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• ActionScripting Issue: adding/removing children

  - by user1890698

  I have three movie clips all linked to the stage and I want them to behave like a button/ But I am not using a button because I have not found a way to have each part (up, over, down, hit) be animated and not just change when the mouse is in use with it. So far I have been able to have all three appear on my stage and show when I have the mouse over and as well when I click, but I think I'm doing something wrong with removeChild. Each MC should appear one at a time and now all three show up when I hover over and seem to "flash". Here's my code: var mainMoon:swayingMoon = new swayingMoon(); mainMoon.x = 50; mainMoon.y = 10; addChild(mainMoon); var hoverMoon:glowMoon = new glowMoon(); hoverMoon.x = 50; hoverMoon.y = 10; var movieMoon:clickedMoon = new clickedMoon(); movieMoon.x = 50; movieMoon.y = 10; mainMoon.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, showHoverMoon); mainMoon.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT, hideHoverMoon); hoverMoon.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, startMovieMoon) function showHoverMoon(event:MouseEvent):void { addChild(hoverMoon); } function hideHoverMoon(event:MouseEvent):void { removeChild(hoverMoon) } function startMovieMoon(event:MouseEvent):void { addChild(movieMoon); }

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• Header redirect and Session start() generating errors

  - by RPK

  I am using following code. I get errors: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/public_html/mc/cpanel/Source/verifylogin.php:11) Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at /home/public_html/mv/cpanel/Source/verifylogin.php:11) Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/public_html/mv/cpanel/Source/verifylogin.php:11) <?php error_reporting(E_ALL^ E_NOTICE); ob_start(); require("../Lib/dbaccess.php"); $inQuery = "SELECT mhuserid, mhusername FROM cpanelusers WHERE mhusername = '". $_POST['UserName'] ."' AND mhpassword = '". hash('sha512', $_POST['Password']) ."'"; try { $Result = dbaccess::GetRows($inQuery); echo $Result; $NumRows = mysql_num_rows($Result); if ($NumRows > 0) { header("Location: http://www.example.com/cpanel/mainwindow.php"); session_start(); } else { header("Location: http://www.example.com/cpanel/"); echo "Last login attempt failed."; exit; } } catch(exception $e) { } ob_clean(); ?>

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• My ASP.NET news sources

  - by Jon Galloway

  I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news. Top Link Blogs Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon. Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets. While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists. Twitter Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft: @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info) @shanselman @haacked @bradwilson @davidfowl @InfinitiesLoop @davidebbo @marcind @DamianEdwards @stevensanderson @bleroy @humancompiler @osbornm @anurse I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list. Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users. Twitter Search with Topsy You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc You can also do combined queries for several tags: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix Paper.li Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service. My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc Delicious I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good: Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence. Community Sites I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies,  CodeProject,  and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed. Terms of Enrampagement When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often. What works for you?

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• Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

  - by Dain C. Hansen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details. /* 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";}

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• Podcast Show Notes: Collaborate 10 Wrap-Up - Part 1

  - by Bob Rhubart

  OK, I know last week I promised you a program featuring Oracle ACE Directors Mike van Alst (IT-Eye) and Jordan Braunstein (TUSC) and The Definitive Guide to SOA: Oracle Service Bus author Jeff Davies. But things happen. In this case, what happened was Collaborate 10 in Las Vegas. Prior to the event I asked Oracle ACE Director and OAUG board member Floyd Teter to see if he could round up a couple of people at the event for an impromtu interview over Skype (I was here in Cleveland) to get their impressions of the event. Listen to Part 1 Floyd, armed with his brand new iPad, went above and beyond the call of duty. At the appointed hour, which turned out to be about hour after the close of Collaborate 10,  Floyd had gathered nine other people to join him in a meeting room somewhere in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Here’s the entire roster: Floyd Teter - Project Manager at Jet Propulsion Lab, OAUG Board Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Mark Rittman - EMEA Technical Director and Co-Founder, Rittman Mead,  ODTUG Board Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Chet Justice - OBI Consultant at BI Wizards Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Elke Phelps - Oracle Applications DBA at Humana, OAUG SIG Chair Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Book | Oracle ACE Profile Paul Jackson - Oracle Applications DBA at Humana Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Book Srini Chavali - Enterprise Database & Tools Leader at Cummins, Inc Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Dave Ferguson – President, Oracle Applications Users Group LinkedIn | OAUG Profile John King - Owner, King Training Resources Website | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Gavyn Whyte - Project Portfolio Manager at iFactory Consulting Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix John Nicholson - Channels & Alliances at Greenlight Technologies Website | LinkedIn Big thanks to Floyd for assembling the panelists and handling the on-scene MC/hosting duties.  Listen to Part 1 On a technical note, this discussion was conducted over Skype, using Floyd’s iPad, placed in the middle of the table.  During the call the audio was fantastic – the iPad did a remarkable job. Sadly, the Technology Gods were not smiling on me that day. The audio set-up that I tested successfully before the call failed to deliver when we first connected – I could hear the folks in Vegas, but they couldn’t hear me. A frantic, last-minute adjustment appeared to have fixed that problem, and the audio in my headphones from both sides of the conversation was loud and clear.  It wasn’t until I listened to the playback that I realized that something was wrong. So the audio for Vegas side of the discussion has about the same fidelity as a cell phone. It’s listenable, but disappointing when compared to what it sounded like during the discussion. Still, this was a one shot deal, and the roster of panelists and the resulting conversation was too good and too much fun to scrap just because of an unfortunate technical glitch.   Part 2 of this Collaborate 10 Wrap-Up will run next week. After that, it’s back on track with the previously scheduled program. So stay tuned: RSS del.icio.us Tags: oracle,otn,collborate 10,c10,oracle ace program,archbeat,arch2arch,oaug,odtug,las vegas Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,collborate 10,c10,oracle ace program,archbeat,arch2arch,oaug,odtug,las vegas

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• Oracle Unified Method (OUM) 6.1

  - by user714714

  ORACLE® UNIFIED METHOD RELEASE 6.1 Oracle’s Full Lifecycle Methodfor Deploying Oracle-Based Business Solutions About | Release | Access | Previous Announcements About Oracle is evolving the Oracle® Unified Method (OUM) to achieve the vision of supporting the entire Enterprise IT Lifecycle, including support for the successful implementation of every Oracle product. OUM replaces Legacy Methods, such as AIM Advantage, AIM for Business Flows, EMM Advantage, PeopleSoft's Compass, and Siebel's Results Roadmap. OUM provides an implementation approach that is rapid, broadly adaptive, and business-focused. OUM includes a comprehensive project and program management framework and materials to support Oracle's growing focus on enterprise-level IT strategy, architecture, and governance. Release OUM release 6.1 provides support for Application Implementation, Cloud Application Services Implementation, and Software Upgrade projects as well as the complete range of technology projects including Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Security, WebCenter, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Application Integration Architecture (AIA), Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Integration, and Custom Software. Detailed techniques and tool guidance are provided, including a supplemental guide related to Oracle Tutor and UPK. This release features: Project Manager and Consultant views provide quick access to material relevant to each role OUM Cloud Application Services Implementation Approach Solution Delivery Guide 3.0 and Project Workplan Template OUM Microsoft Project Workplan Template and User's Guide updated to facilitate review and removal of out-of-scope Activities and Tasks MC.050 Application Setup Template available in Microsoft Excel format in addition to Microsoft Word format BT.070 Abbreviated Project Management Framework Presentation Template Envision Examples for Enterprise Organization Structures (BA.020), Enterprise Business Context Diagram (BA.045), and High-Level Use Cases (BA.060) Implement Examples for System Context Diagram (RD.005), Business Use Case Model (RA.015), Use Case Model (RA.023), MoSCoW List (RD.045), and Analysis Specification (AN.100) Home Page drop-down menu allows access to the method by Role, Supplemental Guidance, Method Repository, or View For a comprehensive list of features and enhancements, refer to the "What's New" page of the Method Pack. Upcoming releases will provide expanded support for Oracle's Enterprise Application suites including product-suite specific materials and guidance for tailoring OUM to support various engagement types. Access Oracle Customers Oracle customers may obtain copies of the method for their internal use – including guidelines, templates, and tailored work breakdown structure – by contracting with Oracle for a consulting engagement of two weeks or longer and meeting some additional minimum criteria. Customers, who have a signed consulting contract with Oracle and meet the engagement qualification criteria, are permitted to download the current release of OUM for their perpetual use. They may also obtain subsequent releases published during a renewable, three-year access period. Training courses are also available to these customers. Contact your local Oracle Sales Representative about enrolling in the OUM Customer Program. Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Diamond, Platinum, and Gold Partners OPN Diamond, Platinum, and Gold Partners are able to access the OUM method pack, training courses, and collateral from the OPN Portal at no additional cost: Go to the OPN Portal at partner.oracle.com. Select "Sign In / Register for Account". Sign In. From the Product Resources section, select "Applications". From the Applications page, locate and select the "Oracle Unified Method" link. From the Oracle Unified Method Knowledge Zone, locate the "I want to:" section. From the I want to: section, locate and select "Implement Solutions". From the Implement Solution page, locate the "Best Practices" section. Locate and select the "Download Oracle Unified Method (OUM)" link. Previous Announcements Oracle Unified Method (OUM) Release 6.1 Oracle Unified Method (OUM) Release 6.0 Oracle Unified Method (OUM) Release 5.6 Oracle Unified Method (OUM) Release 5.5 Oracle Unified Method (OUM) Release 5.4 Oracle EMM Advantage Retired Retirement of Oracle EMM Advantage Planned for December 01, 2011

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 28 - November 3, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of Oct 28 - Nov 3, 2012. Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Mobile Development Platform Strategy Chart: ADF Mobile, WebCenter Sites, Portal, Content and Social "Unlike desktop web focused efforts, the world of mobile has undergone change at a feverish pace," says social enterprise expert John Brunswick. His extensive post charts various resources that will help you keep up. ADF Essentials - The Bare Necessities | Floyd Teter The experiment is over… And now Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter shares his impressions after spending some time with Oracle ADF Essentials, the free version of Oracle ADF. A review of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook | RedStack "More so than any other single piece of content that I have seen on the topic, it provides the information that a SOA administrator needs to know in order to successfully configure, manage, monitor, troubleshoot and backup an Oracle SOA environment." So says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team solution architect Mark Nelson of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook, by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek. Expanding the Oracle Enterprise Repository with functional documentation Capgemini middleware specialist Marc Kuijpers shares information on how Oracle Enterprise Repository can be configured "to contain functional assets, i.e. functional designs, use cases and a logical data model" to aid in SOA governance efforts. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what’s truly valuable. Easy way to access JPA with REST (JSON / XML) | Edwin Biemond Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond shows you "what is possible with JPA-RS, how easy it is and howto setup your own EclipseLink REST service." Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic: when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. 2012 IOUG Virtualization SIG – Online Symposium on Nov 7 and Nov 8 | Kai Yu Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu shares information on this week's IOUG Virtualization SIG online event. Does that make it a virtual virtualization event? Thought for the Day "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning — and the response would be, 'We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.'" — Mark Minasi Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• DotNetNuke 7.0 Only Weeks Away!

  - by sbwalker

  The software industry moves at a lightning pace, and it is only through constant focus and continuous investment that a software product can remain both stable and relevant over the long term. As we approach the 10 Year Anniversary of the DotNetNuke platform, it seems only fitting that we are on the verge of announcing yet another significant product milestone. DotNetNuke 7.0 is just around the corner and represents a bold step forward for our Content Management Platform, including substantial business productivity enhancements, investments in web platform relevance, and a significant overhaul and modernization of the user interface and user experience. It has been five months since I posted the announcement that the next major version of the platform was going to be DotNetNuke 7.0.  This announcement created tremendous excitement and anticipation in the DotNetNuke community, as major version increments have always been utilized as an opportunity  to introduce revolutionary new product features and capabilities. After months of intense product development, the finish line is finally in sight. With that, I am pleased to announce that we released a Release Candidate (RC) of DotNetNuke 7.0 yesterday. You can download the RC from our project page on Codeplex. A Release Candidate represents a software version which is very near to “release” quality. So although we will not be officially endorsing the RC for production use, or providing an official upgrade path, it does represent a significant milestone in our software development efforts ( if you are looking for a more detailed explanation of our software release terminology, I would encourage you to read the blog written by Co-Founder, Joe Brinkman titled "What's In A Name?" ). Modernizing a software platform does have its share of challenges from a backward compatibility perspective and, as usual, we are taking great care in ensuring a seamless upgrade path for our customers. In order to remain relevant and progressive, you need to be aware that DotNetNuke 7.0 has adopted a new set of baseline infrastructure requirements including ASP.NET 4.0.  As a result we are encouraging all major stakeholders in the ecosystem ( module developers, designers, partners, customers, etc... ) to take the opportunity to install the RC in their own local environments. This is the last opportunity to let us know about any final issues which may need to be addressed prior to final release. Mark your calendars now… the expected public release date (RTM) for DotNetNuke 7.0 will be Wednesday, November 28th. On a side note, we expect to release a 6.2.5 Maintenance version today. This release contains some high priority product quality improvements as well as security patches for some vulnerabilities reported through our standard ecosystem channels. As a result we will be encouraging all of our customers to upgrade to the 6.2.5 release as soon as it is available. I hope everyone is as excited as I am about the upcoming DotNetNuke 7.0 release. Please take the opportunity over the next week to put the new platform through its paces. Remember, only through our collective efforts can we ensure that this release has the greatest market impact of any DotNetNuke release to date.

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• Everything You Need to Know About Monitoring Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Irem Radzik

  By Joe deBuzna 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:"Times New Roman","serif";} Having over 16 years of database replication experience with 6 of those split between complex Oracle GoldenGate installations across three continents and researching monitoring requirements for both GoldenGate core replication and the GoldenGate monitoring GUIs, I've seen GoldenGate used and monitored in every way conceivable. And definite patterns have emerged. Next week at OpenWorld, on Tuesday Oct 2nd at 5pm please come by to Mascone West-3005 for "Everything you need to know about Monitoring Oracle GoldenGate"session to hear me discuss how GoldenGate customers are monitoring their implementations today, common methods and tricks, what's new in the GUIs, and a what's on the roadmap ahead. As you may have seen in previous blog posts and in our launch webcast we have now Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager in addition to the new Oracle GoldenGate Monitor product. For those of you who won't be at OpenWorld, please check out our Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate data sheet and Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features white paper to learn more about the new Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 release. In this latest release we also have enhanced conflict detection and resolution. It is a cornerstone of any Active-Active database replication solution. And in the latest release we just took ours to the next level with built in optimized resolution routines (no more dependency on sqlexec!). At OpenWorld we have a session CON8557 - Best Practice for Conflict Detection & resolution 3:30-4:30 on Wed Oct 3rd at Mascone West- 3005. Oracle Development Manager Bharath Aleti and I will highlight the most commonly used options and best practices gained from our interaction with numerous customers and consultants. Hope you can join us next week. 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:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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• Some Original Expressions

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletterIn a guest editorial for the Simple-Talk Newsletter, Phil Factor wonders if we are still likely to find some more novel and unexpected ways of using the newer features of Transact SQL: or maybe in some features that have always been there! There can be a great deal of fun to be had in trying out recent features of SQL Expressions to see if  they provide new functionality.  It is surprisingly rare to find things that couldn’t be done before, but in a different   and more cumbersome way; but it is great to experiment or to read of someone else making that discovery.  One such recent feature is the ‘table value constructor’, or ‘VALUES constructor’, that managed to get into SQL Server 2008 from Standard SQL.  This allows you to create derived tables of up to 1000 rows neatly within select statements that consist of  lists of row values.  E.g. SELECT Old_Welsh, number FROM (VALUES ('Un',1),('Dou',2),('Tri',3),('Petuar',4),('Pimp',5),('Chwech',6),('Seith',7),('Wyth',8),('Nau',9),('Dec',10)) AS WelshWordsToTen (Old_Welsh, number) These values can be expressions that return single values, including, surprisingly, subqueries. You can use this device to create views, or in the USING clause of a MERGE statement. Joe Celko covered  this here and here.  It can become extraordinarily handy to use once one gets into the way of thinking in these terms, and I’ve rewritten a lot of routines to use the constructor, but the old way of using UNION can be used the same way, but is a little slower and more long-winded. The use of scalar SQL subqueries as an expression in a VALUES constructor, and then applied to a MERGE, has got me thinking. It looks very clever, but what use could one put it to? I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t be done almost as  simply in SQL Server 2000, but I’m hopeful that someone will come up with a way of solving a tricky problem, just in the same way that a freak of the XML syntax forever made the in-line  production of delimited lists from an expression easy, or that a weird XML pirouette could do an elegant  pivot-table rotation. It is in this sort of experimentation where the community of users can make a real contribution. The dissemination of techniques such as the Number, or Tally table, or the unconventional ways that the UPDATE statement can be used, has been rapid due to articles and blogs. However, there is plenty to be done to explore some of the less obvious features of Transact SQL. Even some of the features introduced into SQL Server 2000 are hardly well-known. Certain operations on data are still awkward to perform in Transact SQL, but we mustn’t, I think, be too ready to state that certain things can only be done in the application layer, or using a CLR routine. With the vast array of features in the product, and with the tools that surround it, I feel that there is generally a way of getting tricky things done. Or should we just stick to our lasts and push anything difficult out into procedural code? I’d love to know your views.

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• Dissing Architects, or "What's wrong with the coffee?"

  - by Bob Rhubart

  In my conversations with people in architect roles, tales of animosity, disrespect, and outright hostility aren't uncommon. And it's clear that in more than a few organizations architects regularly face a tough uphill climb. For architects with the requisite combination of technical, organizational, and people skills, that rough treatment is grossly undeserved. But tales of unqualified people in positions up and down the IT food chain are also easy to come by. So what's the other side of the architect story? Are some architects tarnishing the role and making life miserable for their more qualified colleagues? The various quotes included below were culled from a variety of sources. The criticism is harsh, and the people behind these quotes clearly have issues with architects. Still, whether based on mere opinion or actual experience, the comments shed some light on behaviors that should raise red flags for anyone pursuing a career as an architect. If you're an architect, and you've ever noticed that your coffee tastes like window cleaner, or your car is repeatedly keyed, or no one ever holds the elevator for you, maybe you need to do a little soul searching... Those Who Can, Code; Those Who Can't, Architect | Joe Winchester [May 18, 2007] "At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas - sweeping generalized designs, creating presentations to audiences of acronym addicts, writing esoteric academic papers, speaking at conferences attended by headless engineers on company expense accounts hungrily seeking out this year's grail, and creating e-mails with huge cc lists from people whose signature footer is more interesting than the content. I tried to re-orient him into actually doing some coding, to join a team that has a good product and keen users both of whom are pushing requirements forward, to no avail. Somehow the lure of being an architecture astronaut was too strong and I lost him to the dark side." Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You | Joel Spolsky [April 21, 2001] "It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line. Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve." Non Coding Architects Suck | Richard Henderson [May 24, 2010] "If a guy with a badge saying 'system architect' looks blank on low-level issues then he is not an architect, he is a business-analyst who went on a course. He will probably wax lyrical on all things high-level and 'important.' He will produce lovely object hierarchies without a clue to implementation. He will have a moustache and play golf." Architects Play Golf | Sunir Shah [August 15, 2012] "Often arrogant architects are difficult to get a hold of during the implementation phase because they no longer feel the need to stick around. Especially around midnight when most of the poor sob [sic] developers are still banging away. After all, they've already solved the problem--the rest is just an implementation exercise." Engineer vs Architect(Part of a discussion on the IT Architect Network Group on LinkedIn) "[An] architect spends his time producing white papers full of acronyms he does not understand but that impress his boss [while the] engineer keeps his head down and does the actual job." Architects Don't Code | [Author Unknown] "Faulty belief: System Architects don't need to code anymore. They know what they are talking about by virtue of the fact that they are System Architects."

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part II

  - by Tara Kizer

  I arrived in Seattle last Monday afternoon to attend PASS Summit 2011.  I had really wanted to attend Gail Shaw’s (blog|twitter) and Grant Fritchey’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar “All About Execution Plans” on Monday, but that would have meant flying out on Sunday which I couldn’t do.  On Tuesday, I attended Allan Hirt’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar entitled “A Deep Dive into AlwaysOn: Failover Clustering and Availability Groups”.  Allan is a great speaker, and his seminar was packed with demos and information about AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012.  Unfortunately, I have lost my notes from this seminar and the presentation materials are only available on the pre-con DVD.  Hmpf! On Wednesday, I attended Gail Shaw’s “Bad Plan! Sit!”, Andrew Kelly’s (blog|twitter) “SQL 2008 Query Statistics”, Dan Jones’ (blog|twitter) “Improving your PowerShell Productivity”, and Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) “BLITZ! The SQL – More One Hour SQL Server Takeovers”.  In Gail’s session, she went over how to fix bad plans and bad query patterns.  Update your stale statistics! How to fix bad plans Use local variables – optimizer can’t sniff it, so it’ll optimize for “average” value Use RECOMPILE (at the query or stored procedure level) – CPU hit OPTIMIZE FOR hint – most common value you’ll pass How to fix bad query patterns Don’t use them – ha! Catch-all queries Use dynamic SQL OPTION (RECOMPILE) Multiple execution paths Split into multiple stored procedures OPTION (RECOMPILE) Modifying parameter values Use local variables Split into outer and inner procedure OPTION (RECOMPILE) She also went into “last resort” and “very last resort” options, but those are risky unless you know what you are doing.  For the average Joe, she wouldn’t recommend these.  Examples are query hints and plan guides. While I enjoyed Andrew’s session, I didn’t take any notes as it was familiar material.  Andrew is a great speaker though, and I’d highly recommend attending his sessions in the future. Next up was Dan’s PowerShell session.  I need to look into profiles, manifests, function modules, and function import scripts more as I just didn’t quite grasp these concepts.  I am attending a PowerShell training class at the end of November, so maybe that’ll help clear it up.  I really enjoyed the Excel integration demo.  It was very cool watching PowerShell build the spreadsheet in real-time.  I must look into this more!  On a side note, I am jealous of Dan’s hair.  Fabulous hair! Brent’s session showed us how to quickly gather information about a server that you will be taking over database administration duties for.  He wrote a script to do a fast health check and then later wrapped it into a stored procedure, sp_Blitz.  I can’t wait to use this at my work even on systems where I’ve been the primary DBA for years, maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.  We are using EPM to help standardize our environment and uncover problems, but sp_Blitz will definitely still help us out.  He even provides a cloud-based update feature, sp_BlitzUpdate, for sp_Blitz so you don’t have to constantly update it when he makes a change.  I think I’ll utilize his update code for some other challenges that we face at my work.

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• Free and Open Source Software in Oracle Solaris 11.1

  - by user13277799

  Oracle Solaris 11.1 contains number of Free and Open Source packages. The following table contains important FOSS packages with their versions available in this latest Oracle Solaris release. a2ps 4.14 aalib 1.4.0 pmtools 20071116 apache-ant 1.7.1 httpd 2.2.22 mod_dtrace 0.3.1 mod_fcgid 2.3.6 tomcat-connectors 1.2.28 mod_perl 2.0.4 mod_proxy_html 3.1.1 modsecurity-apache 2.5.9 mod_wsgi 3.3 apr 1.3.9 apr-util 1.3.9 areca 7.1 autoconf 2.68 autogen 5.9 automake 1.10 automake 1.11.2 automake 1.9.6 bash 4.1 bcc 0.16.17 beanshell 2.0b4 db 5.1.25 bind 9.6-ESV-R7-P2 binutils 2.21.1 bison 2.3 bzip2 1.0.6 cdrtools 3.00 clisp 2.47 cmake 2.8.6 gnu 0.5.11 conflict 20100627 convmv 1.15 coreutils 8.5 cups 1.4.5 curl 7.21.2 cvs 1.12.13 diffutils 2.8.7 doxygen 1.7.6.1 ejabberd 2.1.8 elinks 0.11.7 emacs 23.4 otp_src R12B-5 fcgi 2.4.0 fetchmail 6.3.22 flex 2.5.35 foomatic-db 20080903 foomatic-db-engine 3.0-20080903 foomatic-filters 4.0.15 foomatic-filters-ppds 20080818 fping 2.4b2_to gawk 3.1.8 gcc 3.4.3 gcc 4.5.2 gd 2.0.35 gdb 6.8 gdbm 1.8.3 gettext 0.16.1 grep 2.10 ghostscript 9.00 git 1.7.9.2 gnu-gs-fonts-other 6.0 gnu-gs-fonts-std 6.0 gmp 4.3.2 gnupg 2.0.17 gnuplot 4.6.0 pth 2.0.7 gocr 0.48 gperf 3.0.3 gpgme 1.1.8 grails 1.0.3 graphviz 2.28.0 tar 1.26 guile 1.8.6 gutenprint 5.2.7 gzip 1.4 hal-cups-utils 0.6.19 hexedit 1.2.12 hplip 3.10.9 httping 1.4.4 hwdata 0.5.11 iftop 0.17 ilmbase 1.0.1 ImageMagick 6.3.4 iperf 2.0.4 ipmitool 1.8.11 ircii 20060725 dhcp 4.1-ESV-R7 junit 4.10 INIT 2011-02-08 lcms 1.19 less 436 lftp 4.3.1 libassuan 2.0.1 confuse 2.6 libedit 20110802-3.0 libee 0.3.2 libestr 0.1.2 libevent 1.4.14b expat 2.1.0 libidn 1.19 libksba 1.1.0 libmcrypt 2.5.8 libmemcached 0.16 libmng 1.0.10 neon 0.29.5 libnet 1.1.5 libpcap 1.1.1 librsync 0.9.7 libsigsegv 2.6 libsndfile 1.0.23 libtecla 1.6.1 libtool 2.4.2 libtorrent 0.12.2 libusbugen 0.1.8 libusb 0.1.8 libxml2 2.7.6 libxslt 1.1.26 lighttpd 1.4.23 links 1.03 logilab-astng 0.19.0 logilab-common 0.40.0 lua 5.1.4 m4 1.4.12 make 3.82 mc 4.7.5.2 meld 1.4.0 memcached 1.4.5 memcached-java 2.0.1 mercurial 2.2.1 mpc 0.9 mpfr 2.4.2 mutt 1.5.21 mysql 5.1.37 ncftp 3.2.3 net-snmp 5.4.1 nethack 3.4.3 nmap 5.51 ntp-dev 4.2.5 open-fabrics 1.5.3 openexr 1.6.1 openldap 2.4.30 openscap 0.8.1 openssl 0.9.8q openssl 1.0.0j libopenusb 1.0.1 p7zip 9.20.1 pam_pkcs11 0.6.0 patch 2.5.9 pconsole 1.0 pcre 8.21 perl 5.12.4 DBI 1.58 Net-SSLeay 1.36 pmtools 1.10 XML-Parser 2.36 XML-Simple 2.18 PHP 5.2.17 PHP 5.3.14 pinentry 0.7.6 privoxy 3.0.17 proftpd 1.3.3 psutils p17 pv 1.2.0 pwgen 2.06 pylint 0.18.0 CherryPy 3.1.2 coverage 3.5 jsonrpclib 0.1.3 ldtp 2.1.1 M2Crypto 0.21.1 Mako 0.4.1 nose 1.1.2 ply 3.1 pybonjour 1.1.1 pycups 1.9.46 pycurl 7.19.0 lxml 2.3.3 pyOpenSSL 0.11 Python 2.6.8 Python 2.7.3 setuptools 0.6 quagga 0.99.19 quilt 0.60 rdiff-backup 1.3.3 readline 5.2 rpm2cpio 0.5.11 rsync 3.0.8 rsyslog 6.2.0 rtorrent 0.8.2 ruby 1.8.7 samba 3.6.6 sane-backends 1.0.19 sane-frontends 1.0.14 screen 4.0.3 sed 4.2.1 sendmail 8.14.5 slang 2.2.4 slib 3b1 slrn 0.9.9 snort 2.8.4.1 sox 14.3.2 spawn-fcgi 1.6.3 squid 3.1.18 stdcxx 4.2.1 subversion 1.7.5 sudo 1.8.4.5 swig 1.3.35 expect 5.45 tcl 8.5.9 tk 8.5.9 tls 1.6 tcpdump 4.1.1 tcsh 6.17.00 texinfo 4.7 tidy 1.0.0 timezone apache-tomcat 6.0.35 top 3.8beta1 trousers 0.3.6 unixODBC 2.3.0 unrar 4.1.4 unzip 6.0 vim 7.3 visual-panels wget 1.12 which 2.16 wireshark 1.8.2 wxGTK 2.8.12 xorriso 0.6.0 xz 5.0.1 zip 3.0 zlib 1.2.3 zsh 4.3.17

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for October 14-20, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of October 14-21, 2012. Panel: On the Impact of Software | InfoQ Les Hatton (Oakwood Computing Associates), Clive King (Oracle), Paul Good (Shell), Mike Andrews (Microsoft) and Michiel van Genuchten (moderator) discuss the impact of software engineering on our lives in this panel discussion recorded at the Computer Society Software Experts Summit 2012. ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter Learn how ResCare solves content lifecycle challenges with Oracle WebCenter. Speakers: Joe Lichtefeld, VP of Application Services & PMO, ResCare Wayne Boerger, Product Manager, TEAM Informatics Doug Thompson, EVP Global Development, TEAM Informatics Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Time: 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference "The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference," explains Juergen Kress, "is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner." Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour 2012 : Venues and BI Presentations | Mark Rittman Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman shares information on the Oracle ACE Director Tour, as the community leaders make their way through the land of the midnight sun, with events in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki. Mobile Apps for EBS | Capgemini Oracle Blog Capgemini solution architect Satish Iyer breifly describes how Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite can be used to fill the gap in mobile applications for Oracle EBS. Introducing the New Face of Fusion Applications | Misha Vaughan Oracle ACE Directors Debra Lilly and Floyd Teter have already blogged about the the new face of Oracle Fusion Applications. Now Applications User Experience Architect Misha Vaughan shares a brief overview of how the Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team developed the new look. BPM 11g - Dynamic Task Assignment with Multi-level Organization Units | Mark Foster "I've seen several requirements to have a more granular level of task assignment in BPM 11g based on some value in the data passed to the process," says Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Mark Foster. "Parametric Roles is normally the first port of call to try to satisfy this requirement, but in this blog we will show how a lot of use-cases can be satisfied by the easier to implement and flexible Organization Unit." OTN Architect Day Los Angeles - Oct 25 Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles happens in one week. Register now to make sure you don't miss out on a rich schedule of expert technical sessions and peer interaction covering the use of Oracle technologies in cloud computing, SOA, and more. Even better: it's all free. When: October 25, 2012, 8:30am - 5:00pm. Where: Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.2 released | Oracle's Virtualization Blog The Fat Bloke weighs in with a short post with information on where you can find information and the download for the latest VirtualBox release. Advanced Oracle SOA Suite #OOW 2012 SOA Presentations The Oracle SOA Product Management team has compiled a complete list of all twelve of their Oracle SOA Suite presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2012, with links to the slide decks. Thought for the Day "Software: do you write it like a book, grow it like a plant, accrete it like a pearl, or construct it like a building?" — Jeff Atwood Source: softwarequotes.com

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Backward-compatible vs. forward-compatible: a tale of two clouds | William Vambenepe "There is the Cloud that provides value by requiring as few changes as possible. And there is the Cloud that provides value by raising the abstraction and operation level," says William Vambenepe. "The backward-compatible Cloud versus the forward-compatible Cloud." Vambenepe was a panelist on the recent ArchBeat podcast Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds. Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog: ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis investigates "how you can customize a standard BPM Task Flow through MDS Seeded customization." Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Music Festival If, after a day spent in sessions at Oracle Openworld, you want nothing more than to head back to your hotel for a quiet evening spent responding to email, please ignore the rest of this message. Because every night from Sept 30 to Oct 4 the streets of San Francisco will pulsate with music from a vast array of bands representing more musical styles than a single human brain an comprehend. It's the first ever Oracle Music Festival, baby, 7:00pm to 1:00am every night. Are those emails that important...? Resource Kit: Oracle Exadata - includes demos, videos, product datasheets, and technical white papers. This free resource kit includes several customer case study videos, two 3D product demos, several product datasheets, and three technical architecture white papers. Registration is required for the who don't already have a free Oracle.com membership account. Some execs contemplate making 'Bring Your Own Device' mandatory | ZDNet "Companies and agencies are recognizing that individual employees are doing a better job of handling and managing their devices than their harried and overworked IT departments – who need to focus on bigger priorities, such as analytics and cloud," says ZDNet SOA blogger Joe McKendrick. Podcast Show Notes: Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds All three parts of this discussion are now available. Featuring a panel of leading Oracle cloud computing experts, including Dr. James Baty, Mark T. Nelson, Ajay Srivastava, and William Vambenepe, the discussion covers an overview of the various flavors of cloud computing, the importance of standards, Why cloud computing is a paradigm shift—and why it isn't, and advice on what architects need to know to take advantage of the cloud. And for those who prefer reading to listening, a complete transcript is also available. Amazon AMIs and Oracle VM templates (Cloud Migrations) Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski shares an objective comparison of these two resources. IOUC : Blogs : Read the latest news on the global user group community - June 2012! The June 2012 edition of "Are You a Member Yet?"—the quarterly newsletter about Oracle user group communities around the world. Webcast: Introducing Identity Management 11g R2 - July 19 Date: Thursday, July 19, 2012 Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET Please join Oracle and customer executives for the launch of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2, the breakthrough technology that dramatically expands the reach of identity management to cloud and mobile environments. Thought for the Day "The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." — Bjarne Stroustrup Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for October 2012. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning | @FusionSecExpert Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. Solving Big Problems in Our 21st Century Information Society | Irving Wladawsky-Berger "I believe that the kind of extensive collaboration between the private sector, academia and government represented by the Internet revolution will be the way we will generally tackle big problems in the 21st century. Just as with the Internet, governments have a major role to play as the catalyst for many of the big projects that the private sector will then take forward and exploit. The need for high bandwidth, robust national broadband infrastructures is but one such example." -- Irving Wladawsky-Berger Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Vennster) discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what's truly valuable. ADF Mobile Custom Javascript — iFrame Injection | John Brunswick The ADF Mobile Framework provides a range of out of the box components to add within your AMX pages, according to John Brunswick. But what happens when "an out of the box component does not directly fulfill your development need? What options are available to extend your application interface?" John has an answer. Oracle Solaris 11.1 update focuses on database integration, cloud | Mark Fontecchio TechTarget editor Mark Fontecchio reports on the recent Oracle Solaris 11.1 release, with comments from IDC's Al Gillen. Architects Matter: Making sense of the people who make sense of enterprise IT Why do architects matter? Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens suggests that you ask yourself this question the next time you take the elevator to the Oracle offices on the 45th floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois (or any other skyscraper, for that matter). If you had to take the stairs to get to those offices, who would you blame? "You get the picture," he says. "Architecture is essential for any necessarily complex structure, be it a building or an enterprise." (Read the article) Thought for the Day "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Feynman's inbox

  - by user12607414

  Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

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• Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  Today Nokia and Microsoft had an event to officially introduce the Lumia 920.  Below is a rundown of some of the things I found interesting. As a person who likes photography there was a lot to drool over.  The main feature that caught my attention was PureView with its optical stabilization.  This alone should improve the majority of you pictures.  Add to that the SmartShoot Object remover that uses multiple images to remove unwanted people or objects that move through your picture and you never have to accept reality again. For the most part the lenses concept introduced in Windows Phone 8 just makes the usability of leveraging camera better.  Of course that is Microsoft’s selling point.  One lens that caught my attention was the Bing lens.  I have to say it is about time that we can take pictures and use them to search for answers using Bing. There were a couple of features shown that involved augmented reality.  One was similar to the yapf application that is already in the market which overlays restaurants and other destination over live camera views.  The other was using the navigation directions with a live view. Then you get down to some of the physical features of the Lumia 920.  The one that got the most stage time is that it has a great 2000mah battery which can be charged wirelessly.  They also pointed out the improved glare reduction of the 4.5 in. curved glass screen.  This hardware improvement is improved further with software that detects glare conditions and adjusts the display attributes to enhance viewing ease. Adding to the wireless cool factor of the Lumia 920 is the general NFC capabilities.  This was demonstrated with NFC docking stations as well as JBL speakers and headphones. There was one more hardware feature that I applauded.  The super sensitive touch screen did away with one of my pet peeves with capacitive touch screens.  You will never have to remove you gloves to operate your phone again.  The mittens that they did the demo with looked more like boxing gloves. I was disappointed with Joe Belfiore said that they were only going to show a couple of new features of the Windows Phone 8 and would hear more at future events.  One of the things he did show is the ability to customize which buttons you preferred as defaults in IE10.  For example you could have the folders button where the refresh button normally is.  He also showed that at long last you can natively take screenshots on your phone.  Hopefully he will be back quickly to give us the rest of the features. The most disappointing part of the event was that we never found out when they would be released or how much they would cost.  Let’s hope this comes soon.  Even with these couple of items still left on my wish list I can’t wait to get my hands on a Lumia 920.  del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Nokia,Lumia,Lumia 920,Microsoft

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• What Counts For a DBA – Depth

  - by Louis Davidson

  SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace (even using the newfangled Extended Events!). However, appearances can be deceptive, and often times it is really important that a DBA understands not just the basics of how to perform a task, but why we do a task, and how that task works. As an analogy, consider a child walking into a darkened room. Most would know that they need to turn on the light, and how to do it, so they flick the switch. But what happens if light fails to shine forth. Most would immediately tell you that you need to consider changing the light bulb. So you hop in the car and take them to the local home store and instruct them to buy a replacement. Confronted with a 40 foot display of light bulbs, how will they decide which of the hundreds of types of bulbs, of different types, fittings, shapes, colors, power and efficiency ratings, is the right choice? Obviously the main lesson the child is going to learn this day is how to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they don’t have to ask for help the next time. Likewise, when the metaphorical toddlers who use your database server have issues, they will instinctively know something is wrong, and may even have some idea what caused it, but will have no depth of knowledge to figure out the right solution. That is where the DBA comes in and attempts to save the day. However, when one looks beneath the shiny UI, SQL Server has its own “40 foot display of light bulbs”, in the form of the tremendous number of tools and the often-bewildering amount of information they can present to the DBA, to help us find issues. Unfortunately, resorting to guesswork, to trying different “bulbs” over and over, hoping to stumble on the answer. This is where the right depth of knowledge goes a long way. If we need to write a SELECT statement, then knowing the syntax and where to find the data is not enough. Knowledge of indexes and query plans is essential. Without it, we might hit on a query that “works”, but we are basically still a user, not a programmer, because we have no real control over our platform. Is that level of knowledge deep enough? Probably not, since knowledge of the underlying metadata and structures would be very useful in helping us make sense of any query plan. Understanding the structure of an index makes the “key lookup” operator not sound like what you do when someone tapes your car key to the ceiling. So is even this level of understanding deep enough? Do we need to understand the memory architecture used to process the query? It might be a comforting level of knowledge, and will doubtless come in handy at some point, but is not strictly necessary in most cases. Beyond that lies (more or less) full knowledge of SQL language and the intricacies of every step the SQL Server engine takes to process our query. My personal theory is that, as a professional, our knowledge of a given task should extend, at a minimum, one level deeper than is strictly necessary to perform the task. Anything deeper can be left to the ridiculously smart, or obsessive, or both. As an example. tasked with storing an integer value between 0 and 99999999, it’s essential that I know that choosing an Integer over Decimal(8,0) will likely offer performance benefits. It is then useful that I also understand the value of adding a CHECK constraint, to make sure the values are valid to the desired range; and comforting that I know a little about the underlying processors, registers and computer math. Anything further, I leave to the likes of Joe Chang, whose recent blog post on the topic offers depth by the bucketful!  

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• Sendmail relay authentication

  - by Pawel Veselov

  I'm trying to set up my sendmail to authenticate against a relay (comcast). I'm not seeing any attempts to authenticate at all. I'm trying to just debug how authentication works, and can't connect all the pieces... I have, in my .mc file: define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')dnl define(`SMART_HOST', `relay:smtp.comcast.net.')dnl define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', `PLAIN')dnl FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/client-info')dnl And in my /etc/mail/client-info: AuthInfo:*.comcast.net "U:root" "I:comcast_user" "P:comcast_password" Now, I know everything is fine with the u/p, as I could authenticate directly through SMTP, using telnet. There are two things I don't understand. When AuthInfo records are searched for, they are matched by the target hostname. How? Does it it use the map key (something I would expect), or uses the so-called "Domain" ("R:" parameter that I don't set in my auth-info line) What is "U:", really? Sendmail README (http://www.sendmail.org/m4/smtp_auth.html) says it's "user(authoraztion id)", and "I:" is "authentication ID". That suggests that my username should be in "U:", actually, but http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/auth.html says that "I:" is your remote user name. The session looks like this: [root@manticore]/etc/mail# sendmail -qf -v Warning: Option: AuthMechanisms requires SASL support (-DSASL) Running /var/spool/mqueue/p97CgcWq023273 (sequence 1 of 399) [email protected]... Connecting to smtp.comcast.net. port 587 via relay... 220 omta19.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net comcast ESMTP server ready >>> EHLO my.host.name 250-omta19.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net hello [my.ip.add.res], pleased to meet you 250-HELP 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN 250-SIZE 15728640 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-8BITMIME 250-STARTTLS 250 OK >>> STARTTLS 220 2.0.0 Ready to start TLS >>> EHLO my.host.name 250-omta19.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net hello [my.ip.add.res], pleased to meet you 250-HELP 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN 250-SIZE 15728640 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-8BITMIME 250 OK >>> MAIL From:<> SIZE=2183 550 5.1.0 Authentication required MAILER-DAEMON... aliased to postmaster postmaster... aliased to root root... aliased to [email protected] postmaster... aliased to root root... aliased to [email protected] >>> RSET 250 2.0.0 OK [root@manticore]/etc/mail# sendmail -d0.1 Version 8.14.3 Compiled with: DNSMAP LOG MAP_REGEX MATCHGECOS MILTER MIME7TO8 MIME8TO7 NAMED_BIND NETINET NETINET6 NETUNIX NEWDB NIS PIPELINING SCANF SOCKETMAP STARTTLS TCPWRAPPERS USERDB XDEBUG Thanks, Pawel.

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• Ubuntu 10.04 not detecting multiple monitors

  - by user28837

  I have 2 graphics cards, the output from the lspci: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] I have one monitor connected to the 4850 and 2 connected to the 4350. However when I go into System Preferences Monitors the only monitor shown is the one connected to the 4850. Is there something I need to enable for it to be able to use the other card? How do I get this to work. Thanks. As per request: X.Org X Server 1.7.6 Release Date: 2010-03-17 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-25-server i686 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux jeff-desktop 2.6.32-22-generic-pae #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 14:57:29 UTC 2010 i686 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-22-generic-pae root=UUID=852e1013-4ed6-40fd-a462-c29087888383 ro quiet splash Build Date: 23 April 2010 05:11:50PM xorg-server 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7 (Bryce Harrington <[email protected]>) Current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Tue May 11 08:24:52 2010 (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" (==) Using config directory: "/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d" (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section. (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen" (0) (**) | |-->Monitor "<default monitor>" (==) No device specified for screen "Default Screen". Using the first device section listed. (**) | |-->Device "Default Device" (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen". Using a default monitor configuration. (==) Automatically adding devices (==) Automatically enabling devices (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. Entry deleted from font path. (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi, /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType, built-ins (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. (II) Loader magic: 0x81f0e80 (II) Module ABI versions: X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 X.Org Video Driver: 6.0 X.Org XInput driver : 7.0 X.Org Server Extension : 2.0 (++) using VT number 7 (--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 1002:9442:174b:e104 ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] rev 0, Mem @ 0xc0000000/268435456, 0xfe7e0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000a000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072 (--) PCI: (0:2:0:0) 1002:954f:1462:1618 ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] rev 0, Mem @ 0xd0000000/268435456, 0xfe8e0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000b000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072 (WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory) (II) "extmod" will be loaded by default. (II) "dbe" will be loaded by default. (II) "glx" will be loaded. This was enabled by default and also specified in the config file. (II) "record" will be loaded by default. (II) "dri" will be loaded by default. (II) "dri2" will be loaded by default. (II) LoadModule: "glx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/extensions/libglx.so (II) Module glx: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 7.5.0, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension GLX (II) LoadModule: "extmod" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libextmod.so (II) Module extmod: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER (II) Loading extension XFree86-VidModeExtension (II) Loading extension XFree86-DGA (II) Loading extension DPMS (II) Loading extension XVideo (II) Loading extension XVideo-MotionCompensation (II) Loading extension X-Resource (II) LoadModule: "dbe" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdbe.so (II) Module dbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension DOUBLE-BUFFER (II) LoadModule: "record" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/librecord.so (II) Module record: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.13.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension RECORD (II) LoadModule: "dri" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri.so (II) Module dri: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI (II) LoadModule: "dri2" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri2.so (II) Module dri2: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension DRI2 (II) LoadModule: "fglrx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so (II) Module fglrx: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 8.72.11 Module class: X.Org Video Driver (II) Loading sub module "fglrxdrm" (II) LoadModule: "fglrxdrm" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/linux/libfglrxdrm.so (II) Module fglrxdrm: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 8.72.11 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version Identifier:8.72.11 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Release Identifier: 8.723.1 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Build Date: Apr 8 2010 21:40:29 (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0 (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fglrx (II) Loading PCS database from /etc/ati/amdpcsdb (--) Assigning device section with no busID to primary device (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@2:0:0) found (--) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x9442) found (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@2:0:1) found (**) ChipID override: 0x954F (**) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x954F) found (II) AMD Video driver is running on a device belonging to a group targeted for this release (II) AMD Video driver is signed (II) fglrx(0): pEnt->device->identifier=0x9428aa0 (II) pEnt->device->identifier=(nil) (II) fglrx(0): === [atiddxPreInit] === begin (II) Loading sub module "vgahw" (II) LoadModule: "vgahw" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvgahw.so (II) Module vgahw: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 0.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section "Default Screen" for depth/fbbpp 24/32 (**) fglrx(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 (II) fglrx(0): Pixel depth = 24 bits stored in 4 bytes (32 bpp pixmaps) (==) fglrx(0): Default visual is TrueColor (==) fglrx(0): RGB weight 888 (II) fglrx(0): Using 8 bits per RGB (==) fglrx(0): Buffer Tiling is ON (II) Loading sub module "fglrxdrm" (II) LoadModule: "fglrxdrm" (II) Reloading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/linux/libfglrxdrm.so ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 10, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 10 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 10, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 10 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 11, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 11 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series" (Chipset = 0x9442) (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x174b, PciSubDevice = 0xe104) (==) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party graphics adapter - NOT original ATI (--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xc0000000 (--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xfe7e0000 (--) fglrx(0): I/O port at 0x0000a000 (==) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0x000c0000 (II) fglrx(0): AC Adapter is used (II) fglrx(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000 (II) Loading sub module "vbe" (II) LoadModule: "vbe" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvbe.so (II) Module vbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): VESA BIOS detected (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Version 3.0 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Total Mem: 16384 kB (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM: ATI ATOMBIOS (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Software Rev: 11.13 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Vendor: (C) 1988-2005, ATI Technologies Inc. (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Product: RV770 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Product Rev: 01.00 (II) fglrx(0): ATI Video BIOS revision 9 or later detected (--) fglrx(0): Video RAM: 524288 kByte, Type: GDDR3 (II) fglrx(0): PCIE card detected (--) fglrx(0): Using per-process page tables (PPPT) as GART. (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series" (Chipset = 0x954f) (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x1462, PciSubDevice = 0x1618) (==) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party graphics adapter - NOT original ATI (--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd0000000 (--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xfe8e0000 (--) fglrx(0): I/O port at 0x0000b000 (==) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0x000c0000 (II) fglrx(0): AC Adapter is used (II) fglrx(0): Invalid ATI BIOS from int10, the adapter is not VGA-enabled (II) fglrx(0): ATI Video BIOS revision 9 or later detected (--) fglrx(0): Video RAM: 524288 kByte, Type: DDR2 (II) fglrx(0): PCIE card detected (--) fglrx(0): Using per-process page tables (PPPT) as GART. (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported (II) fglrx(0): Using adapter: 1:0.0. (II) fglrx(0): [FB] MC range(MCFBBase = 0xf00000000, MCFBSize = 0x20000000) (II) fglrx(0): Interrupt handler installed at IRQ 31. (II) fglrx(0): Using adapter: 2:0.0. (II) fglrx(0): [FB] MC range(MCFBBase = 0xf00000000, MCFBSize = 0x20000000) (II) fglrx(0): RandR 1.2 support is enabled! (II) fglrx(0): RandR 1.2 rotation support is enabled! (==) fglrx(0): Center Mode is disabled (II) Loading sub module "fb" (II) LoadModule: "fb" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libfb.so (II) Module fb: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 (II) Loading sub module "ddc" (II) LoadModule: "ddc" (II) Module "ddc" already built-in (II) fglrx(0): Finished Initialize PPLIB! (II) Loading sub module "ddc" (II) LoadModule: "ddc" (II) Module "ddc" already built-in (II) fglrx(0): Connected Display0: DFP on external TMDS [tmds2] (II) fglrx(0): Display0 EDID data --------------------------- (II) fglrx(0): Manufacturer: DEL Model: a038 Serial#: 810829397 (II) fglrx(0): Year: 2008 Week: 51 (II) fglrx(0): EDID Version: 1.3 (II) fglrx(0): Digital Display Input (II) fglrx(0): Max Image Size [cm]: horiz.: 53 vert.: 30 (II) fglrx(0): Gamma: 2.20 (II) fglrx(0): DPMS capabilities: StandBy Suspend Off (II) fglrx(0): Supported color encodings: RGB 4:4:4 YCrCb 4:4:4 (II) fglrx(0): Default color space is primary color space (II) fglrx(0): First detailed timing is preferred mode (II) fglrx(0): redX: 0.640 redY: 0.330 greenX: 0.300 greenY: 0.600 (II) fglrx(0): blueX: 0.150 blueY: 0.060 whiteX: 0.312 whiteY: 0.329 (II) fglrx(0): Supported established timings: (II) fglrx(0): 720x400@70Hz (II) fglrx(0): 640x480@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 640x480@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 800x600@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 800x600@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1024x768@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1024x768@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1280x1024@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): Manufacturer's mask: 0 (II) fglrx(0): Supported standard timings: (II) fglrx(0): #0: hsize: 1152 vsize 864 refresh: 75 vid: 20337 (II) fglrx(0): #1: hsize: 1280 vsize 1024 refresh: 60 vid: 32897 (II) fglrx(0): #2: hsize: 1920 vsize 1080 refresh: 60 vid: 49361 (II) fglrx(0): Supported detailed timing: (II) fglrx(0): clock: 148.5 MHz Image Size: 531 x 298 mm (II) fglrx(0): h_active: 1920 h_sync: 2008 h_sync_end 2052 h_blank_end 2200 h_border: 0 (II) fglrx(0): v_active: 1080 v_sync: 1084 v_sync_end 1089 v_blanking: 1125 v_border: 0 (II) fglrx(0): Serial No: Y183D8CF0TFU (II) fglrx(0): Monitor name: DELL S2409W (II) fglrx(0): Ranges: V min: 50 V max: 76 Hz, H min: 30 H max: 83 kHz, PixClock max 170 MHz (II) fglrx(0): EDID (in hex): (II) fglrx(0): 00ffffffffffff0010ac38a055465430 (II) fglrx(0): 3312010380351e78eeee91a3544c9926 (II) fglrx(0): 0f5054a54b00714f8180d1c001010101 (II) fglrx(0): 010101010101023a801871382d40582c (II) fglrx(0): 4500132a2100001e000000ff00593138 (II) fglrx(0): 3344384346305446550a000000fc0044 (II) fglrx(0): 454c4c205332343039570a20000000fd (II) fglrx(0): 00324c1e5311000a2020202020200059 (II) fglrx(0): End of Display0 EDID data -------------------- (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP2 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT1 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT2 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP2 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS connected (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT1 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT2 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Using exact sizes for initial modes (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS using initial mode 1920x1080 (II) fglrx(0): DPI set to (96, 96) (II) fglrx(0): Adapter ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series has 2 configurable heads and 1 displays connected. (==) fglrx(0): QBS disabled (==) fglrx(0): PseudoColor visuals disabled (II) Loading sub module "ramdac" (II) LoadModule: "ramdac" (II) Module "ramdac" already built-in (==) fglrx(0): NoAccel = NO (==) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO (==) fglrx(0): Capabilities: 0x00000000 (==) fglrx(0): CapabilitiesEx: 0x00000000 (==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "fglrx_dri.so" (==) fglrx(0): UseFastTLS=0 (==) fglrx(0): BlockSignalsOnLock=1 (--) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp (II) Loading extension ATIFGLRXDRI (II) fglrx(0): doing swlDriScreenInit (II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit for fglrx driver ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 17, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 17 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 17, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 17 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] DRM interface version 1.0 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] created "fglrx" driver at busid "PCI:1:0:0" (II) fglrx(0): [uki] added 8192 byte SAREA at 0x2000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] mapped SAREA 0x2000 to 0xb6996000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] framebuffer handle = 0x3000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] added 1 reserved context for kernel (II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit done (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Version Information: (II) fglrx(0): Name: fglrx (II) fglrx(0): Version: 8.72.11 (II) fglrx(0): Date: Apr 8 2010 (II) fglrx(0): Desc: ATI FireGL DRM kernel module (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver. (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Build Time Information: (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel UTS_RELEASE: 2.6.32-22-generic-pae (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel MODVERSIONS: yes (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel __SMP__: yes (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel PAGE_SIZE: 0x1000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] register handle = 0x00004000 (II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull! (II) fglrx(0): FBADPhys: 0xf00000000 FBMappedSize: 0x01068000 (II) fglrx(0): FBMM initialized for area (0,0)-(1920,2240) (II) fglrx(0): FBMM auto alloc for area (0,0)-(1920,1920) (front color buffer - assumption) (II) fglrx(0): Largest offscreen area available: 1920 x 320 (==) fglrx(0): Backing store disabled (II) Loading extension FGLRXEXTENSION (==) fglrx(0): DPMS enabled (II) fglrx(0): Initialized in-driver Xinerama extension (**) fglrx(0): Textured Video is enabled. (II) LoadModule: "glesx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/glesx.so (II) Module glesx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension GLESX (II) Loading sub module "xaa" (II) LoadModule: "xaa" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libxaa.so (II) Module xaa: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.2.1 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): GLESX enableFlags = 94 (II) fglrx(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) Screen to screen bit blits Solid filled rectangles Solid Horizontal and Vertical Lines Driver provided ScreenToScreenBitBlt replacement Driver provided FillSolidRects replacement (II) fglrx(0): GLESX is enabled (II) LoadModule: "amdxmm" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/amdxmm.so (II) Module amdxmm: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension AMDXVOPL (II) fglrx(0): UVD2 feature is available (II) fglrx(0): Enable composite support successfully (II) fglrx(0): X context handle = 0x1 (II) fglrx(0): [DRI] installation complete (==) fglrx(0): Silken mouse enabled (==) fglrx(0): Using HW cursor of display infrastructure! (II) fglrx(0): Disabling in-server RandR and enabling in-driver RandR 1.2. (--) RandR disabled (II) Found 2 VGA devices: arbiter wrapping enabled (II) Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension (II) Initializing built-in extension SHAPE (II) Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM (II) Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension (II) Initializing built-in extension XTEST (II) Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS (II) Initializing built-in extension SYNC (II) Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD (II) Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC (II) Initializing built-in extension SECURITY (II) Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA (II) Initializing built-in extension XFIXES (II) Initializing built-in extension RENDER (II) Initializing built-in extension RANDR (II) Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE (II) Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 18, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 18 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 18, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 18 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so (II) GLX: Initialized DRI GL provider for screen 0 (II) fglrx(0): Enable the clock gating! (II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 507 x 285 (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-B20D7FC79C7F597315E3E501AEF10E0D866E8E92.xkm (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event1) (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (II) LoadModule: "evdev" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so (II) Module evdev: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.3.2 Module class: X.Org XInput Driver ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 7.0 (**) Power Button: always reports core events (**) Power Button: Device: "/dev/input/event1" (II) Power Button: Found keys (II) Power Button: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event0) (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Power Button: always reports core events (**) Power Button: Device: "/dev/input/event0" (II) Power Button: Found keys (II) Power Button: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (/dev/input/event3) (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Device: "/dev/input/event3" (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found 12 mouse buttons (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found scroll wheel(s) (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found relative axes (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found x and y relative axes (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Configuring as mouse (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" (type: MOUSE) (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: initialized for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (/dev/input/mouse1) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard (/dev/input/event4) (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Device: "/dev/input/event4" (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Found keys (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard (/dev/input/event5) (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Device: "/dev/input/event5" (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Found keys (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/event6) (**) KEYBOARD: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) KEYBOARD: always reports core events (**) KEYBOARD: Device: "/dev/input/event6" (II) KEYBOARD: Found keys (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "KEYBOARD" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/event7) (**) KEYBOARD: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) KEYBOARD: always reports core events (**) KEYBOARD: Device: "/dev/input/event7" (II) KEYBOARD: Found 14 mouse buttons (II) KEYBOARD: Found scroll wheel(s) (II) KEYBOARD: Found relative axes (II) KEYBOARD: Found keys (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as mouse (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as keyboard (**) KEYBOARD: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) KEYBOARD: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "KEYBOARD" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (EE) KEYBOARD: failed to initialize for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/mouse2) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) config/udev: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation (/dev/input/event2) (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: always reports core events (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Device: "/dev/input/event2" (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found 3 mouse buttons (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found relative axes (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found x and y relative axes (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Configuring as mouse (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Macintosh mouse button emulation" (type: MOUSE) (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: initialized for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation (/dev/input/mouse0) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) fglrx(0): Restoring Recent Mode via PCS is not supported in RANDR 1.2 capable environments

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• Sendmail SMART_HOST not working

  - by daniel

  Hello, I've defined SMART_HOST to be a specific server, lets call it foo.bar.com. However, when I send a test mail using 'sendmail -t', sendmail tries to use mx.bar.com, which subsequently rejects my mail. I've verified that foo.bar.com works and that mx.bar.com does not work (yay telnet). I've recompiled sendmail.mc vi make, make -C and m4. I've verified the DS entry in sendmail.cf. I've restarted sendmail correctly. I'm not sure how to proceed at this point. Any ideas? Here is my SMART_HOST line: define(SMART_HOST',foo.bar.com')dnl ...and here is the result of a test mail. It never tries to use foo.bar.com, instead it uses mx.bar.com. $ echo subject: test; echo | sendmail -Am -v -flocaluser -- [email protected] subject: test [email protected]... Connecting to mx.bar.com via relay... 220 mx.bar.com ESMTP >>> EHLO myhost.bar.com 250-mx.bar.com 250-8BITMIME 250 SIZE 52428800 >>> MAIL From:<[email protected]> SIZE=1 250 sender <[email protected]> ok >>> RCPT To:<[email protected]> 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected. >>> RSET 250 reset localuser... Connecting to local... localuser... Sent Closing connection to mx.bar.com. >>> QUIT 221 mx.bar.com And last, here is a test mail sent using foo.bar.com: $ hostname myhost.bar.com $ telnet foo.bar.com 25 Trying ***.***.***.***... Connected to foo.bar.com (***.***.***.***). Escape character is '^]'. 220 foo.bar.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.14.1/8.14.1/ITS-7.0/ldap2-1+tls; Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:27:44 -0700 (MST) helo foo 250 foo.bar.com Hello myhost.bar.com [***.***.***.***], pleased to meet you mail from: [email protected] 250 2.1.0 [email protected]... Sender ok rcpt to: [email protected] 250 2.1.5 [email protected]... Recipient ok data 354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself testing . 250 2.0.0 oBLKRikZ003758 Message accepted for delivery quit 221 2.0.0 foo.bar.com closing connection Connection closed by foreign host. Any ideas? Thanks

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• Sendmail smtp-auth issues

  - by SlackO

  I'm running into a problem with Sendmail trying to implement SMTP- auth. I"m running 8.14.5 and have saslauthd running under FreeBSD 7.0-R. I don't believe I have starttls enabled (but I also compiled a version with it and have been testing it too - same problem) - just looking for basic auth, but am wondering if my configuration is not compatible with modern mail clients? I don't think I have any certs set up. It seems an older version of Microsoft Outlook Express works fine with SMTP-auth with no problems, but Outlook 2010 won't work, and neither will Eudora (basic settings to not use encryption and use same uid/pw as pop3 account name) When trying to send mail the server reports: "550 571 Relaying Denied. Proper authentication required." Is there some config that I am missing? Why does it work with Outlook Express but not other e-mail clients? my site.config.m4 has: APPENDDEF(confENVDEF',-DSASL=2') APPENDDEF(conf_sendmail_LIBS',-lsasl2') dnl APPENDDEF(confLIBDIRS',-L/usr/local/lib/sasl2') APPENDDEF(confLIBDIRS',-L/usr/local/lib') APPENDDEF(confINCDIRS',-I/usr/local/include') My sendmail.mc has: define(ConfAUTH_OPTIONS',A') TRUST_AUTH_MECH(LOGIN PLAIN')dnl define(ConfAUTH_MECHANISMS',`LOGIN PLAIN')dnl My /usr/local/lib/sasl2/Sendmail.conf has: pwcheck_method: saslauthd When I restart sendmail this shows up in the logs: Jun 16 12:36:24 x sm-mta[79090]: restarting /usr/sbin/sendmail due to signal Jun 16 12:36:24 x sm-mta[81145]: starting daemon (8.14.5): SMTP+queueing@00:30:00 Jun 16 12:36:24 x sm-mta[81147]: STARTTLS=client, relay=mxgw1.mail.nationalnet.com., version=TLSv1/SSLv3, verify=FAIL, cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits=256/256 Jun 16 12:36:24 x sm-mta[81148]: STARTTLS=client, relay=mxgw1.mail.nationalnet.com., version=TLSv1/SSLv3, verify=FAIL, cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, bits=256/256 testing on the cmd line: telnet localhost 587 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. 220 xxxt ESMTP Sendmail 8.14.5/8.14.5; Fri, 15 Jun 2012 18:28:03 -0500 (CDT) ehlo localhost 250-xxxx Hello localhost [127.0.0.1], pleased to meet you 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-PIPELINING 250-8BITMIME 250-SIZE 250-DSN 250-AUTH GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5 LOGIN PLAIN 250-DELIVERBY 250 HELP I am not using any certs or ssl right now - just trying to get basic auth to work. Anyone have any ideas?

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• How do I (robustly) remotely execute tasks on Windows workstations in a domain?

  - by Zac B

  I'm not even sure if "robustly" is a word. Anyway. Context: We have a few hundred Windows 7 workstations on a LAN. We use AD/GPO management pretty heavily, but there are a lot of periodic and/or manual maintenance tasks we need to do that can't be done via GPO/scheduled task. For example, say I want to execute program X (which runs silently, in the background, and doesn't bother the user) on workstation Y, or say I want to execute task A on a workstation group B either on a schedule or on demand. Kicking the users off of their computers to do this (i.e. using RDP) is a no-no, and doesn't work on groups anyway. Question: What's the best way to do this that is robust enough that, after setup, I could give it to beginner support people (read: people who are phobic of the command line, and get confused with GUI interfaces more complicated than Firefox)? I'm a competent programmer, and, if there is a robust set of tools or framework out there for this type of task, I'd consider hacking something together myself if it didn't take too long. If there's some combination of tools or techniques that others use to make remote-workstation-administration doable by beginners, I have yet to find it. For those who care about the "why": I'm midlevel IT, and was told to implement a remote management solution that allows arbitrary/scheduled remote execution, with confirmation that programs actually ran remotely, and the ability to view what they returned. "Why?" I asked, "Can't I just use PsExec and the task scheduler on a dispatcher machine?" "No," I was told, "'Joe' the second-week tech is going to be in charge of this one, and he needs something simple with a GUI." What I've tried: I've played with making a bunch of one-clickable "transfer files to remote computer and run them with PsExec" batch/VB scrips, but those tend to break down and don't easily support running on customizable groups. I've played a little bit with the Windows version of Puppet, but it doesn't support arbitrary-time remote execution (it's ability to group computers into a tree/node structure is really nice though). I've used an older version of Altiris, and, while it does a lot of what I want, it's interface is awful, it's slow, crashes a lot, and is probably too expensive for management. SwiftWater's DMS solution does some of what I want, but it's very underdeveloped, closed-source (not a deal breaker but not ideal), and I get the impression that support and reliability are lacking.

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• Seriously, It’s Time to Get Your Content Act Together

  - by Mike Stiles

  Branded content, content marketing, social content, brand journalism, we’re seeing those terms more and more. Why? The technology tools are coming together. We should know. We can gather big data, crunch it, listen to the public, moderate, respond, get to know the customer intimately, know what they like, know what they want, we can target, distribute, amplify, measure engagement and reaction, modify strategy and even automate a great deal of all that. An amazing machine, a sleek, smooth-running engine has been built such that all the parts can interact and work together to deliver peak performance and maximum output. But that engine isn’t going anywhere without any gas. Content is the gas. Yes, we curate other people’s content. We can siphon their gas. There’s tech to help with that too. But as for the creation of original, worthwhile content made for a specific audience, our audience, machines can’t do that…at least not yet. Curated content is great. But somebody has to originate the content for it to be curated and shared. And since the need for good, curated content is obviously large and the desire to share is there, it’s a winning proposition for a brand to be a consistent producer of original content. And yet, it feels like content is an issue we’re avoiding. There’s a reluctance to build a massive pipeline if you have no idea what you’re going to run through it. The C-suite often doesn’t know what content is, that it’s different from ads, where to get it, who makes it, how long it should be, what the point of it is if there’s no hard sell of the product, what it costs, how to use it, how to measure it, how to make sure it’s good, or how to make sure it will keep flowing. It could be the reason many brands aren’t pulling the trigger on socially enabling the enterprise. And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of creative, daring, experimental, uniquely talented entertainers and journalists chomping at the bit to execute content for brands. But for many corporate executives, content is “weird,” and the people who make it are even weirder. The content side of the equation is human. It’s art, but art that can be informed by data. The natural inclination is for brands to turn to their agencies for such creative endeavors. But agencies are falling into one of two categories. They’re failing to transition from ads to content. In “Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?” Alexander Jutkowitz says agencies were made for one-hit campaigns, not ongoing content. Or, they’re ready and capable but can’t get clients to do the right things. Agencies have to make money, even if it means continuing to do the wrong things because that’s all the client will agree to. So what we wind up with in the pipeline is advertising, marketing-heavy content, content that was obviously created or spearheaded by non-creative executives, random & inconsistent content, copy written for SEO bots, and other completely uninteresting nightmares. Frank Rose, author of “The Art of Immersion,” writes, “Content without story and excitement is noise pollution.” In the old days, you made an ad and inserted it into shows made by people who knew what they were doing. You could bask in that show’s success and leverage their audience. Now, you are tasked with attracting, amassing and holding your own audience. You may just want to make, advertise and sell your widgets. But now there’s a war on for a precious commodity, attention. People are busy. They have filters to keep uninteresting and irrelevant things out. They value their time and expect value back when they give it up. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says, "Your customers don't care about you, your products, your services…they care about themselves, their wants and their needs." Is it worth getting serious about content and doing it right? 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content (Custom Content Council). Interesting content is one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social (Content+). 78% of consumers think organizations that provide custom content want to build good relationships with them (TMG Custom Media). On the B2B side, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company info in a series of articles vs. an ad. So what’s the hang-up? Cited barriers to content marketing are lack of human resources (42%) and lack of budget (35%). 54% of brands don’t have a single on-site, dedicated content creator. And only 38% of brands have a content marketing strategy. Tech has built the biggest, most incredible stage for brands that’s ever been built. Putting something on that stage is your responsibility. Do a bad show, or no show at all, and you’ll be the beautiful, talented actress that never got discovered. @mikestilesPhoto: Gabriella Fabbri, stock.xchng

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