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• htaccess/cPanel 301 redirects not working for add-on domain

  - by Clemens

  I've already looked at many samples and tutorials how to set up those 301 redirects on Apache and can't figure out why only the second one is working: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on #doesn't work: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old.com$ RewriteRule ^page-still-exists.htm$ "http://www.new.com/new-target-page.htm" [R=301,L] #works: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old.com$ RewriteRule ^page-does-no-longer-exist.htm$ "http://www.new.com/" [R=301,L] #works: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old.com$ RewriteRule ^folder/otherpage.htm$ "http://www.new.com/" [R=301,L] #works: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old.com$ RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.new.com/" [R=301,L] #doesn't work: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old.com$ RewriteRule ^somepage.htm$ "http://www.old.com/some-page.htm" [R=301,L] I have no idea why only the second one is working. The only difference I can see is, that in the second case the old page does no longer exist on the old domain. But whenever I want to redirect any still existing page from the old domain to the new domain the page on the old domain is still used. Any input is much appreciated because this is slowly driving me crazy :) EDIT: I added the complete htaccess file. EDIT 2: So I removed almost all redirects and currently my htaccess looks like this: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old\.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.old\.com$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.new\.com\/$1" [R=301,L] The only redirect that is working is the simple one from old.com to new.com. A redirect like old.com/page.htm to new.com or even new.com/page.htm is not working. And actually I really don't know where this redirect is actually coming from... Can a 301 really be so complicated?

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• ODI 11g – Scripting Repository Creation

  - by David Allan

  Here’s a quick post on how to create both master and work repositories in one simple dialog, its using the groovy capabilities in ODI 11g and the groovy swing builder components. So if you want more/less take the groovy script and change, its easy stuff. The groovy script odi_create_repos.groovy is here, just open it in ODI before connecting and you will be able to create both master and work repositories with ease – or check the groovy out and script your own automation – you can construct the master, work and runtime repositories, so if you are embedding ODI as your DI engine this may be very useful. When you click ‘Create Repository’ you will see the following in the log as the master repository starts to be created; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... Then the completion message followed by the work repository creation and final completion message. Master Repository Creation Completed. Work Repository Creation Started. Work Repository Creation Completed. ====================================================== Repository Creation Completed Successfully ====================================================== Script exited. If any error is hit, the script just exits and prints any error to the log. For example if I enter no passwords, I will get this error; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Repository Creation Complete in Error ====================================================== oracle.odi.setup.RepositorySetupException: oracle.odi.core.security.PasswordPolicyNotMatchedException: ODI-10189: Password policy MinPasswordLength is not matched. ====================================================== Script exited. This is another example of using the ODI 11g SDK showing how to automate the construction of your data integration environment. The main interfaces and classes used here are IMasterRepositorySetup / MasterRepositorySetupImpl and IWorkRepositorySetup / WorkRepositorySetupImpl.

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• ODI 11g – Scripting Repository Creation

  - by David Allan

  Here’s a quick post on how to create both master and work repositories in one simple dialog, its using the groovy capabilities in ODI 11g and the groovy swing builder components. So if you want more/less take the groovy script and change, its easy stuff. The groovy script odi_create_repos.groovy is here, just open it in ODI before connecting and you will be able to create both master and work repositories with ease – or check the groovy out and script your own automation – you can construct the master, work and runtime repositories, so if you are embedding ODI as your DI engine this may be very useful. When you click ‘Create Repository’ you will see the following in the log as the master repository starts to be created; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... Then the completion message followed by the work repository creation and final completion message. Master Repository Creation Completed. Work Repository Creation Started. Work Repository Creation Completed. ====================================================== Repository Creation Completed Successfully ====================================================== Script exited. If any error is hit, the script just exits and prints any error to the log. For example if I enter no passwords, I will get this error; ====================================================== Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Master Repository Creation Started.... ====================================================== Repository Creation Complete in Error ====================================================== oracle.odi.setup.RepositorySetupException: oracle.odi.core.security.PasswordPolicyNotMatchedException: ODI-10189: Password policy MinPasswordLength is not matched. ====================================================== Script exited. This is another example of using the ODI 11g SDK showing how to automate the construction of your data integration environment. The main interfaces and classes used here are IMasterRepositorySetup / MasterRepositorySetupImpl and IWorkRepositorySetup / WorkRepositorySetupImpl.

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• Why are marketing employees, product managers, etc. deserving of their own office, yet programmers are jammed in a room as many as possible?

  - by TheImirOfGroofunkistan

  I don't understand why many (many) companies treat software developers like they are assembly line workers making widgets. Joel Spolsky has a great example of the problems this creates: With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed. Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds). Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh! Quote Link More Spolsky on Offices Why don't managers and owner's see this?

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• Why do marketing employees get their own office, yet programmers are jammed in a room as many as possible?

  - by TheImirOfGroofunkistan

  I don't understand why many (many) companies treat software developers like they are assembly line workers making widgets. Joel Spolsky has a great example of the problems this creates: With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed. Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds). Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh! Quote Link More Spolsky on Offices Why don't managers and owner's see this?

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• Now Available: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Virtual Machines with Sample Data and Hands-on-L

  - by John Alexander

  From a message from Brian Keller: “Back in December we posted a set of virtual machines pre-configured with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2, and 7 hands-on-labs. I am pleased to announce that today we have shipped an updated virtual machine using the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate bits, a brand new sample application, and 9 hands-on-labs. This VM is customer-ready and includes everything you need to learn and/or deliver demonstrations of many of my favorite application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities in Visual Studio 2010. This VM is available in the virtualization platform of your choice (Hyper-V, Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and Windows [7] Virtual PC). Hyper-V is highly recommended because of the performance benefits and snapshotting capabilities. Tailspin Toys The sample application we are using in this virtual machine is a simple ASP.NET MVC 2 storefront called Tailspin Toys. Tailspin Toys sells model airplanes and relies on the application lifecycle management capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 to help them build, test, and maintain their storefront. Major kudos go to Dan Massey for building out this great application for us. Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts The 9 hands-on-labs / demo scripts which accompany this virtual machine cover several of the core capabilities of conducting application lifecycle management with Visual Studio 2010. Each document can be used by an individual in a hands-on-lab capacity, to learn how to perform a given set of tasks, or used by a presenter to deliver a demonstration or classroom-style training. Unlike the beta 2 release, 100% of these labs target Tailspin Toys to help ensure a consistent storytelling experience. Software quality: Authoring and Running Manual Tests using Microsoft Test Manager 2010 Introduction to Test Case Management with Microsoft Test Manager 2010 Introduction to Coded UI Tests with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Debugging with IntelliTrace using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Software architecture: Code Discovery using the architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Understanding Class Coupling with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Using the Architecture Explore in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate to Analyze Your Code Software Configuration Management: Planning your Projects with Team Foundation Server 2010 Branching and Merging Visualization with Team Foundation Server 2010 “ Check out Brian’s Post for more info including download instructions…

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• Dim an Overly Bright Alarm Clock with a Binder Divider

  - by ETC

  Love your alarm clock but hate how eye-searingly bright it is? Slice up a plastic binder divider to dim your alarm clock (or any other aggressively bright monochromatic display). At DIY site Curbly Chris Job shares a simple alarm clock hack. For years he had an alarm clock with a nice dim display. When it broke he went in search of a replacement but failed to find one that wasn’t . His solution came in form of a sliced up binder divider (the clear, usually tinted, plastic tabs you put in between paper in a binder). He sliced to fit the display, spritzed it with a little water to help it cling to the plastic, and pressed it in place. The plastic dims the display enough–as seen in the before/after picture above–that he doesn’t need to cover it up to get a good night’s sleep. Calm Your Alarm Clock’s Display and Sleep Better for 25¢ [Curbly] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 Dim an Overly Bright Alarm Clock with a Binder Divider Preliminary List of Keyboard Shortcuts for Unity Now Available Bring a Touch of the Wild West to Your Desktop with the Rango Theme for Windows 7 Manage Your Favorite Social Accounts in Chrome and Iron with Seesmic E.T. II – Extinction [Fake Movie Sequel Video] Remastered King’s Quest Games Offer Classic Gaming on Modern Machines

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• Using transactions with LINQ-to-SQL

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  Today one of my colleague asked that how we can use transactions with the LINQ-to-SQL Classes when we use more then one entities updated at same time. It was a good question. Here is my answer for that.For ASP.NET 2.0  or higher version have a new class called TransactionScope which can be used to manage transaction with the LINQ. Let’s take a simple scenario we are having a shopping cart application in which we are storing details or particular order placed into the database using LINQ-to-SQL. There are two tables Order and OrderDetails which will have all the information related to order. Order will store particular information about orders while OrderDetails table will have product and quantity of product for particular order.We need to insert data in both tables as same time and if any errors comes then it should rollback the transaction. To use TransactionScope in above scenario first we have add a reference to System.Transactions like below. After adding the transaction we need to drag and drop the Order and Order Details tables into Linq-To-SQL Classes it will create entities for that. Below is the code for transaction scope to use mange transaction with Linq Context. MyContextDataContext objContext = new MyContextDataContext(); using (System.Transactions.TransactionScope tScope = new System.Transactions.TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Required)) { objContext.Order.InsertOnSubmit(Order); objContext.OrderDetails.InsertOnSumbit(OrderDetails); objContext.SubmitChanges(); tScope.Complete(); } Here it will commit transaction only if using blocks will run successfully. Hope this will help you. Technorati Tags: Linq,Transaction,System.Transactions,ASP.NET

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• How to Create Quality Photo Prints With Free Software

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  Photoshop may be the professional standard for high quality photo prints, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay hundreds of dollars for printing software. Freeware program Google Picasa can create excellent quality photo prints that’ll only cost you a download. Picasa and other freeware graphics programs are hardly news to savvy geeks, although with a little patience, they can produce quality prints few could tell apart from thousand dollar graphics suites. Stay tuned for links to various graphics programs, and a simple how-to on getting the perfect print settings for your photos Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• OData.org updated, gives clues about future SQL Azure enhancements

  - by jamiet

  The OData website at http://www.odata.org/home has been updated today to provide a much more engaging page than the previous sterile attempt. Moreover its now chockful of information about the progress of OData including a blog, a list of products that produce OData feeds plus some live OData feeds that you can hit up today, a list of OData-compliant clients and an FAQ. Most interestingly SQL Azure is listed as a producer of OData feeds: If you have a SQL Azure database account you can easily expose an OData feed through a simple configuration portal. You can select authenticated or anonymous access and expose different OData views according to permissions granted to the specified SQL Azure database user. A preview of this upcoming SQL Azure service is available at https://www.sqlazurelabs.com/OData.aspx and it enables you to select one of your existing SQL Azure databases and, with a few clicks, turn it into an OData feed. It looks as though SQL Azure will soon be added to the stable of products that natively support OData, good news indeed. @Jamiet Related blog posts: OData gunning for ubiquity across Microsoft products Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Code Camp 2011 – Summary

  - by hajan

  Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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• Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free

  - by ETC

  Our friends over at MakeUseOf.com have released yet another eBook in their series of Guides to, well, just about everything. This one gives you some tips for speeding up your Windows PC. The guide has a ton of different tips, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say you follow every single tip to the letter (since everybody’s setup is different), it does give you lots of great ideas for speeding up your PC, as well as links to resources, and instructions for how to perform various cleanup tasks. The best tips? Make sure to keep your PC crapware-free, upgrade your RAM if you’re low, scan for viruses, and run some type of disk cleanup on a regular basis. Download the MakeUseOf Windows on Speed Guide (PDF) [Direct Download Link] Windows on Speed [MakeUseOf] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar Reader for Android Updates; Now with Feed Widgets and More

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• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

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• Trying to configure DNS on a Godaddy Virtual Dedicated host, Mediatemple Domain Registration

  - by dclowd9901

  A client of mine purchased VD hosting with Godaddy and a domain name with Mediatemple. I've never configured DNS from scratch, and I'm finding it very difficult to find any sort of explanation on how to go about it. As of right now, Mediatemple is pointing to the Godaddy's ns1.domaincontrol.com and ns2.domaincontrol.com nameservers. The VD hosting on Godaddy (via their Simple Control Panel) has options to "Add a new domain", which brings you through a wizard of sorts that asks you if the domain has already been registered (yes), what it is (dclowd9901.com for this example), create a system username and password for it (with checkboxes for SSH and FTP access), which level of user can administer it, and whether a mail account should be setup. When complete, it also creates a zone file. In this zone file, the Primary nameserver is ns1.dclowd9901.com; the records are as follow (where 12.23.12.34 is the presumed host): @ A 12.23.12.34 @ NS ns1 @ NS ns2 ns1 A 12.23.12.34 ns2 A 12.23.12.34 @ MX mail www A 12.23.12.34 ftp A 12.23.12.34 ssh A 12.23.12.34 mail A 12.23.12.34 If anyone can shed any light on this for me, explain to me the interactions between the registrar and the host and so on, I'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance for the help.

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• SQL SERVER – Attach or Detach Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #068

  - by Pinal Dave

  When we have to move a database from one server to another server or when we have to move a database from one file to another file, we commonly use Database Attach or Detach process. I have been doing this for quite a while as well. Recently, when I was visiting an organization I found that in this organization lots of developers are still using an older version of the code to attach the database. I quickly pointed that out to them the new method to attach the database, however it was really interesting to find out that they really did not know that sp_attach_db is now a deprecated method to attach the database. This really made me to do today’s SQL in Sixty Seconds. I demonstrate in this SQL in Sixty Seconds how to attach or detach the database using a new method of attaching database. The code which I have used in this code is over here: -- Detach Database USE [master] GO EXEC MASTER.dbo.sp_detach_db @dbname = N'AdventureWorks2014_new' GO -- Deprecated Way to Attach Database USE [master] GO EXEC MASTER.dbo.sp_attach_db 'AdventureWorks2014_new', 'E:\AdventureWorks2012_Data_new.mdf', 'E:\AdventureWorks2012_log_new.ldf' GO -- Correct Way to Attach Database USE [master] GO CREATE DATABASE [AdventureWorks2014_new] ON ( FILENAME = 'E:\AdventureWorks2012_Data_new.mdf'), ( FILENAME = 'E:\AdventureWorks2012_log_new.ldf') FOR ATTACH GO Here is the question back to you – Do you still use old methods to attach database? If yes, I suggest that you start using the new method onwards. SQL in Sixty Seconds Video I have attempted to explain the same subject in simple words over in following video. Action Item Here are the blog posts I have previously written on the subject of SA password. You can read it over here: SQL SERVER – 2005 – T-SQL Script to Attach and Detach Database SQL SERVER – Move Database Files MDF and LDF to Another Location SQL SERVER – 2005 Take Off Line or Detach Database SQL SERVER – Attach mdf file without ldf file in Database SQL SERVER – Copy Database from Instance to Another Instance – Copy Paste in SQL Server You can subscribe to my YouTube Channel for frequent updates. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Video

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• SQL SERVER – Effect of Collation on Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #026 – Video

  - by pinaldave

  Collation is a very important concept but often ignored. I have often seen developers either not understanding this or ignored it – this is plain wrong. In simple word we can say Collation is the language or interpreting done by SQL Server. Well, in today’s SQL in Sixty Seconds we are going to observe how collation affects the resultset. Today’s blog post is inspired from my earlier blog post SQL SERVER – Effect of Case Sensitive Collation on Resultset. I strongly encourage you to read this earlier blog post for sample code as well additional explanation related to the concept shared in today’s SQL in Sixty Seconds. Here is the code used in the video. USE TempDB GO -- Sample Data Building CREATE TABLE ColTable (Col1 VARCHAR(15) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS, Col2 VARCHAR(14) COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS) ; INSERT ColTable(Col1, Col2) VALUES ('Apple','Apple'), ('apple','apple'), ('pineapple','pineapple'), ('Pineapple','Pineapple'); GO -- Retrieve Data SELECT * FROM ColTable GO -- Retrieve Data SELECT * FROM ColTable ORDER BY Col1 GO -- Retrieve Data SELECT * FROM ColTable ORDER BY Col2 GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE ColTable GO Related Tips in SQL in Sixty Seconds: SQL SERVER – Effect of Case Sensitive Collation on Resultset Example of Width Sensitive and Width Insensitive Collation Collation and Collation Sensitivity – Quiz – Puzzle – 6 of 31 Change Collation of Database Column – T-SQL Script Find Collation of Database and Table Column Using T-SQL Default Collation of SQL Server 2008 Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation If we like your idea we promise to share with you educational material. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 2

  - by AjarnMark

  In Part 1, I started talking about using Red-Gate’s newest version of SQL Source Control and how I really like it as a viable method to source control your database development.  It looks like this is going to turn into a little series where I will explain how we have done things in the past, and how life is different with SQL Source Control.  I will also explain some of my philosophy and methodology around deployment with these tools.  But for now, let’s talk about some of the good and the bad of the tool itself. More Kudos and Features I mentioned previously how impressed I was with the responsiveness of Red-Gate’s team.  I have been having an ongoing email conversation with Gyorgy Pocsi, and as I have run into problems or requested things behave a little differently, it has not been more than a day or two before a new Build is ready for me to download and test.  Quite impressive! I’m sure much of the requests I put in were already in the plans, so I can’t really take credit for them, but throughout this conversation, Red-Gate has implemented several features that were not in the first Early Access version.  Those include: Honoring the Fortress configuration option to require Work Item (Bug) IDs on check-ins. Adding the check-in comment text as a comment to the Work Item. Adding the list of checked-in files, along with the Fortress links for automatic History and DIFF view Updating the status of a Work Item on check-in (e.g. setting the item to Complete or, in our case “Dev-Complete”) Support for the Fortress 2.0 API, and not just the Vault Pro 5.1 API.  (See later notes regarding support for Fortress 2.0). These were all features that I felt we really needed to have in-place before I could honestly consider converting my team to using SQL Source Control on a regular basis.  Now that I have those, my only excuse is not wanting to switch boats on the team mid-stream.  So when we wrap up our current release in a few weeks, we will make the jump.  In the meantime, I will continue to bang on it to make sure it is stable.  It passed one test for stability when I did a test load of one of our larger database schemas into Fortress with SQL Source Control.  That database has about 150 tables, 200 User-Defined Functions and nearly 900 Stored Procedures.  The initial load to source control went smoothly and took just a brief amount of time. Warnings Remember that this IS still in pre-release stage and while I have not had any problems after that first hiccup I wrote about last time, you still need to treat it with a healthy respect.  As I understand it, the RTM is targeted for February.  There are a couple more features that I hope make it into the final release version, but if not, they’ll probably be coming soon thereafter.  Those are: A Browse feature to let me lookup the Work Item ID instead of having to remember it or look back in my Item details.  This is just a matter of convenience. I normally have my Work Item list open anyway, so I can easily look it up, but hey, why not make it even easier. A multi-line comment area.  The current space for writing check-in comments is a single-line text box.  I would like to have a multi-line space as I sometimes write lengthy commentary.  But I recognize that it is a struggle to get most developers to put in more than the word “fixed” as their comment, so this meets the need of the majority as-is, and it’s not a show-stopper for us. Merge.  SQL Source Control currently does not have a Merge feature.  If two or more people make changes to the same database object, you will get a warning of the conflict and have to choose which one wins (and then manually edit to include the others’ changes).  I think it unlikely you will run into actual conflicts in Stored Procedures and Functions, but you might with Views or Tables.  This will be nice to have, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.  And I have multiple tools at my disposal to do merges manually, so really not a show-stopper for us. Automation has its limits.  As cool as this automation is, it has its limits and there are some changes that you will be better off scripting yourself.  For example, if you are refactoring table definitions, and want to change a column name, you can write that as a quick sp_rename command and preserve the data within that column.  But because this tool is looking just at a before and after picture, it cannot tell that you just renamed a column.  To the tool, it looks like you dropped one column and added another.  This is not a knock against Red-Gate.  All automated scripting tools have this issue, unless the are actively monitoring your every step to know exactly what you are doing.  This means that when you go to Deploy your changes, SQL Compare will script the change as a column drop and add, or will attempt to rebuild the entire table.  Unfortunately, neither of these approaches will preserve the existing data in that column the way an sp_rename will, and so you are better off scripting that change yourself.  Thankfully, SQL Compare will produce warnings about the potential loss of data before it does the actual synchronization and give you a chance to intercept the script and do it yourself. Also, please note that the current official word is that SQL Source Control supports Vault Professional 5.1 and later.  Vault Professional is the new name for what was previously known as Fortress.  (You can read about the name change on SourceGear’s site.)  The last version of Fortress was 2.x, and the API for Fortress 2.x is different from the API for Vault Pro.  At my company, we are currently running Fortress 2.0, with plans to upgrade to Vault Pro early next year.  Gyorgy was able to come up with a work-around for me to be able to use SQL Source Control with Fortress 2.0, even though it is not officially supported.  If you are using Fortress 2.0 and want to use SQL Source Control, be aware that this is not officially supported, but it is working for us, and you can probably get the work-around instructions from Red-Gate if you’re really, really nice to them. Upcoming Topics Some of the other topics I will likely cover in this series over the next few weeks are: How we used to do source control back in the old days (a few weeks ago) before SQL Source Control was available to Vault users What happens when you restore a database that is linked to source control Handling multiple development branches of source code Concurrent Development practices and handling Conflicts Deployment Tips and Best Practices A recap after using the tool for a while

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• User Experience Highlights in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools: Direct from Jeff Robbins

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on the user experience (UX) highlights in various Oracle product families. The last posted interview was with Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy on upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite user experience highlights. You’ll see themes around productivity and efficiency, and get an early look at the latest mobile offerings coming through these product lines. Today’s post is on the user experience in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools. To learn more about what’s ahead, attend PeopleSoft or PeopleTools OpenWorld presentations.This interview is with Jeff Robbins, Senior Director, PeopleSoft Development. Jeff Robbins Q: How would you describe the vision you have for the user experience of PeopleSoft?A: Intuitive – Specifically, customers use PeopleSoft to help their employees do their day-to-day work, and the UI (user interface) has been helpful and assistive in that effort. If it’s not obvious what they need to do a task, then the UI isn’t working. So the application needs to make it simple for users to find information they need, complete a task, do all the things they are responsible for, and it really helps when the UI just makes sense. Productive – PeopleSoft is a tool used to support people to do their work, and a lot of users are measured by how much work they’re able to get done per hour, per day, etc. The UI needs to help them be as productive as possible, and can’t make them waste time or energy. The UI needs to reflect the type of work necessary for a task -- if it's data entry, the UI needs to assist the user to get information into the system. For analysts, the UI needs help users assess or analyze information in a particular way. Innovative – The concept of the UI being innovative is something we’ve been working on for years. It’s not just that we want to be seen as innovative, the fact is that companies are asking their employees to do more than they’ve ever asked before. More often companies want to roll out processes as employee or manager self-service, where an employee is responsible to review and maintain their own data. So we’ve had to reinvent, and ask,  “How can we modify the ways an employee interacts with our applications so that they can be more productive and efficient – even with tasks that are entirely unfamiliar?”  Our focus on innovation has forced us to design new ways for users to interact with the entire application.Q: How are the UX features you have delivered so far resonating with customers?  A: Resonating very well. We’re hearing tremendous responses from users, managers, decision-makers -- who are very happy with the improved user experience. Many of the individual features resonate well. Some have really hit home, others are better than they used to be but show us that there’s still room for improvement.A couple innovations really stand out; features that have a significant effect on how users interact with PeopleSoft.First, the deployment of PeopleSoft in a way that’s more like a consumer website with the PeopleSoft Home page and Dashboards.  This new approach is very web-centric, where users feel they’re coming to a website rather than logging into an enterprise application.  There’s lots of information from all around the organization collected in a way that feels very familiar to users. In order to do your job, you can come to this web site rather than having to learn how to log into an application and figure out a complicated menu. Companies can host these really rich web sites for employees that are home pages for accessing critical tasks and information. The UI elements of incorporating search into the whole navigation process is another hit. Rather than having to log in and choose a task from a menu, users come to the web site and begin a task by simply searching for data: themselves, another employee, a customer record, whatever.  The search results include the data along with a set of actions the user might take, completely eliminating the need to hunt through a complicated system menu. Search-centric navigation is really sitting well with customers who are trying to deploy an intuitive set of systems. Q: Are any UX highlights more popular than you expected them to be?  A: We introduced a feature called Pivot Grid in the last release, which is a combination of an interactive grid, like an Excel Pivot Table, along with a dynamic visual chart that automatically graphs the data. I wasn’t certain at first how extensively this would be used. It looked like an innovative tool, but it wasn’t clear how it would be incorporated in business process applications. The fact is that everyone who sees Pivot Grids is thrilled with that kind of interactivity.  It reflects the amount of analytical thinking customers are asking employees to do. Employees can’t just enter data any more. They must interact with it, analyze it, and make decisions. Pivot Grids fit into this way of working. Q: What can you tell us about PeopleSoft’s mobile offerings?A: A lot of customers are finding that mobile is the chief priority in their organization.  They tell us they want their employees to be able to access company information from their mobile devices.  Of course, not everyone has the same requirements, so we’re working to make sure we can help our customers accomplish what they’re trying to do.  We’ve already delivered a number of mobile features.  For instance, PeopleSoft home pages, dashboards and workcenters all work well on an iPad, straight out of the box.  We’ve delivered a number of key functions and tasks for mobile workers – those who are responsible for using a mobile device to manage inventory, for example.  Customers tell us they also need a holistic strategy, one that allows their employees to access nearly every task from a mobile device.  While we don’t expect users to do extensive data entry from their smartphone, it makes sense that they have access to company information and systems while away from their desk.  That’s where our strategy is going now.  We plan to unveil a number of new mobile offerings at OpenWorld.  Some will be available then, some shortly after. Q: What else are you working on now that you think is going to be exciting to customers at Oracle OpenWorld?A: Our next release -- the big thing is PeopleSoft 9.2, and we’ll be talking about the huge amount of work that’s gone into the next versions. A new toolset, 8.53, will be coming, and there’s a lot to talk about there, and the next generation of PeopleSoft 9.2.  We have a ton of new stuff coming.Q: What do you want PeopleSoft customers to know? A: We have been focusing on the user experience in PeopleSoft as a very high priority for the last 4 years, and it’s had interesting effects. One thing is that the application is better, more usable.  We’ve made visible improvements. Another aspect is that in customers’ minds, the PeopleSoft brand is being reinvigorated. Customers invested in PeopleSoft years ago, and then they weren’t sure where PeopleSoft was going.  This investment in the UI and overall user experience keeps PeopleSoft current, innovative and fresh.  Customers  are able to take advantage of a lot of new features, even on the older applications, simply by upgrading their PeopleTools. The interest in that ability has been tremendous. Knowing they have a lot of these features available -- right now, that’s pretty huge. There’s been a tremendous amount of positive response, just on the fact that we’re focusing on the user experience. Editor’s note: For more on PeopleSoft and PeopleTools user experience highlights, visit the Usable Apps web site.To find out more about these enhancements at Openworld, be sure to check out these sessions: GEN8928     General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product RoadmapCON9183     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap CON8932     New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business UserCON9196     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Roadmap: Mobile ApplicationsCON9186     Case Study: Delivering a Groundbreaking User Interface with PeopleSoft PeopleTools

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• Manipulating Human Tasks (for testing) by Mark Nelson

  - by JuergenKress

  A few months ago, while working on a BPM migration, I had the need to look at the status of human tasks, and to manipulate them – essentially to just have a single user take random actions on them at some interval, to help drive a set of processes that were being tested. To do this, I wrote a little utility called httool.  It reuses some of the core domain classes from my custom worklist sample (with minimal changes to make it a remote client instead of a local one). I have not got around to documenting it yet, but it is pretty simple and fairly self explanatory.  So I thought I would go ahead and share it with folks, in case anyone is interested in playing with it. You can get the code from my ci-samples repository on java.net: git clone git://java.net/ci4fmw~ci-samples It is in the httool directory. I do plan to get back to this “one day” and enhance it to be more intelligent – target particular task types, update the payload, follow a set of “rules” about what action to take – so that I can use it for more driving more interesting test scenarios.  If anyone is feeling generous with their time, and interested, please feel free to join the java.net project and hack away to your heart’s content. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Mark Nelson,Human Task,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Developer’s Life – Attitude and Communication – They Can Cause Problems – Notes from the Field #027

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a 27th episode of Notes from the Field series. The biggest challenge for anyone is to understand human nature. We human have so many things on our mind at any moment of time. There are cases when what we say is not what we mean and there are cases where what we mean we do not say. We do say and things as per our mood and our agenda in mind. Sometimes there are incidents when our attitude creates confusion in the communication and we end up creating a situation which is absolutely not warranted. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Mike Walsh explains a very crucial issue we face in our career, which is not technical but more to relate to human nature. Read on this may be the best blog post you might read in recent times. In this week’s note from the field, I’m taking a slight departure from technical knowledge and concepts explained. We’ll be back to it next week, I’m sure. Pinal wanted us to explain some of the issues we bump into and how we see some of our customers arrive at problem situations and how we have helped get them back on the right track. Often it is a technical problem we are officially solving – but in a lot of cases as a consultant, we are really helping fix some communication difficulties. This is a technical blog post and not an “advice column” in a newspaper – but the longer I am a consultant, the more years I add to my experience in technology the more I learn that the vast majority of the problems we encounter have “soft skills” included in the chain of causes for the issue we are helping overcome. This is not going to be exhaustive but I hope that sharing four pieces of advice inspired by real issues starts a process of searching for places where we can be the cause of these challenges and look at fixing them in ourselves. Or perhaps we can begin looking at resolving them in teams that we manage. I’ll share three statements that I’ve either heard, read or said and talk about some of the communication or attitude challenges highlighted by the statement. 1 – “But that’s the SAN Administrator’s responsibility…” I heard that early on in my consulting career when talking with a customer who had serious corruption and no good recent backups – potentially no good backups at all. The statement doesn’t have to be this one exactly, but the attitude here is an attitude of “my job stops here, and I don’t care about the intent or principle of why I’m here.” It’s also a situation of having the attitude that as long as there is someone else to blame, I’m fine…  You see in this case, the DBA had a suspicion that the backups were not being handled right.  They were the DBA and they knew that they had responsibility to ensure SQL backups were good to go – it’s a basic requirement of a production DBA. In my “As A DBA Where Do I start?!” presentation, I argue that is job #1 of a DBA. But in this case, the thought was that there was someone else to blame. Rather than create extra work and take on responsibility it was decided to just let it be another team’s responsibility. This failed the company, the company’s customers and no one won. As technologists – we should strive to go the extra mile. If there is a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities and we know it – we should push to get it resolved. Especially as the DBAs who should act as the advocates of the data contained in the databases we are responsible for. 2 – “We’ve always done it this way, it’s never caused a problem before!” Complacency. I have to say that many failures I’ve been paid good money to help recover from would have not happened had it been for an attitude of complacency. If any thoughts like this have entered your mind about your situation you may be suffering from it. If, while reading this, you get this sinking feeling in your stomach about that one thing you know should be fixed but haven’t done it.. Why don’t you stop and go fix it then come back.. “We should have better backups, but we’re on a SAN so we should be fine really.” “Technically speaking that could happen, but what are the chances?” “We’ll just clean that up as a fast follow” ..and so on. In the age of tightening IT budgets, increased expectations of up time, availability and performance there is no room for complacency. Our customers and business units expect – no demand – the best. Complacency says “we will give you second best or hopefully good enough and we accept the risk and know this may hurt us later. Sometimes an organization will opt for “good enough” and I agree with the concept that at times the perfect can be the enemy of the good. But when we make those decisions in a vacuum and are not reporting them up and discussing them as an organization that is different. That is us unilaterally choosing to do something less than the best and purposefully playing a game of chance. 3 – “This device must accept interference from other devices but not create any” I’ve paraphrased this one – but it’s something the Federal Communications Commission – a federal agency in the United States that regulates electronic communication – requires of all manufacturers of any device that could cause or receive interference electronically. I blogged in depth about this here (http://www.straightpathsql.com/archives/2011/07/relationship-advice-from-the-fcc/) so I won’t go into much detail other than to say this… If we all operated more on the premise that we should do our best to not be the cause of conflict, and to be less easily offended and less upset when we perceive offense life would be easier in many areas! This doesn’t always cause the issues we are called in to help out. Not directly. But where we see it is in unhealthy relationships between the various technology teams at a client. We’ll see teams hoarding knowledge, not sharing well with others and almost working against other teams instead of working with them. If you trace these problems back far enough it often stems from someone or some group of people violating this principle from the FCC. To Sum It Up Technology problems are easy to solve. At Linchpin People we help many customers get past the toughest technological challenge – and at the end of the day it is really just a repeatable process of pattern based troubleshooting, logical thinking and starting at the beginning and carefully stepping through to the end. It’s easy at the end of the day. The tough part of what we do as consultants is the people skills. Being able to help get teams working together, being able to help teams take responsibility, to improve team to team communication? That is the difficult part, and we get to use the soft skills on every engagement. Work on professional development (http://professionaldevelopment.sqlpass.org/) and see continuing improvement here, not just with technology. I can teach just about anyone how to be an excellent DBA and performance tuner, but some of these soft skills are much more difficult to teach. If you want to get started with performance analytics and triage of virtualized SQL Servers with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

  - by albertpascual

  I’m a developer, I like to write new exciting code everyday, my perfect day at work is a day that when I wake up, I know that I have to write some code that I haven’t done before or to use a new framework/language/platform that is unknown to me. The best days in the office is when a project is waiting for me to architect or write. In my 15 years in the development field, I had to in order to get a better salary to manage people, not just to lead developers, to actually manage people. Something that I found out when I get into a management position is that I’m not that good at managing people, and not afraid to say it. I do not enjoy that part of the job, the worse one, takes time away from what I really like. Leading developers and managing people are very different things. I do like teaching and leading developers in a project. Yet most people believe, and is true in most companies, the way to get a better salary is to be promoted to a manager position. In order to advance in your career you need to let go of the everyday writing code and become a supervisor or manager. This is the path for developers after they become senior developers. As you get older and your family grows, the only way to hit your salary requirements is to advance your career to become a manager and get that manager salary. That path is the common in most companies, the most intelligent companies out there, have learned that promoting good developers mean getting a crappy manager and losing a good resource. Now scratch everything I said, because as I previously stated, I don’t see myself going to the office everyday and just managing people until is time to go home. I like to spend hours working in some code to accomplish a task, learning new platforms and languages or patterns to existing languages. Being interrupted every 15 minutes by emails or people stopping by my office to resolve their problems, is not something I could enjoy. All the sudden riding my motorcycle to work one cold morning over the Redlands Canyon and listening to .NET Rocks podcast, Michael “Doc” Norton explaining how to take control of your development career without necessary going to the manager’s track. I know, I should not have headphones under my helmet when riding a motorcycle in California. His conversation with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell was just confirming everything I have ever did with actually more details and assuring that there are other paths. His method was simple yet most of us, already do many of those steps, Mr. Michael “Doc” Norton believe that it pays off on the long run, that finally companies prefer to pay higher salaries to those developers, yet I would actually think that many companies do not see developers that way, this is not true for bigger companies. However I do believe the value of those developers increase and most of the time, changing companies could increase their salary instead of staying in the same one. In short without even trying to get into the shadow of Mr. Norton and without following the steps in the order; you should love to learn new technologies, and then teach them to other geeks. I personally have learn many technologies and I haven’t stop doing that, I am a professor at UCR where I teach ASP.NET and Silverlight. Mr Norton continues that after than, you want to be involve in the development community, user groups, online forums, open source projects. I personally talk to user groups, I’m very active in forums asking and answering questions as well as for those I got awarded the Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. After you accomplish all those, you should also expose yourself for what you know and what you do not know, learning a new language will make you humble again as well as extremely happy. There is no better feeling that learning a new language or pattern in your daily job. If you love your job everyday and what you do, I really recommend you to follow Michael’s presentation that he kindly share it on the link below. His confirmation is a refreshing, knowing that my future is not behind a desk where the computer screen is on my right hand side instead of in front of me. Where I don’t have to spent the days filling up performance forms for people and the new platforms that I haven’t been using yet are just at my fingertips. Presentation here. http://www.slideshare.net/LeanDog/take-control-of-your-development-career-michael-doc-norton?from=share_email_logout3 Take Control of Your Development Career Welcome! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] Recovering Post Technical I love to learn I love to teach I love to work in teams I love to write code I really love to write code What about YOU? Do you love your job? Do you love your Employer? Do you love your Boss? What do you love? What do you really love? Take Control Take Control • Get Noticed • Get Together • Get Your Mojo • Get Naked • Get Schooled Get Noticed Get Noticed Know Your Business Get Noticed Get Noticed Understand Management Get Noticed Get Noticed Do Your Existing Job Get Noticed Get Noticed Make Yourself Expendable Get Together Get Together Join a User Group Get Together Help Run a User Group Get Together Start a User Group Get Your Mojo Get Your Mojo Kata Get Your Mojo Koans Get Your Mojo Breakable Toys Get Your Mojo Open Source Get Naked Get Naked Run with Group A Get Naked Do Something Different Get Naked Own Your Mistakes Get Naked Admit You Don’t Know Get Schooled Get Schooled Choose a Mentor Get Schooled Attend Conferences Get Schooled Teach a New Subject Get Started Read These (Again) Take Control of Your Development Career Thank You! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] In a short summary, I recommend any developer to check his blog and more important his presentation, I haven’t been lucky enough to watch him live, I’m looking forward the day I have the opportunity. He is giving us hope in the future of developers, when I see some of my geek friends moving to position that in short years they begin to regret, I get more unsure of my future doing what I love. I would say that now is looking at the spectrum of companies that understand and appreciate developers. There are a few there, hopefully with time code sweat shops will start disappearing and being a developer will feed a family of 4. Cheers Al tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/07/career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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• Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure

  - by Josh Holmes

  This is a cool use of Azure. The city of Miami tool their “311” data around potholes, trash pickup issues, recycling issues, broken sidewalks and the like and put that data in Azure. The next step is that they leveraged Bing Maps and Silverlight to visualize those issues spread on a map of the city. The solution takes advantage of virtually unlimited storage and processing power, provides the ability to quickly address service requests and implement updates even during peak times such as hurricane season. If things change, the City can bring the solution on site or move to a physical facility, all based on  need and cost-effectiveness. As a result, residents logging on to Miami 311 can see on average 4,500 issues in progress - not represented as a ‘list', but located on a map in relation to other projects in their neighborhood .  A simple click on the map allows them to easily drill down to more and more specific details if they want. In short, they have turned what used to be represented by a meaningless list of data into useful information, and created  actionable and consumable knowledge that is relevant to the citizens of Miami. For Miami, their ‘service call to the city' becomes an interactive process they can follow - and the City has a new tool to manage and deliver outcomes. … When the city made the move to the web, they chose tools they knew and software they trust. The Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform made it easy to do, and they used both Bing mapping and Silverlight to build a user friendly front end. According to Port25 (Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft), it took two people 8 days to implement the whole system and they are going to open source their solution so that other cities can leverage it. I haven’t seen yet where and how they are going to release it but I’ll keep you posted if I find out.

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• SQL SERVER – Introduction to PERCENTILE_CONT() – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function PERCENTILE_CONT(). The book online gives following definition of this function: Computes a specific percentile for sorted values in an entire rowset or within distinct partitions of a rowset in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Release Candidate 0 (RC 0). For a given percentile value P, PERCENTILE_DISC sorts the values of the expression in the ORDER BY clause and returns the value with the smallest CUME_DIST value (with respect to the same sort specification) that is greater than or equal to P. If you are clear with understanding of the function – no need to read further. If you got lost here is the same in simple words – it is lot like finding median with percentile value. Now let’s have fun following query: USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderQty, ProductID, PERCENTILE_CONT(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY ProductID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID) AS MedianCont FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY SalesOrderID DESC GO The above query will give us the following result: You can see that I have used PERCENTILE_COUNT(0.5) in query, which is similar to finding median. Let me explain above diagram with little more explanation. The defination of median is as following: In case of Even Number of elements = In ordered list add the two digits from the middle and devide by 2 In case of Odd Numbers of elements = In ordered list select the digits from the middle I hope this example gives clear idea how PERCENTILE_CONT() works. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• /users/tags should contain scores

  - by Sean Patrick Floyd

  I am implementing some simple JavaScript/bookmarklet based apps that show some reputation info, including the score in the User's top tags (roughly based on this previous bookmarklet of mine). Now I can get a user's top tags (using the API), and I can also get the per-tag score if the user is logged in, by dynamically parsing the tag's top users page. But it costs me one AJAX request per tag and I have to download 10+k to extract a single numeric value. It would save a lot of traffic if the tags in <api>/users/<userid>/tags had a score field. The data seems to be there, after all the top users pages use it, so it would just be a question of exposing the data. Suggested structure: "tags": [ { "name": { "description": "name of the tag", "values": "string", "optional": false, "suggested_buffer_size": 25 }, "score": { "description": "tag score, sum of up votes for answers on non-wiki questions", "values": "32-bit signed integer", "optional": false }, "count": { "description": "tag count, exact meaning depends on context", "values": "32-bit signed integer", "optional": false }, "restricted_to": { "description": "user types that can make use of this tag, lack of this field indicates it is useable by all", "values": "one of anonymous, unregistered, registered, or moderator", "optional": true }, "fulfills_required": { "description": "indicates whether this tag is one of those that is required to be on a post", "values": "boolean", "optional": false }, "user_id": { "description": "user associated with this tag, depends on context", "values": "32-bit signed integer", "optional": true } } ]

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• Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

  - by terje

  Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

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