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• Ask the Readers: Do You Prefer Computers, Game Consoles, or Other Devices for Your Gaming Needs?

  - by Asian Angel

  Nearly everyone who has access to a computer will play games on it at some point, but many people also use a separate game platform as well. What we would like to know this week is if you prefer using a computer, game consoles, or other devices for your gaming needs. Photo of Faith and Kate Connors from Mirror’s Edge by Tamahikari Tammas. Video games are a perfect way to relax and have fun at home (or at work if you can sneak in some game time!). The increasing variety of devices available with each passing year are making it easier to have access to a gaming platform to suit your needs or “darkest gaming desires”. For many people their computers are the perfect platform…they can play Flash-based games in their browsers, use the default set of games that come with their system, and install any extras that catch their eyes. The added benefit is that when game time is over they can drop right into their browsing, e-mail, personal projects, or work without having to switch hardware. The convenience of the “all-in-one” platform is certainly appealing! Perhaps you prefer to use your computer for other activities outside of gaming and own one or more separate game consoles. You might have chosen an Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo for example. Maybe a hand-held is preferable for its’ size and portability. Then there are mobile phones and the iPad… With so many options it may feel hard to choose the right platform(s) without a good bit of research regarding display, availability of games for a particular platform, how long before the platform starts to become “obsolete”, etc. What we would like to know this week is which gaming platform you prefer. Is there only one that you choose to use or do you use multiple platforms for gaming? Is there a particular reason such as convenience for your choices? You may even be keeping an older platform around just for a certain game (or games) made for it. Are there any recommendations or advice that you would like to share with your fellow readers? Let us know in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Apture Highlights Turns Your Cursor into a Search Tool Add Classic Sci-Fi Goodness to Your Desktop with the Matrix Theme for Windows 7 You Can’t Walk Straight without Visual Markers [Video] Lord of the Rings Movie Parody Double Feature [Video] Turn a Webpage into an Asteroids-Styled Shooting Game in Opera Dolphin Browser Mini Leaves Beta; Sports New GUI, Easy Bookmarking, and More

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• Meet Peter, 80 years old today

  - by AdamRG

  You have to arrive at the office early in the morning to meet Peter. He arrives at 5am and by 8:30am he's gone. Peter has been a cleaner here for several years. He is 80 years old today. Peter was born only a couple of km from our office in Cambridge, England and was for many years an Engineer for Pye Electronics. I'm lucky enough to arrive in the office early enough to catch Peter, dressed smarter than most of us in shirt and tie, and he tells stories of how Cambridge was years ago. He says the site of our office is on land between what would have been a prisoner of war camp (camp 1025), and a few hundred metres North, a camp of American allies. In February 1944, Peter was 13 years old. One night, a Dornier Do 217 heavy bomber heading towards London was hit by anti-aircraft fire and the crew of four parachuted from the plane. The plane however, continued on autopilot for over 50km. Gradually dropping lower and lower, narrowly missing the spires of Cambridge, it eventually came to land, largely intact, in allotment gardens by Peter's house near Milton Road. He told me that he was quick to the scene, along with some other young lads, and grabbed parts of the plane as souvenirs. It's one of many tales that Peter recounts, but I happened to discover a chapter about this particular plane crash in a history book called the War Torn Skies of Great Britain by Julian Evan-Hart. It reads: 'It slid to a halt in the allotment gardens of Milton Road. The cockpit ended up crumpled against a wooden fence and several incendiary bombs that had broken loose from their containers in the ruptured bomb bay were strewn over the ground behind the Dornier.' I smiled when I read the following line: 'Many residents came to see the Dornier in the allotments. Several lads made off with souvenirs' It seems a young Peter has been captured in print! For his birthday, among other things, we gave him a copy of the book. Working for a software company and rushing headlong through the 21st century, it's easy to forget even our recent history, or what feet stood on the same ground before us. That aircraft crashed only 700 metres from where our office now stands. The disused and overgrown railway line that runs down the side of the office closed to passengers 30 years ago. The industrial estate the other side was the site of a farm, Trinity Hall Farm, as recently as 60 years ago. Roman rings and Palaeolithic handaxes have been unearthed nearby. I suppose Peter will be one of the last people I'll ever hear talking first-hand about Cambridge during the war. It's a privilege to know him. Happy birthday Peter.

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• Composite-like pattern and SRP violation

  - by jimmy_keen

  Recently I've noticed myself implementing pattern similar to the one described below. Starting with interface: public interface IUserProvider { User GetUser(UserData data); } GetUser method's pure job is to somehow return user (that would be an operation speaking in composite terms). There might be many implementations of IUserProvider, which all do the same thing - return user basing on input data. It doesn't really matter, as they are only leaves in composite terms and that's fairly simple. Now, my leaves are used by one own them all composite class, which at the moment follows this implementation: public interface IUserProviderComposite : IUserProvider { void RegisterProvider(Predicate<UserData> predicate, IUserProvider provider); } public class UserProviderComposite : IUserProviderComposite { public User GetUser(SomeUserData data) ... public void RegisterProvider(Predicate<UserData> predicate, IUserProvider provider) ... } Idea behind UserProviderComposite is simple. You register providers, and this class acts as a reusable entry-point. When calling GetUser, it will use whatever registered provider matches predicate for requested user data (if that helps, it stores key-value map of predicates and providers internally). Now, what confuses me is whether RegisterProvider method (brings to mind composite's add operation) should be a part of that class. It kind of expands its responsibilities from providing user to also managing providers collection. As far as my understanding goes, this violates Single Responsibility Principle... or am I wrong here? I thought about extracting register part into separate entity and inject it to the composite. As long as it looks decent on paper (in terms of SRP), it feels bit awkward because: I would be essentially injecting Dictionary (or other key-value map) ...or silly wrapper around it, doing nothing more than adding entires This won't be following composite anymore (as add won't be part of composite) What exactly is the presented pattern called? Composite felt natural to compare it with, but I realize it's not exactly the one however nothing else rings any bells. Which approach would you take - stick with SRP or stick with "composite"/pattern? Or is the design here flawed and given the problem this can be done in a better way?

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• Suggestions for getting an open source electron beam tracking code going

  - by Boaz

  I work in the field of accelerator physics and synchrotron radiation. High energy electrons circulating in large rings of magnets produce x-rays that are used for a variety of different kinds of science. Running and improving these facilities requires controlling and modelling the electron beam as it circulates in the ring. A code to model this basically requires trackers to follow the electrons through the elements (something called a symplectic integrator), and then the computation of different parameters associated with this motion. The problem with these codes is that every facility has there own. In principle the code is not so complex. And as a modelling project, one might think it has some general interest. Who doesn't want to be able to create a track in space out of magnets and watch the electrons circulate? There is a Matlab based code to do this called Accelerator Toolbox, but the creator of the code is no longer in the field. I put the code in Sourceforge under the name atcollab. The basic resource is in C- it is the set of symplectic integrators. These are available in the atcollab code here. It has been useful to put the code on Sourceforge in order to exchange code, but the community of users is quite small and most are too busy to put that much time into collaboration. So in terms of really improving the code, I don't think it has been so successful. Any piece of this picture could be recreated without that much difficulty, but overall it is a bit complex, and because each lab has their own installation with lots of add-on Matlab code, people find it hard to really work together and share code. Somehow I think we need to involve a wider community in our development, or just use some standard tools. But for that, I suppose it needs to be of some general interest. I think symplectic integrators may have some general interest. And the part about a plug-in architecture to build up the ring ought to fit other patterns. Or the other option is to just accept that this is not a problem of general interest, and work harder within our small community. Suggestions, or anecdotes of analogous experience would be appreciated.

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• AsteriskNow Migration / Shared Extension Space

  - by Aaron C. de Bruyn

  I am testing the possibility of migrating from an old Avaya phone system to AsteriskNow. The migration would cover several hundred phones--but spread out over several years. (Management wants to move buildings to the new phone system one by one as cables get cut or time permits.) Two other directive is that extensions must not change and they want a GUI that other admins (non-Linux geeks) can manage. They currently use 9XXX for all extensions. We linked the Avaya and Asterisk box via PRI card and they both are communicating. From the Avaya side, if we move (for example) extension 9001 to Asterisk, we forward the call over the PRI to the AsteriskNow box and the SIP phone rings. In AsteriskNow we have an outgoing rule '_9XXX' that routes all 4-digit extensions starting with 9 back to Avaya. Here's the trouble. Dialing 9001 (the extension moved over to AsteriskNow) causes the call to be routed out the PRI to the Avaya box, then the Avaya box routes the call back to Asterisk, and Asterisk routes it to the SIP phone. As we get more and more users switched over, it will use up more and more channels over the PRI card. Is there a way I can ask Asterisk to check it's local extensions first--then forward off to the Avaya system if it starts with '_9XXX'? (I know how I can do it when editing the raw config files, I'm just looking for a way to do it in the GUI so other admins can manage it if necessary.) As a last-ditch plan, I know I can specifically add '_9001' as an outgoing call rule and sent it directly to extension 9001--but I'd really hate to do that for several hundred phones

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• Networking DOS within Windows 7 XP Mode, with a Windows XP/7 Networked Share

  - by theonlylos

  For awhile now, one of my clients has been stuck with Corel Paradox 4.0 (it used to be the biggest database system in the DOS days, until Microsoft released Access in the early 90's) so for awhile I've managed to keep it on life support on Windows XP for a few years, however since switching to Windows 7 x64, I've had to resort to using XP Mode as the sandbox to keep it up and running. While I am able to run Paradox as usual in XP Mode, I'm having a serious issue where if I try connecting the install to the network share (which is located on the Windows 7 portion of the system), Paradox keeps exiting because it says the serial number is invalid. Now, I know for a fact that this is an issue with the virtual loopback adapter and also having the VM linked to the physical ethernet adapter -- and while I have solved this issue before, most of my fixes have been bandages since after a few weeks the issue pops up again. Long story short, I wanted to ask if there is a permanent way to link a DOS program to a network share address. For example, when I try doing \tsclient\paradox (the Windows 7 Address) I keep getting an error saying I need a valid network address. I've tried mapping that folder to various drive letters such as P:\Paradox -- but for some reason that keeps failing over time. For what it's worth, Paradox uses a .SOM file to store the network settings, however it isn't editable in Notepad but rather it's controlled by a wizard in Paradox. But if that extension rings any bells, I'd welcome any insights.

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• Windows XP restarting repeatedly after a fresh restore

  - by DWilliams

  I don't normally deal with Windows but someone wanted me to fix their computer with Windows XP on it. It was just restarting every time it tried to boot. It would not go into safe mode, the result was the same regardless of the selected mode. The computer is like 4 years old and has been running the same installation for that entire time, so I figured the easiest solution was just to back up their files and re-install. I loaded the computer up with a live CD and copied their files off to a USB drive, then proceeded to run HP's "factory restore" feature (which I'm not particularly fond of, I'd rather have a disk to install from than reload all the crapware HP gets paid to install for you). It restored, and I put all their files back, installed their programs, and started the full windows update process. Everything seemed great so I left and told them what to do once it finished. A few hours pass, and my phone rings. Apparently it started doing the exact same thing as before once the updates finished. I don't have the computer sitting in front of me now so I can't really provide any more information than that. What could be causing this and, more importantly, how do I fix it? The fact that the same problem resurfaced after the restore makes me think it's either a hardware problem or an update breaking the computer.

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• Linux DHCPD Mac-Address based Groups

  - by GruffTech

  Our Current DHCPD.conf looks like the following. subnet 10.0.32.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 10.0.32.100 10.0.32.254; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option broadcast-address 10.0.32.255; option domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220; option routers 10.0.32.5; host Dev-ABaird-W { hardware ethernet 00:1D:09:3E:49:13; fixed-address 10.0.32.94; } ... more static hosts .... } About as basic as it gets. The old router is 10.0.32.1, our company wanted to implement a squid proxy to better monitor web traffic while at work, and if necessary block large time-wasters, IE Facebook.com. However, we've quickly realized that this change has played a mean prank on our Polycom SIP Phones. Occasionally our phones will not ring, the end recipient hears ringing (this is artificially created by our PBX) however the handset never rings. The ONLY thing that has changed in our network is the option routers line. So, Since all Polycom MAC addresses begin with 00:04:F2 would it be possible in DHCP to say any 00:04:F2:::* MAC addresses get option routers 10.0.32.1, and anything else must talk with our Gateway?

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• Is wiper.sh working?

  - by Aleksander Blomskøld

  I'm setting up a server running Ubuntu Precise, and I'm trying to verify if SSD TRIM is working. fstrim is failing: ~ sudo fstrim -v / fstrim: /: FITRIM ioctl failed: Operation not supported So I tried wiper.sh in hdparm: wiper-3.5 sudo ./wiper.sh --verbose --commit /dev/sda1 wiper.sh: Linux SATA SSD TRIM utility, version 3.5, by Mark Lord. rootdev=/dev/sda1 fsmode2: fsmode=read-write /: fstype=ext4 freesize = 169502088 KB, reserved = 1695020 KB Preparing for online TRIM of free space on /dev/sda1 (ext4 mounted read-write at /). This operation could silently destroy your data. Are you sure (y/N)? y Creating temporary file (167807068 KB).. Syncing disks.. Beginning TRIM operations.. get_trimlist=/sbin/hdparm --fibmap WIPER_TMPFILE.11503 /dev/sda: trimming 3211263 sectors from 64 ranges succeeded trimming 3571713 sectors from 64 ranges succeeded trimming 3915776 sectors from 64 ranges succeeded (...) trimming 3657913 sectors from 60 ranges succeeded Removing temporary file.. Syncing disks.. Done. It seems to be working, but I'm wondering if it really is. Are there any cases where wiper.sh should work when fstrim isn't? Is there any way I can check if the TRIMing actually has succeeded (other than trusting the wiper.sh-log)?

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• Is there a way in Windows 7 to disable "journaling"?

  - by Psycogeek

  C:\$extend\$Usn.Jrnl:$J:$data Here is a picture finally. The large strip in the center of the top band is the largest chunk, in the other, grey areas are the various clusters with it. On the right, the big long grey line is $logfile (not paging), and it is 63&nbsb;MB. Paging, 500&nbsb;MB is the dark cyan chunk, next to the yellow MFTres in the inner rings.. The disk was defragged so they could be seen easier. Not all clusters of this type of file are tagged, but the idea is there. The disk is 4k clusters, now about 12 GB size. Each cute little block in the picture is .81 MB and represents 207 clusters. The dkGreen section, is mostly the whole Winsxs pile, also interesting when they keep telling us it doesn't take much disk space. Wikipedia suggests that in previous NT systems "USN journaling" would be turned on when enabled (assumes it could also be turned off?). What aspects, services, or program is working on putting that stuff all over the disk which is known by $jrnl$ type clusters, even if it is not actual USN journaling? Is it possible in a Windows 7 system to completly disable the journaling, and what would be the ramifications of that? On a Windows XP NTFS system, I do not recall seeing the quantity of disk clusters used with these $jrnl$ names, so I do not recall this being necessary in this quantity for an NTFS file system itself? I understand that it would not be there, if it did not have a useful function :-) Information about how wonderful is fine, if that information will help track down what parts of the system create and use it. Change Journals states: Change journals are also needed to recover file system indexing Hmm, that might explain some of them, or why it was left on the disk. A crash while background indexing?

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• ixgbe driver: Limit the max number of cores

  - by Shellex Wai

  I have a Linux workstation with 48 cores and runs ixgbe driver for fiber interface. And I have to test a project name Netmap on it. NetMap is a high performance network framework for high speed interfaces, which has been ported to Linux recently. For some reasons, I must try it on the machine. So I compile it and follow the instructions to run the test problems, but it doesn't work. I check dmesg and it says: [10399.085736] 794.159015 netmap_set_ringid [486] ringid o4o1 set to all 48 HW RINGS [10399.085742] 794.282011 netmap_obj_malloc [220] netmap_if request size 816 too large I asked the author of netmap for help. He told me that I have too many cores in the machine and it should work if I tell ixgbe use less cores (2 to 4 is ok). I am not familiar to driver development and I don't know how to limit the ring numbers by passing arguments to ixgbe driver. So I check the spec from intel's website but found nothing about it. So I come here for more helps. Thank you.

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• Windows XP VM on VMWare ESXi 4.1 "pausing" / blocked occasionally

  - by FelixD

  We have an issue with Windows XP SP3 VMs on VMWare ESXi 4.1.0 (the free version): They sometimes seem to "pause" for several minutes. This happens rarely (maybe once a month per VM, at least noticed only that often), but still is an issue for us. It happens for three different but similar VMs on three pretty different hosts (different hardware). I have the feeling that the "pausing" is not actually the CPU blocking, but probably the harddisks, but not 100% sure. The servers have one IDE disk (C:) and one SCSI (D:) and it might be either of the two. I have seen scheduled tasks simply not starting for up to 9 minutes and then running normally again with normal speed. They were totally blocked. This is not a load issue, the VMWare hosts have average load and the VMs in question already have reserved CPU resources plus high priorities for CPU and disk. The Windows boxes run mainly MySQL, Tomcat, FileZilla server, Cygwin stuff, Java + R applications, VMWare client, Elusiva Terminal Server pro, Nagios client. Not sure if this might be related with any of that software (e.g. Elusiva). Trying to debug this, there was nothing visible in Windows Event log, other logs in C:\Windows, VMWare events etc. Unfortunately the vmware.log file ends with "Log throttled". We found that we ran into 2 VMWare bugs there: The VMWare client writes lots on bogus messages in the vmware.log, which we now disabled (log level error setting) plus the bug that VMWare does not unthrottle the log (at least so far despite VM reboots). I know there is not much guidance and that may also be the reason why I so far didn't find anything related on the web or on ServerFault, but maybe some of this rings a bell with someone? Or please direct me to what more info to post. I hope that the vmware.logs get unthrottled eventually (can't easily restart the hosts at the moment). Thanks for any input!

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• Asterisk relay between multiple subnets

  - by immoune

  I wonder what's the best way to go when you have phones on multiple networks which are not directly reachable. I have 3 networks 10.3.x.x 10.6.x.x 10.17.x.x My asterisk server resides on the 10.3.0.5 IP. The machines from the 10.6 and 10.17 networks are routed here through VPN tunnels. At this point we don't talk about NAT anywhere on the network just pure routing. Since the 10.3.0.5 PBX has routes back to all the subnet's it has no problem to communicate with softphones/hardphones from these ranges. The problem comes from that Asterisk (as far as I understand) only responsible for the SIP communication part not the Audio/Video transmission which is in P2P fashion done between the devices. So although a client using sipdroid from 10.6.x.x is able to connect to the pbx (10.3.0.5) and dial a bria client on the 10.17.x.x network once the phone rings out and the call establishes no audio will be transmitted simply because it has no way to directly connect there. For this there are multiple solutions described in this text: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee480411%28v=winembedded.60%29.aspx What I would prefer is to keep these networks segregated as they are now. What would be the best solution? Is it possible to actually relay through all the audio/video information through the Asterisk server? That would be the best in my case, I using Astlinux there which has a lot of other parts. Thanks

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• SQLAuthority News – History of the Database – 5 Years of Blogging at SQLAuthority

  - by pinaldave

  Don’t miss the Contest:Participate in 5th Anniversary Contest   Today is this blog’s birthday, and I want to do a fun, informative blog post. Five years ago this day I started this blog. Intention – my personal web blog. I wrote this blog for me and still today whatever I learn I share here. I don’t want to wander too far off topic, though, so I will write about two of my favorite things – history and databases.  And what better way to cover these two topics than to talk about the history of databases. If you want to be technical, databases as we know them today only date back to the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when computers began to keep records and store memories.  But the idea of memory storage didn’t just appear 40 years ago – there was a history behind wanting to keep these records. In fact, the written word originated as a way to keep records – ancient man didn’t decide they suddenly wanted to read novels, they needed a way to keep track of the harvest, of their flocks, and of the tributes paid to the local lord.  And that is how writing and the database began.  You could consider the cave paintings from 17,0000 years ago at Lascaux, France, or the clay token from the ancient Sumerians in 8,000 BC to be the first instances of record keeping – and thus databases. If you prefer, you can consider the advent of written language to be the first database.  Many historians believe the first written language appeared in the 37th century BC, with Egyptian hieroglyphics. The ancient Sumerians, not to be outdone, also created their own written language within a few hundred years. Databases could be more closely described as collections of information, in which case the Sumerians win the prize for the first archive.  A collection of 20,000 stone tablets was unearthed in 1964 near the modern day city Tell Mardikh, in Syria.  This ancient database is from 2,500 BC, and appears to be a sort of law library where apprentice-scribes copied important documents.  Further archaeological digs hope to uncover the palace library, and thus an even larger database. Of course, the most famous ancient database would have to be the Royal Library of Alexandria, the great collection of records and wisdom in ancient Egypt.  It was created by Ptolemy I, and existed from 300 BC through 30 AD, when Julius Caesar effectively erased the hard drives when he accidentally set fire to it.  As any programmer knows who has forgotten to hit “save” or has experienced a sudden power outage, thousands of hours of work was lost in a single instant. Databases existed in very similar conditions up until recently.  Cuneiform tablets gave way to papyrus, which led to vellum, and eventually modern paper and the printing press.  Someday the databases we rely on so much today will become another chapter in the history of record keeping.  Who knows what the databases of tomorrow will look like! Reference:  Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Comparing Apples and Pairs

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent study, High Costs and Negative Value of Pair Programming, by Capers Jones, pulls no punches in its assessment of the costs-to- benefits ratio of pair programming, two programmers working together, at a single computer, rather than separately. He implies that pair programming is a method rushed into production on a wave of enthusiasm for Agile or Extreme Programming, without any real regard for its effectiveness. Despite admitting that his data represented a far from complete study of the economics of pair programming, his conclusions were stark: it was 2.5 times more expensive, resulted in a 15% drop in productivity, and offered no significant quality benefits. The author provides a more scientific analysis than Jon Evans’ Pair Programming Considered Harmful, but the theme is the same. In terms of upfront-coding costs, pair programming is surely more expensive. The claim of productivity loss is dubious and contested by other studies. The third claim, though, did surprise me. The author’s data suggests that if both the pair and the individual programmers employ static code analysis and testing, then there is no measurable difference in the resulting code quality, in terms of defects per function point. In other words, pair programming incurs a massive extra cost for no tangible return in investment. There were, inevitably, many criticisms of his data and his conclusions, a few of which are persuasive. Firstly, that the driver/observer model of pair programming, on which the study bases its findings, is far from the most effective. For example, many find Ping-Pong pairing, based on use of test-driven development, far more productive. Secondly, that it doesn’t distinguish between “expert” and “novice” pair programmers– that is, independently of other programming skills, how skilled was an individual at pair programming. Thirdly, that his measure of quality is too narrow. This point rings true, certainly at Red Gate, where developers don’t pair program all the time, but use the method in short bursts, while tackling a tricky problem and needing a fresh perspective on the best approach, or more in-depth knowledge in a particular domain. All of them argue that pair programming, and collective code ownership, offers significant rewards, if not in terms of immediate “bug reduction”, then in removing the likelihood of single points of failure, and improving the overall quality and longer-term adaptability/maintainability of the design. There is also a massive learning benefit for both participants. One developer told me how he once worked in the same team over consecutive summers, the first time with no pair programming and the second time pair-programming two-thirds of the time, and described the increased rate of learning the second time as “phenomenal”. There are a great many theories on how we should develop software (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.), but woefully little scientific research in their effectiveness. For a group that spends so much time crunching other people’s data, I wonder if developers spend enough time crunching data about themselves. Capers Jones’ data may be incomplete, but should cause a pause for thought, especially for any large IT departments, supporting commerce and industry, who are considering pair programming. It certainly shouldn’t discourage teams from exploring new ways of developing software, as long as they also think about how to gather hard data to gauge their effectiveness.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists

  - by Argenis

    Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company - and your employer trusts you with keeping them safe. Probably one of the most important of these assets are passwords. As you well know, the can be used anywhere: for service accounts, credentials, proxies, linked servers, DTS/SSIS packages, symmetrical keys, private keys, etc., etc. Have you given some thought to what you're doing to keep these passwords safe? Are you backing them up somewhere? Who else besides you can access them? Good-Ol’ Post-It Notes Under Your Keyboard If you have a password-protected Excel sheet for your passwords, I have bad news for you: Excel's level of encryption is good for your grandma's budget spreadsheet, not for a list of enterprise passwords. I will try to summarize the main point of this best practice in one sentence: You should keep your passwords on an encrypted, access and version-controlled, backed-up, well-known shared location that every DBA on your team is aware of, and maintain copies of this password "database" on your DBA's workstations. Now I have to break down that statement to you: - Encrypted: what’s the point of saving your passwords on a file that any Windows admin with enough privileges can read? - Access controlled: This one is pretty much self-explanatory. - Version controlled: Passwords change (and I’m really hoping you do change them) and version control would allow you to track what a previous password was if the utility you’ve chosen doesn’t handle that for you. - Backed-up: You want a safe copy of the password list to be kept offline, preferably in long term storage, with relative ease of restoring. - Well-known shared location: This is critical for teams: what good is a password list if only one person in the team knows where it is? I have seen multiple examples of this that work well. They all start with an encrypted database. Certainly you could leverage SQL Server's native encryption solutions like cell encryption for this. I have found such implementations to be impractical, for the most part. Enter The World Of Utilities There are a myriad of open source/free software solutions to help you here. One of my favorites is KeePass, which creates encrypted files that can be saved to a network share, Sharepoint, etc. KeePass has UIs for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Other solutions I've used before worth mentioning include PasswordSafe and 1Password, with the latter one being a paid solution – but wildly popular in mobile devices. There are, of course, even more "enterprise-level" solutions available from 3rd party vendors. The truth is that most of the customers that I work with don't need that level of protection of their digital assets, and something like a KeePass database on Sharepoint suits them very well. What are you doing to safeguard your passwords? Leave a comment below, and join the discussion! Cheers, -Argenis

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• Embeddable forum software

  - by Rented

  I am in the planning stages of a specific subject matter community web site, and one feature I feel is required is that of member discussions. However, not in a typical forum style. For example, I don't want the members to have to navigate away from their own "user space" in order to discuss a topic. I think it is best described with an analogous example. Lets say the site is for literature buffs, and each member has a set of pages for keeping notes, progress, questions, etc. on books they are studying/reading. So Joe will have one page for Great Expectations, another for Hamlet, a third for I, Robot, and so forth. Likewise, Jane will have a page for Don Quixote, Lord of the Flies, and also I, Robot. Now, wouldn't it be nice if Joe and Jane could discuss I, Robot from within their own respective pages? Now, at first thought, roll your own seems like the way to go. However, once we start getting into issues such as spam blocking, banning, ratings, pruning, archiving, flooding and so on, well "roll your own" doesn't sound too appealing anymore. Also, I have next to zero experience with forum software. So I'm looking for forum software that has an extensive API or is generally very integration-friendly. I would like to be able to create user groups, topics, permissions, etc. programmatically,as well as the obvious user authentication (most seem open in that respect). The site will most probably be built with Java. Tangler seems like a descent option, but it seems less mature than what I'd prefer.

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• item-not-found(404) when trying to get a node using Smackx pubsub

  - by DustMason

  I'm trying to use the latest Smackx trunk to get and then subscribe to a pubsub node. However, openfire just sends me a back an error: item not found (404). I am instantiating the java objects from ColdFusion, so my code snippets might look funny but maybe someone will be able to tell me what I've forgotten. Here's how I create the node: ftype = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.FormType"); cform = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.ConfigureForm").init(ftype.submit); cform.setPersistentItems(true); cform.setDeliverPayloads(true); caccess = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.AccessModel"); cform.setAccessModel(caccess.open); cpublish = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.PublishModel"); cform.setPublishModel(cpublish.open); cform.setMaxItems(99); manager = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.PubSubManager").init(XMPPConnection); myNode = manager.createNode("subber", cform); And here's how I am trying to get to it (in a different section of code): manager = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.PubSubManager").init(XMPPConnection); myNode = manager.getNode("subber"); Immediately upon creating the node I seem to be able to publish to it like so: payload = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.SimplePayload").init("book","pubsub:test:book","<book xmlns='pubsub:test:book'><title>Lord of the Rings</title></book>"); item = createObject("java", "org.jivesoftware.smackx.pubsub.Item").init(payload); myNode.publish(item); However, it is the getNode() call that is causing my code to error. I have verified that the nodes are being created by checking the DB used by my openfire server. I can see them in there, properly attributed as leaf nodes, etc. Any advice? Anyone else out there doing anything with XMPP and ColdFusion? I have had great success sending and receiving messages with CF and Smack just haven't had the pubsub working yet :) Thanks!

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• Testing a Gui-heavy WPF application.

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  We (my colleagues) have a messy 12 y.o. mature app that is GUI-based, and the current plan is to add new dialogs & other GUI in WPF, as well as replace some of the older dialogs in WPF as well. At the same time we wish to be able to test that Monster - GUI automation in a maintainable way. Some challenges: The application is massive. It constantly gains new features. It is being changed around (bug fixes, patches). It has a back end, and a layer in-between. The state of it can get out of whack if you beat it to death. What we want is: Some tool that can automate testing of WPF. auto-discovery of what the inputs and the outputs of the dialog are. An old test should still work if you add a label that does nothing. It should fail, however, if you remove a necessary text field. It would be very nice if the test suite was easy to maintain, if it ran and did not break most of the time. Every new dialog should be created with testability in mind. At this point I do not know exactly what I want, so I am marking this as a community wiki. If having to test a huge GUI-based app rings the bell (even if not in WPF), then please share your good, bad and ugly experiences here.

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• Pull/Clone a svn repository into hg with new default branch name?

  - by TheLQ

  I'm forking a project's SVN repo and need to integrate into my Mercurial repo. To keep things simple I have a local hgsubversion repo and a local hg repo. However both the mercurial and hgsubversion repo uses default as their default branch name. My goal here is to put the original code and updates on one branch and my code on the default branch However I have yet to be able to do this. W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg clone http://*HG_SITE*/hg . no changes found updating to branch default 0 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg branch blizzard marked working directory as branch blizzard W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg commit W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg log changeset: 0:be13a9580df0 branch: blizzard tag: tip user: Leon Blakey <[email protected]> date: Fri Jan 14 23:44:25 2011 -0500 summary: Created Blizzard Branch W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg pull http://*SVN_SITE*/svn/ pulling from http://*SVN_SITE*/svn/ .... pulled 23 revisions (run 'hg update' to get a working copy) W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg branch blizzard W:\programming\tcsite-svn-test>hg branches default 23:93642a8890ab <------ blizzard 0:be13a9580df0 Not surprisingly, hgsubversion puts pulled commits into the default branch when I really need them in the blizzard branch. From the docs, there is no way to rename the branch that a commit came from. Frustratingly I can't even come up with a way to do it on a repo with only the hgsubversion repo being pulled from, nothing else. All commits are tied to that one branch no matter what. Is there any suggestions on how to pull changes from an SVN repo and rename the branch to something else?

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• PHP Notice: Undefined index when looping array...

  - by Jonathan

  Hi, I'm looping a two-dimensional array like this: if (!empty($aka)) { foreach ($aka as $ak) { if($ak["lang"]=="es") { $sptitle=$ak["title"]; } } } Pretty simple. If the array ($aka) is not empty I loop trough it and when it finds that the "lang" index is equal to "es" I just save the "title" value for that index in $sptitle. The problem is that the array ($aka) contains a lot of information and sometimes there is no "lang" index... and I get this error: Notice: Undefined index: lang. How can I fix this??? This is a extract of the array to help you understand. Notice that [1] doesn't have a [lang] index but [2] does have: [1] =&gt; Array ( [title] =&gt; The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture [year] =&gt; [country] =&gt; USA [comment] =&gt; promotional title ) [2] =&gt; Array ( [title] =&gt; Señor de los anillos: La comunidad del anillo, El [year] =&gt; [country] =&gt; Argentina [comment] =&gt; Chile, Mexico, Peru, Spain [lang] =&gt; es ) Thanks!

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• Geohashing - recursively find neighbors of neighbors

  - by itsme

  I am now looking for an elegant algorithm to recursively find neighbors of neighbors with the geohashing algorithm (http://www.geohash.org). Basically take a central geohash, and then get the first 'ring' of same-size hashes around it (8 elements), then, in the next step, get the next ring around the first etc. etc. Have you heard of an elegant way to do so? Brute force could be to take each neighbor and get their neighbors simply ignoring the massive overlap. Neighbors around one central geohash has been solved many times (here e.g. in Ruby: http://github.com/masuidrive/pr_geohash/blob/master/lib/pr_geohash.rb) Edit for clarification: Current solution, with passing in a center key and a direction, like this (with corresponding lookup-tables): def adjacent(geohash, dir) base, lastChr = geohash[0..-2], geohash[-1,1] type = (geohash.length % 2)==1 ? :odd : :even if BORDERS[dir][type].include?(lastChr) base = adjacent(base, dir) end base + BASE32[NEIGHBORS[dir][type].index(lastChr),1] end (extract from Yuichiro MASUI's lib) I say this approach will get ugly soon, because directions gets ugly once we are in ring two or three. The algorithm would ideally simply take two parameters, the center area and the distance from 0 being the center geohash only (["u0m"] and 1 being the first ring made of 8 geohashes of the same size around it (= [["u0t", "u0w"], ["u0q", "u0n"], ["u0j", "u0h"], ["u0k", "u0s"]]). two being the second ring with 16 areas around the first ring etc. Do you see any way to deduce the 'rings' from the bits in an elegant way?

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• How can I centralise MySQL data between 3 or more geographically separate servers?

  - by Andy Castles

  To explain the background to the question: We have a home-grown PHP application (for running online language-learning courses) running on a Linux server and using MySQL on localhost for saving user data (e.g. results of tests taken, marks of submitted work, time spent on different pages in the courses, etc). As we have students from different geographic locations we currently have 3 virtual servers hosted close to those locations (Spain, UK and Hong Kong) and users are added to the server closest to them (they access via different URLs, e.g. europe.domain.com, uk.domain.com and asia.domain.com). This works but is an administrative nightmare as we have to remember which server a particular user is on, and users can only connect to one server. We would like to somehow centralise the information so that all users are visible on any of the servers and users could connect to any of the 3 servers. The question is, what method should we use to implement this. It must be an issue that that lots of people have encountered but I haven't found anything conclusive after a fair bit of Googling around. The closest I have seen to solutions are: something like master-master replication, but I have read so many posts suggesting that this is not a good idea as things like auto_increment fields can break. circular replication, this sounded perfect but to quote from O'Reilly's High Performance MySQL, "In general, rings are brittle and best avoided" We're not against rewriting code in the application to make it work with whatever solution is required but I am not sure if replication is the correct thing to use. Thanks, Andy P.S. I should add that we experimented with writes to a central database and then using reads from a local database but the response time between the different servers for writing was pretty bad and it's also important that written data is available immediately for reading so if replication is too slow this could cause out-of-date data to be returned. Edit: I have been thinking about writing my own rudimentary replication script which would involve something like having each user given a server ID to say which is his "home server", e.g. users in asia would be marked as having the Hong Kong server as their own server. Then the replication scripts (which would be a PHP script set to run as a cron job reasonably frequently, e.g. every 15 minutes or so) would run independently on each of the servers in the system. They would go through the database and distribute any information about users with the "home server" set to the server that the script is running on to all of the other databases in the system. They would also need to suck new information which has been added to any of the other databases on the system where the "home server" flag is the server where the script is running. I would need to work out the details and build in the logic to deal with conflicts but I think it would be possible, however I wanted to make sure that there is not a correct solution for this already out there as it seems like it must be a problem that many people have already come across.

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• BizTalk host throttling &ndash; Singleton pattern and High database size

  - by S.E.R.

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/06/30/biztalk-host-throttling-ndash-singleton-pattern-and-high-database-size.aspxI have worked for some days around the singleton pattern (for those unfamiliar with it, read this post by Victor Fehlberg) and have come across a few very interesting posts, among which one dealt with performance issues (here, also by Victor Fehlberg). Simply put: if you have an orchestration which implements the singleton pattern, then performances will continuously decrease as the orchestration receives and consumes messages, and that behavior is more obvious when the orchestration never ends (ie : it keeps looping and never terminates or completes). As I experienced the same kind of problem (actually I was alerted by SCOM, which told me that the host was being throttled because of High database size), I thought it would be a good idea to dig a little bit a see what happens deep inside BizTalk and thus understand the reasons for this behavior. NOTE: in this article, I will focus on this High database size throttling condition. I will try and work on the other conditions in some not too distant future… Test conditions The singleton orchestration For the purpose of this study, I have created the following orchestration, which is a very basic implementation of a singleton that piles up incoming messages, then does something else when a certain timeout has been reached without receiving another message: Throttling settings I have two distinct hosts : one that hosts the receive port (basic FILE port) : Ports_ReceiveHostone that hosts the orchestration : ProcessingHost In order to emphasize the throttling mechanism, I have modified the throttling settings for each of these hosts are as follows (all other parameters are set to the default value): [Throttling thresholds] Message count in database: 500 (default value : 50000) Evolution of performance counters when submitting messages Since we are investigating the High database size throttling condition, here are the performance counter that we should take a look at (all of them are in the BizTalk:Message Agent performance object): Database sizeHigh database sizeMessage delivery throttling stateMessage publishing throttling stateMessage delivery delay (ms)Message publishing delay (ms)Message delivery throttling state durationMessage publishing throttling state duration (If you are not used to Perfmon, I strongly recommend that you start using it right now: it is a wonderful tool that allows you to open the hood and see what is going on inside BizTalk – and other systems) Database size It is quite obvious that we will start by watching the database size and high database size counters, just to see when the first reaches the configured threshold (500) and when the second rings the alarm. NOTE : During this test I submitted 600 messages, one message at a time every 10ms to see the evolution of the counters we have previously selected. It might not show very well on this screenshot, but here is what happened: From 15:46:50 to 15:47:50, the database size for the Ports_ReceiveHost host (blue line) kept growing until it reached a maximum of 504.At 15:47:50, the high database size alert fires At first I was surprised by this result: why is it the database size of the receiving host that keeps growing since it is the processing host that piles up messages? Actually, it makes total sense. This counter measures the size of the database queue that is being filled by the host, not consumed. Therefore, the high database size alert is raised on the host that fills the queue: Ports_ReceiveHost. More information is available on the Public MPWiki page. Now, looking at the Message publishing throttling state for the receiving host (green line), we can see that a throttling condition has been reached at 15:47:50: We can also see that the Message publishing delay(ms) (blue line) has begun growing slowly from this point. All of this explains why performances keep decreasing when a singleton keeps processing new messages: the database size grows and when it has exceeded the Message count in database threshold, the host is throttled and the publishing delay keeps increasing. Digging further So, what happens to the database queue then? Is it flushed some day or does it keep growing and growing indefinitely? The real question being: will the host be throttled forever because of this singleton? To answer this question, I set the Message count in database threshold to 20 (this value is very low in order not to wait for too long, otherwise I certainly would have fallen asleep in front of my screen) and I submitted 30 messages. The test was started at 18:26. At 18:56 (ie : exactly 30min later) the throttling was stopped and the database size was divided by 2. 30 min later again, the database size had dropped to almost zero: I guess I’ll have to find some documentation and do some more testing before I sort this out! My guess is that some maintenance job is at work here, though I cannot tell which one Digging even further If we take a look at the Message delivery throttling state counter for the processing host, we can see that this host was also throttled during the submission of the 600 documents: The value for the counter was 1, meaning that Message delivery incoming rate for the host instance exceeds the Message delivery outgoing rate * the specified Rate overdrive factor (percent) value. We will see this another day… :) A last word Let’s end this article with a warning: DO NOT CHANGE THE THROTTLING SETTINGS LIGHTLY! The temptation can be great to just bypass throttling by setting very high values for each parameter (or zero in some cases, which simply disables throttling). Nevertheless, always keep in mind that this mechanism is here for a very good reason: prevent your BizTalk infrastructure from exploding!! So whatever you do with those settings, do a lot of testing and benchmarking!

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• The Oracle Retail Week Awards - in review

  - by user801960

  The Oracle Retail Week Awards 2012 were another great success, building on the legacy of previous award ceremonies. Over 1,600 of the UK's top retailers gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel and many of Europe's top retail leaders attended the prestigious Oracle Retail VIP Reception in the Grosvenor House Hotel's Red Bar. Over the years the Oracle Retail Week Awards have become a rallying point for the morale of the retail industry, and each nominated retailer served as a demonstration that the industry is fighting fit. It was an honour to speak to so many figureheads of UK - and global - retail. All of us at Oracle Retail would like to congratulate both the winners and the nominees for the awards. Retail is a cornerstone of the economy and it was inspiring to see so many outstanding demonstrations of innovation and dedication in the entries. Winners 2012   The Market Force Customer Service Initiative of the Year Winner: Dixons Retail: Knowhow Highly Commended: Hughes Electrical: Digital Switchover     The Deloitte Employer of the Year Winner: Morrisons     Growing Retailer of the Year Winner: Hallett Retail - The Concessions People Highly Commended: Blue Inc     The TCC Marketing/Advertising Campaign of the Year Winner: Sainsbury's: Feed your Family for £50     The Brandbank Multichannel Retailer of the Year Winner: Debenhams Highly Commended: Halfords     The Ashton Partnership Product Innovation of the Year Winner: Argos: Chad Valley Highly Commended: Halfords: Private label bikes     The RR Donnelley Pure-play Online Retailer of the Year Winner: Wiggle     The Hitachi Consulting Responsible Retailer of the Year Winner: B&Q: One Planet Home     The CA Technologies Retail Technology Initiative of the Year Winner: Oasis: Argyll Street flagship launch with iPad PoS     The Premier Tax Free Speciality Retailer of the Year Winner: Holland & Barrett     Store Design of the Year Winner: Next Home and Garden, Shoreham, Sussex Highly Commended: Dixons Retail, Black concept store, Birmingham Bullring     Store Manager of the Year Winner: Ian Allcock, Homebase, Aylesford Highly Commended: Darren Parfitt, Boots UK, Melton Mowbray Health Centre     The Wates Retail Destination of the Year Winner: Westfield, Stratford     The AlixPartners Emerging Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Catriona Marshall, HobbyCraft, Chief Executive     The Wipro Retail International Retailer of the Year Winner: Apple     The Clarity Search Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher     The Oracle Retailer of the Year Winner: Burberry     Outstanding Contribution to Retail Winner: Lord Harris of Peckham     Oracle Retail and "Your Experience Platform" Technology is the key to providing that differentiated retail experience. More specifically, it is what we at Oracle call ‘the experience platform’ - a set of integrated, cross-channel business technology solutions, selected and operated by a retail business and IT team, and deployed in accordance with that organisation’s individual strategy and processes. This business systems architecture simultaneously: Connects customer interactions across all channels and touchpoints, and every customer lifecycle phase to provide a differentiated customer experience that meets consumers’ needs and expectations. Delivers actionable insight that enables smarter decisions in planning, forecasting, merchandising, supply chain management, marketing, etc; Optimises operations to align every aspect of the retail business to gain efficiencies and economies, to align KPIs to eliminate strategic conflicts, and at the same time be working in support of customer priorities.   Working in unison, these three goals not only help retailers to successfully navigate the challenges of today but also to focus on delivering that personalised customer experience based on differentiated products, pricing, services and interactions that will help you to gain market share and grow sales.  

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