changing a Primary Key. Create Multiple Filegroup For Single Database Why should one create multiple file group for any database and what are the advantages of the same. In this blog post, I explain the same in detail. List All Objects Created on All Filegroups in Database In this blog post we discuss the essential question – “How can I find which object belongs to which filegroup. Is there any way to know this?” 2010 DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 When DATE is converted to DATETIME it adds the of midnight. When TIME is converted to DATETIME it adds the date of 1900 and it is something one wants to consider if you are going to run scripts from SQL Server 2008 to earlier version with CONVERT. Disabled Index and Update Statistics If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexes are also updated. Precision of SMALLDATETIME – A 1 Minute Precision The precision of the datatype SMALLDATETIME is 1 minute. It discards the seconds by rounding up or rounding down any seconds greater than zero. 2011 Getting Columns Headers without Result Data – SET FMTONLY ON SET FMTONLY ON returns only metadata to the client. It can be used to test the format of the response without actually running the query. When this setting is ON the resultset only have headers of the results but no data. Copy Database from Instance to Another Instance – Copy Paste in SQL Server SQL Server has a feature which copy database from one database to another database and it can be automated as well using SSIS. Make sure you have SQL Server Agent Turned on as this feature will create a job. Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*) If you have ever wondered SELECT * gives error when executed alone but SELECT COUNT(*) does not. Why? in that case, you should read this blog post. Creating All New Database with Full Recovery Model This blog post is very based on very interesting story where the user wants to do something by default for every single new database created. Model database is a secret weapon which should be used very carefully and with proper evalution. If used carefully this can be a very much beneficiary when we need a newly created database behave in certain fashion. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling?  This is probably a silly question because – of course you can!  Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life.  It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Read five part series on developer training subject Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Free Document/Content Management System Using SharePoint 2010

  - by KunaalKapoor

  That’s right, it’s true. You can use the free version of SharePoint 2010 to meet your document and content management needs and even run your public facing website or an internal knowledge bank.  SharePoint Foundation 2010 is free. It may not have all the features that you get in the enterprise license but it still has enough to cater to your needs to build a document management system and replace age old file shares or folders. I’ve built a dozen content management sites for internal and public use exploiting SharePoint. There are hundreds of web content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix).  On one hand we have commercial platforms like SharePoint, SiteCore, and Ektron etc. which are the most frequently used and on the other hand there are free options like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone etc. which are pretty common popular as well. But I would be very surprised if anyone was able to find a single CMS platform that is all things to all people. Infact not a lot of people consider SharePoint’s free version under the free CMS side but its high time organizations benefit from this. Through this blog post I wanted to present SharePoint Foundation as an option for running a FREE CMS platform. Even if you knew that there is a free version of SharePoint, what most people don’t realize is that SharePoint Foundation is a great option for running web sites of all kinds – not just team sites. It is a great option for many reasons, but in reality it is supported by Microsoft, and above all it is FREE (yay!), and it is extremely easy to get started.  From a functionality perspective – it’s hard to beat SharePoint. Even the free version, SharePoint Foundation, offers simple data connectivity (through BCS), cross browser support, accessibility, support for Office Web Apps, blogs, wikis, templates, document support, health analyzer, support for presence, and MUCH more.I often get asked: “Can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?” The answer really depends on ·          What are your specific requirements? ·          What systems you currently have in place for managing documents. ·          And of course how much money you have J Benefits? Not many large organizations have benefited from SharePoint yet. For some it has been an IT project to see what they can achieve with it, for others it has been used as a collaborative platform or in many cases an extended intranet. SharePoint 2010 has changed the game slightly as the improvements that Microsoft have made have been noted by organizations, and we are seeing a lot of companies starting to build specific business applications using SharePoint as the basis, and nearly every business process will require documents at some stage. If you require a document management system and have SharePoint in place then it can be a relatively straight forward decision to use SharePoint, as long as you have reviewed the considerations just discussed. The collaborative nature of SharePoint 2010 is also a massive advantage, as specific departmental or project sites can be created quickly and easily that allow workers to interact in a variety of different ways using one source of information.  This also benefits an organization with regards to how they manage the knowledge that they have, as if all of their information is in one source then it is naturally easier to search and manage. Is SharePoint right for your organization? As just discussed, this can only be determined after defining your requirements and also planning a longer term strategy for how you will manage your documents and information. A key factor to look at is how the users would interact with the system and how much value would it get for your organization. The amount of data and documents that organizations are creating is increasing rapidly each year. Therefore the ability to archive this information, whilst keeping the ability to know what you have and where it is, is vital to any organizations management of their information life cycle. SharePoint is best used for the initial life of business documents where they need to be referenced and accessed after time. It is often beneficial to archive these to overcome for storage and performance issues. FREE CMS – SharePoint, Really? In order to show some of the completely of what comes with this free version of SharePoint 2010, I thought it would make sense to use Wikipedia (since every one trusts it as a credible source). Wikipedia shows that a web content management system typically has the following components: Document Management:   -       CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction. SharePoint is king when it comes to document management.  Version history, exclusive check-out, security, publication, workflow, and so much more.  Content Virtualization:   -       CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission. Through the use of versioning, each content manager can preview, publish, and roll-back content of pages, wiki entries, blog posts, documents, or any other type of content stored in SharePoint.  The idea of each user having an entire copy of the website virtualized is a bit odd to me – not sure why anyone would need that for anything but the simplest of websites. Automated Templates:   -       Create standard output templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place. Through the use of Master Pages and Themes, SharePoint provides the ability to change the entire look and feel of site.  Of course, the older brother version of SharePoint – SharePoint Server 2010 – also introduces the concept of Page Layouts which allows page template level customization and even switching the layout of an individual page using different page templates.  I think many organizations really think they want this but rarely end up using this bit of functionality.  Easy Edits:   -       Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content. This is probably easier described with a screen cap of a vanilla SharePoint Foundation page in edit mode.  Notice the page editing toolbar, the multiple layout options…  It’s actually easier to use than Microsoft Word. Workflow management: -       Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it. Workflow, it’s in there. In fact, the same workflow engine is running under SharePoint Foundation that is running under the other versions of SharePoint.  The primary difference is that with SharePoint Foundation – you need to configure the workflows yourself.   Web Standards: -       Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards. SharePoint is in the fourth major iteration under Microsoft with the 2010 release.  In addition to the innovation that Microsoft continuously adds, you have the entire global ecosystem available. Scalable Expansion:   -       Available in most modern WCMSs is the ability to expand a single implementation (one installation on one server) across multiple domains. SharePoint Foundation can run multiple sites using multiple URLs on a single server install.  Even more powerful, SharePoint Foundation is scalable and can be part of a multi-server farm to ensure that it will handle any amount of traffic that can be thrown at it. Delegation & Security:  -       Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management. SharePoint Foundation provides very granular security capabilities. Read @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537811.aspx Content Syndication:  -       CMS software often assists in content distribution by generating RSS and Atom data feeds to other systems. They may also e-mail users when updates are available as part of the workflow process. SharePoint Foundation nails it.  With RSS syndication and email alerts available out of the box, content syndication is already in the platform. Multilingual Support: -       Ability to display content in multiple languages. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports more than 40 languages. Read More Read more @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256(v=office.12).aspxYou can download the free version from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5970

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• TGIF: Engagement Wrap-up

  - by Michael Snow

  We've had a very busy week here at Oracle and as we build up to Oracle OpenWorld starting in less than 10 days - it doesn't look like things will be slowing down. Engagement is definitely in the air this week. Our friend, John Mancini published a great article entitled: "The World of Engagement" on his Digital Landfill blog yesterday and we hosted a great webcast with R "Ray" Wang from Constellation Research yesterday on the "9 C's of Engagement". 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} I wanted to wrap-up the week with some key takeaways from our webcast yesterday with Ray Wang. If you missed the webcast yesterday, fear not - it is now available  On-Demand. We'll leave you this week with lots of questions about how to navigate these churning waters of engagement. Stay tuned to the Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series as we fuel this dialogue. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Company Culture Does company support a culture of putting customer satisfaction ahead of profits? Does culture promote creativity and cross functional employee collaboration? Does culture accept different views of multi-generational workforce? Does culture promote employee training and skills development Does culture support upward mobility and long term retention? Does culture support work-life balance? Does the culture provide rewards for employee for outstanding customer support? Channels What are the current primary channels for customer communications? What do you think will be the primary channels in two years? Is company developing support model for emerging channels? Do all channels consistently deliver the same level of customer support? Do you know the cost per transaction across all channels? Do you engage customers proactively across multiple channels? Do all channels have access to the same customer information? Community Does company extend customer support into virtual communities of interest? Does company facilitate educating users through its virtual communities? Does company mine its customer’s experience into useful data? Does company increase the value for customers through using data to deliver new products and services? Does company support two way interactions with its customers through communities of interest? Does company actively support social CRM, online communities and social media markets? Credibility Does company market its trustworthiness through external certificates such as business licenses, BBB certificates or other validations? Does company promote trust through customer testimonials and case studies on ethical business practices? Does company promote truthful market campaigns Does company make it easy for customers to complain? Does company build its reputation for standing behind its products with guarantees for satisfaction? Does company protect its customer data with high security measures> Content What sources do you use to create customer content? Does company mine social media and blogs for customer content? How does your company sort, store and retain its customer content? How frequently does content get updated? What external sources do you use for customer content? How many responses are typically received from a knowledge management system inquiry? Does your company use customer content to design and develop new product and services? Context Does your company market to customers in clusters or individually? Does your company customize its messages and personalize them to specific needs of each individual customer? Does your company store customer data based on their past behaviors, purchases, sentiment analysis and current activities? Does your company manage customer context according to channels used? For example identify personal use channels versus business channels? What is your frequency of collecting customer activities across various touch points? How is your customer data stored and analyzed? Is contextual data used for future customer outreach? Cadence Which channels does your company measure-web site visits, phone calls, IVR, store visits, face to face, social media? Does company make effective use of cross channel marketing to promote more frequent customer engagement? Does your company rate the patterns relevant for your product or service and monitor usage against this pattern? Does your company measure the frequency of both online and offline channels? Does your company apply metrics to the frequency of customer engagements with product or services revenues? Does your company consolidate data for customer engagement across various channels for a complete view of its customer? Catalyst Does company offer coupon discounts? Does company have a customer loyalty program or a VIP membership program? Does company mine customer data to target specific groups of buyers? Do internal employees serve as ambassadors for customer programs? Does company drive loyalty through social media loyalty programs? Does company build rewards based on using loyalty data? Does company offer an employee incentive program to drive customer loyalty?

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• Key ATG architecture principles

  - by Glen Borkowski

  Overview The purpose of this article is to describe some of the important foundational concepts of ATG.  This is not intended to cover all areas of the ATG platform, just the most important subset - the ones that allow ATG to be extremely flexible, configurable, high performance, etc.  For more information on these topics, please see the online product manuals. Modules The first concept is called the 'ATG Module'.  Simply put, you can think of modules as the building blocks for ATG applications.  The ATG development team builds the out of the box product using modules (these are the 'out of the box' modules).  Then, when a customer is implementing their site, they build their own modules that sit 'on top' of the out of the box ATG modules.  Modules can be very simple - containing minimal definition, and perhaps a small amount of configuration.  Alternatively, a module can be rather complex - containing custom logic, database schema definitions, configuration, one or more web applications, etc.  Modules generally will have dependencies on other modules (the modules beneath it).  For example, the Commerce Reference Store module (CRS) requires the DCS (out of the box commerce) module. Modules have a ton of value because they provide a way to decouple a customers implementation from the out of the box ATG modules.  This allows for a much easier job when it comes time to upgrade the ATG platform.  Modules are also a very useful way to group functionality into a single package which can be leveraged across multiple ATG applications. One very important thing to understand about modules, or more accurately, ATG as a whole, is that when you start ATG, you tell it what module(s) you want to start.  One of the first things ATG does is to look through all the modules you specified, and for each one, determine a list of modules that are also required to start (based on each modules dependencies).  Once this final, ordered list is determined, ATG continues to boot up.  One of the outputs from the ordered list of modules is that each module can contain it's own classes and configuration.  During boot, the ordered list of modules drives the unified classpath and configpath.  This is what determines which classes override others, and which configuration overrides other configuration.  Think of it as a layered approach. The structure of a module is well defined.  It simply looks like a folder in a filesystem that has certain other folders and files within it.  Here is a list of items that can appear in a module: MyModule: META-INF - this is required, along with a file called MANIFEST.MF which describes certain properties of the module.  One important property is what other modules this module depends on. config - this is typically present in most modules.  It defines a tree structure (folders containing properties files, XML, etc) that maps to ATG components (these are described below). lib - this contains the classes (typically in jarred format) for any code defined in this module j2ee - this is where any web-apps would be stored. src - in case you want to include the source code for this module, it's standard practice to put it here sql - if your module requires any additions to the database schema, you should place that schema here Here's a screenshots of a module: Modules can also contain sub-modules.  A dot-notation is used when referring to these sub-modules (i.e. MyModule.Versioned, where Versioned is a sub-module of MyModule). Finally, it is important to completely understand how modules work if you are going to be able to leverage them effectively.  There are many different ways to design modules you want to create, some approaches are better than others, especially if you plan to share functionality between multiple different ATG applications. Components A component in ATG can be thought of as a single item that performs a certain set of related tasks.  An example could be a ProductViews component - used to store information about what products the current customer has viewed.  Components have properties (also called attributes).  The ProductViews component could have properties like lastProductViewed (stores the ID of the last product viewed) or productViewList (stores the ID's of products viewed in order of their being viewed).  The previous examples of component properties would typically also offer get and set methods used to retrieve and store the property values.  Components typically will also offer other types of useful methods aside from get and set.  In the ProductViewed component, we might want to offer a hasViewed method which will tell you if the customer has viewed a certain product or not. Components are organized in a tree like hierarchy called 'nucleus'.  Nucleus is used to locate and instantiate ATG Components.  So, when you create a new ATG component, it will be able to be found 'within' nucleus.  Nucleus allows ATG components to reference one another - this is how components are strung together to perform meaningful work.  It's also a mechanism to prevent redundant configuration - define it once and refer to it from everywhere. Here is a screenshot of a component in nucleus:  Components can be extremely simple (i.e. a single property with a get method), or can be rather complex offering many properties and methods.  To be an ATG component, a few things are required: a class - you can reference an existing out of the box class or you could write your own a properties file - this is used to define your component the above items must be located 'within' nucleus by placing them in the correct spot in your module's config folder Within the properties file, you will need to point to the class you want to use: $class=com.mycompany.myclass You may also want to define the scope of the class (request, session, or global): $scope=session In summary, ATG Components live in nucleus, generally have links to other components, and provide some meaningful type of work.  You can configure components as well as extend their functionality by writing code. Repositories Repositories (a.k.a. Data Anywhere Architecture) is the mechanism that ATG uses to access data primarily stored in relational databases, but also LDAP or other backend systems.  ATG applications are required to be very high performance, and data access is critical in that if not handled properly, it could create a bottleneck.  ATG's repository functionality has been around for a long time - it's proven to be extremely scalable.  Developers new to ATG need to understand how repositories work as this is a critical aspect of the ATG architecture.   Repositories essentially map relational tables to objects in ATG, as well as handle caching.  ATG defines many repositories out of the box (i.e. user profile, catalog, orders, etc), and this is comprised of both the underlying database schema along with the associated repository definition files (XML).  It is fully expected that implementations will extend / change the out of the box repository definitions, so there is a prescribed approach to doing this.  The first thing to be sure of is to encapsulate your repository definition additions / changes within your own module (as described above).  The other important best practice is to never modify the out of the box schema - in other words, don't add columns to existing ATG tables, just create your own new tables.  These will help ensure you can easily upgrade your application at a later date. xml-combination As mentioned earlier, when you start ATG, the order of the modules will determine the final configpath.  Files within this configpath are 'layered' such that modules on top can override configuration of modules below it.  This is the same concept for repository definition files.  If you want to add a few properties to the out of the box user profile, you simply need to create an XML file containing only your additions, and place it in the correct location in your module.  At boot time, your definition will be combined (hence the term xml-combination) with the lower, out of the box modules, with the result being a user profile that contains everything (out of the box, plus your additions).  Aside from just adding properties, there are also ways to remove and change properties. types of properties Aside from the normal 'database backed' properties, there are a few other interesting types: transient properties - these are properties that are in memory, but not backed by any database column.  These are useful for temporary storage. java-backed properties - by nature, these are transient, but in addition, when you access this property (by called the get method) instead of looking up a piece of data, it performs some logic and returns the results.  'Age' is a good example - if you're storing a birth date on the profile, but your business rules are defined in terms of someones age, you could create a simple java-backed property to look at the birth date and compare it to the current date, and return the persons age. derived properties - this is what allows for inheritance within the repository structure.  You could define a property at the category level, and have the product inherit it's value as well as override it.  This is useful for setting defaults, with the ability to override. caching There are a number of different caching modes which are useful at different times depending on the nature of the data being cached.  For example, the simple cache mode is useful for things like user profiles.  This is because the user profile will typically only be used on a single instance of ATG at one time.  Simple cache mode is also useful for read-only types of data such as the product catalog.  Locked cache mode is useful when you need to ensure that only one ATG instance writes to a particular item at a time - an example would be a customers order.  There are many options in terms of configuring caching which are outside the scope of this article - please refer to the product manuals for more details. Other important concepts - out of scope for this article There are a whole host of concepts that are very important pieces to the ATG platform, but are out of scope for this article.  Here's a brief description of some of them: formhandlers - these are ATG components that handle form submissions by users. pipelines - these are configurable chains of logic that are used for things like handling a request (request pipeline) or checking out an order. special kinds of repositories (versioned, files, secure, ...) - there are a couple different types of repositories that are used in various situations.  See the manuals for more information. web development - JSP/ DSP tag library - ATG provides a traditional approach to developing web applications by providing a tag library called the DSP library.  This library is used throughout your JSP pages to interact with all the ATG components. messaging - a message sub-system used as another way for components to interact. personalization - ability for business users to define a personalized user experience for customers.  See the other blog posts related to personalization.

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• Evaluating code for a graph [migrated]

  - by mazen.r.f

  This is relatively long code. Please take a look at this code if you are still willing to do so. I will appreciate your feedback. I have spent two days trying to come up with code to represent a graph, calculating the shortest path using Dijkstra's algorithm. But I am not able to get the right result, even though the code runs without errors. The result is not correct and I am always getting 0. I have three classes: Vertex, Edge, and Graph. The Vertex class represents the nodes in the graph and it has id and carried (which carry the weight of the links connected to it while using Dijkstra's algorithm) and a vector of the ids belong to other nodes the path will go through before arriving to the node itself. This vector is named previous_nodes. The Edge class represents the edges in the graph and has two vertices (one in each side) and a width (the distance between the two vertices). The Graph class represents the graph. It has two vectors, where one is the vertices included in this graph, and the other is the edges included in the graph. Inside the class Graph, there is a method named shortest() that takes the sources node id and the destination and calculates the shortest path using Dijkstra's algorithm. I think that it is the most important part of the code. My theory about the code is that I will create two vectors, one for the vertices in the graph named vertices, and another vector named ver_out (it will include the vertices out of calculation in the graph). I will also have two vectors of type Edge, where one is named edges (for all the edges in the graph), and the other is named track (to temporarily contain the edges linked to the temporary source node in every round). After the calculation of every round, the vector track will be cleared. In main(), I've created five vertices and 10 edges to simulate a graph. The result of the shortest path supposedly is 4, but I am always getting 0. That means I have something wrong in my code. If you are interesting in helping me find my mistake and making the code work, please take a look. The way shortest work is as follow: at the beginning, all the edges will be included in the vector edges. We select the edges related to the source and put them in the vector track, then we iterate through track and add the width of every edge to the vertex (node) related to it (not the source vertex). After that, we clear track and remove the source vertex from the vector vertices and select a new source. Then we start over again and select the edges related to the new source, put them in track, iterate over edges in track, adding the weights to the corresponding vertices, then remove this vertex from the vector vertices. Then clear track, and select a new source, and so on. #include<iostream> #include<vector> #include <stdlib.h> // for rand() using namespace std; class Vertex { private: unsigned int id; // the name of the vertex unsigned int carried; // the weight a vertex may carry when calculating shortest path vector<unsigned int> previous_nodes; public: unsigned int get_id(){return id;}; unsigned int get_carried(){return carried;}; void set_id(unsigned int value) {id = value;}; void set_carried(unsigned int value) {carried = value;}; void previous_nodes_update(unsigned int val){previous_nodes.push_back(val);}; void previous_nodes_erase(unsigned int val){previous_nodes.erase(previous_nodes.begin() + val);}; Vertex(unsigned int init_val = 0, unsigned int init_carried = 0) :id (init_val), carried(init_carried) // constructor { } ~Vertex() {}; // destructor }; class Edge { private: Vertex first_vertex; // a vertex on one side of the edge Vertex second_vertex; // a vertex on the other side of the edge unsigned int weight; // the value of the edge ( or its weight ) public: unsigned int get_weight() {return weight;}; void set_weight(unsigned int value) {weight = value;}; Vertex get_ver_1(){return first_vertex;}; Vertex get_ver_2(){return second_vertex;}; void set_first_vertex(Vertex v1) {first_vertex = v1;}; void set_second_vertex(Vertex v2) {second_vertex = v2;}; Edge(const Vertex& vertex_1 = 0, const Vertex& vertex_2 = 0, unsigned int init_weight = 0) : first_vertex(vertex_1), second_vertex(vertex_2), weight(init_weight) { } ~Edge() {} ; // destructor }; class Graph { private: std::vector<Vertex> vertices; std::vector<Edge> edges; public: Graph(vector<Vertex> ver_vector, vector<Edge> edg_vector) : vertices(ver_vector), edges(edg_vector) { } ~Graph() {}; vector<Vertex> get_vertices(){return vertices;}; vector<Edge> get_edges(){return edges;}; void set_vertices(vector<Vertex> vector_value) {vertices = vector_value;}; void set_edges(vector<Edge> vector_ed_value) {edges = vector_ed_value;}; unsigned int shortest(unsigned int src, unsigned int dis) { vector<Vertex> ver_out; vector<Edge> track; for(unsigned int i = 0; i < edges.size(); ++i) { if((edges[i].get_ver_1().get_id() == vertices[src].get_id()) || (edges[i].get_ver_2().get_id() == vertices[src].get_id())) { track.push_back (edges[i]); edges.erase(edges.begin()+i); } }; for(unsigned int i = 0; i < track.size(); ++i) { if(track[i].get_ver_1().get_id() != vertices[src].get_id()) { track[i].get_ver_1().set_carried((track[i].get_weight()) + track[i].get_ver_2().get_carried()); track[i].get_ver_1().previous_nodes_update(vertices[src].get_id()); } else { track[i].get_ver_2().set_carried((track[i].get_weight()) + track[i].get_ver_1().get_carried()); track[i].get_ver_2().previous_nodes_update(vertices[src].get_id()); } } for(unsigned int i = 0; i < vertices.size(); ++i) if(vertices[i].get_id() == src) vertices.erase(vertices.begin() + i); // removing the sources vertex from the vertices vector ver_out.push_back (vertices[src]); track.clear(); if(vertices[0].get_id() != dis) {src = vertices[0].get_id();} else {src = vertices[1].get_id();} for(unsigned int i = 0; i < vertices.size(); ++i) if((vertices[i].get_carried() < vertices[src].get_carried()) && (vertices[i].get_id() != dis)) src = vertices[i].get_id(); //while(!edges.empty()) for(unsigned int round = 0; round < vertices.size(); ++round) { for(unsigned int k = 0; k < edges.size(); ++k) { if((edges[k].get_ver_1().get_id() == vertices[src].get_id()) || (edges[k].get_ver_2().get_id() == vertices[src].get_id())) { track.push_back (edges[k]); edges.erase(edges.begin()+k); } }; for(unsigned int n = 0; n < track.size(); ++n) if((track[n].get_ver_1().get_id() != vertices[src].get_id()) && (track[n].get_ver_1().get_carried() > (track[n].get_ver_2().get_carried() + track[n].get_weight()))) { track[n].get_ver_1().set_carried((track[n].get_weight()) + track[n].get_ver_2().get_carried()); track[n].get_ver_1().previous_nodes_update(vertices[src].get_id()); } else if(track[n].get_ver_2().get_carried() > (track[n].get_ver_1().get_carried() + track[n].get_weight())) { track[n].get_ver_2().set_carried((track[n].get_weight()) + track[n].get_ver_1().get_carried()); track[n].get_ver_2().previous_nodes_update(vertices[src].get_id()); } for(unsigned int t = 0; t < vertices.size(); ++t) if(vertices[t].get_id() == src) vertices.erase(vertices.begin() + t); track.clear(); if(vertices[0].get_id() != dis) {src = vertices[0].get_id();} else {src = vertices[1].get_id();} for(unsigned int tt = 0; tt < edges.size(); ++tt) { if(vertices[tt].get_carried() < vertices[src].get_carried()) { src = vertices[tt].get_id(); } } } return vertices[dis].get_carried(); } }; int main() { cout<< "Hello, This is a graph"<< endl; vector<Vertex> vers(5); vers[0].set_id(0); vers[1].set_id(1); vers[2].set_id(2); vers[3].set_id(3); vers[4].set_id(4); vector<Edge> eds(10); eds[0].set_first_vertex(vers[0]); eds[0].set_second_vertex(vers[1]); eds[0].set_weight(5); eds[1].set_first_vertex(vers[0]); eds[1].set_second_vertex(vers[2]); eds[1].set_weight(9); eds[2].set_first_vertex(vers[0]); eds[2].set_second_vertex(vers[3]); eds[2].set_weight(4); eds[3].set_first_vertex(vers[0]); eds[3].set_second_vertex(vers[4]); eds[3].set_weight(6); eds[4].set_first_vertex(vers[1]); eds[4].set_second_vertex(vers[2]); eds[4].set_weight(2); eds[5].set_first_vertex(vers[1]); eds[5].set_second_vertex(vers[3]); eds[5].set_weight(5); eds[6].set_first_vertex(vers[1]); eds[6].set_second_vertex(vers[4]); eds[6].set_weight(7); eds[7].set_first_vertex(vers[2]); eds[7].set_second_vertex(vers[3]); eds[7].set_weight(1); eds[8].set_first_vertex(vers[2]); eds[8].set_second_vertex(vers[4]); eds[8].set_weight(8); eds[9].set_first_vertex(vers[3]); eds[9].set_second_vertex(vers[4]); eds[9].set_weight(3); unsigned int path; Graph graf(vers, eds); path = graf.shortest(2, 4); cout<< path << endl; return 0; }

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• Nginx no longer servers uwsgi application behind HAProxy - Looks for static file instead

  - by Ralph

  We implemented our web application using web2py. It consists of several modules offering a REST API at various resources (e.g. /dids, /replicas, ...). The API is used by clients implementing requests.py. My problem is that our web app works fine if it's behind HAProxy and hosted by Apache using mod_wsgi. It also works fine if the clients interact with nginx directly. It doesn't work though when using HAProxy in front of nginx. My guess is that HAProxy somehow modifies the request and thus nginx behaves differently i.e. looking for a static file instead of calling the WSGI container. Unfortunately I can't figure out what's exactly going (wr)on(g). Here are the relevant config sections of these three component's config files. At least I guess they are interesting. If you miss anything, please let me know. 1) haproxy.conf frontend app-lb bind loadbalancer:443 ssl crt /etc/grid-security/hostcertkey.pem default_backend nginx-servers mode http backend nginx-servers balance leastconn option forwardfor server nginx-01 nginx-server-int-01.domain.com:80 check 2) nginx.conf: sendfile off; #tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; server { server_name nginx-server-int-01.domain.com; root /path/to/app/; location / { uwsgi_pass unix:///tmp/app.sock; include uwsgi_params; uwsgi_read_timeout 600; # Requests can run for a serious long time } 3) uwsgi.ini [uwsgi] chdir = /path/to/app/ chmod-socket = 777 no-default-app = True socket = /tmp/app.sock manage-script-name = True mount = /dids=did.py mount = /replicas=replica.py callable = application Now when I let my clients go against nginx-server-int-01.domain.com everything is fine. In the access.log of nginx lines like these are appearing: 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:20 +0200] "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1" 201 17 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:20 +0200] "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1" 201 17 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:20 +0200] "POST /dids/user.ogueta/cnt_mc12_8TeV.16304.stream_name_too_long.other.notype.004202218365415e990b9997ea859f20.user/dids HTTP/1.1" 201 17 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:20 +0200] "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1" 200 5282 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:20 +0200] "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1" 200 5094 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:20 +0200] "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1" 200 528 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:21 +0200] "GET /dids/mc13_14TeV/dids/search?project=mc13_14TeV&stream_name=%2Adummy&type=dataset&datatype=NTUP_SMDYMUMU HTTP/1.1" 401 73 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:21 +0200] "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1" 200 713 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" 128.142.XXX.XX0 - - [23/Aug/2014:01:29:21 +0200] "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1" 201 17 "-" "python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/2.6.6 Linux/2.6.32-358.23.2.el6.x86_64" "-" But when I switch the clients to go against HAProxy (loadbalancer.domain.com:443), the error.log of nginx shows lines like these: 2014/08/23 01:26:01 [error] 1705#0: *21231 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/dids/attachments" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XX1, server: localhost, request: "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21232 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/replicas/list" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XX1, server: localhost, request: "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21233 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/dids/attachments" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XX1, server: localhost, request: "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21234 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/replicas/list" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XX1, server: localhost, request: "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21235 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/dids/attachments" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XXX, server: localhost, request: "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21238 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/replicas/list" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XXX, server: localhost, request: "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21239 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/dids/attachments" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XXX, server: localhost, request: "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21242 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/replicas/list" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XXX, server: localhost, request: "POST /replicas/list HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" 2014/08/23 01:26:02 [error] 1705#0: *21244 open() "/usr/share/nginx/html/dids/attachments" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 128.142.XXX.XXX, server: localhost, request: "POST /dids/attachments HTTP/1.1", host: "loadbalancer.domain.com" As you can see, that request looks the same, only the client IP changed, from the client's host to the one from loadbalancer.domain.com. But due to what ever reasons ngxin seems to assume that it is a static file to be served which eventually results in the file not found message. I searched the web for multiple hours already, but without much luck so far. Any help is very much appreciated. Cheers, Ralph

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• help setting up an IPSEC vpn from my linux box

  - by robthewolf

  I have an office with a router and a remote server (Linux - Ubuntu 10.10). Both locations need to connect to a data supplier through a VPN. The VPN is an IPSEC gateway. I was able to configure my Linksys rv42 router to create a VPN connection successfully and now I need to do the same for Linux server. I have been messing around with this for too long. First I tried OpenVPN, but that is SSL and not IPSEC. Then I tried Shrew. I think I have the settings correct but I haven't been able to create the connection. It maybe that I have to use something else like a direct IPSEC config or something like that. If someone knows of a way to turn the following settings that I have been given below into a working IPSEC VPN connection I would be very grateful. Here are the settings I was given that must be used to connect to my supplier: Local destination network: 192.168.4.0/24 Local destination hosts: 192.168.4.100 Remote destination network: 192.167.40.0/24 Remote destination hosts: 192.168.40.27 VPN peering point: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Then they have given me the following details: IPSEC/ISAKMP Phase 1 Parameters: Authentication method: pre shared secret Diffie Hellman group: group 2 Encryption Algorithm: 3DES Lifetime in seconds:28800 Phase 2 parameters: IPSEC security: ESP Encryption algortims: 3DES Authentication algorithms: MD5 lifetime in seconds: 28800 pfs: disabled Here are the settings from my attempt to use shrew: n:version:2 n:network-ike-port:500 n:network-mtu-size:1380 n:client-addr-auto:0 n:network-frag-size:540 n:network-dpd-enable:1 n:network-notify-enable:1 n:client-banner-enable:1 n:client-dns-used:1 b:auth-mutual-psk:YjJzN2QzdDhyN2EyZDNpNG42ZzQ= n:phase1-dhgroup:2 n:phase1-keylen:0 n:phase1-life-secs:28800 n:phase1-life-kbytes:0 n:vendor-chkpt-enable:0 n:phase2-keylen:0 n:phase2-pfsgroup:-1 n:phase2-life-secs:28800 n:phase2-life-kbytes:0 n:policy-nailed:0 n:policy-list-auto:1 n:client-dns-auto:1 n:network-natt-port:4500 n:network-natt-rate:15 s:client-dns-addr:0.0.0.0 s:client-dns-suffix: s:network-host:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx s:client-auto-mode:pull s:client-iface:virtual s:client-ip-addr:192.168.4.0 s:client-ip-mask:255.255.255.0 s:network-natt-mode:enable s:network-frag-mode:disable s:auth-method:mutual-psk s:ident-client-type:address s:ident-client-data:192.168.4.0 s:ident-server-type:address s:ident-server-data:192.168.40.0 s:phase1-exchange:aggressive s:phase1-cipher:3des s:phase1-hash:md5 s:phase2-transform:3des s:phase2-hmac:md5 s:ipcomp-transform:disabled Finally here is the debug output from the shrew log: 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : ipc client process thread begin ... 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : peer config add message 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : peer added ( obj count = 1 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local address 217.xxx.xxx.xxx selected for peer 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : tunnel added ( obj count = 1 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : proposal config message 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : proposal config message 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : client config message 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : local id '192.168.4.0' message 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : remote id '192.168.40.0' message 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : preshared key message 10/12/22 17:22:18 < A : peer tunnel enable message 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : new phase1 ( ISAKMP initiator ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : exchange type is aggressive 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : 217.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 <- 206.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : c1a8b31ac860995d:0000000000000000 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : phase1 added ( obj count = 1 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 : security association payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 : - proposal #1 payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 : -- transform #1 payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 : key exchange payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 : nonce payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 : identification payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local supports nat-t ( draft v00 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local supports nat-t ( draft v01 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local supports nat-t ( draft v02 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local supports nat-t ( draft v03 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local supports nat-t ( rfc ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local supports DPDv1 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local is SHREW SOFT compatible 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local is NETSCREEN compatible 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local is SIDEWINDER compatible 10/12/22 17:22:18 : vendor id payload 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : local is CISCO UNITY compatible 10/12/22 17:22:18 = : cookies c1a8b31ac860995d:0000000000000000 10/12/22 17:22:18 = : message 00000000 10/12/22 17:22:18 - : send IKE packet 217.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 - 206.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 ( 484 bytes ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 DB : phase1 resend event scheduled ( ref count = 2 ) 10/12/22 17:22:18 ii : opened tap device tap0 10/12/22 17:22:28 - : resend 1 phase1 packet(s) 217.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 - 206.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 10/12/22 17:22:38 - : resend 1 phase1 packet(s) 217.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 - 206.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 10/12/22 17:22:48 - : resend 1 phase1 packet(s) 217.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 - 206.xxx.xxx.xxx:500 10/12/22 17:22:58 ii : resend limit exceeded for phase1 exchange 10/12/22 17:22:58 ii : phase1 removal before expire time 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : phase1 deleted ( obj count = 0 ) 10/12/22 17:22:58 ii : closed tap device tap0 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : tunnel stats event canceled ( ref count = 1 ) 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : removing tunnel config references 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : removing tunnel phase2 references 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : removing tunnel phase1 references 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : tunnel deleted ( obj count = 0 ) 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : removing all peer tunnel refrences 10/12/22 17:22:58 DB : peer deleted ( obj count = 0 ) 10/12/22 17:22:58 ii : ipc client process thread exit ...

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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• MySQL port 3306 blocked in csf yet can still telnet to port 3306 from external host

  - by Neek

  We have a Centos 6 VPS that was recently migrated to a new machine within the same web hosting company. It's running WHM/cPanel and has csf/lfd installed. csf is set up with mostly vanilla config. I'm no iptables expert, csf has not let me down before. If a port isn't in the TCP_IN list, it should be blocked on the firewall by iptables. My problem is that I can telnet to port 3306 from an external host, yet I think iptables ought to be blocking 3306 because of csf's rules. We are now failing a security check because of this open port. (this output is obfuscated to protect the innocent: www.ourhost.com is the host with the firewall problem) [root@nickfenwick log]# telnet www.ourhost.com 3306 Trying 158.255.45.107... Connected to www.ourhost.com. Escape character is '^]'. HHost 'nickfenwick.com' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL serverConnection closed by foreign host. So the connection is established, and MySQL refuses the connection due to its configuration. I need the network connection to be refused at the firewall level, before it reaches MySQL. Using WHM's csf web UI I can see 'Firewall Configuration' includes a fairly sensible TCP_IN line: TCP_IN: 20,21,22,25,53,80,110,143,222,443,465,587,993,995,2077,2078,2082,2083,2086,2087,2095,2096,8080 (lets ignore that I could trim that a little for now, my concern is that 3306 is not listed in that list) When csf is restarted it logs the usual slew of output as it sets up iptables rules, for example what looks like it blocking all traffic and then allowing specific ports like SSH on 22: [cut] DROP all opt -- in * out * 0.0.0.0/0 -> 0.0.0.0/0 [cut] ACCEPT tcp opt -- in !lo out * 0.0.0.0/0 -> 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:22 [cut] I can see that iptables is running, service iptables status returns a long list of firewall rules. Here is my Chain INPUT section from service iptables status, hopefully that's enough to show how the firewall is configured. Table: filter Chain INPUT (policy DROP) num target prot opt source destination 1 acctboth all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 2 ACCEPT tcp -- 217.112.88.10 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:53 3 ACCEPT udp -- 217.112.88.10 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:53 4 ACCEPT tcp -- 217.112.88.10 0.0.0.0/0 tcp spt:53 5 ACCEPT udp -- 217.112.88.10 0.0.0.0/0 udp spt:53 6 ACCEPT tcp -- 8.8.4.4 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:53 7 ACCEPT udp -- 8.8.4.4 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:53 8 ACCEPT tcp -- 8.8.4.4 0.0.0.0/0 tcp spt:53 9 ACCEPT udp -- 8.8.4.4 0.0.0.0/0 udp spt:53 10 ACCEPT tcp -- 8.8.8.8 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:53 11 ACCEPT udp -- 8.8.8.8 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:53 12 ACCEPT tcp -- 8.8.8.8 0.0.0.0/0 tcp spt:53 13 ACCEPT udp -- 8.8.8.8 0.0.0.0/0 udp spt:53 14 LOCALINPUT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 15 ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 16 INVALID tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 17 ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED 18 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:20 19 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:21 20 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:22 21 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:25 22 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:53 23 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:80 24 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:110 25 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:143 26 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:222 27 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:443 28 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:465 29 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:587 30 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:993 31 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:995 32 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2077 33 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2078 34 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2082 35 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2083 36 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2086 37 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2087 38 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2095 39 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:2096 40 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW tcp dpt:8080 41 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW udp dpt:20 42 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW udp dpt:21 43 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW udp dpt:53 44 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW udp dpt:222 45 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state NEW udp dpt:8080 46 ACCEPT icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp type 8 47 ACCEPT icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp type 0 48 ACCEPT icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp type 11 49 ACCEPT icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp type 3 50 LOGDROPIN all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 What's the next thing to check?

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• Disaster, or Migration?

  - by Rob Farley

  This post is in two parts – technical and personal. And I should point out that it’s prompted in part by this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen Kinsel. First, the technical: I’ve had a few conversations with people recently about migration – moving a SQL Server database from one box to another (sometimes, but not primarily, involving an upgrade). One question that tends to come up is that of downtime. Obviously there will be some period of time between the old server being available and the new one. The way that most people seem to think of migration is this: Build a new server. Stop people from using the old server. Take a backup of the old server Restore it on the new server. Reconfigure the client applications (or alternatively, configure the new server to use the same address as the old) Make the new server online. There are other things involved, such as testing, of course. But this is essentially the process that people tell me they’re planning to follow. The bit that I want to look at today (as you’ve probably guessed from my title) is the “backup and restore” section. If a SQL database is using the Simple Recovery Model, then the only restore option is the last database backup. This backup could be full or differential. The transaction log never gets backed up in the Simple Recovery Model. Instead, it truncates regularly to stay small. One that’s using the Full Recovery Model (or Bulk-Logged) won’t truncate its log – the log must be backed up regularly. This provides the benefit of having a lot more option available for restores. It’s a requirement for most systems of High Availability, because if you’re making sure that a spare box is up-and-running, ready to take over, then you have to be interested in the logs that are happening on the current box, rather than truncating them all the time. A High Availability system such as Mirroring, Replication or Log Shipping will initialise the spare machine by restoring a full database backup (and maybe a differential backup if available), and then any subsequent log backups. Once the secondary copy is close, transactions can be applied to keep the two in sync. The main aspect of any High Availability system is to have a redundant system that is ready to take over. So the similarity for migration should be obvious. If you need to move a database from one box to another, then introducing a High Availability mechanism can help. By turning on the Full Recovery Model and then taking a backup (so that the now-interesting logs have some context), logs start being kept, and are therefore available for getting the new box ready (even if it’s an upgraded version). When the migration is ready to occur, a failover can be done, letting the new server take over the responsibility of the old, just as if a disaster had happened. Except that this is a planned failover, not a disaster at all. There’s a fine line between a disaster and a migration. Failovers can be useful in patching, upgrading, maintenance, and more. Hopefully, even an unexpected disaster can be seen as just another failover, and there can be an opportunity there – perhaps to get some work done on the principal server to increase robustness. And if I’ve just set up a High Availability system for even the simplest of databases, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. :) So now the personal: It’s been an interesting time recently... June has been somewhat odd. A court case with which I was involved got resolved (through mediation). I can’t go into details, but my lawyers tell me that I’m allowed to say how I feel about it. The answer is ‘lousy’. I don’t regret pursuing it as long as I did – but in the end I had to make a decision regarding the commerciality of letting it continue, and I’m going to look forward to the days when the kind of money I spent on my lawyers is small change. Mind you, if I had a similar situation with an employer, I’d do the same again, but that doesn’t really stop me feeling frustrated about it. The following day I had to fly to country Victoria to see my grandmother, who wasn’t expected to last the weekend. She’s still around a week later as I write this, but her 92-year-old body has basically given up on her. She’s been a Christian all her life, and is looking forward to eternity. We’ll all miss her though, and it’s hard to see my family grieving. Then on Tuesday, I was driving back to the airport with my family to come home, when something really bizarre happened. We were travelling down the freeway, just pulled out to go past a truck (farm-truck sized, not a semi-trailer), when a car-sized mass of metal fell off it. It was something like an industrial air-conditioner, but from where I was sitting, it was just a mass of spinning metal, like something out of a movie (one friend described it as “holidays by Michael Bay”). Somehow, and I’m really don’t know how, the part of it nearest us bounced high enough to clear the car, and there wasn’t even a scratch. We pulled over the check, and I was just thanking God that we’d changed lanes when we had, and that we remained unharmed. I had all kinds of thoughts about what could’ve happened if we’d had something that size land on the windscreen... All this has drilled home that while I feel that I haven’t provided as well for the family as I could’ve done (like by pursuing an expensive legal case), I shouldn’t even consider that I have proper control over things. I get to live life, and make decisions based on what I feel is right at the time. But I’m not going to get everything right, and there will be things that feel like disasters, some which could’ve been in my control and some which are very much beyond my control. The case feels like something I could’ve pursued differently, a disaster that could’ve been avoided in some way. Gran dying is lousy of course. An accident on the freeway would have been awful. I need to recognise that the worst disasters are ones that I can’t affect, and that I need to look at things in context – perhaps seeing everything that happens as a migration instead. Life is never the same from one day to the next. Every event has a before and an after – sometimes it’s clearly positive, sometimes it’s not. I remember good events in my life (such as my wedding), and bad (such as the loss of my father when I was ten, or the back injury I had eight years ago). I’m not suggesting that I know how to view everything from the “God works all things for good” perspective, but I am trying to look at last week as a migration of sorts. Those things are behind me now, and the future is in God’s hands. Hopefully I’ve learned things, and will be able to live accordingly. I’ve come through this time now, and even though I’ll miss Gran, I’ll see her again one day, and the future is bright.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives Part 2 - Jumpstarting your IAM program with R2

  - by Tanu Sood

  Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t a new concept. Over the past decade, companies have begun to address identity management through a variety of solutions that have primarily focused on provisioning. . The new age workforce is converging at a rapid pace with ever increasing demand to use diverse portfolio of applications and systems to interact and interface with their peers in the industry and customers alike. Oracle has taken a significant leap with their release of Identity and Access Management 11gR2 towards enabling this global workforce to conduct their business in a secure, efficient and effective manner. As companies deal with IAM business drivers, it becomes immediately apparent that holistic, rather than piecemeal, approaches better address their needs. When planning an enterprise-wide IAM solution, the first step is to create a common framework that serves as the foundation on which to build the cost, compliance and business process efficiencies. As a leading industry practice, IAM should be established on a foundation of accurate data for identity management, making this data available in a uniform manner to downstream applications and processes. Mature organizations are looking beyond IAM’s basic benefits to harness more advanced capabilities in user lifecycle management. For any organization looking to embark on an IAM initiative, consider the following use cases in managing and administering user access. Expanding the Enterprise Provisioning Footprint Almost all organizations have some helpdesk resources tied up in handling access requests from users, a distraction from their core job of handling problem tickets. This dependency has mushroomed from the traditional acceptance of provisioning solutions integrating and addressing only a portion of applications in the heterogeneous landscape Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11gR2 solves this problem by offering integration with third party ticketing systems as “disconnected applications”. It allows for the existing business processes to be seamlessly integrated into the system and tracked throughout its lifecycle. With minimal effort and analysis, an organization can begin integrating OIM with groups or applications that are involved with manually intensive access provisioning and de-provisioning activities. This aspect of OIM allows organizations to on-board applications and associated business processes quickly using out of box templates and frameworks. This is especially important for organizations looking to fold in users and resources from mergers and acquisitions. Simplifying Access Requests Organizations looking to implement access request solutions often find it challenging to get their users to accept and adopt the new processes.. So, how do we improve the user experience, make it intuitive and personalized and yet simplify the user access process? With R2, OIM helps organizations alleviate the challenge by placing the most used functionality front and centre in the new user request interface. Roles, application accounts, and entitlements can all be found in the same interface as catalog items, giving business users a single location to go to whenever they need to initiate, approve or track a request. Furthermore, if a particular item is not relevant to a user’s job function or area inside the organization, it can be hidden so as to not overwhelm or confuse the user with superfluous options. The ability to customize the user interface to suit your needs helps in exercising the business rules effectively and avoiding access proliferation within the organization. Saving Time with Templates A typical use case that is most beneficial to business users is flexibility to place, edit, and withdraw requests based on changing circumstances and business needs. With OIM R2, multiple catalog items can now be added and removed from the shopping cart, an ecommerce paradigm that many users are already familiar with. This feature can be especially useful when setting up a large number of new employees or granting existing department or group access to a newly integrated application. Additionally, users can create their own shopping cart templates in order to complete subsequent requests more quickly. This feature saves the user from having to search for and select items all over again if a request is similar to a previous one. Advanced Delegated Administration A key feature of any provisioning solution should be to empower each business unit in managing their own access requests. By bringing administration closer to the user, you improve user productivity, enable efficiency and alleviate the administration overhead. To do so requires a federated services model so that the business units capable of shouldering the onus of user life cycle management of their business users can be enabled to do so. OIM 11gR2 offers advanced administrative options for creating, managing and controlling business logic and workflows through easy to use administrative interface and tools that can be exposed to delegated business administrators. For example, these business administrators can establish or modify how certain requests and operations should be handled within their business unit based on a number of attributes ranging from the type of request or the risk level of the individual items requested. Closed-Loop Remediation Security continues to be a major concern for most organizations. Identity management solutions bolster security by ensuring only the right users have the right access to the right resources. To prevent unauthorized access and where it already exists, the ability to detect and remediate it, are key requirements of an enterprise-grade proven solution. But the challenge with most solutions today is that some of this information still exists in silos. And when changes are made to systems directly, not all information is captured. With R2, oracle is offering a comprehensive Identity Governance solution that our customer organizations are leveraging for closed loop remediation that allows for an automated way for administrators to revoke unauthorized access. The change is automatically captured and the action noted for continued management. Conclusion While implementing provisioning solutions, it is important to keep the near term and the long term goals in mind. The provisioning solution should always be a part of a larger security and identity management program but with the ability to seamlessly integrate not only with the company’s infrastructure but also have the ability to leverage the information, business models compiled and used by the other identity management solutions. This allows organizations to reduce the cost of ownership, close security gaps and leverage the existing infrastructure. And having done so a multiple clients’ sites, this is the approach we recommend. In our next post, we will take a journey through our experiences of advising clients looking to upgrade to R2 from a previous version or migrating from a different solution. Meet the Writers:   Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Software: Launching League of Legends spectator mode from Command Line (Mac)

  - by Alex Popov

  Background: tl;dr at the end League of Legends has a spectator mode, in which you can watch someone else's game (essentially a replay) with a 3 minute delay. Popular LoL website OP.GG has figured out a clever way of hosting these spectator games on their own servers, thereby making them replayable, as opposed to only being available while the game is on (as Riot does it). If you request a replay from OP.GG, it sends a batch file which looks for where the League is situated and then the magic happens: @start "" "League of Legends.exe" "8394" "LoLLauncher.exe" "" "spectator fspectate.op.gg:4081 tjJbtRLQ/HMV7HuAxWV0XsXoRB4OmFBr 1391881421 NA1" This works fine on Windows. I'm trying to get it to work on Mac (which has an official client). First I tried running the same command by hand, (split for convenience) /Applications/ ... /LeagueOfLegends.app/ ... /LeagueofLegends 8393 LoLLauncher \ /Applications/ ... /LolClient spectator fspectate.op.gg:4081 tjJbtRLQ/HMV7HuAxWV0XsXoRB4OmFBr 1391881421 NA1 Running this, however, just starts the LoLLauncher, which closes all the active League processes. The exactly same thing happens if I just call /Applications/ ... /LeagueOfLegends.app/ ... /LeagueofLegends Next I tried seeing what actually happens when Spectator mode is initiated so I ran $ ps -axf | grep -i lol which showed UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD 503 3085 1 0 Wed02pm ?? 0:00.00 (LolClient) 503 24607 1 0 9:19am ?? 0:00.98 /Applications/League of Legends.app/Contents/LOL/RADS/system/UserKernel.app/Contents/MacOS/UserKernel updateandrun lol_launcher LoLLauncher.app 503 24610 24607 0 9:19am ?? 1:08.76 /Applications/League of Legends.app/Contents/LoL/RADS/projects/lol_launcher/releases/0.0.0.122/deploy/LoLLauncher.app/Contents/MacOS/LoLLauncher 503 24611 24610 0 9:19am ?? 1:23.02 /Applications/League of Legends.app/Contents/LoL/RADS/projects/lol_air_client/releases/0.0.0.127/deploy/bin/LolClient -runtime .\ -nodebug META-INF\AIR\application.xml .\ -- 8393 503 24927 24610 0 9:44am ?? 0:03.37 /Applications/League of Legends.app/Contents/LoL/RADS/solutions/lol_game_client_sln/releases/0.0.0.117/deploy/LeagueOfLegends.app/Contents/MacOS/LeagueofLegends 8394 LoLLauncher /Applications/League of Legends.app/Contents/LoL/RADS/projects/lol_air_client/releases/0.0.0.127/deploy/bin/LolClient spectator 216.133.234.17:8088 Yn1oMX/n3LpXNebibzUa1i3Z+s2HV0ul 1400781241 NA1 Of Interest: there is (LolClient) which I cannot kill by it's PID. UserKernel updateandrun lol_launcher LoLLauncher.app is launched first. LoLLauncher is launched by the UserKernel (as we can see from the PPID) The very long command (PID: 24927) is how Spectator mode is launched, and is also launched by UserKernel. Spectator mode is launched in exactly the same way that the OP.GG .bat wanted to, with the only difference that Spectator mode connects to Riot instead of OP.GG's spectate server. I tried attaching GDB to the LolClient, but I couldn't get anything meaningful from it since it's an Adobe AIR application (and I've never used GDB with code other than mine own). Next I ran dtruss -a -b 100m -f -p $PID on everything I could think of: the LolClient, the LolLauncher and the UserKernel and skimmed the half a million lines produced. I found stuff like the GET request used to get the information of the game to spectate, but I could not see any launch of the equivalent of League of Legends.exe with spectator options. Finally, I ran lsof | grep -i lol to see if anything else was opened in the process, but didn't find anything that seemed appropriate. Open were UserKernel, LolLauncher, LolClient, Adobe AIR, LeagueofLegends and then Bugsplat, all of which are expected. None of this seemed especially relevant to figuring out how LeagueofLegends was opened into spectator mode. It obviously can be done, since Spectator mode is accessible from within the client. It seems likely that it can be done from the CLI, since Windows can do it and the clients are supposed to equals. Unless I'm missing something in the difference between how UNIX and Windows handle CLI application launches. My question is if there are any other things I can try to figure out how to launch Spectator mode myself. tl;dr: Trying to get into spectator mode from the CLI. It's possible on Windows (see first code block) but it just restarts League on Mac. What else can I try to find what call is made, and how to reproduce it? PS: Please let me know how I can improve this question or its formatting, I'd love to use StackOverflow/SuperUser, but as the guys said on the podcast this week (Ep. 59) it's very intimidating. Sorry for posting this on StackOverflow the first time :(

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• Agilist, Heal Thyself!

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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• Bad disks in ancient server

  - by Joel Coel

  I have a 1998-era Netware 3.12 server that runs everything on our campus: general ledger, purchasing, payroll, student information, grades, you name it. The server has an Adaptec RAID controller with two volumes: RAID 1, 2 17GB scsi disks, Seagate ST318417W RAID 5, 3 4GB scsi disks, 2 Seagate ST34573W and 1 ST34572W. We are currently in the early stages of a project to replace this system, but you don't just jump into a new system like that and so I need to keep this server running until at least November 2011. This week we had not one but two hard drives fail. Thankfully they are from different volumes and we're able to keep running for the moment, but given the close nature of these failures I have serious doubts that I'll be able to avoid catastrophic failure from this server through the November target as is without restoring the RAID redundancy — it'll only take one more drive failure anywhere and I'm completely hosed. We are fortunate enough to have exact match "spares" lying around for both drives, but the spares are in unknown condition. I tried swapping just them in, but the RAID controller isn't smart enough to handle this and it renders the system unbootable. As for the RAID controller itself, there is utility I can get into during POST via a Ctrl-A shortcut, but I can't do much useful from there. To actually manage volumes I must first boot in to Netware, at which point I can use CI/O Array Management Software Version 2.0 to actually look at volume information. I suspect that the normal way to manage things is to boot from a special floppy with the controller software on it, but that floppy is long gone. Going through the options in the RAID software, I think the only supported way to replace a disk in an existing RAID volume is to physically add the disk, boot up and configure it as a "spare" for a volume, force the volume to use the spare to replace an existing down disk (and at this point I'm only guessing) so that the down disk becomes the spare, repair the volume, remove the spare from the volume, and then shut down and remove the disk. Then start all over for the other failed disk. All this amounts to a lot of downtime, assuming I can even make it work and that my spares are any good. As for finding reliable spares, I have no clue where to even begin looking to find a new 4GB scsi drive, or even which exact scsi system I'm looking for, as it's gone through a few different iterations over time. Another option is to migrate this to a virtual machine (hyper-v), but all previous attempts we've made in this area have failed to get very far. When this machine was installed I was just graduating from high school, and so it requires lower level knowledge of netware and dos than I ever developed, or if I did have since forgotten (I'm not exactly a dos neophyte, either). Part of my problem is this is a high-use server, and taking it down for a few days to figure things out isn't gonna fly very well. As for the question, I'm looking for anything that might be helpful in this situation: a recommendation on a place to find good spares from this era, personal experience repairing RAID volumes using a similar controller or building a hyper-v vm from an old netware server, a line on a floppy with better software for the RAID controller, recommendation on a good Novell consultant in Nebraska that would be able to put things right, a whole other option I haven't considered yet, etc. Update: For backups, we have good (recently verified via restore) backups of the data only -- nothing for the software that actually runs things. Update 2: Just a progress report that I currently have a working Netware 3.12 install in VMWare Virtual Server 2.0, thanks largely to the guide I found here: http://cerbulescubogdan.blogspot.com/2010/11/novell-netware-312-on-vmware.html The next steps are preparing empty netware volumes to match the additional volumes on my existing server, taking a dump of everything on the C:\ drive and netware volumes on my existing server, and figuring out from that information what modules need added to netware, installing my licenses (we do still have that disk, if it's any good), and moving data over. I have approval to bring the server down for a week after the first of the year (sadly not before), so, aside from creating empty volumes, the rest of the work will have to wait until then. Final Update (Jan 5, 2011): I was able to get spares working in both raid arrays without data loss this week. Both are now listed by the controller as "FAULT TOLLERANT" (yay!). I was also able to build on the progress from my last update and now have a functional "spare" server in VMWare Server 2.0. The spare can run and use our erp software, but I can't put it into production because I can't (yet) print from that box (and I have no idea why). Even so, this VM will do in a pinch if I have no other choice, and between it and the repaired RAID arrays I'm comfortable pushing on until I can junk the machine in November.

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• Unable to connect to Wireless after installing Ubuntu 12.10

  - by Moulik

  I am using Asus U56E laptop and after installing Ubuntu 12.10 alongside Windows 8, I am unable to connect to the Wireless. I have been trying to solve this problem since two weeks and couldn't solve it. Please help. Any answer would be appreciated. Here are some command-line results. lspci -v | grep -iA 7 network ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lspci -v | grep -iA 7 network 02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N + WiMAX 6150 (rev 67) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N + WiMAX 6150 BGN Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 52 Memory at de800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi Kernel modules: iwlwifi lsmod | grep iwlwifi ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi iwlwifi 386826 0 mac80211 539908 1 iwlwifi cfg80211 206566 2 iwlwifi,mac80211 ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep iwlwifi [ 57.846261] iwlwifi: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, in-tree: [ 57.846264] iwlwifi: Copyright(c) 2003-2012 Intel Corporation [ 57.846336] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >pci_resource_len = 0x00002000 [ 57.846338] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >pci_resource_base = ffffc90000c7c000 [ 57.846341] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >HW Revision ID = 0x67 [ 57.846438] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >irq 52 for MSI/MSI-X [ 59.558335] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >loaded firmware version 41.28.5.1 build 33926 [ 59.558514] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEBUG disabled [ 59.558516] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEBUGFS enabled [ 59.558517] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEVICE_TRACING enabled [ 59.558519] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEVICE_TESTMODE enabled [ 59.558520] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >CONFIG_IWLWIFI_P2P disabled [ 59.558522] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >Detected Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N + WiMAX 6150 BGN, REV=0x84 [ 59.558583] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 59.569083] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >device EEPROM VER=0x557, CALIB=0x6 [ 59.569085] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >Device SKU: 0x150 [ 59.569087] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >Valid Tx ant: 0x1, Valid Rx ant: 0x3 [ 59.569100] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 0 802.11a channels [ 70.208469] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 70.208648] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >Radio type=0x1-0x2-0x0 [ 70.366319] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 70.366470] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: >Radio type=0x1-0x2-0x0 sudo lshw -c network ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lshw -c network *-network description: Wireless interface product: Centrino Wireless-N + WiMAX 6150 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 67 serial: 40:25:c2:84:99:c4 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.5.0-17-generic firmware=41.28.5.1 build 33926 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:52 memory:de800000-de801fff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: c0 serial: 54:04:a6:2b:6a:ef capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1c driverversion=1.0.1.0-NAPI latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:54 memory:dd400000-dd43ffff ioport:a000(size=128) ifconfig ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 54:04:a6:2b:6a:ef 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) 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:176 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:176 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:14368 (14.3 KB) TX bytes:14368 (14.3 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 40:25:c2:84:99:c4 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) iwconfig ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ iwconfig eth0 no wireless extensions. lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=15 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off iwlist scan ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ iwlist scan eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. lo Interface doesn't support scanning. wlan0 No scan results nm-tool ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ nm-tool NetworkManager Tool State: disconnected - Device: eth0 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Type: Wired Driver: atl1c State: unavailable Default: no HW Address: 54:04:A6:2B:6A:EF Capabilities: Carrier Detect: yes Wired Properties Carrier: off - Device: wlan0 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Type: 802.11 WiFi Driver: iwlwifi State: disconnected Default: no HW Address: 40:25:C2:84:99:C4 Capabilities: Wireless Properties WEP Encryption: yes WPA Encryption: yes WPA2 Encryption: yes Wireless Access Points hypeness2: Infra, 00:21:29:DA:08:4F, Freq 2462 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 42 WPA love: Infra, 68:7F:74:17:02:66, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 19 WPA WPA2 DIRECT-MwSCX-3400Pamela: Infra, 02:15:99:A3:3F:AC, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 22 WPA2 router: Infra, 1C:AF:F7:D6:76:F3, Freq 2417 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 20 WPA2 wing: Infra, E8:40:F2:34:E4:F7, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 20 WPA WPA2 132LINKSYS: Infra, 00:1A:70:80:1F:E9, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 57 WEP VMITTAL: Infra, E0:46:9A:3C:F0:C4, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 27 WEP HP-Print-10-LaserJet 1025: Infra, 7C:E9:D3:7E:F8:10, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 59 ACNBB: Infra, 00:26:75:22:A6:2F, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 20 SATKAIVAL: Infra, 00:18:E7:CE:69:A6, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 69 WPA WPA2 hypeness: Infra, B8:E6:25:24:C3:B1, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 54 WPA WPA2 CSNetwork: Infra, BC:14:01:58:C5:88, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 25 WPA WPA2 tharma: Infra, BC:14:01:E2:06:18, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 15 WPA WPA2 Active2.4: Infra, 10:6F:3F:0E:F3:8E, Freq 2462 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 17 WPA WPA2 ACNBB: Infra, 00:26:75:58:4E:7A, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 85 KO: Infra, BC:14:01:2E:AF:A8, Freq 2452 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 22 WPA WPA2 FEAR: Infra, 00:18:4D:C0:BC:58, Freq 2462 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 17 WPA Pamela: Infra, BC:14:01:52:F6:F8, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 24 WPA WPA2 bvrk2: Infra, 78:CD:8E:7B:3C:79, Freq 2457 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 19 WPA WPA2 BELL030: Infra, D8:6C:E9:17:AF:09, Freq 2462 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 22 WPA2 Desai: Infra, 00:1D:7E:52:FB:C5, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 14 WEP Sritharan: Infra, BC:14:01:E5:59:78, Freq 2462 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 19 WPA WPA2 PFN: Infra, 00:13:10:8B:CF:45, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 19 WEP rfkill list all ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ rfkill list all 0: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: asus-wimax: WiMAX Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no so these are some more results sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 echo "blacklist asus_wmi" | sudo tee -a /etcmodprobe.d/blacklist.conf ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ echo "blacklist asus_wmi" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf blacklist asus_wmi echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 sudo modprobe -rfv iwlwifi ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe -rfv iwlwifi rmmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-17-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwlwifi.ko rmmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-17-generic/kernel/net/mac80211/mac80211.ko rmmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-17-generic/kernel/net/wireless/cfg80211.ko sudo modprobe -v iwlwifi ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo modprobe -v iwlwifi insmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-17-generic/kernel/net/wireless/cfg80211.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-17-generic/kernel/net/mac80211/mac80211.ko insmod /lib/modules/3.5.0-17-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwlwifi.ko 11n_disable=1

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3&ndash;Clrizr)

  - by ToString(theory);

  Welcome back!  In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions.  I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color.  Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that.  However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality!  So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it.  I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors.  However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics.  Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload.  The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t.  Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users.  So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades.  Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1.  Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file.  After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables…  Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;...   In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent.  Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things…  On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness.  This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name.  So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel.  You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces.  For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part.  These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input.  However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it.  Black or white depending on light or dark color.  Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story.  You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red.  So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it!  I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works.  Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

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• I Know What I Did This Summer: Put Down Trex Decking

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re wondering why I would bore everyone with my pictures and frequent status updates/tweets from the past week – it’s so I could document the process of refurbishing my deck, or what some would call a porch. When we go to take a vacation, buy a car, do anything – we also read personal blogs to get the real story. So, if you’re curious about what it takes to tackle this sort of project, read on. Skills/Equipment/Manpower We Possessed I took the old decking out by myself. I’m about 230 lbs, more than 6′ tall, and I’m pretty healthy. This took about 8 hours over two afternoons. Three of us put the deck back together. My wife has two engineering degrees. Her father also has two engineering degrees. Lots of brainpower available here. Also, her dad ran the public works department for a country for more than 20 years – so lots and lots of practical experience on hand. We had a compound mitre saw, a skilsaw, 2-3 crowbars, a framing hammer, 3 cordless drills, a corded drill, lots of sawhorses, a power sander, an angle grinder, a 10×10 Coleman canopy tent, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, outdoor speakers and lots of iTunes playlists, plenty of water and cold beer. Why We Did This Our deck was relatively young – it was built in 2005. However, the pressure treated boards must not have been adequately maintained before we bought the house. I had powerwashed the deck every other year and had it stained a few times. The boards just rotted. We’re going to be in the house for a long time, and we wanted something that would look nice and require little maintenance. More bad deck boards The deck boards were in bad shape Things We Learned The two most important things: The hidden fasteners have to be put in JUST right. Wedge them into the grooved board, then bend down the bit that is screwed down. We didn’t do this on the first board and couldn’t get the second board to fit nearly close enough. Watching the official TREX YouTube video helped immensely, and we should have watched that first. When pre-drilling holes for the boards that need screwed down – DO NOT pre-drill through the underlying framing wood. ONLY pre-drill through the TREX itself. The screw won’t seat in the board properly. Instead of sitting down flush with the board, it will stop at the top of the board and just spin. I had to call the the place that sold me the screws to find this out. So about a third of our screws look like crap. If it doesn’t look or feel right – stop everything and pick up your computer or your phone. It’s not right, and it will be much easier to stop and find out why. We didn’t do this, and now I’m going to see every screw that’s not flush with the boards and get upset. Oh well. The Process How much time did it take? Well I spent about 8 hours taking the deck apart. And then the 3 of use spent 8 hours the first day, 10 hours the second day, 8 hours the third, and another 6 hours on the fourth day. That’s like 104 man-hours. We supposedly saved four or five thousand dollars in labor, but don’t do the math here or you might get a bit upset. The main thing is that we got what we wanted, and there won’t be any surprises later. Now for some pictures… This 6”+ pry bar made the destruction of the old deck much easier Most of the joists, once exposed, were OK. This joist wasn’t sitting on ANYTHING before. We think a lazy gas person cut the board to sneak a gas line in. Awesome… These monster lag bolts had to be accounted for when putting in the additional framing The border pattern Sheri wanted to put in required a lot more framing. These were the first boards to go down – we screwed them in as there was no way to attach clips I sat, kicked in the boards, and then drilled these clips in – but my wife was able to go MUCH faster by using her hands to lock the boards in and drill on her knees. I liked locking the board in with my feet when they needed to be ‘encouraged’ to go straight. The first board took FOREVER to go in, but then when we got rolling, we were able to put in a 20′ board in less than 10 minutes. This was end of construction day #2 – we got much further than we thought we would. Ah, the dreaded last 10% – what to do here? Remember those ‘floating’ stringers? Yeah, we fixed that up a bit, too. My wife used a website (and her brain) to calculate exactly how to cut the stringers to give us the rise/run we needed with the proper clearance and all that jazz. The stairs with stringers and toe kicks – this was worth the effort It started raining on us as I screwed down the steps – this we managed to get our shade tent up on the deck to protect us from the rain too The stairs, finished Finished, mostly Good corner shot The top of the stairs Stairs, looking down Celebratory beer In Summary There are a few things we’re not happy with. I think we can fix them up – but later. I have a few things left to finish, rewire the lighting, get the gas grille put back in, and rehang some screen doors. I was expecting this to be a lot worse than it was. If I didn’t have the help, I would have never done it myself. But I’m glad that I did have that help and did do that project. It’s not often you get to spend that kind of qualify time with family and building cool stuff.

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• Silverlight IConvertible TypeConverter

  - by codingbloke

  I recently answered the following question on stackoverflow:  Silverlight 3 custom control: only ‘int’ as numeric type for a property? [e.g. long or int64 seems to break] I quickly knocked up the class ConvertibleTypeConverter<T> that I posted in the question (listed later here as well). Afterward I fully expected to find that of the usual clever “bods who blog” to have covered this probably with a better solution than I.  So far though I’ve not found one so I thought I’d blog it myself. The Problem Here is a classic gotcha I’ve seen asked more than once on stackoverflow :- public class MyClass {     public float SomeValue { get; set; } } <local:MyClass SomeValue="45.15" /> This fails with the error  “Failed to create a 'System.Single' from the text '45.15'”  and results in much premature hair loss.  Fortunately this is SL4, in SL3 the error message is almost meaningless.  So what gives, how can it be that this fails when we can see other very similar values parsing happily all over the place? It comes down the fact that the Xaml parser only handles a few of the primitive data types namely: bool, int, string and double.  Since the parser has no idea how to convert a string to a float we get the above error. The Solution The sensible solution is “use double not float” but lets not dwell on that, there has to be occasions where such an answer isn’t acceptable. In order to achieve parsing of other types we need an implementation of TypeConverter for the type of the property and then we need to use the TypeConverterAttribute to decorate the property .  As an example the Silverlight SDK provides one for DateTime the DateTimeTypeConverter (yes I know DateTime isn’t really a primitive). The following class will parse in Xaml:- public class MyClass {     [TypeConverter(typeof(DateTimeTypeConverter))]     public DateTime SomeValue {get; set; } } So far though we would need to create a TypeConverter for each primitive type we are using, what if I had the following mad class to support in Xaml:- public class StrangePrimitives {     public Boolean BooleanProp { get; set; }     public Byte ByteProp { get; set; }     public Char CharProp { get; set; }     public DateTime DateTimeProp { get; set; }     public Decimal DecimalProp { get; set; }     public Double DoubleProp { get; set; }     public Int16 Int16Prop { get; set; }     public Int32 Int32Prop { get; set; }     public Int64 Int64Prop { get; set; }     public SByte SByteProp { get; set; }     public Single SingleProp { get; set; }     public String StringProp { get; set; }     public UInt16 UInt16Prop { get; set; }     public UInt32 UInt32Prop { get; set; }     public UInt64 UInt64Prop { get; set; } } Then I want to fill an instance of StrangePrimitives with the following Xaml which of course fails. <local:StrangePrimitives x:Key="MyStrangePrimitives"                          BooleanProp="True"                          ByteProp="156"                          CharProp="A"                          DateTimeProp="06 Jun 2010"                          DecimalProp="123.56"                          DoubleProp="8372.937803"                          Int16Prop="16532"                          Int32Prop="73738248"                          Int64Prop="12345678909298"                          SByteProp="-123"                          SingleProp="39.0"                          StringProp="Hello, World!"                          UInt16Prop="40000"                          UInt32Prop="4294967295"                          UInt64Prop="18446744073709551615"      /> I got to thinking, though, one thing all these primitive types have in common is that they all implement IConvertible so it should be possible to write just one converter to handle them all.  Here it is:- The ConvertibleTypeConverter public class ConvertibleTypeConverter<T> : TypeConverter where T : IConvertible {     public override bool CanConvertFrom(ITypeDescriptorContext context, Type sourceType)     {         return sourceType.GetInterface("IConvertible", false) != null;     }     public override bool CanConvertTo(ITypeDescriptorContext context, Type destinationType)     {         return destinationType.GetInterface("IConvertible", false) != null;     }     public override object ConvertFrom(ITypeDescriptorContext context, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture, object value)     {         return ((IConvertible)value).ToType(typeof(T), culture);     }     public override object ConvertTo(ITypeDescriptorContext context, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture, object value, Type destinationType)     {         return ((IConvertible)value).ToType(destinationType, culture);     } } I won’t bore you with an explanation of how it works, it simply adapts one existing interface (the IConvertible) and exposes it as another (the TypeConverter).   With that in place the previous strange primitives class can be modified as:- public class StrangePrimitives {     public Boolean BooleanProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Byte>))]     public Byte ByteProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Char>))]     public Char CharProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<DateTime>))]     public DateTime DateTimeProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Decimal>))]     public Decimal DecimalProp { get; set; }     public Double DoubleProp {get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Int16>))]     public Int16 Int16Prop { get; set; }     public Int32 Int32Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Int64>))]     public Int64 Int64Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<SByte>))]     public SByte SByteProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Single>))]     public Single SingleProp { get; set; }     public String StringProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<UInt16>))]     public UInt16 UInt16Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<UInt32>))]     public UInt32 UInt32Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<UInt64>))]     public UInt64 UInt64Prop { get; set; } } This results in the previous Xaml parsing happily.  Now it seems such an obvious thing to do that one may wonder why such a class doesn’t already existing in Silverlight or at least in the SDK.   I would not be surprised if there were some very good reasons hence use the ConvertibleTypeConverter with caution.  It does seem to me to be a useful little class to have lying around in the toolbox for the odd occasion where it may be needed.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 20, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 20, 2014Popular ReleasesEdiFabric: Release 3.1: Fixed parse tree generation for the latest validation schemasCompare .NET Objects: Version 2.03.0.0: Support for System.Drawing.Font type New Option to Ignore Unknown Object TypesQuickMon: Version 3.11: This release adds some major changes to the core monitoring engine. 1. Polling overrides: Each collector entry can specify a minimum time updating is allowed for it and dependent collector entries. 2. Polling frequency sliding: Additional to polling overrides a collector entry can specify 'sliding' polling frequency if the state remains the same. This means the frequency slows down reducing overhead of polling on a stagnant resource. 3. The monitor pack has an overriding frequency. If used...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 3.7.2.3-beta2: Small beta test to determine issue with Lost Cousins facts with census with no country.AST - a tool for exploring windows kernel: Ast-0.2.20140519-win8.1x86: symbol form, supports any symbol query like dt/x command in windbg symbol form, supports loading pdb file pe form, visualizer of pe info (dos/optional header, sections, directories, import/export table)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (1.0.72.457): Apologies for the previous update! FK issue fixed and also a template data cache issue.Endomondo Export: First Release: This is the first release, it might be buggy, so I'll eventually try to improve it over time. I did it quick and dirty as I didn't have much spare time to develop it, but again it works for me. ;-) If I see people use it and there are reasonable requests I might add more stuff to it. Hope you guys like it!FileTable Services for Lightswitch: FileTable Services for Lightswitch 1.0.0: 19 MAY 2014 v.1.0.0 Initial releaseWordMat: WordMat v. 1.06: Check WordMat.blogspot.com for a complete description of new features.Visual F# Tools: Daily Builds Preview 05-16-2014: This preview is released for use under a proprietary license.Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1405.17: Add Russian translation (thanks to VSharmanov) Fix a bug that make WPP to crash if the user click on "Connect/Reload" while the Report Tab is loading. Enhance the way WPP store the password for remote computers command.MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): More Terra 1.12.9: =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to account for new format 1.2.4.1 =========== = Issues = =========== all items have not been added. Some colors for new tiles may be off. I wanted to get this out so people have a usable program.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v3.0.3: Supports .NET 4.5x, Windows Phone 8.x, Windows 8.x, Windows Azure, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS. New features include Status/Lookup, Mute APIs, and bug fixes. 100% Twitter API v1.1 coverage, Async, Portable Class Library (PCL).ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140519 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.26.0: Added access to the Release Notes during 'Check for Updates...'' Debug panels Added support for generic types members Members are grouped into 'Raw View' and 'Non-Public members' categories Implemented dedicated (array-like) view for Lists and Dictionaries http://download-codeplex.sec.s-msft.com/Download?ProjectName=csscriptnpp&DownloadId=846498ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.70.0: A lot of fixes. See history.SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.2): Changelog: Neues Icon Xup.in CnL Plugin BugfixSEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.030.008 Release 1: Fixed cube editor failing to apply color to cubes. Added to cube editor, replace cube dialog, and Build Percent dialog. Corrected for hidden asteroid ore, allowing rare ore to show when importing an asteroid, or converting a 3d model to an asteroid (still appears to be limitations on rare ore in small asteroids). Allowed ore selection to Asteroid file import. (Can copy/import and convert existing asteroid to another ore). Added progress bars to common long running operations. Fixed ...Better Robocopy GUI: Command Line GUI for Robocopy: Better Robocopy GUI had become the primary plugin in Command Line GUI built on .NET 4TFS Planning and Disaster Recovery Avoidance Guide: v1.4.BETA - TFS, DR and Azure IaaS Planning Guides: Welcome to the TFS Planning and DR Avoidance Guidance What is new? A new crisper, more compact style, which is easier to consume on multiple devices without sacrificing any content. Also included are the new TFS on Azure IaaS guide and supplementary guides. Note Capacity planning workbook and posters are included in the Everything Zip package. Quality-Bar Detail Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review ...New ProjectsBizTalk Port Info Query Tool: This tool is capable of retrieving BizTalk send and receive port information, through which can be searched.C5_StyleCopped: The C5 project while an excellent set of collections suffers from being very non StyleCop compliant.Channel 9 RSS Reader (Universal / WinPhone 8): Channel 9 RSS Reader Code Share Sample- A simple RSS reader app for the Channel 9 RSS feed sharing code across 3 apps.CRM Web API Yelp Example: Sample Visual Studio 2013 project that provides an example of how you could use Web API and Microsoft Azure to integrate with Yelp.ERP Accounting System: ERP Accounting SystemEssIL: Essential classes written in CIL.FileTable Services for Lightswitch: Integrates SQL Server 2012 and later FileTable functionality with Lightswitch rapid application development tools. Works with ALL types of Lightswitch clients.freeasyDMS: A free and easy to use DMS for everyone. Without any cloud restrictions. All information about added Documents are stored lokaly at XML files.FreelancerCreateReport: Freelancer_CreateReportInstituto Superior de Ciencias Comerciales: esta es una pruebaMVC Blogger: Under TestingMVC Bootstrap Timepicker: ASP.NET MVC html helper for Bootstrap 3 time picker. This helper makes it easy to use a time picker with the bootstrap look 'n feel in your web site.NextGen: NextGen FrameworkPlato 2D Framework: Plato Windows Runtime App canvas oriented MVVM framework.Promotion Planner Pro: Trade Promotion Management and Analytic suitSharePoint Managed Metadata List Filter: This managed metadata list filter webpart provides the ability to filter multiple list view webparts that contain the same Managed metadata site column on the sSurfwave: A Windows Store (Windows Runtime) library that provides multi-touch tracking and normalized interpretation capabilities.Torrent Description Generator: A simple WPF application to generate a robust torrent description for movies in text or bbcode. Includes file info, thumbs, imdb/RT links and poster.Trang's Project: Qu?n lý thông tin khách hàng trong ho?t d?ng vay v?nWebSniffer: A bot written in C# to play a hangman game and intelligently make decisions about what to pick next.WorldBankBBS: BBS Package designed for use with ASCII, ANSI and PETSCII (Commodore) users. All resources are shared between differing clients. WPF Password Generator with Prism 5 and Moq (2014): This is a WPF reference implementation for developing an MVVM application that uses Prism (5) and Moq.????-????【??】????????: ??????????????,??????????????????,?????????????。?????????,????????????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????????,????,????,?????????.?????,?????!?????,?????????、??、??! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????,???????,??????。??????????,????,????,?????,????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、???????,?????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????????????????,????:????,????,????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????????? ??。??????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???、???!???????,????????????????,????????????,???! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????,????,???????、???????????,???????????,????,?????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????,?????????,??????????,????????,?????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,????????,??????????????,?????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????、?????????,?????????,????,????????,????????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????:??????、????、????、????、????、??????、??????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????、?????,????????????????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????，???????、???????????，????????、????、????、??????、????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????????????,???????????????????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、????、????、??????、????、???????,?????,?????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????、????、??????、????????,????????????,???????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????????????,?????,????,???????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、???????,?????????,???????????????,?????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????、??、???????????,??????,????????,??????????????????...????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????，?????????/?,,???????????,??????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????,????????????????????????,???????????????,?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????,????????,?????,???,???????????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????????????、??????????????,??????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,????:????,????,????,??????,?????,???????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????????,???????????,????????,?????????????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????、????、????????,????????、?????????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,?????????????。????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????、??、??、????,??????????,?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????????,???,?????,???????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????,?????, ... ????????????,????,????,?????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????、??????,????、?????、????， ?????????，?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????,??????,?????????????????????,???????????????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????、????、????、??????、???????,??????、??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????【.????.????.????.????.】??【??】:、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,????,??.??.??.??.??.??.??.???，????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????、????????、????????、????????、???????,????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????,???????,???????????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、??????、????、?????、?????!????,????????????????!????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????,??,????????。 ... ??????????????????、??????????????????... ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????！ ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????:????,????,????,???????,????????,??????:????????,?????! ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????,?????????,?????????????。?????????????,?????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,???????、???????????,????????,????,?????????,??????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,????????????,?????????????????,??????,????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????、????、????、??????、???????,??????,???????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,??,??,??,??? ?,??,,??,??,??,??,??,??,????????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,?????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????,????,????,????,???????,?????,?????.??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????,???????????.????????????,????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,??:??????,????,????,????,?????,??????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????,?????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,????(??)????????，??????，????，???，????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????,?????????????,?????????????,??????,????,????,??????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,????????,????:???????,??????,????,????,?????,?????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,??????... ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????、?????、?????、?????、?????、????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????、?????、?????、????、?????,??????????。????????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,????????????,?????、??、????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、???????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，??????????????！

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 10, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 10, 2012Popular ReleasesImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadPdfReport: PdfReport 1.4: - Added Html Footer Template. - Added a new HeaderTemplate (HtmlHeader) to simplify creating the headers of pages and groups by using HTML. See HtmlHeader/HtmlHeaderPdfReport.cs sample for more info. - Added a new sample (HtmlCellTemplate/HtmlCellTemplatePdfReport.cs) to show how to use the HtmlField template for creating the custom cell templates. - Added transparency setting to DiagonalWatermark. See ProgressReportPdfReport for more info. - Added DynamicCompile/DynamicCompilePdfReport.cs sa...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.10.0. Whats newMVC support New request pipeline Many, many bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesWe have done all we can not to break backwards compatibility, but we had to do some minor breaking changes: Removed graphicHeadlineFormat config setting from umbracoSettings.config (an old relic from the 3.x days) U4-690 DynamicNode ChildrenAsList was fixed, altering it'...MySQL Tuner for Windows: 0.3: Welcome to the third beta of MySQL Tuner for Windows! This release fixes bugs in the displaying of numbers, and a crash that occurred due to the program incorrectly closing and disposing of resources, Be warned that there will be bugs in this release, so please do not use on production or critical systems. Do post details of issues found to the issue tracker, and I will endeavour to fix them, when I can. I would love to have your feedback, and if possible your support! Requirements Microso...SharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.D3D9Client: D3D9Client R7: New release for Orbiter 2010-P1 - Added horizon/sun angle for night-lights into the configuration file (default 10deg) - Some runway lights related bugs are fixed - Added more configuration options for runway lightsFiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...MFCMAPI: October 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1036 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. 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MCEBuddy now installs ShowAnalyzer during installation 6. Added support for long description atom in iTunesFoxyXLS: FoxyXLS Releases: Source code and samplesWindow Manager: Window Manager 1.0: First releaseProDinner - ASP.NET MVC Sample (EF4.4, N-Tier, jQuery): 8: update to ASP.net MVC Awesome 3.0 udpate to EntityFramework 4.4 update to MVC 4 added dinners grid on homepageASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.0: added Grid helper added XML Documentation added textbox helper added Client Side API for AjaxList removed .SearchButton from AjaxList AjaxForm and Confirm helpers have been merged into the Form helper optimized html output for AjaxDropdown, AjaxList, Autocomplete works on MVC 3 and 4BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.7: Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. 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QuesSys: this project is about examinationsample of inheritance: this project a sample of inheritance between classes at C#SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool: Tool to test and debug the Search REST API in SharePoint 2013. Issue GET and POST search and suggestions queries. Use also against SharePoint Online. SharePoint Metro Grid: SharePoint 2010/2013 web part that displays links in Metro Tile Grid format. Just like Windows 8. Includes 215 images in 7 different sizes. 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• General Policies and Procedures for Maintaining the Value of Data Assets

  Here is a general list for policies and procedures regarding maintaining the value of data assets. Data Backup Policies and Procedures Backups are very important when dealing with data because there is always the chance of losing data due to faulty hardware or a user activity. So the need for a strategic backup system should be mandatory for all companies. This being said, in the real world some companies that I have worked for do not really have a good data backup plan. Typically when companies tend to take this kind of approach in data backups usually the data is not really recoverable.  Unfortunately when companies do not regularly test their backup plans they get a false sense of security because they think that they are covered. However, I can tell you from personal and professional experience that a backup plan/system is never fully implemented until it is regularly tested prior to the time when it actually needs to be used. Disaster Recovery Plan Expanding on Backup Policies and Procedures, a company needs to also have a disaster recovery plan in order to protect its data in case of a catastrophic disaster.  Disaster recovery plans typically encompass how to restore all of a company’s data and infrastructure back to a restored operational status.  Most Disaster recovery plans also include time estimates on how long each step of the disaster recovery plan should take to be executed.  It is important to note that disaster recovery plans are never fully implemented until they have been tested just like backup plans. Disaster recovery plans should be tested regularly so that the business can be confident in not losing any or minimal data due to a catastrophic disaster. Firewall Policies and Content Filters One way companies can protect their data is by using a firewall to separate their internal network from the outside. Firewalls allow for enabling or disabling network access as data passes through it by applying various defined restrictions. Furthermore firewalls can also be used to prevent access from the internal network to the outside by these same factors. Common Firewall Restrictions Destination/Sender IP Address Destination/Sender Host Names Domain Names Network Ports Companies can also desire to restrict what their network user’s view on the internet through things like content filters. Content filters allow a company to track what webpages a person has accessed and can also restrict user’s access based on established rules set up in the content filter. This device and/or software can block access to domains or specific URLs based on a few factors. Common Content Filter Criteria Known malicious sites Specific Page Content Page Content Theme  Anti-Virus/Mal-ware Polices Fortunately, most companies utilize antivirus programs on all computers and servers for good reason, virus have been known to do the following: Corrupt/Invalidate Data, Destroy Data, and Steal Data. Anti-Virus applications are a great way to prevent any malicious application from being able to gain access to a company’s data.  However, anti-virus programs must be constantly updated because new viruses are always being created, and the anti-virus vendors need to distribute updates to their applications so that they can catch and remove them. Data Validation Policies and Procedures Data validation is very important to ensure that only accurate information is stored. The existence of invalid data can cause major problems when businesses attempt to use data for knowledge based decisions and for performance reporting. Data Scrubbing Policies and Procedures Data scrubbing is valuable to companies in one of two ways. The first can be used to clean data prior to being analyzed for report generation. The second is that it allows companies to remove things like personally Identifiable information from its data prior to transmit it between multiple environments or if the information is sent to an external location. An example of this can be seen with medical records in regards to HIPPA laws that prohibit the storage of specific personal and medical information. Additionally, I have professionally run in to a scenario where the Canadian government does not allow any Canadian’s personal information to be stored on a server not located in Canada. Encryption Practices The use of encryption is very valuable when a company needs to any personal information. This allows users with the appropriated access levels to view or confirm the existence or accuracy of data within a system by either decrypting the information or encrypting a piece of data and comparing it to the stored version.  Additionally, if for some unforeseen reason the data got in to the wrong hands then they would have to first decrypt the data before they could even be able to read it. Encryption just adds and additional layer of protection around data itself. Standard Normalization Practices The use of standard data normalization practices is very important when dealing with data because it can prevent allot of potential issues by eliminating the potential for unnecessary data duplication. Issues caused by data duplication include excess use of data storage, increased chance for invalidated data, and over use of data processing. Network and Database Security/Access Policies Every company has some form of network/data access policy even if they have none. These policies help secure data from being seen by inappropriate users along with preventing the data from being updated or deleted by users. In addition, without a good security policy there is a large potential for data to be corrupted by unassuming users or even stolen. Data Storage Policies Data storage polices are very important depending on how they are implemented especially when a company is trying to utilize them in conjunction with other policies like Data Backups. I have worked at companies where all network user folders are constantly backed up, and if a user wanted to ensure the existence of a piece of data in the form of a file then they had to store that file in their network folder. Conversely, I have also worked in places where when a user logs on or off of the network there entire user profile is backed up. Training Policies One of the biggest ways to prevent data loss and ensure that data will remain a company asset is through training. The practice of properly train employees on how to work with in systems that access data is crucial when trying to ensure a company’s data will remain an asset. Users need to be trained on how to manipulate a company’s data in order to perform their tasks to reduce the chances of invalidating data.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• Building an OpenStack Cloud for Solaris Engineering, Part 1

  - by Dave Miner

  One of the signature features of the recently-released Solaris 11.2 is the OpenStack cloud computing platform.  Over on the Solaris OpenStack blog the development team is publishing lots of details about our version of OpenStack Havana as well as some tips on specific features, and I highly recommend reading those to get a feel for how we've leveraged Solaris's features to build a top-notch cloud platform.  In this and some subsequent posts I'm going to look at it from a different perspective, which is that of the enterprise administrator deploying an OpenStack cloud.  But this won't be just a theoretical perspective: I've spent the past several months putting together a deployment of OpenStack for use by the Solaris engineering organization, and now that it's in production we'll share how we built it and what we've learned so far.In the Solaris engineering organization we've long had dedicated lab systems dispersed among our various sites and a home-grown reservation tool for developers to reserve those systems; various teams also have private systems for specific testing purposes.  But as a developer, it can still be difficult to find systems you need, especially since most Solaris changes require testing on both SPARC and x86 systems before they can be integrated.  We've added virtual resources over the years as well in the form of LDOMs and zones (both traditional non-global zones and the new kernel zones).  Fundamentally, though, these were all still deployed in the same model: our overworked lab administrators set up pre-configured resources and we then reserve them.  Sounds like pretty much every traditional IT shop, right?  Which means that there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies from greater use of virtualization and the self-service style of cloud computing.  As we were well into development of OpenStack on Solaris, I was recruited to figure out how we could deploy it to both provide more (and more efficient) development and test resources for the organization as well as a test environment for Solaris OpenStack.At this point, let's acknowledge one fact: deploying OpenStack is hard.  It's a very complex piece of software that makes use of sophisticated networking features and runs as a ton of service daemons with myriad configuration files.  The web UI, Horizon, doesn't often do a good job of providing detailed errors.  Even the command-line clients are not as transparent as you'd like, though at least you can turn on verbose and debug messaging and often get some clues as to what to look for, though it helps if you're good at reading JSON structure dumps.  I'd already learned all of this in doing a single-system Grizzly-on-Linux deployment for the development team to reference when they were getting started so I at least came to this job with some appreciation for what I was taking on.  The good news is that both we and the community have done a lot to make deployment much easier in the last year; probably the easiest approach is to download the OpenStack Unified Archive from OTN to get your hands on a single-system demonstration environment.  I highly recommend getting started with something like it to get some understanding of OpenStack before you embark on a more complex deployment.  For some situations, it may in fact be all you ever need.  If so, you don't need to read the rest of this series of posts!In the Solaris engineering case, we need a lot more horsepower than a single-system cloud can provide.  We need to support both SPARC and x86 VM's, and we have hundreds of developers so we want to be able to scale to support thousands of VM's, though we're going to build to that scale over time, not immediately.  We also want to be able to test both Solaris 11 updates and a release such as Solaris 12 that's under development so that we can work out any upgrade issues before release.  One thing we don't have is a requirement for extremely high availability, at least at this point.  We surely don't want a lot of down time, but we can tolerate scheduled outages and brief (as in an hour or so) unscheduled ones.  Thus I didn't need to spend effort on trying to get high availability everywhere.The diagram below shows our initial deployment design.  We're using six systems, most of which are x86 because we had more of those immediately available.  All of those systems reside on a management VLAN and are connected with a two-way link aggregation of 1 Gb links (we don't yet have 10 Gb switching infrastructure in place, but we'll get there).  A separate VLAN provides "public" (as in connected to the rest of Oracle's internal network) addresses, while we use VxLANs for the tenant networks. One system is more or less the control node, providing the MySQL database, RabbitMQ, Keystone, and the Nova API and scheduler as well as the Horizon console.  We're curious how this will perform and I anticipate eventually splitting at least the database off to another node to help simplify upgrades, but at our present scale this works.I had a couple of systems with lots of disk space, one of which was already configured as the Automated Installation server for the lab, so it's just providing the Glance image repository for OpenStack.  The other node with lots of disks provides Cinder block storage service; we also have a ZFS Storage Appliance that will help back-end Cinder in the near future, I just haven't had time to get it configured in yet.There's a separate system for Neutron, which is our Elastic Virtual Switch controller and handles the routing and NAT for the guests.  We don't have any need for firewalling in this deployment so we're not doing so.  We presently have only two tenants defined, one for the Solaris organization that's funding this cloud, and a separate tenant for other Oracle organizations that would like to try out OpenStack on Solaris.  Each tenant has one VxLAN defined initially, but we can of course add more.  Right now we have just a single /24 network for the floating IP's, once we get demand up to where we need more then we'll add them.Finally, we have started with just two compute nodes; one is an x86 system, the other is an LDOM on a SPARC T5-2.  We'll be adding more when demand reaches the level where we need them, but as we're still ramping up the user base it's less work to manage fewer nodes until then.My next post will delve into the details of building this OpenStack cloud's infrastructure, including how we're using various Solaris features such as Automated Installation, IPS packaging, SMF, and Puppet to deploy and manage the nodes.  After that we'll get into the specifics of configuring and running OpenStack itself.

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