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• SQL Sentry First Impressions

  - by AjarnMark

  After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate. A couple of weeks ago, seemingly from out of nowhere, complaints from the business users started coming in that one of the core internal applications was running dramatically slower than normal, and fingers were being pointed at the SQL Server.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a production DBA whose entire job is to monitor and maintain our SQL Servers.  The responsibility falls to me to do the best I can, investing only a small portion of my time, because there are so many other responsibilities to take care of, and our industry is still deep in recession.  I inherited these SQL Servers and have made significant improvements in process and procedure, but I had not yet made the time to take real baseline measurements or keep a really close eye on the performance.  Like many DBAs, I wrote several of my own tools and used the “built-in tools” like Profiler, PerfMon, and sp_who2 (did I mention most of our instances are SQL Server 2000?).  These have all served me well for in-the-moment troubleshooting and maintenance, but they really fell down on the job when I was called upon to “prove” that SQL Server performance was acceptable and more importantly had not degraded recently (i.e. historical comparisons).  I really didn’t have anything from a historical comparison perspective, but I was able to show that current performance was acceptable, and deflect attention back onto other components (which in fact turned out to be the real culprit). That experience dramatically illustrated the need for better monitoring tools.  Coincidentally, I had been talking recently to my boss about the mini nightmare of monitoring several critical and interdependent overnight jobs that operate on separate instances of SQL Server.  Among other tools, I had been using Idera’s SQL Job Manager which is a free tool and did a nice job of showing me job schedules and histories in a nice calendar view.  This worked fairly well, and for the money (did I mention it was free?) it couldn’t be beat.  But it is based on the stored job history in MSDB, and there were other performance problems that we ran into when we started changing the settings for how much job history to retain, in order to be able to look back a month or more in the calendar view.  Another coincidence (if you believe in such things) was that when we had some of those performance challenges, I posted a couple of questions to the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter and Greg Gonzalez (@SQLSensei) suggested I check out SQL Sentry’s Event Manager.  At the time, I just thought he worked there, but later found out that he founded the company.  When I took a quick look at the features & benefits, the one that really jumped out at me is Chaining and Queueing which sounded like it would really help with our “interdependent jobs on different servers” issue. I know that is a lot of background story and coincidences, but hopefully you have stuck with me so far, and now we have arrived at the point where last week I downloaded and installed the 30-day trial of the SQL Sentry Power Suite, which is Event Manager plus Performance Advisor.  And I must say that I really like what I see so far.  Here are a few highlights: Great Support.  I had two issues getting the trial setup and monitoring a handful of our servers.  One of which was entirely my fault (missed a security setting in SQL 2008) and the other was mostly my fault (late change to some config settings that were apparently cached and did not get refreshed properly).  In both cases, the support staff at SQL Sentry were very responsive and rather quickly figured out what the cause and fix was for each of them.  This left me with a great impression of the company.  Kudos to them! Chaining and Queueing.  While I have not yet activated this feature, I am very excited about the possibilities.  We have jobs on three different instances of SQL Server that have to be run in a certain order, and each has to finish before the next can successfully begin, and I believe this feature will ensure just that.  It has been a real pain in the backside when one of those jobs runs just a little too long and does not finish before the job on another instance starts, thus triggering a chain reaction of either outright job failures, or worse, successful completion of completely invalid processing. Calendar View.  I really, really like the Event Manager calendar view where I can see all jobs and events across all instances and identify potential resource contention as well as windows of opportunity for maintenance activity.  Very well done, and based on Event Manager’s own database of accumulated historical information rather than querying the source instances every time. Performance Advisor Dashboard History View.  This view let’s me quickly select a date and time range and it displays graphs of key SQL Server and Windows metrics.  This is exactly the thing I needed to answer the “has performance changed recently” question at the beginning of this post. Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name.  This was a big and VERY pleasant surprise.  If you have ever looked at the list of SQL Server jobs that SQL Server Reporting Services creates when you make a Subscription, you will notice that they all have some sort of GUID as the name of the job.  This is really ugly, and really annoying because when you are just looking at the SQL Agent and Job Activity Monitor, if you see that Job X failed, you really do not have any indication in the name or the properties of the Job itself, as to what Report that was for.  But with SQL Sentry Event Manager you do.  The Jobs list in the Navigator pane in SQL Sentry, amazingly, displays the name of the Report that the Subscription Job is for.  And when you open it to see more details, it shows you the full Reporting Services path to that Report, so you can immediately track it down in the Report Manager in case you want to identify/notify the owner or edit the Subscription information.  I did not expect this at all, but I sure do like it.  HOORAY! That is just my first impressions from using the tools for a few days.  And I haven’t even gotten into how it showed me where I was completely mistaken about one aspect of my SQL Server disk configurations.  I’ll share that lesson in another blog entry.  But I have to say it again, the combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan.

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• Visiting the Fire Station in Coromandel

  Hm, I just tried to remember how we actually came up with this cool idea... but it's already too blurred and it doesn't really matter after all. Anyway, if I remember correctly (IIRC), it happened during one of the Linux meetups at Mugg & Bean, Bagatelle where Ajay and I brought our children along and we had a brief conversation about how cool it would be to check out one of the fire stations here in Mauritius. We both thought that it would be a great experience and adventure for the little ones. An idea takes shape And there we go, down the usual routine these... having an idea, checking out the options and discussing who's doing what. Except this time, it was all up to Ajay, and he did a fantastic job. End of August, he told me that he got in touch with one of his friends which actually works as a fire fighter at the station in Coromandel and that there could be an option to come and visit them (soon). A couple of days later - Confirmed! Be there, and in time... What time? Anyway, doesn't really matter... Everything was settled and arranged. I asked the kids on Friday afternoon if they might be interested to see the fire engines and what a fire fighter is doing. Of course, they were all in! Getting up early on Sunday morning isn't really a regular exercise for all of us but everything went smooth and after a short breakfast it was time to leave. Where are we going? Are we there yet? Now, we are in Bambous. Why do you go this way? The kids were so much into it. Absolutely amazing to see their excitement. Are we there yet? Well, we went through the sugar cane fields towards Chebel and then down into the industrial zone at Coromandel. Honestly, I had a clue where the fire station is located but having Google Maps in reach that shouldn't be a problem in case that we might get lost. But my worries were washed away when our children guided us... "There! Over there are the fire engines! We have to turn left, dad." - No comment, the kids were right! As we were there a little bit too early, we parked the car and the kids started to explore the area and outskirts of the fire station. Some minutes later, as if we had placed an order a unit of two cars had to go out for an alarm and the kids could witness them leaving as closely as possible. Sirens on and wow!!! Ladder truck L32 - MAN truck with Rosenbauer built-up and equipment by Metz Taking the tour Ajay arrived shortly after that and guided us finally inside the station to meet with his pal. The three guys were absolutely well-prepared and showed us around in the hall, explaining that there two units out at the moment. But the ladder truck (with max. 32m expandable height) was still around we all got a great insight into the technique and equipment on the vehicle. It was amazing to see all three kids listening to Mambo as give some figures about the truck and how the fire fighters are actually it. The children and 'our' fire fighters of the day had great fun with the various fire engines Absolutely fantastic that the children were allowed to experience this - we had so much fun! Ajay's son brought two of his toy fire engines along, shared them with ours, and they all played very well together. As a parent it was really amazing to see them at such an ease. Enough theory Shortly afterwards the ladder truck was moved outside, got stabilised and ready to go for 'real-life' exercising. With the additional equipment of safety helmets, security belts and so on, we all got a first-hand impression about how it could be as a fire-fighter. Actually, I was totally amazed by the curiousity and excitement of my BWE. She was really into it and asked lots of interesting questions - in general but also technical. And while our fighters were busy with Ajay and family, I gave her some more details and explanations about the truck, the expandable ladder, the safety cage at the top and other equipment available. Safety first! No exceptions and always be prepared for the worst case... Also, the equipped has been checked prior to excuse - This is your life saver... Hooked up and ready to go... ...of course not too high. This is just a demonstration - and 32 meters above ground isn't for everyone. Well, after that it was me that had the asking looks on me, and I finally revealed to the local fire fighters that I was in the auxiliary fire brigade, more precisely in the hazard department, for more than 10 years. So not a professional fire fighter but at least a passionate and educated one as them. Inside the station Our fire fighters really took their time to explain their daily job to kids, provided them access to operation seat on the ladder truck and how the truck cabin is actually equipped with the different radios and so on. It was really a great time. Later on we had a brief tour through the building itself, and again all of our questions were answered. We had great fun and started to joke about bits and pieces. For me it was also very interesting to see the comparison between the fire station here in Mauritius and the ones I have been to back in Germany. Amazing to see them completely captivated in the play - the children had lots of fun! Also, that there are currently ten fire stations all over the island, plus two additional but private ones at the airport and at the harbour. The newest one is actually down in Black River on the west coast because the time from Quatre Bornes takes too long to have any chance of an effective alarm at all. IMHO, a very good decision as time is the most important factor in getting fire incidents under control. After all it was great experience for all of us, especially for the children to see and understand that their toy trucks are only copies of the real thing and that the job of a (professional) fire fighter is very important in our society. Don't forget that those guys run into the danger zone while you're trying to get away from it as much as possible. Another unit just came back from a grass fire - and shortly after they went out again. No time to rest, too much to do! Mauritian Fire Fighters now and (maybe) in the future... Thank you! It was an honour to be around! Thank you to Ajay for organising and arranging this Sunday morning event, and of course of Big Thank You to the three guys that took some time off to have us at the Fire Station in Coromandel and guide us through their daily job! And remember to call 115 in case of emergencies!

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• Our winners- and some BBQ for everyone

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Congrats to our two winners for the first two comments on my last entry. Steve from Australia and John Lemon. Steve won since he was the first person over the International Date Line to see the post I made so late after a workday on Friday. So not only does he get to live in a country with the 2nd most beautiful women in the world, but now he gets some cool Oracle Swag, too. (Yes, I live on the beach in southern California, so you can guess where 1st place is for that other contest…Now if Steve happens to live in Manly, we may actually have a tie going…) OK, ok, for everyone else, you can be winners, too. How you ask? I will make you the envy of every guy and gal in your neighborhood or campsite. What follows is the way to smoke the best ribs you or anyone you know have ever tasted. Follow my instructions and give it a try. People at your party/cookout/campsite will tell you that they’re the best ribs they’ve ever had, and I will let you take all the credit. Yes, I fully realize this post is going to be longer than any post I’ve done yet. But let’s get serious here. Smoking meat is much more important, agreed? J In all honesty, this is a repeat of another blog I did, so I’m just copying and pasting. Step 1. Get some ribs. I actually really like Costco’s pack. They have both St. Louis and Baby Back. (They are the same ribs, but cut in half down the sides. St. Louis style is the ‘front’ of the ribs closest to the stomach, and ‘Baby back’ is the part of the ribs where is connects to the backbone). I like them both, so here you see I got one pack of each. About 4 racks to a pack. So these two packs for $25 each will feed about 16-20 of my guests. So around 3 bucks a person is a pretty good deal for the best ribs you’ll ever have. Step 2. Prep the ribs the night before you’re going to smoke. You need to trim them to fit your smoker racks, and also take off the membrane and add your rub. Then cover and set in fridge overnight. Here’s how to take off the membrane, which will not break down with heat and smoke like the rest of the meat, so must be removed. Use a butter knife to work in a ways between the membrane and the white bone. Just enough to make room for your finger. Try really hard not to poke through the membrane, you want to keep it whole. See how my gloved fingers can now start to lift up and pull off the membrane? This is what you are trying to do. It’s awesome when the whole thing can come off at once. This one is going great, maybe the best one I’ve ever done. Sometime, it falls apart and doesn't come off in one nice piece. I hate when that happens. Now, add your rub and pat it down once into the meat with your other hand. My rub is not secret. I got it from my mentor, a BBQ competitive chef who is currently ranked #1 in California and #3 in the nation on the BBQ circuit. He does full-day classes in southern California if anyone is interested in taking his class. Go to www.slapyodaddybbq.com to check him out. I tweaked his run recipe a tad and made my own. It’s one part Lawry’s, one part sugar, one part Montreal Steak Seasoning, one part garlic powder, one-half part red chili powder, one-half part paprika, and then 1/20th part cayenne. You can adjust that last ingredient, or leave it out. Real cheap stuff you can get at Costco. This lets you make enough rub to last about a year or two. Don’t make it all at once, make a shaker’s worth and use it up before you make more. Place it all in a bowl, mix well, and then add to a shaker like you see here. You can get a shaker with medium sized holes on it at any restaurant supply store or Smart & Final. The kind you see at pizza places for their red pepper flakes works best. Now cover and place in fridge overnight. Step 3. The next day. Ok, I’m ready to go. Get your stuff together. You will need your smoker, some good foil, a can of peach nectar, a bottle of Agave syrup, and a package of brown sugar. You will need this stuff later. I also use a clean spray bottle, and apple juice. Step 4. Make your fire, or turn on your electric smoker. In this example I’m using my portable charcoal smoker. I got this for only $40. I then modified it to be useful. Once modified, these guys actually work very well. Trust me, your food DOES NOT KNOW how expensive your smoker is. Someone who tells you that you need to spend a bunch of money on a smoker is an idiot. I also have an electric smoker that stays in my backyard. It’s cleaner and larger so I can smoke more food. But this little $40 one works great for going camping. Here is what my fire-bowl looks like. I leave a space in the middle open, and place cold charcoal and wood chucks in a circle going outwards. This makes it so when I dump the hot coals down the middle, they will slowly burn outwards, hitting different wood chucks at different times, allowing me to go 4-5 hours without having to even touch my fire. For ribs, I use apple and pecan wood. Pecan works for anything. Apple or any fruit wood is excellent for pork. So now I make my hot charcoal with a chimney only about half-full. I found a great use for that side-burner on my grill that I never use. It makes a fantastic chimney starter. You never use fluids of any kind, nor ever use that stupid charcoal that has lighter fluid built into it. Never, ever, ever. Step 5. Smoke. Add your ribs in the racks and stack them up in your smoker. I have a digital thermometer on a probe that I use to keep track of the temp in the smoker. I just lay the probe on the top rack and shut the lid. This cheap guy is a little harder to maintain the right temperature of around 225 F, so I do have to keep my eye on it more than my electric one or a more expensive charcoal one with the cool gadgets that regulate your temp for you. Every hour, spray apple juice all over your ribs using that spray bottle. After about 3 hours, you should have a very good crust (called the Bark) on your ribs. Once you have the Bark where you want it, carefully remove your ribs and place them in a tray. We are now ready for a very important part to make the flavor. Get a large piece of foil and place one rib section on it. Splash some of the peach nectar on it, and then a drizzle of the Agave syrup. Then, use your gloved hand to pack on some brown sugar. Do this on BOTH sides, and then completely wrap it up TIGHT in the foil. Do this for each rib section, and then place all the wrapped sections back into the smoker for another 4 to 6 hours. This is where the meat will get tender and flavorful. The first three hours is only to make the smoke bark. You don’t need smoke anymore, since the ribs are wrapped, you only need to keep the heat around 225 for the next 4-6 hours. Obviously you don’t spray anymore. Just time and slow heat. Be patient. It’s actually really hard to overdo it. You can let them go longer, and all that will happen is they will get even MORE tender!!! If you take them out too soon, they will be tough. How do you know? Take out one package (use long tongs) and open it up. If you grab a bone with your tongs and it just falls apart and breaks away from the rest of the meat, you are done!!! Enjoy!!! Step 6. Eat. It pulls apart like this when it’s done. By the way, smoking tri-tip is way easier. Just rub it with the same rub, and put in your smoker for about 2.5 hours at 250 F. That’s it. Low-maintenance. It comes out like this, with a fantastic smoke ring and amazing flavor. Thanks, and I will put up another good tip, about the ZFSSA, around the end of November. Steve 

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• How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or Sarbanes–Oxley.)   From something as simple as relating Tasks to Check-in’s or being able to see the top 10 files in your codebase that are causing the most Bugs, to identifying which Bugs and Requirements are in which Release. All that information is available and more in TFS. Although all of this tradability is available within TFS you do need to understand that it is not for free. Well… I say that, but if you are using TFS properly you will have this information with no additional work except for firing up the reporting. Using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server you can relate every line of code changes all the way up to requirements and back down through Test Cases to the Test Results. Figure: The only thing missing is Build In order to build the relationship model below we need to examine how each of the relationships get there. Each member of your team from programmer to tester and Business Analyst to Business have their roll to play to knit this together. Figure: The relationships required to make this work can get a little confusing If Build is added to this to relate Work Items to Builds and with knowledge of which builds are in which environments you can easily identify what is contained within a Release. Figure: How are things progressing Along with the ability to produce the progress and trend reports the tractability that is built into TFS can be used to fulfil most audit requirements out of the box, and augmented to fulfil the rest. In order to understand the relationships, lets look at each of the important Artifacts and how they are associated with each other… Requirements – The root of all knowledge Requirements are the thing that the business cares about delivering. These could be derived as User Stories or Business Requirements Documents (BRD’s) but they should be what the Business asks for. Requirements can be related to many of the Artifacts in TFS, so lets look at the model: Figure: If the centre of the world was a requirement We can track which releases Requirements were scheduled in, but this can change over time as more details come to light. Figure: Who edited the Requirement and when There is also the ability to query Work Items based on the History of changed that were made to it. This is particularly important with Requirements. It might not be enough to say what Requirements were completed in a given but also to know which Requirements were ever assigned to a particular release. Figure: Some magic required, but result still achieved As an augmentation to this it is also possible to run a query that shows results from the past, just as if we had a time machine. You can take any Query in the system and add a “Asof” clause at the end to query historical data in the operational store for TFS. select <fields> from WorkItems [where <condition>] [order by <fields>] [asof <date>] Figure: Work Item Query Language (WIQL) format In order to achieve this you do need to save the query as a *.wiql file to your local computer and edit it in notepad, but one imported into TFS you run it any time you want. Figure: Saving Queries locally can be useful All of these Audit features are available throughout the Work Item Tracking (WIT) system within TFS. Tasks – Where the real work gets done Tasks are the work horse of the development team, but they only as useful as Excel if you do not relate them properly to other Artifacts. Figure: The Task Work Item Type has its own relationships Requirements should be broken down into Tasks that the development team work from to build what is required by the business. This may be done by a small dedicated group or by everyone that will be working on the software team but however it happens all of the Tasks create should be a Child of a Requirement Work Item Type. Figure: Tasks are related to the Requirement Tasks should be used to track the day-to-day activities of the team working to complete the software and as such they should be kept simple and short lest developers think they are more trouble than they are worth. Figure: Task Work Item Type has a narrower purpose Although the Task Work Item Type describes the work that will be done the actual development work involves making changes to files that are under Source Control. These changes are bundled together in a single atomic unit called a Changeset which is committed to TFS in a single operation. During this operation developers can associate Work Item with the Changeset. Figure: Tasks are associated with Changesets   Changesets – Who wrote this crap Changesets themselves are just an inventory of the changes that were made to a number of files to complete a Task. Figure: Changesets are linked by Tasks and Builds   Figure: Changesets tell us what happened to the files in Version Control Although comments can be changed after the fact, the inventory and Work Item associations are permanent which allows us to Audit all the way down to the individual change level. Figure: On Check-in you can resolve a Task which automatically associates it Because of this we can view the history on any file within the system and see how many changes have been made and what Changesets they belong to. Figure: Changes are tracked at the File level What would be even more powerful would be if we could view these changes super imposed over the top of the lines of code. Some people call this a blame tool because it is commonly used to find out which of the developers introduced a bug, but it can also be used as another method of Auditing changes to the system. Figure: Annotate shows the lines the Annotate functionality allows us to visualise the relationship between the individual lines of code and the Changesets. In addition to this you can create a Label and apply it to a version of your version control. The problem with Label’s is that they can be changed after they have been created with no tractability. This makes them practically useless for any sort of compliance audit. So what do you use? Branches – And why we need them Branches are a really powerful tool for development and release management, but they are most important for audits. Figure: One way to Audit releases The R1.0 branch can be created from the Label that the Build creates on the R1 line when a Release build was created. It can be created as soon as the Build has been signed of for release. However it is still possible that someone changed the Label between this time and its creation. Another better method can be to explicitly link the Build output to the Build. Builds – Lets tie some more of this together Builds are the glue that helps us enable the next level of tractability by tying everything together. Figure: The dashed pieces are not out of the box but can be enabled When the Build is called and starts it looks at what it has been asked to build and determines what code it is going to get and build. Figure: The folder identifies what changes are included in the build The Build sets a Label on the Source with the same name as the Build, but the Build itself also includes the latest Changeset ID that it will be building. At the end of the Build the Build Agent identifies the new Changesets it is building by looking at the Check-ins that have occurred since the last Build. Figure: What changes have been made since the last successful Build It will then use that information to identify the Work Items that are associated with all of the Changesets Changesets are associated with Build and change the “Integrated In” field of those Work Items . Figure: Find all of the Work Items to associate with The “Integrated In” field of all of the Work Items identified by the Build Agent as being integrated into the completed Build are updated to reflect the Build number that successfully integrated that change. Figure: Now we know which Work Items were completed in a build Now that we can link a single line of code changed all the way back through the Task that initiated the action to the Requirement that started the whole thing and back down to the Build that contains the finished Requirement. But how do we know wither that Requirement has been fully tested or even meets the original Requirements? Test Cases – How we know we are done The only way we can know wither a Requirement has been completed to the required specification is to Test that Requirement. In TFS there is a Work Item type called a Test Case Test Cases enable two scenarios. The first scenario is the ability to track and validate Acceptance Criteria in the form of a Test Case. If you agree with the Business a set of goals that must be met for a Requirement to be accepted by them it makes it both difficult for them to reject a Requirement when it passes all of the tests, but also provides a level of tractability and validation for audit that a feature has been built and tested to order. Figure: You can have many Acceptance Criteria for a single Requirement It is crucial for this to work that someone from the Business has to sign-off on the Test Case moving from the  “Design” to “Ready” states. The Second is the ability to associate an MS Test test with the Test Case thereby tracking the automated test. This is useful in the circumstance when you want to Track a test and the test results of a Unit Test designed to test the existence of and then re-existence of a a Bug. Figure: Associating a Test Case with an automated Test Although it is possible it may not make sense to track the execution of every Unit Test in your system, there are many Integration and Regression tests that may be automated that it would make sense to track in this way. Bug – Lets not have regressions In order to know wither a Bug in the application has been fixed and to make sure that it does not reoccur it needs to be tracked. Figure: Bugs are the centre of their own world If the fix to a Bug is big enough to require that it is broken down into Tasks then it is probably a Requirement. You can associate a check-in with a Bug and have it tracked against a Build. You would also have one or more Test Cases to prove the fix for the Bug. Figure: Bugs have many associations This allows you to track Bugs / Defects in your system effectively and report on them. Change Request – I am not a feature In the CMMI Process template Change Requests can also be easily tracked through the system. In some cases it can be very important to track Change Requests separately as an Auditor may want to know what was changed and who authorised it. Again and similar to Bugs, if the Change Request is big enough that it would require to be broken down into Tasks it is in reality a new feature and should be tracked as a Requirement. Figure: Make sure your Change Requests only Affect Requirements and not rewrite them Conclusion Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server together provide an exceptional Application Lifecycle Management platform that can help your team comply with even the harshest of Compliance requirements while still enabling them to be Agile. Most Audits are heavy on required documentation but most of that information is captured for you as long a you do it right. You don’t even need every team member to understand it all as each of the Artifacts are relevant to a different type of team member. Business Analysts manage Requirements and Change Requests Programmers manage Tasks and check-in against Change Requests and Bugs Testers manage Bugs and Test Cases Build Masters manage Builds Although there is some crossover there are still rolls or “hats” that are worn. Do you thing this is all achievable? Have I missed anything that you think should be there?

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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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• Remote host: can tracert, can telnet, can*not* browse: what gives?

  - by MacThePenguin

  One of my customers of the company I work for has made a change to their Internet connection, and now we can't connect to them any more from our LAN. To help me troubleshoot this issue, the network guy on the customer's site has configured their firewall so that a HTTPS connection to their public IP address is open to any IP. I should put https://<customer's IP> in my browser and get a web page. Well, it works from any network I've tried (even from my smartphone), just not from my company's LAN. I thought it may be an issue with our firewall (though I checked its rules and it allows outbound TCP port 443 to anywhere), so I just connected a PC directly to the network connection of our provider, bypassing out firewall completely, and still it didn't work (everything else worked). So I asked for help to our Internet provider's customer service, and they asked me to do a tracert to our customer's IP. The tracert is successful, as the final hop shown in the output is the host I want to reach. So they said there's no problem. :( I also tried telnet <customer's IP> 443 and that works as well: I get a blank page with the cursor blinking (I've tried using another random port and that gives me an error message, as it should). Still, from any browser of any PC in my LAN I can't open that URL. I tried checking the network traffic with Wireshark: I see the packages going through and answers coming back, thought the packets I see passing are far less than they are if I successfully connect to another HTTPS website. See the attached screenshot: I had to blur the IPs, anyway the longer string is my PC's local IP address, the shorter one is the customer's public IP. I don't know what else to try. This is the only IP doing this... Any idea what could I try to find a solution to this issue? Thanks, let me know if you need further details. Edit: when I say "it doesn't work" I mean: the page doesn't open, the browser keeps loading for a long time and eventually shows an error saying that the page cannot be opened. I'm not in my office now so I can't paste the exact message, but it's the usual message you get when the browser reaches its timeout. When I say "it works", I mean the browser loads and shows a webpage (it's the logon page for the customers' firewall admin interface: so there's the firewall brand's logo and there are fields to enter a user id and a password). Update 13/09/2012: tried again to connect to the customer's network through our Internet connection without a firewall. This is what I did: Run a Kubuntu 12.04 live distro on a spare laptop; Updated all the packages I could and installed WireShark; Attached it to my LAN and verified that I couldn't open https://<customer's IP>. Verified that the Wireshark trace for this attempt was the same as the one I've already posted; Verified that I could connect to another customer's host using rdesktop (it worked); Tried to rdesktop to <customer's IP>, here's the output: kubuntu@kubuntu:/etc$ rdesktop <customer's IP> Autoselected keyboard map en-us ERROR: recv: Connection reset by peer Disconnected the laptop from the LAN; Disconnected the firewall from the Extranet connection, connected the laptop instead. Set its network configuration so that I could access the Internet; Verified that I could connect to other websites in http and https and in RDP to other customers' hosts - it all worked as expected; Verified that I could still traceroute to <customer's IP>: I could; Verified that I still couldn't open https://<customer's IP> (same exact result as before); Checked the WireShark trace for this attempt and noticed a different behaviour: I could see packets going out to the customer's IP, but no replies at all; Tried to run rdesktop again, with a slightly different result: kubuntu@kubuntu:/etc/network$ rdesktop <customer's IP> Autoselected keyboard map en-us ERROR: <customer's IP>: unable to connect Finally gave up, put everything back as it was before, turned off the laptop and lost the WireShark traces I had saved. :( I still remember them very well though. :) Can you get anything out of it? Thank you very much. Update 12/09/2012 n.2: I followed the suggestion by MadHatter in the comments. From inside the firewall, this is what I get: user@ubuntu-mantis:~$ openssl s_client -connect <customer's IP>:443 CONNECTED(00000003) If I now type GET / the output pauses for several seconds and then I get: write:errno=104 I'm going to try the same, but bypassing the firewall, as soon as I can. Thanks. Update 12/09/2012 n.3: So, I think ISA Server is altering the results of my tests... I tried installing Wireshark directly on the firewall and monitoring the packets on the Extranet network card. When the destination is the customer's IP, whatever service I try to connect to (HTTPS, RDP or SAProuter), I can only see outbound packets and no response packets whatsoever from their side. It looks like ISA Server is "faking" the remote server's replies, that's why I get a connection using telnet or the openSSL client. This is the wireshark trace from inside our LAN: But this is the trace on the Extranet network card: This makes a bit more sense... I'll send this info to the customer's tech and see if he can make anything out of it. Thanks to all that took the time to read my question and post suggestions. I'll update this post again.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 31, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 31, 2012Popular ReleasesDevpad: 4.25: Whats new for Devpad 4.25: New Theme support New Export Wordpress Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsAssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.5: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: Fixed potential bot bugs: Map change, OpenAL...Edi: Edi 1.0 with DarkExpression: Added DarkExpression theme (dialogs and message boxes are not completely themed, yet)DirectX Tool Kit: October 30, 2012 (add WP8 support): October 30, 2012 Added project files for Windows Phone 8MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.6: Changelog for 2.3.6 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed a bug in multichannel audio conversion failure. AAC does not support 6 channel audio, MCEBuddy now checks for it and force the output to 2 channel if AAC codec is specified 2. Fixed a bug in Original Broadcast Date and Time. Original Broadcast Date and Time is reported in UTC timezone in WTV metadata. TVDB and MovieDB dates are reported in network timezone. It is assumed the video is recorded and converted on the same machine, i.e. local timezone...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V4.1 for Visual Studio 2012: This version only supports Visual Studio 2012 (and all Express editions too). If you use Visual Studio 2010, please stay tuned, we will publish an update in a few days with support for VS10. V4.1 supports: Windows Phone 8 Windows 8 (Windows RT) Silverlight 5 Silverlight 4 WPF 4.5 WPF 4 WPF 3.5 And the following development environments: Visual Studio 2012 (Pro, Premium, Ultimate) Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone 8 Visual...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.73: Fix issue in Discussion #401101 (unreferenced var in a for-in statement was getting removed). add the grouping operator to the parsed output so that unminified parsed code is closer to the original. Will still strip unneeded parens later, if minifying. more cleaning of references as they are minified out of the code.RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.03: changes NEW: Added Support for the phun.org forum FIXED: Kitty-Kats new Forum UrlLiberty: v3.4.0.1 Release 28th October 2012: Change Log -Fixed -H4 Fixed the save verification screen showing incorrect mission and difficulty information for some saves -H4 Hopefully fixed the issue where progress did not save between missions and saves would not revert correctly -H3 Fixed crashes that occurred when trying to load player information -Proper exception dialogs will now show in place of crashesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 7): This release is compatible with the version of the Smooth Streaming SDK released today (10/26). Release 1 of the player framework is expected to be available next week. IMPROVEMENTS & FIXESIMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 6 Support for the latest smooth streaming SDK. Xaml only: Support for moving any of the UI elements outside the MediaPlayer (e.g. into the appbar). Note: Equivelent changes to the JS version due in coming week. Support for localizing all text used in t...Send multiple SMS via Way2SMS C#: SMS 1.1: Added support for 160by2Quick Launch: Quick Launch 1.0: A Lightweight and Fast Way to Manage and Launch Thousands of Tools and ApplicationsPress Win+Q and start to search and run. http://www.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=quicklaunch&DownloadId=523536Orchard Project: Orchard 1.6: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.6: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-6-Release-Notes Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.Media Companion: Media Companion 3.507b: Once again, it has been some time since our release, and there have been a number changes since then. It is hoped that these changes will address some of the issues users have been experiencing, and of course, work continues! New Features: Added support for adding Home Movies. Option to sort Movies by votes. Added 'selectedBrowser' preference used when opening links in an external browser. Added option to fallback to getting runtime from the movie file if not available on IMDB. Added new Big...MSBuild Extension Pack: October 2012: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack October 2012 release provides a collection of over 475 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GUI...NAudio: NAudio 1.6: Release notes at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/naudio-16-release-notes-10th.htmlPowerShell Community Extensions: 2.1 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 2.1 Release NotesOct 25, 2012 This version of PSCX supports both Windows PowerShell 2.0 and 3.0. See the ReleaseNotes.txt download above for more information.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.1: Umbraco 4.9.1 is a bugfix release to fix major issues in 4.9.0 BugfixesThe full list of fixes can be found in the issue tracker's filtered results. A summary: Split buttons work again, you can now also scroll easier when the list is too long for the screen Media and Content pickers have information of the full path of the picked item Fixed: Publish status may not be accurate on nodes with large doctypes Fixed: 2 media folders and recycle bins after upgrade to 4.9 The template/code ...AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...Rawr: Rawr 5.0.2: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...New ProjectsAccess 2010 Application Platform - Build Your Own Database: An Access database used as an Application Platform, where defined modules with functionality can be easily added.ASPMVCUtil: ASPMVCUtil is a compilation of libraries useful for developing in ASP.NET MVCBCF.Net: BCF.Net?????Microsoft.Net?????，??????????????????????????????。BCF.Net?????.Net?????????，???????????????????，???????????。Bytecode Translator: A translator from .NET bytecode to Boogie: Bytecode Translator is a translator from .NET bytecode to Boogie.Chalice: Specification and Verification of Concurrent Programs: Chalice is a verifier for concurrent programsDafny: An Automatic Program Verifier for Functional Correctness: Dafny is an automatic program verifier for functional correctness.DNN Task Manager1: This is the DnnTaskManager Project I have started with to learn how to create DNN modules.E Ledger: E Ledger provide user friendly interface to manage daily ledger party wise. And reporting in this project is platform independent. Reporting is in HTML format.FederatedScaleOutDatabases: A broker piece of code that helps to use relational databases in a scale-out fashion. The broker exposes a LINQ based API.FIFP: project for schedule testFileStrider: Explores 50 biggest forlders and files which "eat" disk spaceFlake ID Generators: Flake Id Generators is a set of decentralized, k-ordered id generation services in C#GFC and ASP.Net: Google Friend Connect and ASP.Net TechnologyGPUVerify: A verifier for GPU kernels: GPUVerify is a tool for verifying race- and divergence-freedom of GPU kernels written in OpenCL and CUDA.labirinthus: This is a simple videogame developed for an university project. I've not the rights of media contents, I used them only for academic purpose. LFS ERP: My First Open Source Systemmangopollo: Mangopollo* will allow you to easily take advantage of new windows phone 8 tiles (cyclic, flip, iconic) and of new launchersMediaAutomator: This project was created in order to provide an automation for media files (videos, music, etc)P-ZPP_ATH_2B: Oto wymyslny i jakze przydatny program utworzony przez grupe 2 b na Czele Radoslawa BuryRemote domain rename: A graphical front-end for Microsoft's netdom utility that allows users to batch rename domain computers.Simple Trading Platform: This project is aimed at providing meaningful trading information including feedback and managed conversations to all traders in an easy to use manner.Software41: Still deciding on what our projects main goal isSqlCondition for the CapableObject's ECO framework.: ECO is a tool for Domain Driven Development from Capable Objects (www.capableobjects.com). ECO uses OCL for loading objects from the database backend. Loading objects by SQL is currently not supported. This project aims to fill that gap, until ECO provides that support.Streamlet Website: This is my own website for personal use.Symmetry XAML Plugins (Osiris Release): Got a bug you just can't crack? Want to automate or customize something but the team will howl at you for checking it in? Symmetry Plugins to the rescue!!!TOP TECHNOLOGIES Learn & Research Labs: At TOP TECHNOLOGIES we are constantly researching awesome and thrilling topics and decided to share our knowledge with the community.UiAutomationExtension: UI Automation ????????????????????。What's Happening Tag Cloud: Web site that creates tag cloud for multiple words. The weight or occurences of this word is responsible for the font size. Position and color are random.?????????: ?????????????: ???? Windows Phone ????，?????，?????????WebService Api，?????wap.10010.com???????。

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• Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

  From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others...  General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon!  Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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• How do I restrict concurrent statistics gathering to a small set of tables from a single schema?

  - by Maria Colgan

  I got an interesting question from one of my colleagues in the performance team last week about how to restrict a concurrent statistics gather to a small subset of tables from one schema, rather than the entire schema. I thought I would share the solution we came up with because it was rather elegant, and took advantage of concurrent statistics gathering, incremental statistics, and the not so well known “obj_filter_list” parameter in DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure. You should note that the solution outline below with “obj_filter_list” still applies, even when concurrent statistics gathering and/or incremental statistics gathering is disabled. The reason my colleague had asked the question in the first place was because he wanted to enable incremental statistics for 5 large partitioned tables in one schema. The first time you gather statistics after you enable incremental statistics on a table, you have to gather statistics for all of the existing partitions so that a synopsis may be created for them. If the partitioned table in question is large and contains a lot of partition, this could take a considerable amount of time. Since my colleague only had the Exadata environment at his disposal overnight, he wanted to re-gather statistics on 5 partition tables as quickly as possible to ensure that it all finished before morning. Prior to Oracle Database 11g Release 2, the only way to do this would have been to write a script with an individual DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS command for each partition, in each of the 5 tables, as well as another one to gather global statistics on the table. Then, run each script in a separate session and manually manage how many of this session could run concurrently. Since each table has over one thousand partitions that would definitely be a daunting task and would most likely keep my colleague up all night! In Oracle Database 11g Release 2 we can take advantage of concurrent statistics gathering, which enables us to gather statistics on multiple tables in a schema (or database), and multiple (sub)partitions within a table concurrently. By using concurrent statistics gathering we no longer have to run individual statistics gathering commands for each partition. Oracle will automatically create a statistics gathering job for each partition, and one for the global statistics on each partitioned table. With the use of concurrent statistics, our script can now be simplified to just five DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS commands, one for each table. This approach would work just fine but we really wanted to get this down to just one command. So how can we do that? You may be wondering why we didn’t just use the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure with the OPTION parameter set to ‘GATHER STALE’. Unfortunately the statistics on the 5 partitioned tables were not stale and enabling incremental statistics does not mark the existing statistics stale. Plus how would we limit the schema statistics gather to just the 5 partitioned tables? So we went to ask one of the statistics developers if there was an alternative way. The developer told us the advantage of the “obj_filter_list” parameter in DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure. The “obj_filter_list” parameter allows you to specify a list of objects that you want to gather statistics on within a schema or database. The parameter takes a collection of type DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB. Each entry in the collection has 5 feilds; the schema name or the object owner, the object type (i.e., ‘TABLE’ or ‘INDEX’), object name, partition name, and subpartition name. You don't have to specify all five fields for each entry. Empty fields in an entry are treated as if it is a wildcard field (similar to ‘*’ character in LIKE predicates). Each entry corresponds to one set of filter conditions on the objects. If you have more than one entry, an object is qualified for statistics gathering as long as it satisfies the filter conditions in one entry. You first must create the collection of objects, and then gather statistics for the specified collection. It’s probably easier to explain this with an example. I’m using the SH sample schema but needed a couple of additional partitioned table tables to get recreate my colleagues scenario of 5 partitioned tables. So I created SALES2, SALES3, and COSTS2 as copies of the SALES and COSTS table respectively (setup.sql). I also deleted statistics on all of the tables in the SH schema beforehand to more easily demonstrate our approach. Step 0. Delete the statistics on the tables in the SH schema. Step 1. Enable concurrent statistics gathering. Remember, this has to be done at the global level. Step 2. Enable incremental statistics for the 5 partitioned tables. Step 3. Create the DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB and pass it to the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS command. Here, you will notice that we defined two variables of DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB type. The first, filter_lst, will be used to pass the list of tables we want to gather statistics on, and will be the value passed to the obj_filter_list parameter. The second, obj_lst, will be used to capture the list of tables that have had statistics gathered on them by this command, and will be the value passed to the objlist parameter. In Oracle Database 11g Release 2, you need to specify the objlist parameter in order to get the obj_filter_list parameter to work correctly due to bug 14539274. Will also needed to define the number of objects we would supply in the obj_filter_list. In our case we ere specifying 5 tables (filter_lst.extend(5)). Finally, we need to specify the owner name and object name for each of the objects in the list. Once the list definition is complete we can issue the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS command. Step 4. Confirm statistics were gathered on the 5 partitioned tables. Here are a couple of other things to keep in mind when specifying the entries for the  obj_filter_list parameter. If a field in the entry is empty, i.e., null, it means there is no condition on this field. In the above example , suppose you remove the statement Obj_filter_lst(1).ownname := ‘SH’; You will get the same result since when you have specified gather_schema_stats so there is no need to further specify ownname in the obj_filter_lst. All of the names in the entry are normalized, i.e., uppercased if they are not double quoted. So in the above example, it is OK to use Obj_filter_lst(1).objname := ‘sales’;. However if you have a table called ‘MyTab’ instead of ‘MYTAB’, then you need to specify Obj_filter_lst(1).objname := ‘”MyTab”’; As I said before, although we have illustrated the usage of the obj_filter_list parameter for partitioned tables, with concurrent and incremental statistics gathering turned on, the obj_filter_list parameter is generally applicable to any gather_database_stats, gather_dictionary_stats and gather_schema_stats command. You can get a copy of the script I used to generate this post here. +Maria Colgan

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• The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

  - by Phil Factor

  The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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• evaluating a code of a graph [migrated]

  - by mazen.r.f

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

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• Common Live Upgrade problems

  - by user12611829

  As I have worked with customers deploying Live Upgrade in their environments, several problems seem to surface over and over. With this blog article, I will try to collect these troubles, as well as suggest some workarounds. If this sounds like the beginnings of a Wiki, you would be right. At present, there is not enough material for one, so we will use this blog for the time being. I do expect new material to be posted on occasion, so if you wish to bookmark it for future reference, a permanent link can be found here. Live Upgrade copies over ZFS root clone This was introduced in Solaris 10 10/09 (u8) and the root of the problem is a duplicate entry in the source boot environments ICF configuration file. Prior to u8, a ZFS root file system was not included in /etc/vfstab, since the mount is implicit at boot time. Starting with u8, the root file system is included in /etc/vfstab, and when the boot environment is scanned to create the ICF file, a duplicate entry is recorded. Here's what the error looks like. # lucreate -n s10u9-baseline Checking GRUB menu... System has findroot enabled GRUB Analyzing system configuration. Comparing source boot environment file systems with the file system(s) you specified for the new boot environment. Determining which file systems should be in the new boot environment. Updating boot environment description database on all BEs. Updating system configuration files. Creating configuration for boot environment . Source boot environment is . Creating boot environment . Creating file systems on boot environment . Creating file system for in zone on . The error indicator ----- /usr/lib/lu/lumkfs: test: unknown operator zfs Populating file systems on boot environment . Checking selection integrity. Integrity check OK. Populating contents of mount point . This should not happen ------ Copying. Ctrl-C and cleanup If you weren't paying close attention, you might not even know this is an error. The symptoms are lucreate times that are way too long due to the extraneous copy, or the one that alerted me to the problem, the root file system is filling up - again thanks to a redundant copy. This problem has already been identified and corrected, and a patch (121431-58 or later for x86, 121430-57 for SPARC) is available. Unfortunately, this patch has not yet made it into the Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Cluster. Applying the prerequisite patches from the latest cluster is a recommendation from the Live Upgrade Survival Guide blog, so an additional step will be required until the patch is included. Let's see how this works. # patchadd -p | grep 121431 Patch: 121429-13 Obsoletes: Requires: 120236-01 121431-16 Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWluzone Patch: 121431-54 Obsoletes: 121436-05 121438-02 Requires: Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWlucfg SUNWluu SUNWlur # unzip 121431-58 # patchadd 121431-58 Validating patches... Loading patches installed on the system... Done! Loading patches requested to install. Done! Checking patches that you specified for installation. Done! Approved patches will be installed in this order: 121431-58 Checking installed patches... Executing prepatch script... Installing patch packages... Patch 121431-58 has been successfully installed. See /var/sadm/patch/121431-58/log for details Executing postpatch script... Patch packages installed: SUNWlucfg SUNWlur SUNWluu # lucreate -n s10u9-baseline Checking GRUB menu... System has findroot enabled GRUB Analyzing system configuration. INFORMATION: Unable to determine size or capacity of slice . Comparing source boot environment file systems with the file system(s) you specified for the new boot environment. Determining which file systems should be in the new boot environment. INFORMATION: Unable to determine size or capacity of slice . Updating boot environment description database on all BEs. Updating system configuration files. Creating configuration for boot environment . Source boot environment is . Creating boot environment . Cloning file systems from boot environment to create boot environment . Creating snapshot for on . Creating clone for on . Setting canmount=noauto for in zone on . Saving existing file in top level dataset for BE as //boot/grub/menu.lst.prev. Saving existing file in top level dataset for BE as //boot/grub/menu.lst.prev. Saving existing file in top level dataset for BE as //boot/grub/menu.lst.prev. File propagation successful Copied GRUB menu from PBE to ABE No entry for BE in GRUB menu Population of boot environment successful. Creation of boot environment successful. This time it took just a few seconds. A cursory examination of the offending ICF file (/etc/lu/ICF.3 in this case) shows that the duplicate root file system entry is now gone. # cat /etc/lu/ICF.3 s10u8-baseline:-:/dev/zvol/dsk/panroot/swap:swap:8388608 s10u8-baseline:/:panroot/ROOT/s10u8-baseline:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/vbox:pandora/vbox:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/setup:pandora/setup:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/export:pandora/export:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/pandora:pandora:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/panroot:panroot:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/workshop:pandora/workshop:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/export/iso:pandora/iso:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/export/home:pandora/home:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/vbox/HardDisks:pandora/vbox/HardDisks:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/vbox/HardDisks/WinXP:pandora/vbox/HardDisks/WinXP:zfs:0 Solaris 10 9/10 introduces new autoregistration file This one is actually mentioned in the Oracle Solaris 9/10 release notes. I know, I hate it when that happens too. Here's what the "error" looks like. # luupgrade -u -s /mnt -n s10u9-baseline System has findroot enabled GRUB No entry for BE in GRUB menu Copying failsafe kernel from media. 61364 blocks miniroot filesystem is Mounting miniroot at ERROR: The auto registration file does not exist or incomplete. The auto registration file is mandatory for this upgrade. Use -k argument along with luupgrade command. autoreg_file is path to auto registration information file. See sysidcfg(4) for a list of valid keywords for use in this file. The format of the file is as follows. oracle_user=xxxx oracle_pw=xxxx http_proxy_host=xxxx http_proxy_port=xxxx http_proxy_user=xxxx http_proxy_pw=xxxx For more details refer "Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade". As with the previous problem, this is also easy to work around. Assuming that you don't want to use the auto-registration feature at upgrade time, create a file that contains just autoreg=disable and pass the filename on to luupgrade. Here is an example. # echo "autoreg=disable" /var/tmp/no-autoreg # luupgrade -u -s /mnt -k /var/tmp/no-autoreg -n s10u9-baseline System has findroot enabled GRUB No entry for BE in GRUB menu Copying failsafe kernel from media. 61364 blocks miniroot filesystem is Mounting miniroot at ####################################################################### NOTE: To improve products and services, Oracle Solaris communicates configuration data to Oracle after rebooting. You can register your version of Oracle Solaris to capture this data for your use, or the data is sent anonymously. For information about what configuration data is communicated and how to control this facility, see the Release Notes or www.oracle.com/goto/solarisautoreg. INFORMATION: After activated and booted into new BE , Auto Registration happens automatically with the following Information autoreg=disable ####################################################################### Validating the contents of the media . The media is a standard Solaris media. The media contains an operating system upgrade image. The media contains version . Constructing upgrade profile to use. Locating the operating system upgrade program. Checking for existence of previously scheduled Live Upgrade requests. Creating upgrade profile for BE . Checking for GRUB menu on ABE . Saving GRUB menu on ABE . Checking for x86 boot partition on ABE. Determining packages to install or upgrade for BE . Performing the operating system upgrade of the BE . CAUTION: Interrupting this process may leave the boot environment unstable or unbootable. The Live Upgrade operation now proceeds as expected. Once the system upgrade is complete, we can manually register the system. If you want to do a hands off registration during the upgrade, see the Oracle Solaris Auto Registration section of the Oracle Solaris Release Notes for instructions on how to do that. Technocrati Tags: Oracle Solaris Patching Live Upgrade var sc_project=1193495; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="a46f6831";

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• Community Outreach - Where Should I Go

  - by Roger Brinkley

  A few days ago I was talking to person new to community development and they asked me what guidelines I used to determine the worthiness of a particular event. After our conversation was over I thought about it a little bit more and figured out there are three ways to determine if any event (be it conference, blog, podcast or other social medias) is worth doing: Transferability, Multiplication, and Impact. Transferability - Is what I have to say useful to the people that are going to hear it. For instance, consider a company that has product offering that can connect up using a number of languages like Scala, Grovey or Java. Sending a Scala expert to talk about Scala and the product is not transferable to a Java User Group, but a Java expert doing the same talk with a Java slant is. Similarly, talking about JavaFX to any Java User Group meeting in Brazil was pretty much a wasted effort until it was open sourced. Once it was open sourced it was well received. You can also look at transferability in relation to the subject matter that you're dealing with. How transferable is a presentation that I create. Can I, or a technical writer on the staff, turn it into some technical document. Could it be converted into some type of screen cast. If we have a regular podcast can we make a reference to the document, catch the high points or turn it into a interview. Is there a way of using this in the sales group. In other words is the document purely one dimensional or can it be re-purposed in other forms. Multiplication - On every trip I'm looking for 2 to 5 solid connections that I can make with developers. These are long term connections, because I know that once that relationship is established it will lead to another 2 - 5 from that connection and within a couple of years were talking about some 100 connections from just one developer. For instance, when I was working on JavaHelp in 2000 I hired a science teacher with a programming background. We've developed a very tight relationship over the year though we rarely see each other more than once a year. But at this JavaOne, one of his employees came up to me and said, "Richard (Rick Hard in Czech) told me to tell you that he couldn't make it to JavaOne this year but if I saw you to tell you hi". Another example is from my Mobile & Embedded days in Brasil. On our very first FISL trip about 5 years ago there were two university students that had created a project called "Marge". Marge was a Bluetooth framework that made connecting bluetooth devices easier. I invited them to a "Sun" dinner that evening. Originally they were planning on leaving that afternoon, but they changed their plans recognizing the opportunity. Their eyes were as big a saucers when they realized the level of engineers at the meeting. They went home started a JUG in Florianoplis that we've visited more than a couple of times. One of them went to work for Brazilian government lab like Berkley Labs, MIT Lab, John Hopkins Applied Physicas Labs or Lincoln Labs in the US. That presented us with an opportunity to show Embedded Java as a possibility for some of the work they were doing there. Impact - The final criteria is how life changing is what I'm going to say be to the individuals I'm reaching. A t-shirt is just a token, but when I reach down and tug at their developer hearts then I know I've succeeded. I'll never forget one time we flew all night to reach Joan Pasoa in Northern Brazil. We arrived at 2am went immediately to our hotel only to be woken up at 6 am to travel 2 hours by car to the presentation hall. When we arrived we were totally exhausted. Outside the facility there were 500 people lined up to hear 6 speakers for the day. That itself was uplifting.  I delivered one of my favorite talks on "I have passion". It was a talk on golf and embedded java development, "Find your passion". When we finished a couple of first year students came up to me and said how much my talk had inspired them. FISL is another great example. I had been about 4 years in a row. FISL is a very young group of developers so capturing their attention is important. Several of the students will come back 2 or 3 years later and ask me questions about research or jobs. And then there's Louis. Louis is one my favorite Brazilians. I can only describe him as a big Brazilian teddy bear. I see him every year at FISL. He works primarily in Java EE but he's attended every single one of my talks over the last 4 years. I can't tell you why, but he always greets me and gives me a hug. For some reason I've had a real impact. And of course when it comes to impact you don't just measure a presentation but every single interaction you have at an event. It's the hall way conversations, the booth conversations, but more importantly it's the conversations at dinner tables or in the cars when you're getting transported to an event. There's a good story that illustrates this. Last year in the spring I was traveling to Goiânia in Brazil. I've been there many times and leaders there no me well. One young man has picked me up at the airport on more than one occasion. We were going out to dinner one evening and he brought his girl friend along. One thing let to another and I eventually asked him, in front of her, "Why haven't you asked her to marry you?" There were all kinds of excuses and she just looked at him and smiled. When I came back in December for JavaOne he came and sought me. "I just want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said, and I asked her to marry me. We're getting married next Spring." Sometimes just one presentation is all it takes to make an impact. Other times it takes years. Some impacts are directly related to the company and some are more personal in nature. It doesn't matter which it is because it's having the impact that matters.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 08, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 08, 2012Popular ReleasesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...P1 & S0 Port monitoring with Netduino Plus: V0.6.1 Beta Netduino Plus Monitoring: Sixth public version V0.6.1 Bugfix in the temperature module (wrong calculation)WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...SQLite for Excel: SQLite for Excel Version 0.9: Added support for sqlite3_open_v2 to allow opening of database as read-only.MySQL Tuner for Windows: 0.3: Welcome to the third beta of MySQL Tuner for Windows! This release fixes bugs in the displaying of numbers, and a crash that occurred due to the program incorrectly closing and disposing of resources, Be warned that there will be bugs in this release, so please do not use on production or critical systems. Do post details of issues found to the issue tracker, and I will endeavour to fix them, when I can. I would love to have your feedback, and if possible your support! Requirements Microso...SharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.D3D9Client: D3D9Client R7: New release for Orbiter 2010-P1 - Added horizon/sun angle for night-lights into the configuration file (default 10deg) - Some runway lights related bugs are fixed - Added more configuration options for runway lightsFiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...PowerComboBox: PowerComboBox VB v1.0: Visual Basic source code class file.Edi: Themable Edi: Completed ExpressionDark theme Improved Error Handling and Reporting feature Refactored all views to be look-less controlsMFCMAPI: October 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1036 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.7: Changelog for 2.3.7 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Improved performance of MP4 Fast and M4V Fast Profiles (no deinterlacing, removed --decomb) 2. Improved priority handling 3. Added support for Pausing and Resume conversions 4. Added support for fallback to source directory if network destination directory is unavailable 5. MCEBuddy now installs ShowAnalyzer during installation 6. Added support for long description atom in iTunesFoxyXLS: FoxyXLS Releases: Source code and samplesProDinner - ASP.NET MVC Sample (EF4.4, N-Tier, jQuery): 8: update to ASP.net MVC Awesome 3.0 udpate to EntityFramework 4.4 update to MVC 4 added dinners grid on homepageASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.0: added Grid helper added XML Documentation added textbox helper added Client Side API for AjaxList removed .SearchButton from AjaxList AjaxForm and Confirm helpers have been merged into the Form helper optimized html output for AjaxDropdown, AjaxList, Autocomplete works on MVC 3 and 4BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.7: Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.7 instructions. If you looking for Web Application Project, ...Launchbar: Launchbar 4.2.2.0: This release is the first step in cleaning up the code and using all the latest features of .NET 4.5 Changes 4.2.2 (2012-11-02) Improved handling of left clicks 4.1.0 (2012-10-17) Removed tray icon Assembly renamed and signed with strong name Note When you upgrade, Launchbar will start with the default settings. You can import your previous settings by following these steps: Run Launchbar and just save the settings without configuring anything Shutdown Launchbar Go to the folder %LOCA...Mouse Jiggler: MouseJiggle-1.3: This adds the much-requested minimize-to-tray feature to Mouse Jiggler.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0 Release Candidate: This is a Release Candidate, which means that if we do not find any major issues in the next week, we will release this version as the final release of 4.10.0 on November 9th, 2012. The documentation for the MVC bits still lives in the Github version of the docs for now and will be updated on our.umbraco.org with the final release of 4.10.0. Browse the documentation here: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco4Docs/tree/4.8.0/Documentation/Reference/Mvc If you want to do only MVC then make sur...Skype Auto Recorder: SkypeAutoRecorder 1.3.4: New icon and images. Reworked settings window. Implemented high-quality sound encoding. Implemented a possibility to produce stereo records. Added buttons with system-wide hot keys for manual starting and canceling of recording. Added buttons for opening folder with records. Added Help button. Fixed an issue when recording is continuing after call end. Fixed an issue when recording doesn't start. Fixed several bugs and improved stability. Major refactoring and optimization...New Projects.Net Streamer: With .Net Streamer you can easily view and download series from watchseries.eu/gorillapod.in You can also download and display subtitles along with the video.Boards And Commissions: In accordance with Va. Code § 2.2-2822(B)(1), VITA has released the code for the CRM OASYS system and the OASYS portal to the public domain on CodePlex. The folcces: Center for Complex Engineering Systems codebase for Kail: Fornt-end code including javascript css html xsltdbSend: Simple tool for uploading large files, such as databases, to a remote SFTP server.DNN Task Manager GOR: Summary.Drive Watcher: Drive Watcher windows application in .net framework 4. watch the chosen path for any changeDSLPed: DSLPed is a framework to design & develop WPF-based projectional editors of custom Domain Specific Lanugages as add-ins into the Visual Studio 2010 designer.FAST Corner Detector: This simple demp app takes the live camera feed, detects the FAST9 corners based on the method by E. Rosten.Inkscape 9-patch extension: This is an extension to Inkscape that makes it easier to create bitmap resources for Android apps at multiple resolutions and in nine-patch format.Inmeta Visual Studio Gallery Service: An ASP.NET Web API service for implementing a Visual Studio Private Extension Gallery.IService001: IServiceissueIT.net - ”I just found the last bug”: issueIT is the best open source web-based issue tracker for .NET. It’s easy to customize to suit your organization. This project is not finished yet - it is only at a very early stageJason WP Tools: this project consists of a number of useful utilities and extensions for developing Windows Phone (both 7 and 8) apps.LeadersGenerator: make an easy way to play Hearts of Iron3MD5FolderVerifier: A project used to verify file md5s inside a folder.Media Center Commander: Media Center Commander allows you to change Live TV channels in Windows Media Center via the command-line (and thus desktop shortcuts).My Sulekha: Its a classified basic website which contains all the data of advertisers & their advertisements Pancake Sorting PANA 2012-2: A university work about the implementation of pancakes sorting.Parallel Cache Handler for Unity: Lightweight Unity Interceptor to introduce generic caching for parallel invocationsQuizzMasterStudio V.2: A software that helps users absorb new material faster through various types of quizzes. The system also includes a mechanism to more effectively learn math.RTSparse: This is a port of CSparse to WinRT runtime component.Share: Share is a new web-based content management system. For more information about this project, please visit http://blog.aphysoft.com.SpeedDial Assistent: No summary available yetspSite.pro - Investigating SharePoint and implementing it's missing parts.: Source code storage for our collective resource about SharePoint.Sql Server Stress / Load Test tool: Some time we need to stress test SQL server. This is simple and flexible Visual Studio load test which can load your SQL server with different type of load.Statuos: Statuos is a customer driven project management solution that supports subtasks.TabManager: TabManager is a simple windows control container control and supports custom tab header sizing. TabManager is written in VB and is a new project.Tagomatique: Permet la gestion de fichiers multimédia (audio, vidéo, image) sur principe des tags, chapitres, signets.Technoera.Common FW2.0: A simple repository that contains some of our "domain-unrelated" application blocks.TestDraw: This is a test project. Written out my own interest to see if it can survive into a better project.testesunnyedm: testesunnyedmTricogolWeb: Tricogol WebWA77696A-9075-44CC-A378-D42A096D5989: Project Codename : WA77696A-9075-44CC-A378-D42A096D5989WCF y Net remoting en el famoso ejemplo HOLA MUNDO: El ejemplo ideal para entender de manera muy facil los componententes implicados en una comunicación WCF y otra .NET Remoting.. En español!Web API Tools: Project enables easy communication with ASP.NET MVC Web API.Web Application Navigator for SharePoint: For SharePoint 2010-13 : Implements a web part that supports consistent navigation across an entire web application. The navigation links are provided by a listWinRDF - RDF made easy!: Welcome to the homepage of the WinRDF project.WP728DC9-1E30-468E-A4AE-5879C6CC5BD6: Project Codename : WP728DC9-1E30-468E-A4AE-5879C6CC5BD6X3D.NET: X3D.NET is a library package providing a simple and easy way handling the Extensible 3D format (X3D) for .NET FrameworkXheis's Game Development: Xheis's game dev of a persistent zombie, waved based action RPG, RTS defenceX-tee.NET: Teeme xtee-ga suhtluse lihtsamaks

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 30, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 30, 2012Popular ReleasesCleverBobCat: CleverBobCat 0.4: Added: ModuleCleverResourceTransferMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.6: Changelog for 2.3.6 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed a bug in multichannel audio conversion failure. AAC does not support 6 channel audio, MCEBuddy now checks for it and force the output to 2 channel if AAC codec is specified 2. Fixed a bug in Original Broadcast Date and Time. Original Broadcast Date and Time is reported in UTC timezone in WTV metadata. TVDB and MovieDB dates are reported in network timezone. It is assumed the video is recorded and converted on the same machine, i.e. local timezone...ZXMAK2: Version 2.6.8.0: Whats new: add Spectrum +3 model; tape serializer: show extended info for crc bad blocksMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.73: Fix issue in Discussion #401101 (unreferenced var in a for-in statement was getting removed). add the grouping operator to the parsed output so that unminified parsed code is closer to the original. Will still strip unneeded parens later, if minifying. more cleaning of references as they are minified out of the code.RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.03: changes FIXED: Kitty-Kats new Forum UrlJobboard Light Edition: Version 2.2: Major Release Parallalization Added Job posting now working Job Editing now working Search Box Clear Filters added Search criteria updated (more simple) jobdetails page displays missing selections parameters added to url Cleaned UI moreMJP's DirectX 11 Samples: MSAA Resolve Filtering: Sample application and source code from the article "Experimenting with Reconstruction Filters for MSAA Resolve" http://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/msaa-resolve-filters/Liberty: v3.4.0.1 Release 28th October 2012: Change Log -Fixed -H4 Fixed the save verification screen showing incorrect mission and difficulty information for some saves -H4 Hopefully fixed the issue where progress did not save between missions and saves would not revert correctly -H3 Fixed crashes that occurred when trying to load player information -Proper exception dialogs will now show in place of crashesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 7): This release is compatible with the version of the Smooth Streaming SDK released today (10/26). Release 1 of the player framework is expected to be available next week. IMPROVEMENTS & FIXESIMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 6 Support for the latest smooth streaming SDK. Xaml only: Support for moving any of the UI elements outside the MediaPlayer (e.g. into the appbar). Note: Equivelent changes to the JS version due in coming week. Support for localizing all text used in t...Send multiple SMS via Way2SMS C#: SMS 1.1: Added support for 160by2Quick Launch: Quick Launch 1.0: A Lightweight and Fast Way to Manage and Launch Thousands of Tools and ApplicationsPress Win+Q and start to search and run. http://www.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=quicklaunch&DownloadId=523536Orchard Project: Orchard 1.6: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.6: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-6-Release-Notes Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.Media Companion: Media Companion 3.507b: Once again, it has been some time since our release, and there have been a number changes since then. It is hoped that these changes will address some of the issues users have been experiencing, and of course, work continues! New Features: Added support for adding Home Movies. Option to sort Movies by votes. Added 'selectedBrowser' preference used when opening links in an external browser. Added option to fallback to getting runtime from the movie file if not available on IMDB. Added new Big...MSBuild Extension Pack: October 2012: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack October 2012 release provides a collection of over 475 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GUI...NAudio: NAudio 1.6: Release notes at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/naudio-16-release-notes-10th.htmlPowerShell Community Extensions: 2.1 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 2.1 Release NotesOct 25, 2012 This version of PSCX supports both Windows PowerShell 2.0 and 3.0. See the ReleaseNotes.txt download above for more information.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.1: Umbraco 4.9.1 is a bugfix release to fix major issues in 4.9.0 BugfixesThe full list of fixes can be found in the issue tracker's filtered results. A summary: Split buttons work again, you can now also scroll easier when the list is too long for the screen Media and Content pickers have information of the full path of the picked item Fixed: Publish status may not be accurate on nodes with large doctypes Fixed: 2 media folders and recycle bins after upgrade to 4.9 The template/code ...AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...Rawr: Rawr 5.0.2: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1025.5): [NEW] Support for connecting to CRM Online via Office 365 (OSDP) [NEW] Current connection information and loaded ribbon name are displayed in the status bar [IMPROVED] Connect dialog minor improvements and error message descriptions [IMPROVED] Connecting to a CRM server will close currently loaded ribbon upon confirmation (if another ribbon was loaded previously) [FIX] Fixed bug in Open Ribbon dialog which would not allow to refresh entity list more than onceNew Projects10010dshjlahfajhflkjhkjhherkjhfkja: 10010dshjlahfajhflkjhkjhherkjhfkjaA supplementary Machine Learning and Evolutionary Computation suite for Orange: ML & EC tools such as: - Optimization Meta-heuristics (EDAs, cGA) - Feature Selection - Kernel Methods - Dependency NetworksATH TaskList 2012: ATH TaskList 2012Canlipe: This is a simple C# / Mono (.NET) static blog generator. Nothing fancy, just the basic functionality at the moment. The code is really dirty too.com.sogeti.certif: Basic but essential source code example for SharePoint 2010Duhking: A quasi-duck typing library for .Net. It doesn't provide "real" duck typing, but it kinda looks a little bit like a duck if you squint and look at it from a distance. This library is built on and for .Net 3.5,Guestbook 2: A highly customizable program to track people visiting a booth via recording their name and some basic information. Written in C#.Interval Mandelbrot Explorer: Explore the Mandelbrot set using interval arithmetic.Isel - Projecto: projecto para isel....killStudentMain: killStudentMainKWSystem-WithClient: c++??La villa del seis: La villa del seis is a multiplatform point-and-click graphical adventure. Also, you can play it like a text adventure (interactive fiction) on a text browser (like Links, w3m or Lynx) or in a normal browser without JavaScript support.malversuchen: Das ist ein TEstPhotoCloud: This is a sample ASP.NET Web Pages app that uses Twitter authentication, HTMl5 drag and drop file uploading, blob storage, and SignalR to build a photo sharing platnosci-test: testSharePoint GSC: SharePoint GSC is a set of SharePoint utilities developed in General de Software. SHCODE: SH Project please contact little_deer@hotmail.com for more details.SimpleImageCacherRT: WinRT????????????????????。Windows.UI.XAML.Controls.Image????Source?????????????????????。???????????????…SLIP Framework: SilverLightweight Prism FrameworkSmallCheck: F# exhaustive testing framework. Port of Haskell SmallCheck test librarySolution organizer: Help developers organizing their Visual Studio 2010 solutionsSukul: Web 2.0 Portal for powering modern CMStestjabbr1029: heTFS Reflect Work Items Links: This small utility allows complex TFS to TFS migration to preserve work item links during the process. It is used in complement with the TFS Integration tools.XactiSource Application Framework: The XactiSource Application Framework is an attempt to add basic functionality that can be used from one project to the next. Yasminoku: Yasminoku is an open source "Sudoku" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. Includes sudoku solver. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.Zalgo for Word: Zalgo addin for Word 2010

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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• Reviewing Retail Predictions for 2011

  - by David Dorf

  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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I've been busy thinking about what 2012 and beyond will look like for retail, and I have some interesting predictions to share.  But before I go there, let’s first review this year’s predictions before making new ones for 2012. 1. Alternate Payments We've seen several alternate payment schemes emerge over the last two years, and 2011 may be the year one of them takes hold. Any competition that can drive down fees will be good for everyone. I'm betting that Apple will add NFC chips to their next version of the iPhone, then enable payments in stores using iTunes accounts on the backend. Paypal will continue to make inroads, and Isis will announce a pilot. The iPhone 4S did not contain an NFC chip, so we’ll have to continuing waiting for the iPhone 5. PayPal announced its moving into in-store payments, and Google launched its wallet in selected cities.  Overall I think the payment scene is heating up and that trend will continue. 2. Engineered Systems The industry is moving toward purpose-built appliances that are optimized across the entire stack. Oracle calls these "engineered systems" and the first two examples are Exadata and Exalogic, but there are other examples from other vendors. These are particularly important to the retail industry because of the volume of data that must be processed. There should be continued adoption in 2011. Oracle reports that Exadata is its fasting growing product, and at the recent OpenWorld it announced the SuperCluster and Exalytics products, both continuing the engineered systems trend. SAP’s HANA continues to receive attention, and IBM also seems to be moving in this direction. 3. Social Analytics There are lots of tools that provide insight into how a brand is perceived across popular internet sites, but as far as I know, these tools are not industry specific. The next step needs to mine the data and determine how it should influence retail operations. The data needs to help retailers determine how they create promotions, which products to stock, and how to keep consumers engaged. Social data alone does not provide the answers, but its one more data point that will help retailers make better decisions. Look for some vendor consolidation to help make this happen. In March, Salesforce.com acquired leading social monitoring vendor Radian6 and followed up with acquisitions of Heroku and Model Metrics. The notion of Social CRM seems to be going more mainstream now. 4. 2-D Barcodes Look for more QRCodes on shelf-tags, in newspaper circulars, and on billboards. It's a great portal from the physical world into the digital one that buys us time until augmented reality matures further. Nobody wants to type "www", backslash, and ".com" on their phones. QRCodes are everywhere. ‘Nuff said. 5. In the words of Microsoft, "To the Cloud!" My favorite "cloud application" is Evernote. If you take notes on your work laptop, you will inevitably need those notes on your home PC. And if you manage to solve that problem, you'll need to access them from your mobile phone. Evernote stores your notes in the cloud and provides easy ways to access them. Being able to access a service from anywhere and not having to worry about backups, upgrades, etc. is great. Retailers will start to rely on cloud services, both public and private, in the coming year. There were no shortage of announcements in this area: Amazon’s cloud-based Kindle Fire, Apple’s iCloud, Oracle’s Public Cloud, etc. I saw an interesting presentation showing how BevMo moved their systems to the cloud.  Seems like retailers are starting to consider the cloud for specific uses. 6. F-CommerceTop of Form Move over "E" and "M" so we can introduce "F-Commerce," which should go mainstream in 2011. Already several retailers have created small stores on Facebook, and it won't be long before Facebook becomes a full-fledged channel in the omni-channel world of retail. The battle between Facebook and Google will heat up over retail, where both stand to make lots of money. JCPenney and ASOS both put their entire catalogs on Facebook, and lots of other retailers have connected Facebook to their e-commerce site. I still think selling from the newsfeed is the best approach, and several retailers are trying that approach as well. I just don’t see Google+ as a threat to Facebook, so I think that battle is over.  I called 2011 The Year of F-Commerce, and that was probably accurate. Its good to look back at predictions, but we also have to think about what was missed.  I didn't see Amazon entering the tablet business with such a splash, although in hindsight it was obvious. Nor did I think HP would fall so far so fast.  Look for my 2012 predictions coming soon.

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• Using SPServices &amp; jQuery to Find My Stuff from Multi-Select Person/Group Field

  - by Mark Rackley

  Okay… quick blog post for all you SPServices fans out there. I needed to quickly write a script that would return all the tasks currently assigned to me.  I also wanted it to return any task that was assigned to a group I belong to. This can actually be done with a CAML query, so no big deal, right?  The rub is that the “assigned to” field is a multi-select person or group field. As far as I know (and I actually know so little) you cannot just write a CAML query to return this information. If you can, please leave a comment below and disregard the rest of this blog post… So… what’s a hacker to do? As always, I break things down to their most simple components (I really love the KISS principle and would get it tattooed on my back if people wouldn’t think it meant “Knights In Satan’s Service”. You really gotta be an old far to get that reference).  Here’s what we’re going to do: Get currently logged in user’s name as it is stored in a person field Find all the SharePoint groups the current user belongs to Retrieve a set of assigned tasks from the task list and then find those that are assigned to current  user or group current user belongs to Nothing too hairy… So let’s get started Some Caveats before I continue There are some obvious performance implications with this solution as I make a total of four SPServices calls and there’s a lot of looping going on. Also, the CAML query in this blog has NOT been optimized. If you move forward with this code, tweak it so that it returns a further subset of data or you will see horrible performance if you have a few hundred entries in your task list. Add a date range to the CAML or something. Find some way to limit the results as much as possible. Lastly, if you DO have a better solution, I would like you to share. Iron sharpens iron and all…   Alright, let’s really get started. Get currently logged in user’s name as it is stored in a person field First thing we need to do is understand how a person group looks when you look at the XML returned from a SharePoint Web Service call. It turns out it’s stored like any other multi select item in SharePoint which is <id>;#<value> and when you assign a person to that field the <value> equals the person’s name “Mark Rackley” in my case. This is for Windows Authentication, I would expect this to be different in FBA, but I’m not using FBA. If you want to know what it looks like with FBA you can use the code in this blog and strategically place an alert to see the value.  Anyway… I need to find the name of the user who is currently logged in as it is stored in the person field. This turns out to be one SPServices call: var userName = $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({                     fieldName: "Title",                     debug: false                     }); As you can see, the “Title” field has the information we need. I suspect (although again, I haven’t tried) that the Title field also contains the user’s name as we need it if I was using FBA. Okay… last thing we need to do is store our users name in an array for processing later: myGroups = new Array(); myGroups.push(userName); Find all the SharePoint groups the current user belongs to Now for the groups. How are groups returned in that XML stream?  Same as the person <ID>;#<Group Name>, and if it’s a mutli select it’s all returned in one big long string “<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>”.  So, how do we find all the groups the current user belongs to? This is also a simple SPServices call. Using the “GetGroupCollectionFromUser” operation we can find all the groups a user belongs to. So, let’s execute this method and store all our groups. $().SPServices({       operation: "GetGroupCollectionFromUser",       userLoginName: $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser(),       async: false,       completefunc: function(xData, Status) {          $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=Group]").each(function() {                 myGroups.push($(this).attr("Name"));          });         }     }); So, all we did in the above code was execute the “GetGroupCollectionFromUser” operation and look for the each “Group” node (row) and store the name for each group in our array that we put the user’s name in previously (myGroups). Now we have an array that contains the current user’s name as it will appear in the person field XML and  all the groups the current user belongs to. The Rest Now comes the easy part for all of you familiar with SPServices. We are going to retrieve our tasks from the Task list using “GetListItems” and look at each entry to see if it belongs to this person. If it does belong to this person we are going to store it for later processing. That code looks something like this: // get list of assigned tasks that aren't closed... *modify the CAML to perform better!*             $().SPServices({                   operation: "GetListItems",                   async: false,                   listName: "Tasks",                   CAMLViewFields: "<ViewFields>" +                             "<FieldRef Name='AssignedTo' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Title' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='StartDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='EndDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Status' />" +                             "</ViewFields>",                   CAMLQuery: "<Query><Where><And><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='AssignedTo'/></IsNotNull><Neq><FieldRef Name='Status'/><Value Type='Text'>Completed</Value></Neq></And></Where></Query>",                     completefunc: function (xData, Status) {                         var aDataSet = new Array();                        //loop through each returned Task                         $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=z:row]").each(function() {                             //store the multi-select string of who task is assigned to                             var assignedToString = $(this).attr("ows_AssignedTo");                             found = false;                            //loop through the persons name and all the groups they belong to                             for(var i=0; i<myGroups.length; i++) {                                 //if the person's name or group exists in the assigned To string                                 //then the task is assigned to them                                 if (assignedToString.indexOf(myGroups[i]) >= 0){                                     found = true;                                     break;                                 }                             }                             //if the Task belongs to this person then store or display it                             //(I'm storing it in an array)                             if (found){                                 var thisName = $(this).attr("ows_Title");                                 var thisStartDate = $(this).attr("ows_StartDate");                                 var thisEndDate = $(this).attr("ows_EndDate");                                 var thisStatus = $(this).attr("ows_Status");                                                                  var aDataRow=new Array(                                     thisName,                                     thisStartDate,                                     thisEndDate,                                     thisStatus);                                 aDataSet.push(aDataRow);                             }                          });                          SomeFunctionToDisplayData(aDataSet);                     }                 }); Some notes on why I did certain things and additional caveats. You will notice in my code that I’m doing an AssignedToString.indexOf(GroupName) to see if the task belongs to the person. This could possibly return bad results if you have SharePoint Group names that are named in such a way that the “IndexOf” returns a false positive.  For example if you have a Group called “My Users” and a group called “My Users – SuperUsers” then if a user belonged to “My Users” it would return a false positive on executing “My Users – SuperUsers”.IndexOf(“My Users”). Make sense? Just be aware of this when naming groups, we don’t have this problem. This is where also some fine-tuning can probably be done by those smarter than me. This is a pretty inefficient method to determine if a task belongs to a user, I mean what if a user belongs to 20 groups? That’s a LOT of looping.  See all the opportunities I give you guys to do something fun?? Also, why am I storing my values in an array instead of just writing them out to a Div? Well.. I want to pass my data to a jQuery library to format it all nice and pretty and an Array is a great way to do that. When all is said and done and we put all the code together it looks like:   $(document).ready(function() {         var userName = $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({                     fieldName: "Title",                     debug: false                     });         myGroups = new Array();     myGroups.push(userName );       $().SPServices({       operation: "GetGroupCollectionFromUser",       userLoginName: $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser(),       async: false,       completefunc: function(xData, Status) {          $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=Group]").each(function() {                 myGroups.push($(this).attr("Name"));          });                      // get list of assigned tasks that aren't closed... *modify this CAML to perform better!*             $().SPServices({                   operation: "GetListItems",                   async: false,                   listName: "Tasks",                   CAMLViewFields: "<ViewFields>" +                             "<FieldRef Name='AssignedTo' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Title' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='StartDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='EndDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Status' />" +                             "</ViewFields>",                   CAMLQuery: "<Query><Where><And><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='AssignedTo'/></IsNotNull><Neq><FieldRef Name='Status'/><Value Type='Text'>Completed</Value></Neq></And></Where></Query>",                     completefunc: function (xData, Status) {                         var aDataSet = new Array();                         //loop through each returned Task                         $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=z:row]").each(function() {                             //store the multi-select string of who task is assigned to                             var assignedToString = $(this).attr("ows_AssignedTo");                             found = false;                            //loop through the persons name and all the groups they belong to                             for(var i=0; i<myGroups.length; i++) {                                 //if the person's name or group exists in the assigned To string                                 //then the task is assigned to them                                 if (assignedToString.indexOf(myGroups[i]) >= 0){                                     found = true;                                     break;                                 }                             }                            //if the Task belongs to this person then store or display it                             //(I'm storing it in an array)                             if (found){                                 var thisName = $(this).attr("ows_Title");                                 var thisStartDate = $(this).attr("ows_StartDate");                                 var thisEndDate = $(this).attr("ows_EndDate");                                 var thisStatus = $(this).attr("ows_Status");                                                                  var aDataRow=new Array(                                     thisName,                                     thisStartDate,                                     thisEndDate,                                     thisStatus);                                 aDataSet.push(aDataRow);                             }                          });                          SomeFunctionToDisplayData(aDataSet);                     }                 });       }    });  }); Final Thoughts So, there you have it. Take it and run with it. Make it something cool (and tell me how you did it). Another possible way to improve performance in this scenario is to use a DVWP to display the tasks and use jQuery and the “myGroups” array from this blog post to hide all those rows that don’t belong to the current user. I haven’t tried it, but it does move some of the processing off to the server (generating the view) so it may perform better.  As always, thanks for stopping by… hope you have a Merry Christmas…

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, September 19, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, September 19, 2012Popular ReleasesWinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 RC: PTVS 1.5RC Available! We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RC. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. The primary new feature for the 1.5 release is Django including Azure support! The http://www.djangoproject.com is a pop...Launchbar: Lanchbar 4.0.0: First public release.AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.4 -: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: New logo Improved airstrike! Reset nukes...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. JayData core: all async operations now support promises JayDa...fastJSON: v2.0.5: 2.0.5 - fixed number parsing for invariant format - added a test for German locale number testing (,. problems)????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 4: 2012?9?17??? ?????，???????????????。 ?????Release 3??????，???????，???，??? ??????????????????SDK，????????。 ??，??????? That's all.VidCoder: 1.4.0 Beta: First Beta release! Catches up to HandBrake nightlies with SVN 4937. Added PGS (Blu-ray) subtitle support. Additional framerates available: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates available: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates available for audio. Same as Source Constant Framerate available. Added Apple TV 3 preset. Added new Bob deinterlacing option. Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will keep running and continue pro...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.01: Stabilization release fixed this issues: Links not worked on FF, Chrome and Safari Modified packaging with own manifest file for install and source package. Moved the user Image on the Login to the left side. Moved h2 font-size to 24px. Note : This release Comes w/o source package about we still work an a solution. Who Needs the Visual Studio source files please go to source and download it from there. Known 16 CSS issues that related to the skin.css. All others are DNN default o...Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.1: This fixes a bug in the 1.5 release where it would crash when no language packs were installed for VS2010.sheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.1.0: This release of sheetengine introduces major drawing optimizations. A background canvas is created with the full drawn scenery onto which only the changed parts are redrawn. For example a moving object will cause only its bounding box to be redrawn instead of the full scene. This background canvas is copied to the main canvas in each iteration. For this reason the size of the bounding box of every object needs to be defined and also the width and height of the background canvas. The example...VFPX: Desktop Alerts 1.0.2: This update for the Desktop Alerts contains changes to behavior for setting custom sounds for alerts. I have removed ALERTWAV.TXT from the project, and also removed DA_DEFAULTSOUND from the VFPALERT.H file. The AlertManager class and Alert class both have a "default" cSound of ADDBS(JUSTPATH(_VFP.ServerName))+"alert.wav" --- so, as long as you distribute a sound file with the file name "alert.wav" along with the EXE, that file will be used. You can set your own sound file globally by setti...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.15: Changelog for 2.2.15 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for %originalfilepath% to get the source file full path. Used for custom commands only. 2. Added support for better parsing of Media Portal XML files to extract ShowName and Episode Name and download additional details from TVDB (like Season No, Episode No etc). 3. Added support for TVDB seriesID in metadata 4. Added support for eMail non blocking UI testCrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.2: *Added html mail format which shows hierarchical exception report for better understanding.PDF Viewer Web part: PDF Viewer Web Part: PDF Viewer Web PartIIS Express Manager: IIS Express Manager v 0.5B: Several added features, including adding site and right click menu for sites; which allows you to start/stop site, view it directly in browser etc.Chris on SharePoint Solutions: View Grid Banding - v1.0: Initial release of the View Creation and Management Page Column Selector Banding solution.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.67: Fix issue #18629 - incorrectly handling null characters in string literals and not throwing an error when outside string literals. update for Issue #18600 - forgot to make the ///#DEBUG= directive also set a known-global for the given debug namespace. removed the kill-switch for disregarding preprocessor define-comments (///#IF and the like) and created a separate CodeSettings.IgnorePreprocessorDefines property for those who really need to turn that off. Some people had been setting -kil...Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2: Lakana V2 contains : - Lakana WPF Forms (with sample project) - Lakana WPF Navigation (with sample project)Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: OData QueryFeed workflow activity: The OData QueryFeed sample activity shows how to create a workflow activity that consumes an OData resource, and renders entity properties in a Microsoft Excel 2010 worksheet or Microsoft Word 2010 document. Using the sample QueryFeed activity, you can consume any OData resource. The sample activity uses LINQ to project OData metadata into activity designer expression items. By setting activity expressions, a fully qualified OData query string is constructed consisting of Resource, Filter, Or...New ProjectsCachalote-Todo: Cachalote TodoCommerce Server Tools: A collection of tools and samples for Microsoft and Ascentium Commerce ServerCopiarArquivosNaRede: facilitate the process of copying files from one machine to host several machines,should be used primarily for network administrators and support teams.CS 3750 Team Ghana: Weber State University's Computer Science Department students are working on feature completing the Ghana Hospital inventory system in Asp.Net C#.CUDAFY TSP: Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem in C# on the GPGPU.Deixei Software Factory: Line Of Business application are one of the most important assets in a enterprise environment. You do not need to build the basis over and over. FocusMeter: Tiny tray application for tracking distractions.FrontTest: ????????generalshop: Host a number of ASP.NET controls I developed overtime: 1, RolloverImageButtonjschome: ??????。OVS Web App: OVS web appPeoplePicker Port Tester: The PeoplePicker Port Tester helps with troubleshooting PeoplePicker issues.Project Demo: hajshjdhfjkhdskfhdkhfkahdkjProyectoLenguaje2: proyecto de lenguaje de programación II Por: Moreira Kennedy Palma LuisSharePoint 2010 and 2013 jQuery / JS code samples: Various code samples for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013Strom: A projectsuperScheduler: A TDD project to help the contributors learn and have fun. The result should be something that looks like a cross platform task scheduler.......Troll Face SDK: Application project using the Face SDK for Windows Phone for demonstration purposeUseful PowerShell Scripts: Powerful & useful PowerShell scriptsWeiTalk: Sina weibo for Windows PhoneXML.NET Serializer: Striving for: - Great performance - Very easy to use - Very flexible and configurable - Ability to configure both via configuration file and/or attributes

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• Checking who is connected to your server, with PowerShell.

  - by Fatherjack

  There are many occasions when, as a DBA, you want to see who is connected to your SQL Server, along with how they are connecting and what sort of activities they are carrying out. I’m going to look at a couple of ways of getting this information and compare the effort required and the results achieved of each. SQL Server comes with a couple of stored procedures to help with this sort of task – sp_who and its undocumented counterpart sp_who2. There is also the pumped up version of these called sp_whoisactive, written by Adam Machanic which does way more than these procedures. I wholly recommend you try it out if you don’t already know how it works. When it comes to serious interrogation of your SQL Server activity then it is absolutely indispensable. Anyway, back to the point of this blog, we are going to look at getting the information from sp_who2 for a remote server. I wrote this Powershell script a week or so ago and was quietly happy with it for a while. I’m relatively new to Powershell so forgive both my rather low threshold for entertainment and the fact that something so simple is a moderate achievement for me. $Server = 'SERVERNAME' $SMOServer = New-Object Microsoft.SQLServer.Management.SMO.Server $Server # connection and query stuff         $ConnectionStr = "Server=$Server;Database=Master;Integrated Security=True" $Query = "EXEC sp_who2" $Connection = new-object system.Data.SQLClient.SQLConnection $Table = new-object "System.Data.DataTable" $Connection.connectionstring = $ConnectionStr try{ $Connection.open() $Command = $Connection.CreateCommand() $Command.commandtext = $Query $result = $Command.ExecuteReader() $Table.Load($result) } catch{ # Show error $error[0] | format-list -Force } $Title = "Data access processes (" + $Table.Rows.Count + ")" $Table | Out-GridView -Title $Title $Connection.close() So this is pretty straightforward, create an SMO object that represents our chosen server, define a connection to the database and a table object for the results when we get them, execute our query over the connection, load the results into our table object and then, if everything is error free display these results to the PowerShell grid viewer. The query simply gets the results of ‘EXEC sp_who2′ for us. Depending on how many connections there are will influence how long the query runs. The grid viewer lets me sort and search the results so it can be a pretty handy way to locate troublesome connections. Like I say, I was quite pleased with this, it seems a pretty simple script and was working well for me, I have added a few parameters to control the output and give me more specific details but then I see a script that uses the $SMOServer object itself to provide the process information and saves having to define the connection object and query specifications. $Server = 'SERVERNAME' $SMOServer = New-Object Microsoft.SQLServer.Management.SMO.Server $Server $Processes = $SMOServer.EnumProcesses() $Title = "SMO processes (" + $Processes.Rows.Count + ")" $Processes | Out-GridView -Title $Title Create the SMO object of our server and then call the EnumProcesses method to get all the process information from the server. Staggeringly simple! The results are a little different though. Some columns are the same and we can see the same basic information so my first thought was to which runs faster – so that I can get my results more quickly and also so that I place less stress on my server(s). PowerShell comes with a great way of testing this – the Measure-Command function. All you have to do is wrap your piece of code in Measure-Command {[your code here]} and it will spit out the time taken to execute the code. So, I placed both of the above methods of getting SQL Server process connections in two Measure-Command wrappers and pressed F5! The Powershell console goes blank for a while as the code is executed internally when Measure-Command is used but the grid viewer windows appear and the console shows this. You can take the output from Measure-Command and format it for easier reading but in a simple comparison like this we can simply cross refer the TotalMilliseconds values from the two result sets to see how the two methods performed. The query execution method (running EXEC sp_who2 ) is the first set of timings and the SMO EnumProcesses is the second. I have run these on a variety of servers and while the results vary from execution to execution I have never seen the SMO version slower than the other. The difference has varied and the time for both has ranged from sub-second as we see above to almost 5 seconds on other systems. This difference, I would suggest is partly due to the cost overhead of having to construct the data connection and so on where as the SMO EnumProcesses method has the connection to the server already in place and just needs to call back the process information. There is also the difference in the data sets to consider. Let’s take a look at what we get and where the two methods differ Query execution method (sp_who2) SMO EnumProcesses Description - Urn What looks like an XML or JSON representation of the server name and the process ID SPID Spid The process ID Status Status The status of the process Login Login The login name of the user executing the command HostName Host The name of the computer where the  process originated BlkBy BlockingSpid The SPID of a process that is blocking this one DBName Database The database that this process is connected to Command Command The type of command that is executing CPUTime Cpu The CPU activity related to this process DiskIO - The Disk IO activity related to this process LastBatch - The time the last batch was executed from this process. ProgramName Program The application that is facilitating the process connection to the SQL Server. SPID1 - In my experience this is always the same value as SPID. REQUESTID - In my experience this is always 0 - Name In my experience this is always the same value as SPID and so could be seen as analogous to SPID1 from sp_who2 - MemUsage An indication of the memory used by this process but I don’t know what it is measured in (bytes, Kb, Mb…) - IsSystem True or False depending on whether the process is internal to the SQL Server instance or has been created by an external connection requesting data. - ExecutionContextID In my experience this is always 0 so could be analogous to REQUESTID from sp_who2. Please note, these are my own very brief descriptions of these columns, detail can be found from MSDN for columns in the sp_who results here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/ms174313.aspx. Where the columns are common then I would use that description, in other cases then the information returned is purely for interpretation by the reader. Rather annoyingly both result sets have useful information that the other doesn’t. sp_who2 returns Disk IO and LastBatch information which is really useful but the SMO processes method give you IsSystem and MemUsage which have their place in fault diagnosis methods too. So which is better? On reflection I think I prefer to use the sp_who2 method primarily but knowing that the SMO Enumprocesses method is there when I need it is really useful and I’m sure I’ll use it regularly. I’m OK with the fact that it is the slower method because Measure-Command has shown me how close it is to the other option and that it really isn’t a large enough margin to matter.

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• Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

  - by DotNetBlues

  I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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• Log Blog

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Logging – A log blog In a another blog (Missing Fields and Defaults) I spoke about not doing a blog about log files, but then I looked at it again and realized that this is a nice opportunity to show a simple yet powerful tool and also deal with static variables and functions in C#. My log had to be able to answer a few simple logging rules:   To log or not to log? That is the question – Always log! That is the answer  Do we share a log? Even when a file is opened with a minimal lock, it does not share well and performance greatly suffers. So sharing a log is not a good idea. Also, when sharing, it is harder to find your particular entries and you have to establish rules about retention. My recommendation – Do Not Share!  How verbose? Your log can be very verbose – a good thing when testing, very terse – a good thing in day-to-day runs, or somewhere in between. You must be the judge. In my Blog, I elect to always report a run with start and end times, and always report errors. I normally use 5 levels of logging: 4 – write all, 3 – write more, 2 – write some, 1 – write errors and timing, 0 – write none. The code sample below is more general than that. It uses the config file to set the max log level and each call to the log assigns a level to the call itself. If the level is above the .config highest level, the line will not be written. Programmers decide which log belongs to which level and thus we can set the .config differently for production and testing.  Where do I keep the log? If your career is important to you, discuss this with the boss and with the system admin. We keep logs in the L: drive of our server and make sure that we have a directory for each app that needs a log. When adding a new app, add a new directory. The default location for the log is also found in the .config file Print One or Many? There are two options here:   1.     Print many, Open but once once – you start the stream and close it only when the program ends. This is what you can do when you perform in “batch” mode like in a console app or a stsadm extension.The advantage to this is that starting a closing a stream is expensive and time consuming and because we use a unique file, keeping it open for a long time does not cause contention problems. 2.     Print one entry at a time or Open many – every time you write a line, you start the stream, write to it and close it. This work for event receivers, feature receivers, and web parts. Here scalability requires us to create objects on the fly and get rid of them as soon as possible.  A default value of the onceOrMany resides in the .config.  All of the above applies to any windows or web application, not just SharePoint.  So as usual, here is a routine that does it all, and a few simple functions that call it for a variety of purposes.   So without further ado, here is app.config  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration>     <configSections>         <sectionGroup name="applicationSettings" type="System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsGroup, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, ublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" >         <section name="statics.Properties.Settings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" requirePermission="false" />         </sectionGroup>     </configSections>     <applicationSettings>         <statics.Properties.Settings>             <setting name="oneOrMany" serializeAs="String">                 <value>False</value>             </setting>             <setting name="logURI" serializeAs="String">                 <value>C:\staticLog.txt</value>             </setting>             <setting name="highestLevel" serializeAs="String">                 <value>2</value>             </setting>         </statics.Properties.Settings>     </applicationSettings> </configuration>   And now the code:  In order to persist the variables between calls and also to be able to persist (or not to persist) the log file itself, I created an EventLog class with static variables and functions. Static functions do not need an instance of the class in order to work. If you ever wondered why our Main function is static, the answer is that something needs to run before instantiation so that other objects may be instantiated, and this is what the “static” Main does. The various logging functions and variables are created as static because they do not need instantiation and as a fringe benefit they remain un-destroyed between calls. The Main function here is just used for testing. Note that it does not instantiate anything, just uses the log functions. This is possible because the functions are static. Also note that the function calls are of the form: Class.Function.  using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IO; namespace statics {       class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             //write a single line             EventLog.LogEvents("ha ha", 3, "C:\\hahafile.txt", 4, true, false);             //this single line will not be written because the msgLevel is too high             EventLog.LogEvents("baba", 3, "C:\\babafile.txt", 2, true, false);             //The next 4 lines will be written in succession - no closing             EventLog.LogLine("blah blah", 1);             EventLog.LogLine("da da", 1);             EventLog.LogLine("ma ma", 1);             EventLog.LogLine("lah lah", 1);             EventLog.CloseLog(); // log will close             //now with specific functions             EventLog.LogSingleLine("one line", 1);             //this is just a test, the log is already closed             EventLog.CloseLog();         }     }     public class EventLog     {         public static string logURI = Properties.Settings.Default.logURI;         public static bool isOneLine = Properties.Settings.Default.oneOrMany;         public static bool isOpen = false;         public static int highestLevel = Properties.Settings.Default.highestLevel;         public static StreamWriter sw;         /// <summary>         /// the program will "print" the msg into the log         /// unless msgLevel is > msgLimit         /// onceOrMany is true when once - the program will open the log         /// print the msg and close the log. False when many the program will         /// keep the log open until close = true         /// normally all the arguments will come from the app.config         /// called by many overloads of logLine         /// </summary>         /// <param name="msg"></param>         /// <param name="msgLevel"></param>         /// <param name="logFileName"></param>         /// <param name="msgLimit"></param>         /// <param name="onceOrMany"></param>         /// <param name="close"></param>         public static void LogEvents(string msg, int msgLevel, string logFileName, int msgLimit, bool oneOrMany, bool close)         {             //to print or not to print             if (msgLevel <= msgLimit)             {                 //open the file. from the argument (logFileName) or from the config (logURI)                 if (!isOpen)                 {                     string logFile = logFileName;                     if (logFileName == "")                     {                         logFile = logURI;                     }                     sw = new StreamWriter(logFile, true);                     sw.WriteLine("Started At: " + DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"));                     isOpen = true;                 }                 //print                 sw.WriteLine(msg);             }             //close when instructed             if (close || oneOrMany)             {                 if (isOpen)                 {                     sw.WriteLine("Ended At: " + DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"));                     sw.Close();                     isOpen = false;                 }             }         }           /// <summary>         /// The simplest, just msg and level         /// </summary>         /// <param name="msg"></param>         /// <param name="msgLevel"></param>         public static void LogLine(string msg, int msgLevel)         {             //use the given msg and msgLevel and all others are defaults             LogEvents(msg, msgLevel, "", highestLevel, isOneLine, false);         }                 /// <summary>         /// one line at a time - open print close         /// </summary>         /// <param name="msg"></param>         /// <param name="msgLevel"></param>         public static void LogSingleLine(string msg, int msgLevel)         {             LogEvents(msg, msgLevel, "", highestLevel, true, true);         }           /// <summary>         /// used to close. high level, low limit, once and close are set         /// </summary>         /// <param name="close"></param>         public static void CloseLog()         {             LogEvents("", 15, "", 1, true, true);         }           }     }   }   That’s all folks!

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• Why Are Minimized Programs Often Slow to Open Again?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  It seems particularly counterintuitive: you minimize an application because you plan on returning to it later and wish to skip shutting the application down and restarting it later, but sometimes maximizing it takes even longer than launching it fresh. What gives? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Bart wants to know why he’s not saving any time with application minimization: I’m working in Photoshop CS6 and multiple browsers a lot. I’m not using them all at once, so sometimes some applications are minimized to taskbar for hours or days. The problem is, when I try to maximize them from the taskbar – it sometimes takes longer than starting them! Especially Photoshop feels really weird for many seconds after finally showing up, it’s slow, unresponsive and even sometimes totally freezes for minute or two. It’s not a hardware problem as it’s been like that since always on all on my PCs. Would I also notice it after upgrading my HDD to SDD and adding RAM (my main PC holds 4 GB currently)? Could guys with powerful pcs / macs tell me – does it also happen to you? I guess OSes somehow “focus” on active software and move all the resources away from the ones that run, but are not used. Is it possible to somehow set RAM / CPU / HDD priorities or something, for let’s say, Photoshop, so it won’t slow down after long period of inactivity? So what is the deal? Why does he find himself waiting to maximize a minimized app? The Answer SuperUser contributor Allquixotic explains why: Summary The immediate problem is that the programs that you have minimized are being paged out to the “page file” on your hard disk. This symptom can be improved by installing a Solid State Disk (SSD), adding more RAM to your system, reducing the number of programs you have open, or upgrading to a newer system architecture (for instance, Ivy Bridge or Haswell). Out of these options, adding more RAM is generally the most effective solution. Explanation The default behavior of Windows is to give active applications priority over inactive applications for having a spot in RAM. When there’s significant memory pressure (meaning the system doesn’t have a lot of free RAM if it were to let every program have all the RAM it wants), it starts putting minimized programs into the page file, which means it writes out their contents from RAM to disk, and then makes that area of RAM free. That free RAM helps programs you’re actively using — say, your web browser — run faster, because if they need to claim a new segment of RAM (like when you open a new tab), they can do so. This “free” RAM is also used as page cache, which means that when active programs attempt to read data on your hard disk, that data might be cached in RAM, which prevents your hard disk from being accessed to get that data. By using the majority of your RAM for page cache, and swapping out unused programs to disk, Windows is trying to improve responsiveness of the program(s) you are actively using, by making RAM available to them, and caching the files they access in RAM instead of the hard disk. The downside of this behavior is that minimized programs can take a while to have their contents copied from the page file, on disk, back into RAM. The time increases the larger the program’s footprint in memory. This is why you experience that delay when maximizing Photoshop. RAM is many times faster than a hard disk (depending on the specific hardware, it can be up to several orders of magnitude). An SSD is considerably faster than a hard disk, but it is still slower than RAM by orders of magnitude. Having your page file on an SSD will help, but it will also wear out the SSD more quickly than usual if your page file is heavily utilized due to RAM pressure. Remedies Here is an explanation of the available remedies, and their general effectiveness: Installing more RAM: This is the recommended path. If your system does not support more RAM than you already have installed, you will need to upgrade more of your system: possibly your motherboard, CPU, chassis, power supply, etc. depending on how old it is. If it’s a laptop, chances are you’ll have to buy an entire new laptop that supports more installed RAM. When you install more RAM, you reduce memory pressure, which reduces use of the page file, which is a good thing all around. You also make available more RAM for page cache, which will make all programs that access the hard disk run faster. As of Q4 2013, my personal recommendation is that you have at least 8 GB of RAM for a desktop or laptop whose purpose is anything more complex than web browsing and email. That means photo editing, video editing/viewing, playing computer games, audio editing or recording, programming / development, etc. all should have at least 8 GB of RAM, if not more. Run fewer programs at a time: This will only work if the programs you are running do not use a lot of memory on their own. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite products such as Photoshop CS6 are known for using an enormous amount of memory. This also limits your multitasking ability. It’s a temporary, free remedy, but it can be an inconvenience to close down your web browser or Word every time you start Photoshop, for instance. This also wouldn’t stop Photoshop from being swapped when minimizing it, so it really isn’t a very effective solution. It only helps in some specific situations. Install an SSD: If your page file is on an SSD, the SSD’s improved speed compared to a hard disk will result in generally improved performance when the page file has to be read from or written to. Be aware that SSDs are not designed to withstand a very frequent and constant random stream of writes; they can only be written over a limited number of times before they start to break down. Heavy use of a page file is not a particularly good workload for an SSD. You should install an SSD in combination with a large amount of RAM if you want maximum performance while preserving the longevity of the SSD. Use a newer system architecture: Depending on the age of your system, you may be using an out of date system architecture. The “system architecture” is generally defined as the “generation” (think generations like children, parents, grandparents, etc.) of the motherboard and CPU. Newer generations generally support faster I/O (input/output), better memory bandwidth, lower latency, and less contention over shared resources, instead providing dedicated links between components. For example, starting with the “Nehalem” generation (around 2009), the Front-Side Bus (FSB) was eliminated, which removed a common bottleneck, because almost all system components had to share the same FSB for transmitting data. This was replaced with a “point to point” architecture, meaning that each component gets its own dedicated “lane” to the CPU, which continues to be improved every few years with new generations. You will generally see a more significant improvement in overall system performance depending on the “gap” between your computer’s architecture and the latest one available. For example, a Pentium 4 architecture from 2004 is going to see a much more significant improvement upgrading to “Haswell” (the latest as of Q4 2013) than a “Sandy Bridge” architecture from ~2010. Links Related questions: How to reduce disk thrashing (paging)? Windows Swap (Page File): Enable or Disable? Also, just in case you’re considering it, you really shouldn’t disable the page file, as this will only make matters worse; see here. And, in case you needed extra convincing to leave the Windows Page File alone, see here and here. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Fun with Aggregates

  - by Paul White

  There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join.  The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units.  The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too?  To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query.  This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones.  The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above.  It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join!  The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join.  In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting.  The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set.  In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL).  To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709;   -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case.  The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate.  This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect.  Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all.  Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans.  Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :)  The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier.  What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too).  Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places.  It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates.  As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, September 17, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, September 17, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 03.01.06: Cambios Parmenio: Actualizaciones al formato 2 de programación, se corrigió las vigencias y los estados de los botones. Cambios John: Integración de código con cambios enviados por Parmenio Bonilla. Generación de instaladores. Soporte técnico por correo electrónico y telefónico.Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.1: This fixes a bug in the 1.5 release where it would crash when no language packs were installed for VS2010.WPF Animated GIF: WPF Animated GIF 1.2: Improvements Added support for using the repeat count from GIF metadata (Netscape application block) if the RepeatBehavior is not explicitly specified. If the repeat count can't be found in the metadata, the behavior will default to Forever Note: the default value for the RepeatBehavior property has been changed to 0x (the default value for this type) instead of Forever. This might be a breaking change in some cases. If you need the animation to run forever regardless of the repeat count spe...Layered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.0.6 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This is release only works on Visual Studio 2012. For the Visual Studio 2010 version, please visit here. To read more about the features in this version, please visit here. Take note that LASG is not meant to generate an entire application but just th...DeForm: DeForm v1.1: New javascript client app New effects: brightness, hue, saturationsheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.1.0: This release of sheetengine introduces major drawing optimizations. A background canvas is created with the full drawn scenery onto which only the changed parts are redrawn. For example a moving object will cause only its bounding box to be redrawn instead of the full scene. This background canvas is copied to the main canvas in each iteration. For this reason the size of the bounding box of every object needs to be defined and also the width and height of the background canvas. The example...VFPX: Desktop Alerts 1.0.2: This update for the Desktop Alerts contains changes to behavior for setting custom sounds for alerts. I have removed ALERTWAV.TXT from the project, and also removed DA_DEFAULTSOUND from the VFPALERT.H file. The AlertManager class and Alert class both have a "default" cSound of ADDBS(JUSTPATH(_VFP.ServerName))+"alert.wav" --- so, as long as you distribute a sound file with the file name "alert.wav" along with the EXE, that file will be used. You can set your own sound file globally by setti...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.15: Changelog for 2.2.15 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for %originalfilepath% to get the source file full path. Used for custom commands only. 2. Added support for better parsing of Media Portal XML files to extract ShowName and Episode Name and download additional details from TVDB (like Season No, Episode No etc). 3. Added support for TVDB seriesID in metadata 4. Added support for eMail non blocking UI testRazor-sharp your skills: CSharp 4.0 Examples: Dynamic word Covariant and contravariant generic type parameters Optional Parameters and Named Arguments Tuples Task Parallel LibraryDECnet 2.0 Router: Second Alpha Release: This second alpha release fixes some bugs and limitations. It has been tested in two DECnet areas and seems to be stable enough for more extensive testing. ThisCrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.2: *Added html mail format which shows hierarchical exception report for better understanding.DotNetNuke Search Engine Sitemaps Provider: Version 02.00.00: New release of the Search Engine Sitemap Providers New version - not backwards compatible with 1.x versions New sandboxing to prevent exceptions in module providers interfering with main provider Now installable using the Host->Extensions page New sitemaps available for Active Forums and Ventrian Property Agent Now derived from DotNetNuke Provider base for better framework integration DotNetNuke minimum compatibility raised to DNN 5.2, .NET to 3.5Annoying Manager: 1.0.0.0: Annoying Manager is in beta stage no longer! The main improvement in this release is the task report feature, where users can check their tasks.PDF Viewer Web part: PDF Viewer Web Part: PDF Viewer Web PartIIS Express Manager: IIS Express Manager v 0.5B: Several added features, including adding site and right click menu for sites; which allows you to start/stop site, view it directly in browser etc.Chris on SharePoint Solutions: View Grid Banding - v1.0: Initial release of the View Creation and Management Page Column Selector Banding solution.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.67: Fix issue #18629 - incorrectly handling null characters in string literals and not throwing an error when outside string literals. update for Issue #18600 - forgot to make the ///#DEBUG= directive also set a known-global for the given debug namespace. removed the kill-switch for disregarding preprocessor define-comments (///#IF and the like) and created a separate CodeSettings.IgnorePreprocessorDefines property for those who really need to turn that off. Some people had been setting -kil...Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2: Lakana V2 contains : - Lakana WPF Forms (with sample project) - Lakana WPF Navigation (with sample project)Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: OData QueryFeed workflow activity: The OData QueryFeed sample activity shows how to create a workflow activity that consumes an OData resource, and renders entity properties in a Microsoft Excel 2010 worksheet or Microsoft Word 2010 document. Using the sample QueryFeed activity, you can consume any OData resource. The sample activity uses LINQ to project OData metadata into activity designer expression items. By setting activity expressions, a fully qualified OData query string is constructed consisting of Resource, Filter, Or...Arduino for Visual Studio: Arduino 1.x for Visual Studio 2012, 2010 and 2008: Register for the forum for more news and updates Version 1209.15 is beta and resolves a number of issues in Visual Studio 2012 and minor debugger fixes for all vs versions. After you have tested a working installation, if you would like to beta the debug tool then email beta at visualmicro.com. Version 1208.19 (click the downloads tab) is considered stable for visual studio 2010 and 2008. Key Features of 1209.10 Support for Visual Studio 2012 (.NET 4.5) Debug tools beta team can re-e...New ProjectsApertium.NET: This is a Windows 8 library to use Apertium easelyAsyncFtp: AsyncFtp is a library, which enables support for async ftp transactions in .NET Framework.Computer Club System: Computer Club System - designed to manage client machines in a computer club.Dynamic Time Warp for Time Series Analysis: This is a conversion to C# of Stan Salvador, Philip Chan Fast DTW algorithm originally implemented in Java. G.Controls: win8 ????????htmlhelp: ??????????????HtmlMaker: ?html?????if、for、foreach??????????，????c#???，????????html??。 ??????，?????????~~JsonSerializerLite: JsonSerializerLite is a C#.NET library that aims to be a compliant, easy-to-use and lightweight JSON serializer/deserializer. Launchbar: Access all your favorite applications at lightning speed.LP 2012: Calculates football stats and predicts the winners. This is a closed project at the moment. We are not asking for any help.Malibu Project: to be definedPersonal Family Record System: In April, 2012, person family information management project was begun. This is a project for K14T students of Van Lang University. PPCalc: ProPoints/WeightWatchers points calculator for Windows 8.SA Plugins: The code available in this project is open source, the know-how is not, sorry.SapientS School Management System: This is a software to manage a Advanced level classes of a school in a efficient manner.Sonar: Sonar is .NET ORM written in C# 4.0VB.net: Project này là c?a nhóm Tùng và Phu?c cùng làm v? nh?ng ?ng d?ng qu?n lýWebser Web Browser: One of the worlds most basic browsers ever designed. Its nice on the eyes and can get you surfing the web in less than five minutes.

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