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• When do you tag your software project?

  - by WilhelmTell of Purple-Magenta

  I realize there are various kinds of software projects: commercial (for John Doe) industrial (for Mr. Montgomery Burns) successful open-source (with audience larger than, say, 10 people) personal projects (with audience size in the vicinity of 1). each of which release a new version of their product on difference conditions. I'm particularly interested in the case of personal projects and open-source projects. When, or under what conditions, do you make a new release of any kind? Do you subscribe to a fixed recurring deadline such as every two weeks? Do you commit to a release of at least 10 minor fixes, or one major fix? Do you combine the two conditions such as at least one condition must hold, or both must hold? I reckon this is a subjective question. I ask this question in light of searching for tricks to keep my projects alive and kicking. Sometimes my projects are active but look as if they aren't because I don't have the confidence to make a release or a tag of any sort for a long time -- in the order of months.

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• how to handle multiple profiles per user?

  - by Scott Willman

  I'm doing something that doesn't feel very efficient. From my code below, you can probably see that I'm trying to allow for multiple profiles of different types attached to my custom user object (Person). One of those profiles will be considered a default and should have an accessor from the Person class. Can this be done better? from django.db import models from django.contrib.auth.models import User, UserManager class Person(User): public_name = models.CharField(max_length=24, default="Mr. T") objects = UserManager() def save(self): self.set_password(self.password) super(Person, self).save() def _getDefaultProfile(self): def_teacher = self.teacher_set.filter(default=True) if def_teacher: return def_teacher[0] def_student = self.student_set.filter(default=True) if def_student: return def_student[0] def_parent = self.parent_set.filter(default=True) if def_parent: return def_parent[0] return False profile = property(_getDefaultProfile) def _getProfiles(self): # Inefficient use of QuerySet here. Tolerated because the QuerySets should be very small. profiles = [] if self.teacher_set.count(): profiles.append(list(self.teacher_set.all())) if self.student_set.count(): profiles.append(list(self.student_set.all())) if self.parent_set.count(): profiles.append(list(self.parent_set.all())) return profiles profiles = property(_getProfiles) class BaseProfile(models.Model): person = models.ForeignKey(Person) is_default = models.BooleanField(default=False) class Meta: abstract = True class Teacher(BaseProfile): user_type = models.CharField(max_length=7, default="teacher") class Student(BaseProfile): user_type = models.CharField(max_length=7, default="student") class Parent(BaseProfile): user_type = models.CharField(max_length=7, default="parent")

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• Query on object id in VQL

  - by Banang

  I'm currently working with the versant object database (using jvi), and have a case where I need to query the database based on an object id. What I'm trying to achieve is something along the lines of Employee employee = new Employee("Mr. Pickles"); session.commit(); FundVQLQuery q = new FundVQLQuery(session, "select * from Employee employee where employee = $1"); q.bind(employee); q.execute(); However, I'm finding out the hard way (I get an EVJ_NOT_A_VALID_KEY_TYPE error thrown at me) that this is infact not the way to do it. Anyone got any experience in working with VQL? Your help is much apreciated! A small clarification: The problem is I'm running some performance tests on the database using the pole position framework, and one of the tests in that framework requires me to fetch an object from the database using either an object reference or a low level object id. Thus, I'm not allowed to reference specific fields in the employee object, but must perform the query on the object in its entirety. So, it's not allowed for me to go "select * from Employee e where e.id = 4", I need it to use the entire object. Accepted answer: Since there is some sort of lunacy magic built into SO that prevents me to mark an accepted answer after a bounty has run out, readers should know that the answer posted by Chris Holmes solves this issue. Readers are encouraged to up-vote his post to further signalize the correctness of his answer to any future readers of this thread.

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• How to parse this xml document?

  - by dfjhdfjhdf

  Get such a XML document with the help of ajax (var data = request.responseXML;), how do I parse the contacts?: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Alladresses xmlns="http://somedomain.org/doc/2007-08-02/"> <Owner> <ID>gut74hfowesdfj49fjsifhryh8e8rta3uyhw4</ID> <Name>Mr.Bin</Name> </Owner> <Contacts> <Person> <Name>Greg</Name> <Phone>3254566756</Phone> </Person> <Person> <Name>Smith</Name> <Phone>342446446</Phone> </Person> <Person> <Name>Yuliya</Name> <Phone>675445566867</Phone> </Person> </Contacts> </Alladresses>

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• How to enforce foreign keys using Xerial SQLite JDBC?

  - by Space_C0wb0y

  According to their release notes, the Xerial SQLite JDBC driver supports foreign keys since version 3.6.20.1. I have tried some time now to get a foreign key constraint to be enforced, but to no avail. Here is what I came up with: public static void main(String[] args) throws ClassNotFoundException, SQLException { Class.forName("org.sqlite.JDBC"); SQLiteConfig config = new SQLiteConfig(); config.enforceForeignKeys(true); Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:sqlite::memory:", config.toProperties()); connection.createStatement().executeUpdate( "CREATE TABLE artist(" + "artistid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, " + "artistname TEXT);"); connection.createStatement().executeUpdate( "CREATE TABLE track("+ "trackid INTEGER," + "trackname TEXT," + "trackartist INTEGER," + "FOREIGN KEY(trackartist) REFERENCES artist(artistid)" + ");"); connection.createStatement().executeUpdate( "INSERT INTO track VALUES(14, 'Mr. Bojangles', 3)"); } The table definitions are taken directly from the sample in the SQLite documentation. This is supposed to fail, but it doesn't. I also checked, and it really inserts the tuple (no ignore or something like that). Does anyone have any experience with that, or knows how to make it work?

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• BinaryWriterWith7BitEncoding & BinaryReaderWith7BitEncoding

  - by Tim

  Mr. Ayende wrote in his latest blog post about an implementation of a queue. In the post he's using two magical files: BinaryWriterWith7BitEncoding & BinaryReaderWith7BitEncoding BinaryWriterWith7BitEncoding can write both int and long? using the following method signatures: void WriteBitEncodedNullableInt64(long? value) & void Write7BitEncodedInt(int value) and BinaryReaderWith7BitEncoding can read the values written using the following method signatures: long? ReadBitEncodedNullableInt64() and int Read7BitEncodedInt() So far I've only managed to find a way to read the 7BitEncodedInt: protected int Read7BitEncodedInt() { int value = 0; int byteval; int shift = 0; while(((byteval = ReadByte()) & 0x80) != 0) { value |= ((byteval & 0x7F) << shift); shift += 7; } return (value | (byteval << shift)); } I'm not too good with byte shifting - does anybody know how to read and write the 7BitEncoded long? and write the int ?

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• Different EF Property DataType than Storage Layer Possible?

  - by dj_kyron

  Hi, I am putting together a WCF Data Service for PatientEntities using Entity Framework. My solution needs to address these requirements: Property DateOfBirth of entity Patient is stored in SQL Server as string. It would be ideal if the entity class did not also use the "string" type but rather a DateTime type. (I would expect this to be possible since we're abstracting away from the storage layer). Where could a conversion mechanism be put in place that would convert to and from DateTime/string so that the entity and SQL Server are in sync?. I cannot change the storage layer's structure, so I have to work around it. WCF Data Services (Read-only, so no need for saving changes) need to be used since clients will be able to use LINQ expressions to consume the service. They can generate results based on any given query scenario they need and not be constrained by a single method such as GetPatient(int ID). I've tried to use DTOs, but run into problem of mapping the ObjectContext to a DTO, I don't think that is theoretically possible...or too complicated if it is. I've tried to use Self Tracking Entities but they require the metadata from the .edmx file if I'm correct, and this isn't allowing a different property data type. I also want to add customizations to my Entity getter methods so that a property "MRN" of type "string" needs to have .Replace("MR~", string.Empty) performed before it is returned. I can add this to the getter methods but the problem with that is Entity Framework will overwrite that next time it refreshes the entity classes. Is there a permanent place I can put these? Should I use POCO instead? How would that work with WCF Data Services? Where would the service grab the metadata?

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• OpenGL Colour Interpolation

  - by Will-of-fortune

  I'm currently working on an little project in C++ and OpenGL and am trying to implement a colour selection tool similar to that in photoshop, as below. However I am having trouble with interpolation of the large square. Working on my desktop computer with a 8800 GTS the result was similar but the blending wasn't as smooth. This is the code I am using: GLfloat swatch[] = { 0,0,0, 1,1,1, mR,mG,mB, 0,0,0 }; GLint swatchVert[] = { 400,700, 400,500, 600,500, 600,700 }; glVertexPointer(2, GL_INT, 0, swatchVert); glColorPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, swatch); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS, 0, 4); Moving onto my laptop with Intel Graphics HD 3000, this result was even worse with no change in code. I thought it was OpenGL splitting the quad into two triangles, so I tried rendering using triangles and interpolating the colour in the middle of the square myself but it still doesnt quite match the result I was hoping for. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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• Linux: modpost does not build anything

  - by waffleman

  I am having problems getting any kernel modules to build on my machine. Whenever I build a module, modpost always says there are zero modules: MODPOST 0 modules To troubleshoot the problem, I wrote a test module (hello.c): #include <linux/module.h> /* Needed by all modules */ #include <linux/kernel.h> /* Needed for KERN_INFO */ #include <linux/init.h> /* Needed for the macros */ static int __init hello_start(void) { printk(KERN_INFO "Loading hello module...\n"); printk(KERN_INFO "Hello world\n"); return 0; } static void __exit hello_end(void) { printk(KERN_INFO "Goodbye Mr.\n"); } module_init(hello_start); module_exit(hello_end); Here is the Makefile for the module: obj-m = hello.o KVERSION = $(shell uname -r) all: make -C /lib/modules/$(KVERSION)/build M=$(shell pwd) modules clean: make -C /lib/modules/$(KVERSION)/build M=$(shell pwd) clean When I build it on my machine, I get the following output: make -C /lib/modules/2.6.32-27-generic/build M=/home/waffleman/tmp/mod-test modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-27-generic' CC [M] /home/waffleman/tmp/mod-test/hello.o Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST 0 modules make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-27-generic' When I make the module on another machine, it is successful: make -C /lib/modules/2.6.24-27-generic/build M=/home/somedude/tmp/mod-test modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-27-generic' CC [M] /home/somedude/tmp/mod-test/hello.o Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST 1 modules CC /home/somedude/tmp/mod-test/hello.mod.o LD [M] /home/somedude/tmp/mod-test/hello.ko make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-27-generic' I looked for any relevant documentation about modpost, but found little. Anyone know how modpost decides what to build? Is there an environment that I am possibly missing? BTW here is what I am running: uname -a Linux waffleman-desktop 2.6.32-27-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Wed Dec 1 23:52:12 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

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• Reporting Services - can't group by a column called "LanguageId"

  - by marc_s

  Folks, I have a really odd behavior here: I have a SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services report which gets grouped and sorted dynamically. One of the column in my data set which I display is called LanguageId and I was trying to get a grouping going by this LanguageId field. I checked, double-checked and triple-checked the data being returned - it does contain my expected values for LanguageId and everything seems fine and dandy. It just never worked - I didn't get the expected groups, I got things like a specific node actually changing its display value from one ID to another when expanding its subitems, and other really whacky stuff. I discovered that grouping and sorting by LanguageCaption works just fine. It also started working fine after I renamed LanguageId to MyLanguageId. So where on earth is this documented that LanguageId appears to be a system variable / reserved word / keyword of some sort in SQL Server Reporting Services that must be avoided at all costs?? I can't seem to find anything on that topic - even Mr. Google and Mrs. Bing came up empty so far....

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• hadoop implementing a generic list writable

  - by Guruprasad Venkatesh

  I am working on building a map reduce pipeline of jobs(with one MR job's output feeding to another as input). The values being passed around are fairly complex, in that there are lists of different types and hash maps with values as lists. Hadoop api does not seem to have a ListWritable. Am trying to write a generic one, but it seems i can't instantiate a generic type in my readFields implementation, unless i pass in the class type itself: public class ListWritable<T extends Writable> implements Writable { private List<T> list; private Class<T> clazz; public ListWritable(Class<T> clazz) { this.clazz = clazz; list = new ArrayList<T>(); } @Override public void write(DataOutput out) throws IOException { out.writeInt(list.size()); for (T element : list) { element.write(out); } } @Override public void readFields(DataInput in) throws IOException{ int count = in.readInt(); this.list = new ArrayList<T>(); for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) { try { T obj = clazz.newInstance(); obj.readFields(in); list.add(obj); } catch (InstantiationException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IllegalAccessException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } } But hadoop requires all writables to have a no argument constructor to read the values back. Has anybody tried to do the same and solved this problem? TIA.

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• How can I have sub-elements of a complex/mixed type with unrestricted order and count?

  - by mbmcavoy

  I am working with XML where some elements will contain text with additional markup. This is similar to this example at W3Schools. However, I need the markup tags to be able to appear in any order and possibly more than once. To modify their example for illustration: <letter> Dear Mr.<name>John Smith</name>. Your order <orderid>1032</orderid> will be shipped on <shipdate>2001-07-13</shipdate>. Thank you, <name>Bob Adams</name> </letter> None of the options presented by W3Schools (on the page following the linked example) allow this XML due to the second <name> element. Their explanation of the "indicators" and my testing are consistent. <xs:sequence> - violates the element order <xs:choice> - more than one kind of element is used. <xs:all> - maxOccurs is restricted to "1". This seems like it should be basic, after all, XHTML allows such things. How do I define my schema to allow this?

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• sending mail in contact information with c#.net problem? help please..

  - by ilkdrl

  protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string ad = TextBox1.Text; string firma = TextBox2.Text; string mail = TextBox3.Text; string tel = TextBox4.Text; string tel2 = TextBox5.Text; string fax = TextBox6.Text; string fax2 = TextBox7.Text; string web = TextBox8.Text; string mesaj = TextBox9.Text; try { string fromAddress = "[email protected]"; string fromName = "user"; string toMail = "[email protected]"; string toNme = "Mr."; string msgSubject = "Contact"; string sifre = "userpassword"; string msgBody = "you have a message; \n" + "\n" + "\n" + "Mesaji Gönderenin Adi :" + ad + "\n" + "Mesaji Gönderen Firma :" + firma + "\n" + "Mesaji Gönderenin Maili :" + mail + "\n" + "Mesaji Gönderenin Tel. Numarasi :" + tel + tel2 + "\n" + "Mesaji Gönderenin Fax Numarasi :" + fax + fax2 + "\n" + "Mesaji Gönderenin Web Adresi :" + web + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "" + mesaj + "" + "\n" + "\n" + "=======================================" + "\n"; SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(); client.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(fromAddress, sifre); client.Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; client.Port = 1772; client.EnableSsl = false; MailAddress from = new MailAddress(fromAddress, fromName); MailAddress to = new MailAddress(toMail, toNme); MailMessage message = new MailMessage(from, to); message.Subject = msgSubject; message.Body = msgBody; client.Send(message); Response.Redirect("iletisim.aspx"); } catch (Exception ex) { } AND WEB.CONFIG http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=169433 -- iam trying to send email but i cant give. Where is my problem. Please help me.

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• How to add a WHERE clause on the second table of a 1-to-1 join in Fluent NHibernate?

  - by daddywoodland

  I'm using a legacy database that was 'future proofed' to keep track of historical changes. It turns out this feature is never used so I want to map the tables into a single entity. My tables are: CodesHistory (CodesHistoryID (pk), CodeID (fk), Text) Codes (CodeID (pk), CodeName) To add an additional level of complexity, these tables hold the content for the drop down lists throughout the application. So, I'm trying to map a Title entity (Mr, Mrs etc.) as follows: Title ClassMap - Public Sub New() Table("CodesHistory") Id(Function(x) x.TitleID, "CodesHistoryID") Map(Function(x) x.Text) 'Call into the other half of the 1-2-1 join in order to merge them in 'this single domain object Join("Codes", AddressOf AddTitleDetailData) Where("CodeName like 'C.Title.%'") End Sub ' Method to merge two tables with a 1-2-1 join into a single entity in VB.Net Public Sub AddTitleDetailData(ByVal m As JoinPart(Of Title)) m.KeyColumn("CodeID") m.Map(Function(x) x.CodeName) End Sub From the above, you can see that my 'CodeName' field represents the select list in question (C.Title, C.Age etc). The problem is that the WHERE clause only applies to the 'CodesHistory' table but the 'CodeName' field is in the 'Codes' table. As I'm sure you can guess there's no scope to change the database. Is it possible to apply the WHERE clause to the Codes table?

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• When is a try catch not a try catch?

  - by Dearmash

  I have a fun issue where during application shutdown, try / catch blocks are being seemingly ignored in the stack. I don't have a working test project (yet due to deadline, otherwise I'd totally try to repro this), but consider the following code snippet. public static string RunAndPossiblyThrow(int index, bool doThrow) { try { return Run(index); } catch(ApplicationException e) { if(doThrow) throw; } return ""; } public static string Run(int index) { if(_store.Contains(index)) return _store[index]; throw new ApplicationException("index not found"); } public static string RunAndIgnoreThrow(int index) { try { return Run(index); } catch(ApplicationException e) { } return ""; } During runtime this pattern works famously. We get legacy support for code that relies on exceptions for program control (bad) and we get to move forward and slowly remove exceptions used for program control. However, when shutting down our UI, we see an exception thrown from "Run" even though "doThrow" is false for ALL current uses of "RunAndPossiblyThrow". I've even gone so far as to verify this by modifying code to look like "RunAndIgnoreThrow" and I'll still get a crash post UI shutdown. Mr. Eric Lippert, I read your blog daily, I'd sure love to hear it's some known bug and I'm not going crazy. EDIT This is multi-threaded, and I've verified all objects are not modified while being accessed

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• C++ std::vector memory/allocation

  - by aaa

  from a previous question about vector capacity, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2663170/stdvector-capacity-after-copying, Mr. Bailey said: In current C++ you are guaranteed that no reallocation occurs after a call to reserve until an insertion would take the size beyond the value of the previous call to reserve. Before a call to reserve, or after a call to reserve when the size is between the value of the previous call to reserve and the capacity the implementation is allowed to reallocate early if it so chooses. So, if I understand correctly, in order to assure that no relocation happens until capacity is exceeded, I must do reserve twice? can you please clarify it? I am using vector as a memory stack like this: std::vector<double> memory; memory.reserve(size); memory.insert(memory.end(), matrix.data().begin(), matrix.data().end()); // smaller than size size_t offset = memory.size(); memory.resize(memory.capacity(), 0); I need to guarantee that relocation does not happen in the above. thank you. ps: I would also like to know if there is a better way to manage memory stack in similar manner other than vector

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• PHP foreach help

  - by sea_1987

  Hello I have an array that looks like this, Array ( [cfi_title] => Mr [cfi_firstname] => Firstname [cfi_surname] => Lastname [cfi_email] => [email protected] [cfi_subscribe_promotional] => [cfi_tnc] => [friendsName] => Array ( [0] => Firstname 1 [1] => Firstname 2 [2] => Firstname 3 ) [friendsEmail] => Array ( [0] => [email protected] [1] => [email protected] [2] => [email protected] ) [submit_form] => Submit ) My dilema is I need to save the values from the friendsName and friendsEmail arrays into a database, I know I can loop through them but how can I send the matching data, for example I need to save [friendsName][0] and friendsEmail][0] on the same row of database? I know I need to use a foreach but I just cannot figure out the logic.

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• How Expedia Made My New Bride Cry

  - by Lance Robinson

  Tweet this? Email Expedia and ask them to give me and my new wife our honeymoon? When Expedia followed up their failure with our honeymoon trip with a complete and total lack of acknowledgement of any responsibility for the problem and endless loops of explaining the issue over and over again - I swore that they would make it right. When they brought my new bride to tears, I got an immediate and endless supply of motivation. I hope you will help me make them make it right by posting our story on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, on Expedia itself, and when talking to your friends in person about their own travel plans.   If you are considering using them now for an important trip - reconsider. Short summary: We arrived early for a flight - but Expedia had made a mistake with the data they supplied to JetBlue and Emirates, which resulted in us not being able to check in (one leg of our trip was missing)!  At the time of this post, three people (myself, my wife, and an exceptionally patient JetBlue employee named Mary) each spent hours on the phone with Expedia.  I myself spent right at 3 hours (according to iPhone records), Lauren spent an hour and a half or so, and poor Mary was probably on the phone for a good 3.5 hours.  This is after 5 hours total at the airport.  If you add up our phone time, that is nearly 8 hours of phone time over a 5 hour period with little or no help, stall tactics (?), run-around, denial, shifting of blame, and holding. Details below (times are approximate): First, my wife and I were married yesterday - June 18th, the 3 year anniversary of our first date. She is awesome. She is the nicest person I have ever known, a ton of fun, absolutely beautiful in every way. Ok enough mushy - here are the dirty details. 2:30 AM - Early Check-in Attempt - we attempted to check-in for our flight online. Some sort of technology error on website, instructed to checkin at desk. 4:30 AM - Arrive at airport. Try to check-in at kiosk, get the same error. We got to the JetBlue desk at RDU International Airport, where Mary helped us. Mary discovered that the Expedia provided itinerary does not match the Expedia provided tickets. We are informed that when that happens American, JetBlue, and others that use the same software cannot check you in for the flight because. Why? Because the itinerary was missing a leg of our flight! Basically we were not shown in the system as definitely being able to make it home. Mary called Expedia and was put on hold by their automated system. 4:55 AM - Mary, myself, and my brand new bride all waited for about 25 minutes when finally I decided I would make a call myself on my iPhone while Mary was on the airport phone. In their automated system, I chose "make a new reservation", thinking they might answer a little more quickly than "customer service". Not surprisingly I was connected to an Expedia person within 1 minute. They informed me that they would have to forward me to a customer service specialist. I explained to them that we were already on hold for that and had been for nearly half an hour, that we were going on our honeymoon and that our flight would be leaving soon - could they please help us. "Yes, I will help you". I hand the phone to JetBlue Mary who explains the situation 3 or 4 times. Obviously I couldn't hear both ends of the conversation at this point, but the Expedia person explained what the problem was by stating exactly what Mary had just spent 15 minutes explaining. Mary calmly confirms that this is the problem, and asks Expedia to re-issue the itinerary. Expedia tells Mary that they'll have to transfer her to customer service. Mary asks for someone specific so that we get an answer this time, and goes on hold. Mary get's connected, explains the situation, and then Mary's connection gets terminated. 5:10 AM - Mary calls back to the Expedia automated system again, and we wait for about 5 minutes on hold this time before I pick up my iPhone and call Expedia again myself. Again I go to sales, a person picks up the phone in less than a minute. I explain the situation and let them know that we are now very close to missing our flight for our honeymoon, could they please help us. "Yes, I will help you". Again I give the phone to Mary who provides them with a call back number in case we get disconnected again and explains the situation again. More back and forth with Expedia doing nothing but repeating the same questions, Mary answering the questions with the same information she provided in the original explanation, and Expedia simply restating the problem. Mary again asks them to re-issue the itinerary, and explains that doing so will fix the problem. Expedia again repeats the problem instead of fixing it, and Mary's connection gets terminated. 5:20 AM - Mary again calls back to Expedia. My beautiful bride also calls on her own phone. At this point she is struggling to hold back her tears, stumbling through an explanation of all that has happened and that we are about to miss our flight. Please help us. "Yes, I will help". My beautiful bride's connection gets terminated. Ok, maybe this disconnection isn't an accident. We've now been disconnected 3 times on two different phones. 5:45 AM - I walk away and pleadingly beg a person to help me. They "escalate" the issue to "Rosy" (sp?) at Expedia. I go through the whole song and dance again with Rosy, who gives me the same treatment Mary was given. Rosy blames JetBlue for now having the correct data. Meanwhile Mary is on the phone with Emirates Air (the airline for the second leg of our trip), who agrees with JetBlue that Expedia's data isn't up to date. We are informed by two airport employees that issues like this with Expedia are not uncommon, and that the fix is simple. On the phone iwth Rosy, I ask her to re-issue the itinerary because we are about to miss our flight. She again explains the problem to me. At this point, I am standing at the window, pleading with Rosy to help us get to our honeymoon, watching our airplane. Then our airplane leaves without us. 6:03 AM - At this point we have missed our flight. Re-issuing the itinerary is no longer a solution. I ask Rosy to start from the beginning and work us up a new trip. She says that she cannot do that. She says that she needs to talk to JetBlue and Emirates and find out why we cannot check-in for our flight. I remind Rosy that our flight has already left - I just watched it taxi away - it no longer matters why (not to mention the fact that we already knew why, and have known why since 4:30 AM), and have known the solution since 4:30 AM. Rosy, can you please book a new trip? Yes, but it will cost $400. Excuse me? Now you can, but it will cost ME to fix your mistake? Rosy says that she can escalate the situation to her supervisor but that will take 1.5 hours. 6:15 AM - I told Rosy that if they had re-issued the itinerary as JetBlue asked (at 4:30 AM), my new wife and I might be on the airplane now instead of dealing with this on the phone and missing the beginning (and how much more?) of our honeymoon. Rosy said that it was not necessary to re-issue the itinerary. Out of curiosity, i asked Rosy if there was some financial burden on them to re-issue the itinerary. "No", said Rosy. I asked her if it was a large time burden on Expedia to re-issue the itinerary. "No", said Rosy. I directly asked Rosy: Why wouldn't Expedia have re-issued the itinerary when JetBlue asked? No answer. I asked Rosy: If you had re-issued the itinerary at 4:30, isn't it possible that I would be on that flight right now? She actually surprised me by answering "Yes" to that question. So I pointed out that it followed that Expedia was responsible for the fact that we missed out flight, and she immediately went into more about how the problem was with JetBlue - but now it was ALSO an Emirates Air problem as well. I tell Rosy to go ahead and escalate the issue again, and please call me back in that 1.5 hours (which how is about 1 hour and 10 minutes away). 6:30 AM - I start tweeting my frustration with iPhone. It's now pretty much impossible for us to make it to The Maldives by 3pm, which is the time at which we would need to arrive in order to be allowed service to the actual island where we are staying. Expedia has now given me the run-around for 2 hours, caused me to miss my flight, and worst of all caused my amazing new wife Lauren to miss our honeymoon. You think I was mad? No. Furious. Its ok to make mistakes - but to refuse to fix them and to ruin our honeymoon? No, not ok, Expedia. I swore right then that Expedia would make this right. 7:45 AM - JetBlue mary is still talking her tail off to other people in JetBlue and Emirates Air. Mary works it out so that if Expedia simply books a new trip, JetBlue and Emirates will both waive all the fees. Now we just have to convince Expedia to fix their mistake and get us on our way! Around this time Expedia Rosy calls me back! I inform her of the excellent work of JetBlue Mary - that JetBlue and Emirates both will waive the fees so Expedia can fix their mistake and get us going on our way. She says that she sees documentation of this in her system and that she needs to put me on hold "for 1 to 10 minutes" to talk to Emirates Air (why I'm not exactly sure). I say ok. 8:45 AM - After an hour on hold, Rosy comes on the line and asks me to hold more. I ask her to call me back. 9:35 AM - I put down the iPhone Twitter app and picks up the laptop. You think I made some noise with my iPhone? Heh 11:25 AM - Expedia follows me and sends a canned "We're sorry, DM us the details".  If you look at their Twitter feed, 16 out of the most recent 20 tweets are exactly the same canned response.  The other 4?  Ads.  Um - #MultiFAIL? To Expedia:  You now have had (as explained above) 8 hours of 3 different people explaining our situation, you know the email address of our Expedia account, you know my web blog, you know my Twitter address, you know my phone number.  You also know how upset you have made both me and my new bride by treating us with such a ... non caring, scripted, uncooperative, argumentative, and possibly even deceitful manner.  In the wise words of the great Kenan Thompson of SNL: "FIX IT!".  And no, I'm NOT going away until you make this right. Period. 11:45 AM - Expedia corporate office called.  The woman I spoke to was very nice and apologetic.  She listened to me tell the story again, she says she understands the problem and she is going to work to resolve it.  I don't have any details on what exactly that resolution might me, she said she will call me back in 20 minutes.  She found out about the problem via Twitter.  Thank you Twitter, and all of you who helped.  Hopefully social media will win my wife and I our honeymoon, and hopefully Expedia will encourage their customer service teams treat their customers properly. 12:22 PM - Spoke to Fran again from Expedia corporate office.  She has a flight for us tonight.  She is booking it now.  We will arrive at our honeymoon destination of beautiful Veligandu Island Resort only 1 day late.  She cannot confirm today, but she expects that Expedia will pay for the lost honeymoon night.  Thank you everyone for your help.  I will reflect more on this whole situation and confirm its resolution after our flight is 100% confirmed.  For now, I'm going to take a breather and go kiss my wonderful wife! 1:50 PM - Have not yet received the promised phone call.  We did receive an email with a new itinerary for a flight but the booking is not for specific seats, so there is no guarantee that my wife and I will be able to sit together.  With the original booking I carefully selected our seats for every segment of our trip.  I decided to call into the phone number that Fran from the Expedia corporate office gave me.  Its automated voice system identified itself as "Tier 3 Support".  I am currently still on hold with them, I have not gotten through to a human yet. 1:55 PM - Fran from Expedia called me back.  She confirmed us as booked.  She called the airlines to confirm.  Unfortunately, Expedia was unwilling or unable to allow us any type of seat selection.  It is possible that i won't get to sit next to the woman I married less than a day ago on our 40 total hours of flight time (there and back).  In addition, our seats could be the worst seats on the planes, with no reclining seat back or right next to the restroom.  Despite this fact (which in my opinion is huge), the horrible inconvenience, the hours at the airport, and the negative Internet publicity that Expedia is receiving, Expedia declined to offer us any kind of upgrade or to mark us as SFU (suitable for upgrade).  Since they didn't offer - I asked, and was rejected.  I am grateful to finally be heading in the right direction, but not only did Expedia horribly botch this job from the very beginning, they followed that botch job with near zero customer service, followed by a verbally apologetic but otherwise half-hearted resolution.  If this works out favorably for us, great.  If not - I'm not done making noise, Expedia.  You owe us, and I expect you to make it right.  You haven't quite done that yet. Thanks - Thank you to Twitter.  Thanks to all those who sympathize with us and helped us get the attention of Expedia, since three people (one of them an airline employee) using Expedia's normal channels of communication for many hours didn't help.  Thanks especially to my PowerShell and Sharepoint friends, my local friends, and those connectors who encouraged me and spread my story. 5:15 PM - Love Wins - After all this, Lauren and I are exhausted.  We both took a short nap, and when we woke up we talked about the last 24 hours.  It was a big, amazing, story-filled 24 hours.  I said that Expedia won, but Lauren said no.  She pointed out how lucky we are.  We are in love and married.  We have wonderful family and friends.  We are both hard-working successful people who love what they do.  We get to go to an amazing exotic destination for our honeymoon like Veligandu in The Maldives...  That's a lot of good.  Expedia didn't win.  This was (is) a big loss for Expedia.  It is a public blemish for all to see.  But Lauren and I did win, big time.  Expedia may not have made things right - but things are right for us.  Post in progress... I will relay any further comments (or lack of) from Expedia soon, as well as an update on confirmation of their repayment of our lost resort room rates.  I'll also post a picture of us on our honeymoon as soon as I can!

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• Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples.         After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped.         Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run.   Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test.   Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through.  As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete.      Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’.    Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap   Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You!   Share this post : CodeProject

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• EM12c Release 4: New Compliance features including DB STIG Standard

  - by DaveWolf

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Enterprise Manager’s compliance framework is a powerful and robust feature that provides users the ability to continuously validate their target configurations against a specified standard. Enterprise Manager’s compliance library is filled with a wide variety of standards based on Oracle’s recommendations, best practices and security guidelines. These standards can be easily associated to a target to generate a report showing its degree of conformance to that standard. ( To get an overview of  Database compliance management in Enterprise Manager see this screenwatch. ) Starting with release 12.1.0.4 of Enterprise Manager the compliance library will contain a new standard based on the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for Oracle Database 11g. According to the DISA website, “The STIGs contain technical guidance to ‘lock down’ information systems/software that might otherwise be vulnerable to a malicious computer attack.” In essence, a STIG is a technical checklist an administrator can follow to secure a system or software. Many US government entities are required to follow these standards however many non-US government entities and commercial companies base their standards directly or partially on these STIGs. You can find more information about the Oracle Database and other STIGs on the DISA website. The Oracle Database 11g STIG consists of two categories of checks, installation and instance. Installation checks focus primarily on the security of the Oracle Home while the instance checks focus on the configuration of the running database instance itself. If you view the STIG compliance standard in Enterprise Manager, you will see the rules organized into folders corresponding to these categories. 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;} The rule names contain a rule ID ( DG0020 for example ) which directly map to the check name in the STIG checklist along with a helpful brief description. The actual description field contains the text from the STIG documentation to aid in understanding the purpose of the check. All of the rules have also been documented in the Oracle Database Compliance Standards reference documentation. In order to use this standard both the OMS and agent must be at version 12.1.0.4 as it takes advantage of several features new in this release including: 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;} Agent-Side Compliance Rules Manual Compliance Rules Violation Suppression Additional BI Publisher Compliance Reports /* 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;} Agent-Side Compliance Rules 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;} Agent-side compliance rules are essentially the result of a tighter integration between Configuration Extensions and Compliance Rules. If you ever created customer compliance content in past versions of Enterprise Manager, you likely used Configuration Extensions to collect additional information into the EM repository so it could be used in a Repository compliance rule. This process although powerful, could be confusing to correctly model the SQL in the rule creation wizard. With agent-side rules, the user only needs to choose the Configuration Extension/Alias combination and that’s it. Enterprise Manager will do the rest for you. This tighter integration also means their lifecycle is managed together. When you associate an agent-side compliance standard to a target, the required Configuration Extensions will be deployed automatically for you. The opposite is also true, when you unassociated the compliance standard, the Configuration Extensions will also be undeployed. The Oracle Database STIG compliance standard is implemented as an agent-side standard which is why you simply need to associate the standard to your database targets without previously deploying the associated Configuration Extensions. You can learn more about using Agent-Side compliance rules in the screenwatch Using Agent-Side Compliance Rules on Enterprise Manager's Lifecycle Management page on OTN. /* 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;} Manual Compliance Rules 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;} There are many checks in the Oracle Database STIG as well as other common standards which simply cannot be automated. This could be something as simple as “Ensure the datacenter entrance is secured.” or complex as Oracle Database STIG Rule DG0186 – “The database should not be directly accessible from public or unauthorized networks”. These checks require a human to perform and attest to its successful completion. Enterprise Manager now supports these types of checks in Manual rules. When first associated to a target, each manual rule will generate a single violation. These violations must be manually cleared by a user who is in essence attesting to its successful completion. The user is able to permanently clear the violation or give a future date on which the violation will be regenerated. Setting a future date is useful when policy dictates a periodic re-validation of conformance wherein the user will have to reperform the check. The optional reason field gives the user an opportunity to provide details of the check results. 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;} Violation Suppression There are situations that require the need to permanently or temporarily suppress a legitimate violation or finding. These include approved exceptions and grace periods. Enterprise Manager now supports the ability to temporarily or permanently suppress a violation. Unlike when you clear a manual rule violation, suppression simply removes the violation from the compliance results UI and in turn its negative impact on the score. The violation still remains in the EM repository and can be accounted for in compliance reports. Temporarily suppressing a violation can give users a grace period in which to address an issue. If the issue is not addressed within the specified period, the violation will reappear in the results automatically. Again the user may enter a reason for the suppression which will be permanently saved with the event along with the suppressing user ID. 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;} Additional BI Publisher compliance reports As I am sure you have learned by now, BI Publisher now ships and is integrated with Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4. This means users can take full advantage of the powerful reporting engine by using the Oracle provided reports or building their own. There are many new compliance related reports available in 12.1.0.4 covering all aspects including the association status, library as well as summary and detailed results reports.  10 New Compliance Reports Compliance Summary Report Example showing STIG results 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;} Conclusion Together with the Oracle Database 11g STIG compliance standard these features provide a complete solution for easily auditing and reporting the security posture of your Oracle Databases against this well known benchmark. You can view an overview presentation and demo in the screenwatch Using the STIG Compliance Standard on Enterprise Manager's Lifecycle Management page on OTN. Additional EM12c Compliance Management Information Compliance Management - Overview ( Presentation ) Compliance Management - Custom Compliance on Default Data (How To) Compliance Management - Custom Compliance using SQL Configuration Extension (How To) Compliance Management - Customer Compliance using Command Configuration Extension (How To)

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #2 - Balancing the forces

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/02/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---2---balancing-the-forces.aspxCategorizing requirements is the prerequisite for ecconomic architectural decisions. Not all requirements are created equal. However, to truely understand and describe the requirement forces pulling on software development, I think further examination of the requirements aspects is varranted. Aspects of Functionality There are two sides to Functionality requirements. It´s about what a software should do. I call that the Operations it implements. Operations are defined by expressions and control structures or calls to frameworks of some sort, i.e. (business) logic statements. Operations calculate, transform, aggregate, validate, send, receive, load, store etc. Operations are about behavior; they take input and produce output by considering state. I´m not using the term “function” here, because functions - or methods or sub-programs - are not necessary to implement Operations. Functions belong to a different sub-aspect of requirements (see below). Operations alone are not enough, though, to make a customer happy with regard to his/her Functionality requirements. Only correctly implemented Operations provide full value. This should make clear, why testing is so important. And not just manual tests during development of some operational feature, but automated tests. Because only automated tests scale when over time the number of operations increases. Without automated tests there is no guarantee formerly correct operations are still correct after more got added. To retest all previous operations manually is infeasible. So whoever relies just on manual tests is not really balancing the two forces Operations and Correctness. With manual tests more weight is put on the side of the scale of Operations. That might be ok for a short period of time - but in the long run it will bite you. You need to plan for Correctness in the long run from the first day of your project on. Aspects of Quality As important as Functionality is, it´s not the driver for software development. No software has ever been written to just implement some operation in code. We don´t need computers just to do something. All computers can do with software we can do without them. Well, at least given enough time and resources. We could calculate the most complex formulas without computers. We could do auctions with millions of people without computers. The only reason we want computers to help us with this and a million other Operations is… We don´t want to wait for the results very long. Or we want less errors. Or we want easier accessability to complicated solutions. So the main reason for customers to buy/order software is some Quality. They want some Functionality with a higher Quality (e.g. performance, scalability, usability, security…) than without the software. But Qualities come in at least two flavors: Most important are Primary Qualities. That´s the Qualities software truely is written for. Take an online auction website for example. Its Primary Qualities are performance, scalability, and usability, I´d say. Auctions should come within reach of millions of people; setting up an auction should be very easy; finding a suitable auction and bidding on it should be as fast as possible. Only if those Qualities have been implemented does security become relevant. A secure auction website is important - but not as important as a fast auction website. Nobody would want to use the most secure auction website if it was unbearably slow. But there would be people willing to use the fastest auction website even it was lacking security. That´s why security - with regard to online auction software - is not a Primary Quality, but just a Secondary Quality. It´s a supporting quality, so to speak. It does not deliver value by itself. With a password manager software this might be different. There security might be a Primary Quality. Please get me right: I don´t want to denigrate any Quality. There´s a long list of non-functional requirements at Wikipedia. They are all created equal - but that does not mean they are equally important for all software projects. When confronted with Quality requirements check with the customer which are primary and which are secondary. That will help to make good economical decisions when in a crunch. Resources are always limited - but requirements are a bottomless ocean. Aspects of Security of Investment Functionality and Quality are traditionally the requirement aspects cared for most - by customers and developers alike. Even today, when pressure rises in a project, tunnel vision will focus on them. Any measures to create and hold up Security of Investment (SoI) will be out of the window pretty quickly. Resistance to customers and/or management is futile. As long as SoI is not placed on equal footing with Functionality and Quality it´s bound to suffer under pressure. To look closer at what SoI means will help to become more conscious about it and make customers and management aware of the risks of neglecting it. SoI to me has two facets: Production Efficiency (PE) is about speed of delivering value. Customers like short response times. Short response times mean less money spent. So whatever makes software development faster supports this requirement. This must not lead to duct tape programming and banging out features by the dozen, though. Because customers don´t just want Operations and Quality, but also Correctness. So if Correctness gets compromised by focussing too much on Production Efficiency it will fire back. Customers want PE not just today, but over the whole course of a software´s lifecycle. That means, it´s not just about coding speed, but equally about code quality. If code quality leads to rework the PE is on an unsatisfactory level. Also if code production leads to waste it´s unsatisfactory. Because the effort which went into waste could have been used to produce value. Rework and waste cost money. Rework and waste abound, however, as long as PE is not addressed explicitly with management and customers. Thanks to the Agile and Lean movements that´s increasingly the case. Nevertheless more could and should be done in many teams. Each and every developer should keep in mind that Production Efficiency is as important to the customer as Functionality and Quality - whether he/she states it or not. Making software development more efficient is important - but still sooner or later even agile projects are going to hit a glas ceiling. At least as long as they neglect the second SoI facet: Evolvability. Delivering correct high quality functionality in short cycles today is good. But not just any software structure will allow this to happen for an indefinite amount of time.[1] The less explicitly software was designed the sooner it´s going to get stuck. Big ball of mud, monolith, brownfield, legacy code, technical debt… there are many names for software structures that have lost the ability to evolve, to be easily changed to accomodate new requirements. An evolvable code base is the opposite of a brownfield. It´s code which can be easily understood (by developers with sufficient domain expertise) and then easily changed to accomodate new requirements. Ideally the costs of adding feature X to an evolvable code base is independent of when it is requested - or at least the costs should only increase linearly, not exponentially.[2] Clean Code, Agile Architecture, and even traditional Software Engineering are concerned with Evolvability. However, it seems no systematic way of achieving it has been layed out yet. TDD + SOLID help - but still… When I look at the design ability reality in teams I see much room for improvement. As stated previously, SoI - or to be more precise: Evolvability - can hardly be measured. Plus the customer rarely states an explicit expectation with regard to it. That´s why I think, special care must be taken to not neglect it. Postponing it to some large refactorings should not be an option. Rather Evolvability needs to be a core concern for every single developer day. This should not mean Evolvability is more important than any of the other requirement aspects. But neither is it less important. That´s why more effort needs to be invested into it, to bring it on par with the other aspects, which usually are much more in focus. In closing As you see, requirements are of quite different kinds. To not take that into account will make it harder to understand the customer, and to make economic decisions. Those sub-aspects of requirements are forces pulling in different directions. To improve performance might have an impact on Evolvability. To increase Production Efficiency might have an impact on security etc. No requirement aspect should go unchecked when deciding how to allocate resources. Balancing should be explicit. And it should be possible to trace back each decision to a requirement. Why is there a null-check on parameters at the start of the method? Why are there 5000 LOC in this method? Why are there interfaces on those classes? Why is this functionality running on the threadpool? Why is this function defined on that class? Why is this class depending on three other classes? These and a thousand more questions are not to mean anything should be different in a code base. But it´s important to know the reason behind all of these decisions. Because not knowing the reason possibly means waste and having decided suboptimally. And how do we ensure to balance all requirement aspects? That needs practices and transparency. Practices means doing things a certain way and not another, even though that might be possible. We´re dealing with dangerous tools here. Like a knife is a dangerous tool. Harm can be done if we use our tools in just any way at the whim of the moment. Over the centuries rules and practices have been established how to use knifes. You don´t put them in peoples´ legs just because you´re feeling like it. You hand over a knife with the handle towards the receiver. You might not even be allowed to cut round food like potatos or eggs with it. The same should be the case for dangerous tools like object-orientation, remote communication, threads etc. We need practices to use them in a way so requirements are balanced almost automatically. In addition, to be able to work on software as a team we need transparency. We need means to share our thoughts, to work jointly on mental models. So far our tools are focused on working with code. Testing frameworks, build servers, DI containers, intellisense, refactoring support… That´s all nice and well. I don´t want to miss any of that. But I think it´s not enough. We´re missing mental tools, tools for making thinking and talking about software (independently of code) easier. You might think, enough of such tools already exist like all those UML diagram types or Flow Charts. But then, isn´t it strange, hardly any team is using them to design software? Or is that just due to a lack of education? I don´t think so. It´s a matter value/weight ratio: the current mental tools are too heavy weight compared to the value they deliver. So my conclusion is, we need lightweight tools to really be able to balance requirements. Software development is complex. We need guidance not to forget important aspects. That´s like with flying an airplane. Pilots don´t just jump in and take off for their destination. Yes, there are times when they are “flying by the seats of their pants”, when they are just experts doing thing intuitively. But most of the time they are going through honed practices called checklist. See “The Checklist Manifesto” for very enlightening details on this. Maybe then I should say it like this: We need more checklists for the complex businss of software development.[3] But that´s what software development mostly is about: changing software over an unknown period of time. It needs to be corrected in order to finally provide promised operations. It needs to be enhanced to provide ever more operations and qualities. All this without knowing when it´s going to stop. Probably never - until “maintainability” hits a wall when the technical debt is too large, the brownfield too deep. Software development is not a sprint, is not a marathon, not even an ultra marathon. Because to all this there is a foreseeable end. Software development is like continuously and foreever running… ? And sometimes I dare to think that costs could even decrease over time. Think of it: With each feature a software becomes richer in functionality. So with each additional feature the chance of there being already functionality helping its implementation increases. That should lead to less costs of feature X if it´s requested later than sooner. X requested later could stand on the shoulders of previous features. Alas, reality seems to be far from this despite 20+ years of admonishing developers to think in terms of reusability.[1] ? Please don´t get me wrong: I don´t want to bog down the “art” of software development with heavyweight practices and heaps of rules to follow. The framework we need should be lightweight. It should not stand in the way of delivering value to the customer. It´s purpose is even to make that easier by helping us to focus and decreasing waste and rework. ?

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• QNetworkAccessManager timeout.

  - by Umesha MS

  Hi, Presently I am working on an application which sends and receives file from remote server. To do network operation I am using QNetworkAccessManager. To upload a file I am using QNetworkAccessManager::put() and to download I am using QNetworkAccessManager::get() functions. While uploading a file I will initialize a timer with time out of 15 sec. if I upload a small file it will complete it within the time out period. But if I try to upload a file which is very large in size get time out. So how to decide time out for uploading of large file. Same in case of downloading of a large file. I get file in chunk by chunk in readyread() signal. Here also if I download a large file I get time out. So how to decide time out for uploading of large file.

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• How to access Google Chrome browser history programmatically on local machine

  - by Tejas

  I want to write a simple program which shows my internet activity over a period of time (which site I visited, how many times and so on). I mostly use Google Chrome browser. I found out Chrome stores browser history at this location - C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default (please correct me if I'm wrong). How can I open the history files? They don't have any file extension. I could not open using notepad, SQLite browser. How do I access this data programmatically? I want to know which file format it is and how to read it using a programming language like C#.

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• Connection Pool error LINQ to SQL

  - by Ved

  Guys, In Our project I have used LINQ to SQL for every kind of database interaction. Now from what I know , When I create and use DataContext object : it opens the connection , crates a transaction , perform the query and closes the connection. Every now and then we are getting Connection pool error on our services and Server. " The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached. " Any idea ? Am I completely off here ? Is this related to SQL Server itself ? We are using LINQ , .Net 3.5 and Sql Server 2008 NOTE: NO DATAREADER IS BEING USED ANYWHERE IN SYSTEM. Thanks

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• Implementing automatic logout in silverlight and wcf due to user inactivity

  - by rubin-attack

  I have a WCF web-service and a Silverlight app displaying data from that service. In my service I'd like to implement automatic logout of the user, if no service methods were invoked during a period of time (for example 20 minutes). I'm thinking about smth like that: Dictionary<User,TimeSpan> Inactivity When a service method is invoked i reset the TimeSpan. But what will happen, if 20 minutes pass, and I call the Logout method (which clears all User caches), and suddenly the User returns from lunch)) and presses a button in his Silverlight app? Obviously he'll get an error. Is there any way to avoid this, or all my concept is wrong? Maybe there's a better way to logout the user automatically?

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