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  • Infiniband: a highperformance network fabric - Part I

    - by Karoly Vegh
    Introduction:At the OpenWorld this year I managed to chat with interesting people again - one of them answering Infiniband deepdive questions with ease by coffee turned out to be one of Oracle's IB engineers, Ted Kim, who actually actively participates in the Infiniband Trade Association and integrates Oracle solutions with this highspeed network. This is why I love attending OOW. He granted me an hour of his time to talk about IB. This post is mostly based on that tech interview.Start of the actual post: Traditionally datatransfer between servers and storage elements happens in networks with up to 10 gigabit/seconds or in SANs with up to 8 gbps fiberchannel connections. Happens. Well, data rather trickles through.But nowadays data amounts grow well over the TeraByte order of magnitude, and multisocket/multicore/multithread Servers hunger data that these transfer technologies just can't deliver fast enough, causing all CPUs of this world do one thing at the same speed - waiting for data. And once again, I/O is the bottleneck in computing. FC and Ethernet can't keep up. We have half-TB SSDs, dozens of TB RAM to store data to be modified in, but can't transfer it. Can't backup fast enough, can't replicate fast enough, can't synchronize fast enough, can't load fast enough. The bad news is, everyone is used to this, like back in the '80s everyone was used to start compile jobs and go for a coffee. Or on vacation. The good news is, there's an alternative. Not so-called "bleeding-edge" 8gbps, but (as of now) 56. Not layers of overhead, but low latency. And it is available now. It has been for a while, actually. Welcome to the world of Infiniband. Short history:Infiniband was born as a result of joint efforts of HPAQ, IBM, Intel, Sun and Microsoft. They planned to implement a next-generation I/O fabric, in the 90s. In the 2000s Infiniband (from now on: IB) was quite popular in the high-performance computing field, powering most of the top500 supercomputers. Then in the middle of the decade, Oracle realized its potential and used it as an interconnect backbone for the first Database Machine, the first Exadata. Since then, IB has been booming, Oracle utilizes and supports it in a large set of its HW products, it is the backbone of the famous Engineered Systems: Exadata, SPARC SuperCluster, Exalogic, OVCA and even the new DB backup/recovery box. You can also use it to make servers talk highspeed IP to eachother, or to a ZFS Storage Appliance. Following Oracle's lead, even IBM has jumped the wagon, and leverages IB in its PureFlex systems, their first InfiniBand Machines.IB Structural Overview: If you want to use IB in your servers, the first thing you will need is PCI cards, in IB terms Host Channel Adapters, or HCAs. Just like NICs for Ethernet, or HBAs for FC. In these you plug an IB cable, going to an IB switch providing connection to other IB HCAs. Of course you're going to need drivers for those in your OS. Yes, these are long-available for Solaris and Linux. Now, what protocols can you talk over IB? There's a range of choices. See, IB isn't accepting package loss like Ethernet does, and hence doesn't need to rely on TCP/IP as a workaround for resends. That is, you still can run IP over IB (IPoIB), and that is used in various cases for control functionality, but the datatransfer can run over more efficient protocols - like native IB. About PCI connectivity: IB cards, as you see are fast. They bring low latency, which is just as important as their bandwidth. Current IB cards run at 56 gbit/s. That is slightly more than double of the capacity of a PCI Gen2 slot (of ~25 gbit/s). And IB cards are equipped usually with two ports - that is, altogether you'd need 112 gbit/s PCI slots, to be able to utilize FDR IB cards in an active-active fashion. PCI Gen3 slots provide you with around ~50gbps. This is why the most IB cards are configured in an active-standby way if both ports are used. Once again the PCI slot is the bottleneck. Anyway, the new Oracle servers are equipped with Gen3 PCI slots, an the new IB HCAs support those too. Oracle utilizes the QDR HCAs, running at 40gbp/s brutto, which translates to a 32gbp/s net traffic due to the 10:8 signal-to-data information ratio. Consolidation techniques: Technology never stops to evolve. Mellanox is working on the 100 gbps (EDR) version already, which will be optical, since signal technology doesn't allow EDR to be copper. Also, I hear you say "100gbps? I will never use/need that much". Are you sure? Have you considered consolidation scenarios, where (for example with Oracle Virtual Network) you could consolidate your platform to a high densitiy virtualized solution providing many virtual 10gbps interfaces through that 100gbps? Technology never stops to evolve. I still remember when a 10mbps network was impressively fast. Back in those days, 16MB of RAM was a lot. Now we usually run servers with around 100.000 times more RAM. If network infrastrucure speends could grow as fast as main memory capacities, we'd have a different landscape now :) You can utilize SRIOV as well for consolidation. That is, if you run LDoms (aka Oracle VM Server for SPARC) you do not have to add physical IB cards to all your guest LDoms, and you do not need to run VIO devices through the hypervisor either (avoiding overhead). You can enable SRIOV on those IB cards, which practically virtualizes the PCI bus, and you can dedicate Physical- and Virtual Functions of the virtualized HCAs as native, physical HW devices to your guests. See Raghuram's excellent post explaining SRIOV. SRIOV for IB is supported since LDoms 3.1.  This post is getting lengthier, so I will rename it to Part I, and continue it in a second post. 

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  • The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

    - by user9147039
    I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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  • Global Perspective: Oracle AppAdvantage Does its Stage Debut in the UK

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Global Perspective is a monthly series that brings experiences, business needs and real-world use cases from regions across the globe. This month’s feature is a follow-up from last month’s Global Perspective note from a well known ACE Director based in EMEA. My first contribution to this blog was before Oracle Open World and I was quite excited about where this initiative would take me in my understanding of the value of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Rimi Bewtra from the Oracle AppAdvantage team came as promised to the Oracle ACE Director briefings and explained what this initiative was all about and I then asked the directors to take part in the new survey. The story was really well received and then at the SOA advisory board that many of these ACE Directors already take part in there was a further discussion on how this initiative will help customers understand the benefits of adoption. A few days later Rick Beers launched the program at a lunch of invited customer executives which included one from Pella who talked about their projects (a quick recap on that here). I wasn’t able to stay for the whole event but what really interested me was that these executives who understood the technology but where looking for how they could use them to drive their businesses. Lots of ideas were bubbling up in my head about how we can use this in user groups to help our members, and the timing was fantastic as just three weeks later we had UKOUG_Apps13, our flagship Applications conference in the UK. We had independently working with Oracle marketing in the UK on an initiative called Apps Transformation to help our members look beyond just the application they use today. We have had a Fusion community page but felt the options open are now much wider than Fusion Applications, there are acquired applications, social, mobility and of course the underlying technology, Oracle Fusion Middleware. I was really pleased to be allowed to give the Oracle AppAdvantage story as a session in our conference and we are planning a special Apps Transformation event in March where I hope the Oracle AppAdvantage team will take part and we will have the results of the survey to discuss. But, life also came full circle for me. In my first post, I talked about Andrew Sutherland and his original theory that Oracle Fusion Middleware adoption had technical drivers. Well, Andrew was a speaker at our event and he gave a potted, tech-talk free update on Oracle Open World. Andrew talked about the Prevailing Technology Winds, and what is driving this today and he talked about that in the past it was the move from simply automating processes (ERP etc), through the altering of those processes (SOA) and onto consolidation. The next drivers are around the need to predict, both faster and more accurately; how to better exploit the information that we have available. He went on to talk about The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – harnessing these forces of change with Oracle technology. Gartner really likes this concept and if you want to know more you can get their paper here. All this has made me think, and I hope it will make you too. Technology can help us drive our businesses better and understanding your needs can be the first step on your journey, which was the theme of our event in the UK. I spoke to a number of the delegates and I hope to share some of their stories in later posts. If you have a story to share, the survey is at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P335DD3 About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Debra has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Leader and then Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts Editor’s Note: Debra has kindly agreed to share her musings and experience in a monthly column on the Fusion Middleware blog so do stay tuned…

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  • What Keeps You from Changing Your Public IP Address and Wreaking Havoc on the Internet?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    What exactly is preventing you (or anyone else) from changing their IP address and causing all sorts of headaches for ISPs and other Internet users? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Whitemage is curious about what’s preventing him from wantonly changing his IP address and causing trouble: An interesting question was asked of me and I did not know what to answer. So I’ll ask here. Let’s say I subscribed to an ISP and I’m using cable internet access. The ISP gives me a public IP address of 60.61.62.63. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75, and messing with another consumer’s internet access? For the sake of this argument, let’s say that this other IP address is also owned by the same ISP. Also, let’s assume that it’s possible for me to go into the cable modem settings and manually change the IP address. Under a business contract where you are allocated static addresses, you are also assigned a default gateway, a network address and a broadcast address. So that’s 3 addresses the ISP “loses” to you. That seems very wasteful for dynamically assigned IP addresses, which the majority of customers are. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Two things to investigate here, why can’t we just go around changing our addresses, and is the assignment process as wasteful as it seems? The Answer SuperUser contributor Moses offers some insight: Cable modems aren’t like your home router (ie. they don’t have a web interface with simple point-and-click buttons that any kid can “hack” into). Cable modems are “looked up” and located by their MAC address by the ISP, and are typically accessed by technicians using proprietary software that only they have access to, that only runs on their servers, and therefore can’t really be stolen. Cable modems also authenticate and cross-check settings with the ISPs servers. The server has to tell the modem whether it’s settings (and location on the cable network) are valid, and simply sets it to what the ISP has it set it for (bandwidth, DHCP allocations, etc). For instance, when you tell your ISP “I would like a static IP, please.”, they allocate one to the modem through their servers, and the modem allows you to use that IP. Same with bandwidth changes, for instance. To do what you are suggesting, you would likely have to break into the servers at the ISP and change what it has set up for your modem. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Every ISP is different, both in practice and how close they are with the larger network that is providing service to them. Depending on those factors, they could be using a combination of ACL and static ARP. It also depends on the technology in the cable network itself. The ISP I worked for used some form of ACL, but that knowledge was a little beyond my paygrade. I only got to work with the technician’s interface and do routine maintenance and service changes. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75 and mess with another consumer’s internet access? Given the above, what keeps you from changing your IP to one that your ISP hasn’t specifically given to you is a server that is instructing your modem what it can and can’t do. Even if you somehow broke into the modem, if 60.61.62.75 is already allocated to another customer, then the server will simply tell your modem that it can’t have it. David Schwartz offers some additional insight with a link to a white paper for the really curious: Most modern ISPs (last 13 years or so) will not accept traffic from a customer connection with a source IP address they would not route to that customer were it the destination IP address. This is called “reverse path forwarding”. See BCP 38. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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  • Some New .NET Downloads and Resources

    - by Kevin Grossnicklaus
    Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit.  It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft.  The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of.  The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today.  Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)?  Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox).   With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target.  Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks.  Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment.  This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight.  You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model.   Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here.  You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/.   This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform.  If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs.  You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others.  Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies.  By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done.  Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need.  I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities.  Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results.  First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from.  For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings.  All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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  • Gamification at OOW

    - by erikanollwebb
    Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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  • Agile Testing Days 2012 – My First Conference!

    - by Chris George
    I’d like to give you a bit of background first… so please bear with me! In 1996, whilst studying for my final year of my degree, I applied for a job as a C++ Developer at a small software house in Hertfordshire  After bodging up the technical part of the interview I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position as a QA Engineer instead. The role sounded intriguing and the pay was pretty good so in the absence of anything else I took it. Here began my career in the world of software testing! Back then, testing/QA was often an afterthought, something that was bolted on to the development process and very much a second class citizen. Test automation was rare, and tools were basic or non-existent! The internet was just starting to take off, and whilst there might have been testing communities and resources, we were certainly not exposed to any of them. After 8 years I moved to another small company, and again didn’t find myself exposed to any of the changes that were happening in the industry. It wasn’t until I joined Red Gate in 2008 that my view of testing and software development as a whole started to expand. But it took a further 4 years for my view of testing to be totally blown open, and so the story really begins… In May 2012 I was fortunate to land the role of Head of Test Engineering. Soon after, I received an email with details for the “Agile Testi However, in my new role, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and at least go to one conference. Perhaps I could get some new ideas to supplement and support some of the ideas I already had.ng Days” conference in Potsdam, Germany. I looked over the suggested programme and some of the talks peeked my interest. For numerous reasons I’d shied away from attending conferences in the past, one of the main ones being that I didn’t see much benefit in attending loads of talks when I could just read about stuff like that on the internet. So, on the 18th November 2012, myself and three other Red Gaters boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Potsdam, Germany to attend Agile Testing Days 2012. Tutorial Day – “Software Testing Reloaded” We chose to do the tutorials on the 19th, I chose the one titled “Software Testing Reloaded – So you wanna actually DO something? We’ve got just the workshop for you. Now with even less powerpoint!”. With such a concise and serious title I just had to see what it was about! I nervously entered the room to be greeted by tables, chairs etc all over the place, not set out and frankly in one hell of a mess! There were a few people in there playing a game with dice. Okaaaay… this is going to be a long day! Actually the dice game was an exercise in deduction and simplification… I found it very interesting and is certainly something I’ll be using at work as a training exercise! (I won’t explain the game here cause I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag…) The tutorial consisted of several games, exploring different aspects of testing. They were all practical yet required a fair amount of thin king. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen were running the tutorial, and presented it in a very relaxed and light-hearted manner. It was really my first experience of working in small teams with testers from very different backgrounds, and it was really enjoyable. Matt & Pete were very approachable and offered advice where required whilst still making you work for the answers! One of the tasks was to devise several strategies for testing some electronic dice. The premise was that a Vegas casino wanted to use the dice to appeal to the twenty-somethings interested in tech, but needed assurance that they were as reliable and random as traditional dice. This was a very interesting and challenging exercise that forced us to challenge various assumptions, determine/clarify requirements but most of all it was frustrating because the dice made a very very irritating beeping noise. Multiple that by at least 12 dice and I was dreaming about them all that night!! Some of the main takeaways that were brilliantly demonstrated through the games were not to make assumptions, challenge requirements, and have fun testing! The tutorial lasted the whole day, but to be honest the day went very quickly! My introduction into the conference experience started very well indeed, and I would talk to both Matt and Pete several times during the 4 days. Days 1,2 & 3 will be coming soon…  

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  • How Can I Safely Destroy Sensitive Data CDs/DVDs?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    You have a pile of DVDs with sensitive information on them and you need to safely and effectively dispose of them so no data recovery is possible. What’s the most safe and efficient way to get the job done? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader HaLaBi wants to know how he can safely destroy CDs and DVDs with personal data on them: I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and may cause harm. Scratching them badly is what I always do but it takes long time and I managed to read some of the data in the scratched CDs/DVDs. What’s the way to physically destroy a CD/DVD safely? How should he approach the problem? The Answer SuperUser contributor Journeyman Geek offers a practical solution coupled with a slightly mad-scientist solution: The proper way is to get yourself a shredder that also handles cds – look online for cd shredders. This is the right option if you end up doing this routinely. I don’t do this very often – For small scale destruction I favour a pair of tin snips – they have enough force to cut through a cd, yet are blunt enough to cause small cracks along the sheer line. Kitchen shears with one serrated side work well too. You want to damage the data layer along with shearing along the plastic, and these work magnificently. Do it in a bag, cause this generates sparkly bits. There’s also the fun, and probably dangerous way – find yourself an old microwave, and microwave them. I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area of course, and not using your mother’s good microwave. There’s a lot of videos of this on YouTube – such as this (who’s done this in a kitchen… and using his mom’s microwave). This results in a very much destroyed cd in every respect. If I was an evil hacker mastermind, this is what I’d do. The other options are better for the rest of us. Another contributor, Keltari, notes that the only safe (and DoD approved) way to dispose of data is total destruction: The answer by Journeyman Geek is good enough for almost everything. But oddly, that common phrase “Good enough for government work” does not apply – depending on which part of the government. It is technically possible to recover data from shredded/broken/etc CDs and DVDs. If you have a microscope handy, put the disc in it and you can see the pits. The disc can be reassembled and the data can be reconstructed — minus the data that was physically destroyed. So why not just pulverize the disc into dust? Or burn it to a crisp? While technically, that would completely eliminate the data, it leaves no record of the disc having existed. And in some places, like DoD and other secure facilities, the data needs to be destroyed, but the disc needs to exist. If there is a security audit, the disc can be pulled to show it has been destroyed. So how can a disc exist, yet be destroyed? Well, the most common method is grinding the disc down to destroy the data, yet keep the label surface of the disc intact. Basically, it’s no different than using sandpaper on the writable side, till the data is gone. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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  • Atheros 922 PCI WIFI is disabled in Unity but enabled in terminal - How to get it to work?

    - by zewone
    I am trying to get my PCI Wireless Atheros 922 card to work. It is disabled in Unity: both the network utility and the desktop (see screenshot http://www.amisdurailhalanzy.be/Screenshot%20from%202012-10-25%2013:19:54.png) I tried many different advises on many different forums. Installed 12.10 instead of 12.04, enabled all interfaces... etc. I have read about the aht9 driver... The terminal shows no hw or sw lock for the Atheros card, nevertheless, it is still disabled. Nothing worked so far, the card is still disabled. Any help is much appreciated. Here are more tech details: myuser@adri1:~$ sudo lshw -C network *-network:0 DISABLED description: Wireless interface product: AR922X Wireless Network Adapter vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:03:02.0 logical name: wlan1 version: 01 serial: 00:18:e7:cd:68:b1 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.5.0-17-generic firmware=N/A latency=168 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:18 memory:d8000000-d800ffff *-network:1 description: Ethernet interface product: VT6105/VT6106S [Rhine-III] vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc. physical id: 6 bus info: pci@0000:03:06.0 logical name: eth0 version: 8b serial: 00:11:09:a3:76:4a size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=via-rhine driverversion=1.5.0 duplex=half latency=32 link=no maxlatency=8 mingnt=3 multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:18 ioport:d300(size=256) memory:d8013000-d80130ff *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface physical id: 1 bus info: usb@1:8.1 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:11:09:51:75:36 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt2500usb driverversion=3.5.0-17-generic firmware=N/A link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg myuser@adri1:~$ sudo rfkill list all 0: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: phy1: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no myuser@adri1:~$ dmesg | grep wlan0 [ 15.114235] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready myuser@adri1:~$ dmesg | egrep 'ath|firm' [ 14.617562] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x30 [ 14.617568] ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a direct regpair map [ 14.617572] ath: Country alpha2 being used: AM [ 14.617575] ath: Regpair used: 0x30 [ 14.637778] ieee80211 phy0: >Selected rate control algorithm 'ath9k_rate_control' [ 14.639410] Registered led device: ath9k-phy0 myuser@adri1:~$ dmesg | grep wlan1 [ 15.119922] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready myuser@adri1:~$ lspci -nn | grep 'Atheros' 03:02.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR922X Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0029] (rev 01) myuser@adri1:~$ sudo ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:09:a3:76:4a inet addr:192.168.2.2 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::211:9ff:fea3:764a/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:5457 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2548 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:3425684 (3.4 MB) TX bytes:282192 (282.1 KB) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:590 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:590 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:53729 (53.7 KB) TX bytes:53729 (53.7 KB) myuser@adri1:~$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=off Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:on lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wlan1 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off myuser@adri1:~$ lsmod | grep "ath9k" ath9k 116549 0 mac80211 461161 3 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib,ath9k ath9k_common 13783 1 ath9k ath9k_hw 376155 2 ath9k,ath9k_common ath 19187 3 ath9k,ath9k_common,ath9k_hw cfg80211 175375 4 rt2x00lib,ath9k,mac80211,ath myuser@adri1:~$ iwlist scan wlan0 Failed to read scan data : Network is down lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. wlan1 Failed to read scan data : Network is down myuser@adri1:~$ lsb_release -d Description: Ubuntu 12.10 myuser@adri1:~$ uname -mr 3.5.0-17-generic i686 ![Schizophrenic Ubuntu](http://www.amisdurailhalanzy.be/Screenshot%20from%202012-10-25%2013:19:54.png) Any help much appreciated... Thanks, Philippe 31-10-2012 ... I have some more updates. When I do the following command it does see my Wifi router... So even if it is still disabled... the card seems to work and see the router (ESSID:"5791BC26-CE9C-11D1-97BF-0000F81E") See below: sudo iwlist wlan1 scanning wlan1 Scan completed : Cell 01 - Address: 00:19:70:8F:B0:EA Channel:10 Frequency:2.457 GHz (Channel 10) Quality=51/70 Signal level=-59 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"5791BC26-CE9C-11D1-97BF-0000F81E" Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s Bit Rates:24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=000000025dbf2188 Extra: Last beacon: 108ms ago IE: Unknown: 002035373931424332362D434539432D313144312D393742462D3030303046383145 IE: Unknown: 010882848B960C121824 IE: Unknown: 03010A IE: Unknown: 0706424520010D14 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: 2A0100 IE: Unknown: 32043048606C IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101030003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 IE: Unknown: DD0900037F01010000FF7F IE: Unknown: DD0A00037F04010000000000

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  • What do the participants say about the Open Day in South Africa?

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On the 26th of September, a group of students who were specifically selected to attend an Open day at Oracle South Africa, joined us at our offices in Woodmead, Johannesburg. The Conference room was filled with inquisitive minds. What we had in store for them was a detailed presentation about Oracle which was delivered by Zuko - Cluster Leader: Tech GB South Africa. The student’s many questions were all answered especially when we started addressing the opportunities we have and detailed information on our Graduate Programme. Our employees then came to talk about their experience. This allowed all the students to have an integrated learning experience. By inviting the students to walk around our Oracle Offices allowed them to see, talk, experience a bit of the culture and ask more questions. Here is some of the feedback from the attendees: Maxwell Moloi: “The open day truly served its purpose and exceeded expectations in the sense that I got to find out more about Oracle and all the different opportunities it has to offer. The fact that Oracle supplies a full solution to a customer and not just part of it and how the company manages to setup professional development for their employees is what entices me to want to join the rapidly growing team of Oracle.” Nqobile Mabaso: “I found the open day to be quite informative and enlightening because coming from a marketing background I could apply the knowledge I got from varsity to the Company I was able to point out what they do as part of their corporate social responsibility (Oracle recently partnered with the department of education to build a school), how Oracle emphasizes on relationship building because they know they sell to people and not companies and how they offer the full stack of solutions which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.” Nondumiso Mvelase: “The Open Day was a wonderful experience for me especially because I have never been part of an Open Day before, so it was absolutely amazing for me. It gave me a good idea of how it is to be part of Oracle. We were served with lovely breakfast and lunch which I enjoyed. I wish the Open Day went on for a whole week. Seeing and hearing from 2013 Graduates, telling us about their experience within Oracle was very inspiring to me. They were encouraging us to work hard if we ever got the opportunity they had. After hearing this from them I will definitely not take it for granted.” Itumeleng Moraka: “Before I walked into the Oracle offices all that was in my mind was databases and cloud storage. I was then surrounded by passionate, enthusiastic and welcoming employees. I came across a positive energy within the multinational company. I realized that Oracle is not a company that operates in survival mode. This may sound idealistic, but they operate in a non-traditional way investing more into innovation, they stay focused on what matters most about where technology is going and at the same time they are not losing sight of how their products make a difference in the world.” For more information on how to be part of the Oracle Graduate Programme please follow us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/CampusAtOracle /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • The Dreaded Startup Repair Loop on Win 7

    - by HighAltitudeCoder
    For most people, upgrading to Windows 7 has been a relatively painless process.  Not me.  I am in the unlucky 1% or less who had a somewhat less pleasant experience.  First, I cloned my entire onto a larger (and much faster) solid state hard drive, only experiencing minimal problems. Then, I bought the Retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate, took a deep breath and... oh yeah, I almost forgot - BACK UP THE COMPUTER.  The next morning I upgraded to Win 7 and everything seemed fine, until... I rebooted the system, the nice Windows 7 launch graphics come up, it's about to launch and AWWW, are you kidding me?!?!  Back to the BIOS splash screen?  Next comes the sequence of failure - attempt repair - unable to repair - do you want to wipe your hard drive decisions. Because I purchased the retail version, a number is provided where I could call Microsoft Tech support.  When I did, they instructed me to click "Install" from my installation CD, which did not work.  When I tried the "Upgrade" option, it reaches an impasse, telling you that yoiu have a newer version of Win 7, and thus cannot Upgrade.  If you choose "Install" you willl lose everything... files, programs, EVERYTHING.  Or at least this is what it tells you.  I was not willing to take the risk. To make things worse, I had installed a new antivirus software application before I realized my system was unstable (Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security), and this was causing additional problems. One interesting thing, and the only saving grace as it turns out, was that my system WOULD successfully reboot into the OS if I chose to restart it, rather than shut it down.  If I chose to shut down, I would have to go through the loop again until I was given the option to restart. As it turned out, I needed to update my BIOS.  I assumed that since I had updated my BIOS a long time ago to settings that were stable under Windows Vista Ultimate x64, I incorrectly expected Win 7 to adopt the same settings and didn't expect there to be any problems.  WRONG. My BIOS had a setting to halt the boot cycle if various kinds of errors were detected.  Windows Vista didn't care about this, but forget it under Windows 7.  I turned immediately corrected that BIOS setting.  Next, there were the two separate BIOS settings: enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard.  The only sequence of events that would work were to start my reboot process over from stratch with a hard-wired non-usb keyboard and mouse.  Whent the system booted under these settings, it doesn't detect any errors due to either the mouse or keyboard, and actually booted for the first time in a long while (let me tell ya, that's an amazing experience after fiddling with settings for two entire weekends!) Next step: leave your old mouse and keyboard connected, but also connect your other two devices (mouse, keyboard) that use USB connections.  During the boot cycle, the operating system will not fail due to missing requirements during startup, and it will then pick up the new drivers necessary to use your new hardware. If you think you are in the clear here, you are wrong.  The next VERY IMPORTANT step is to remember to change your settings in the BIOS upon next startup.  Specifically, yoiu will need ot change your BIOS to enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard input.  If you don't, Windows will detect an incompatibility upon the next startup, and you will be stuck once again in the endless cycle of reboot/Startup Repair/reboot/Startup Repair, without ever reaching a successful boot. Here's the thing - the BIOS and the drivers registered in Win 7 need to match.  If they don't, you're going to lose another weekend worrying and fiddling, all the while wondering if you've permanently damaged your hard drive beyond repair. (Sigh).  In the end, things worked out.  I must note that it is saddening to see how many posts there are out there that recommend just doing a clean install, as if it's the only option.  How many countless poor souls have lost their data, their backups, their pictures and videos, all for nothing other than the fact that the person giving advice just didn't know what to do at that point? My advice to you, try having a look at your BIOS settings first and making sure Win 7 can find your BIOS settings, and also disabling in your BIOS anything that might halt your system boot-up process if it encounters errors.

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  • Revisiting .NET, but what should I focus on?

    - by Wayne M
    After about a two-year hiatus, I'm brushing up on my .NET skills to find a .NET job (my previous two positions have very little development, or development using legacy technologies, so apart from a few very minor apps I have not touched .NET in close to two years). I'm aware of things like ASP.NET MVC, and I have previously read on things like NHibernate and DI/IOC, albeit I have yet to use them apart from very trivial "Hello World" type applications. I have a subscription to Rob Conery's Tekpub website and occasionally watch these videos when I have free time. My concern is this: I don't live in a very technical area. I would be surprised if any but the most tech-savvy companies have heard of, let alone use, ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate (or even LINQ/EF), or know about IoC. I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that 95% of the possible jobs I could obtain will use the following: Visual Source Safe, if any VCS at all ASP.NET 2.0 Webforms (3.5 if lucky) Raw ADO.NET on top of a very thin implementation of the Gateway pattern Stored Procedures in the database for most CRUD operations Gratuitous use of code-behind, with a Service layer if I'm lucky If I were extremely lucky, I might find a shop that has heard of ORMs and either uses one, or has wrote their own data abstraction. Also if I were lucky, the company would be using Model-View-Presenter. In light of this I'm not sure what I should focus on learning. Personally, I would prefer to be using the latest stuff - ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, jQuery, WCF etc. Reality says I should go back to the basics, since it looks like most potential opportunities aren't going to be anywhere near the cutting edge, or anywhere close to it. And, as much as I would like to find a position and start to show the other developers the benefits, in my past experience this has usually resulted in my being fired for "not being a team player" and doing things the bad old way. So, I am curious how you would approach a situation like this? What should I focus on, in order to A) Reaquaint myself with .NET, and B) Prepare myself to obtain a .NET job again that is more than likely going to use techniques that I and most other knowledgeable developers will scoff at?

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  • Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict Stock Prices

    - by akaphenom
    Given a set of datavery similar to the Motley Fool CAPS system, where individual users enter BUY and SELL recommendations on various equities. What I would like to do is show each recommendation and I guess some how rate (1-5) as to whether it was good predictor<5 (ie corellation coeffient = 1) of the future stock price (or eps or whatever) or a horrible predictor (ie corellation coeffient = -1) or somewhere inbetween. Each recommendation is tagged to a particular user, so that can be tracked over time. I can also track market direction (bullish / bearish) based off of something like sp500 price. The components I think that would make sense in the model would be: user direction (long/short) market direction sector of stock The thought is that some users are better in bull markets than bear (and vice versa), and some are better at shorts than longs- and then a cobination the above. I can automatically tag the market direction and sector (based off the market at the time and the equity being recommended). The thought is that I could present a series of screens and allow me to rank each individual recommendation by displaying available data absolute, market and sector out performance for a specfic time period out. I would follow a detailed list for ranking the stocks so that the ranking is as objective as possible. My assumtion is that a single user is right no more than 57% of the time - but who knows. I could load the system and say "Lets rank the recommendation as a predictor of stock value 90 days forward"; and that would represent a very explicit set of rankings. NOW here is the crux - I want to create some sort of machine learning algorithm that can identify patterns over a series of time so that as recommendations stream into the application we maintain a ranking of that stock (ie. similar to correlation coeeficient) as to the likelihood of that recommendation (in addition to the past series of recommendations ) will affect the price. Now here is the super crux. I have never taken an AI class / read an AI book / never mind specific to machine learning. So I cam looking for guidance - sample or description of a similar system I could adapt. Place to look for info or any general help. Or even push me in the right direction to get started... My hope is to implment this with F# and be able to impress my friends with a new skillset in F# with an implementation of machine learnign and potentially something (application / source) I can include in a tech portfolio or blog space; Thank you for any advice in advance.

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  • ASP.NET MVC, Webform hybrid

    - by Greg Ogle
    We (me and my team) have a ASP.NET MVC application and we are integrating a page or two that are Web Forms. We are trying to reuse the Master Page from our MVC part of the app in the WebForms part. We have found a way of rendering an MVC partial view in web forms, which works great, until we try and do a postback, which is the reason for using a WebForm. The Error: Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm. AutoGenerate cannot be used in a cluster. The Code to render the partial view from a WebForm (credited to "How to include a partial view inside a webform"): public static class WebFormMVCUtil { public static void RenderPartial(string partialName, object model) { //get a wrapper for the legacy WebForm context var httpCtx = new HttpContextWrapper(System.Web.HttpContext.Current); //create a mock route that points to the empty controller var rt = new RouteData(); rt.Values.Add("controller", "WebFormController"); //create a controller context for the route and http context var ctx = new ControllerContext( new RequestContext(httpCtx, rt), new WebFormController()); //find the partial view using the viewengine var view = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ctx, partialName).View; //create a view context and assign the model var vctx = new ViewContext(ctx, view, new ViewDataDictionary { Model = model }, new TempDataDictionary()); //ERROR OCCURS ON THIS LINE view.Render(vctx, System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Output); } } My only experience with this error is in context of a web farm, which is not the case. Also, I understand that the machine key is used for decrypting the ViewState. Any information on how to diagnose this issue would be appreciated. A Work-around: So far the work-around is to move the header content to a PartialView, then use an AJAX call to call a page with just the Partial View from the WebForms, and then using the PartialView directly on the MVC Views. Also, we are still able to share non-tech-specific parts of the Master Page, i.e. anything that is not MVC specific. Still yet, this is not an ideal solution, a server-side solution is still desired. Also, this solutino has issues when working with controls that have more sophisticated controls, using JavaScript, particularly dynamically generated script as used by 3rd party controls.

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  • Determine the 'Overtype' mode using Javascript

    - by Snorkpete
    We are creating a web app to replace an old-school green-screen application. In the green-screen app, as the user presses the Insert key to switch between overtype and insert modes, the cursor changes to indicate which input mode the user is currently in. In IE (which is the official browser of the company), overtype mode also works, but there's no visual indication as to whether overtype mode is on or not, until the user starts typing and possibly over-writes existing information unexpectedly. I'd like to put some sort of visual indicator on the screen if in overtype mode. How can you determine if the browser is in 'overtype mode' from Javascript? Is there some property or function i can query to determine if the browser is in overtype mode? Even an IE-specific solution would be helpful, since our corporate policy dictates the browser to use as IE7 (pure torture, btw). (I do know that one solution is to do check for key presses of the Insert key. However, it's a solution that I'd prefer to avoid since that method seems a bit flaky & error-prone because I can't guarantee what mode the user would be in BEFORE he/she hits my page. ) The reasoning behind this question: The functionality of this portion of the green-screen app is such that the user can select from a list of 'preformatted bodies of text'. crude eg. The excess for this policy is: $xxxxxx and max limit is:$xxxxxx Date of policy is: xx/xx/xxxx and expires : xx/xx/xxxx Some other irrelevant text After selecting this 'preformatted text', the user would then use overtype to replace the x's with actual values, without disturbing the alignment of the rest of the text. (To be clear, they can still edit any part of the 'preformatted text' if they so wished. It's just that usually, they just wish to replace specific portions of the text. Keeping the alignment is important since these sections of text can end up on printed documents.) Of course, the same effect can be achieved by just selecting the x's to replace first, but it would be helpful (with respect to easing the transition to the web app) to allow old methods of doing things to continue to work, while still allowing 'web methods' to be used by the more tech-savvy users. Essentially, we're trying to make the initial transition from the green-screen app to the web app be as seemless as possible to minimise the resistance from the long-time green-screeners.

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  • Web Safe Area (optimal resolution) for web app design

    - by M.A.X
    I'm in the process of designing a new web app and I'm wondering for what 'web safe area' should I optimize the app layout and design. I did some investigation and thinking on my own but wanted to share this to see what the general opinion is. Here is what I found: Optimal Display Resolution: w3schools web stats seems to be the most referenced source (however they state that these are results from their site and is biased towards tech savvy users) http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php (aggregate data from something like 15,000 different sites that use their tracking services) StatCounter Global Stats Display Resolution (Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites) NetMarketShare Screen Resolutions (marketshare.hitslink.com) (a web analytics consulting firm, they get data from browsers of site visitors to their on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month) Display Resolution Summary: There is a bit of variation between the above sources but in general as of Jan 2011 looks like 1024x768 is about 20%, while ~85% have a higher resolution of at least 1280x768 (1280x800 is the most common of these with 15-20% of total web, depending on the source; 1280x1024 and 1366x768 follow behind with 9-14% of the share). My guess would be that the higher resolution values will be even more common if we filter on North America, and even higher if we filter on N.American corporate users (unfortunately I couldn't find any free geographically filtered statistics). Another point to note is that the 1024x768 desktop user population is likely lower than the aforementioned 20%, seeing as the iPad (1024x768 native display) is likely propping up those number. My recommendation would be to optimize around the 1280x768 constraint (*note: 1280x768 is actually a relatively rare resolution, but I think it's a valid constraint range considering that 1366x768 is relatively common and 1280 is the most common horizontal resolution). Browser + OS Constraints: To further add to the constraints we have to subtract the space taken up by the browser (assuming IE, which is the most space consuming) and the OS (assuming WinXP-Win7): Win7 has the biggest taskbar footprint at a height of 40px (XP's and Vista's is 30px) The default IE8 view uses up 25px at the bottom of the screen with the status bar and a further 120px at the top of the screen with the windows title bar and the browser UI (assuming the default 'favorites' toolbar is present, it would instead be 91px without the favorites toolbar). Assuming no scrollbar, we also loose a total of 4px horizontally for the window outline. This means that we are left with 583px of vertical space and 1276px of horizontal. In other words, a Web Safe Area of 1276 x 583 Is this a correct line of thinking? I tried to Google some design best practices but most still talk about designing around 1024x768 which seems to be quickly disappearing. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

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  • How do I reward my developers for the little things they get right?

    - by Nat
    I am in a tech lead role and my developers get stuff right most of the time. How do I communicate to them thier value to me? (I.e. they have value because I do not have to go through and point out mistakes which means I do not have to watch them like a hawk which frees me to do more useful things). In summary For doing the mundane well on a day to day basis, it is good to recognise the developers effort verbally to them. An honest thankyou that mentions the specific behaviour and its positive repercussions to you personally will be well received, adjust the language to suite each individual. (Note that other developers within earshot may also respond to this by increasing their efforts in this specific activity.) Other things that should be done regularly are: Team drinks In many cultures this is an entirely worthy way of giving the team some time to socialise and relax. Be sure that you do not exclude people who do not drink or are not keen on pub culture. Shared meals are another option. Formal written (email) acknowledgment and praise to senior managers of the teams efforts and successes. (Note that acknowledging individuals alone may damage team spirit) Work the hours you expect your team to do. If they absolutely must work late for a deadline, be there in support Go to bat for the team. Refuse to let them be forced to work long periods of overtime without compensation. Protect them from level politics and stress. Give your team the best equipment you can afford. Good tools show respect and improve productivity. Small or large team rewards where appropriate can consist of many interesting activities/ items. If it allows the team to get together in a fun and even lightly competitive manner it will work (foosball table, go-karting, darts board, video game console etc). Don’t forget to listen to what the team wants, each team will have different ideas. Ensure they are getting a fair deal financially from the company. While different people may have different expectations of their pay, someone being paid unfairly will rot morale for the entire team

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  • Amusing or Sad? Network Solutions

    - by dbasnett
    When I got sick my email ended up in every drug sellers email list. Some days I get over 200 emails selling everything from Viagra to Xanax. Either they don't know what my condition is or they are telling me you are a goner, might as well chill-ax and have a good time. In order to cut down on the mail being downloaded I thought I would add all of the Junk email senders from Outlook to my Network Solution mail server. Much to my amazement I could not find that import Spammers button, so I submitted a tech support request. Here is the response: Thank you for contacting Network Solutions Customer Service Department. We are committed to creating the best Customer experience possible. One of the first ways we can demonstrate our commitment to this goal is to quickly and efficiently handle your recent request. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. With regard to your concern, please be advised that we cannot import blocked senders in to you e-mail servers. An alternative option is for you to create a Custom Filter that filters unwanted e-mails. To create a Custom Filter: Open a Web browser (e.g., Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.). Type mail.[domain name].[ext] in the address line. Login to your Network Solutions email account. Click on the Configuration left menu tab. Click on the Custom Filter link. Type the rule name. blah, blah, blah Basically add them one at a time. "We are committed to creating the best Customer experience possible." No you are not. You are trying to squeeze every nickle you can out of me. "With regard to your concern, please be advised that we cannot import blocked senders in to you e-mail servers." Maybe I should apply for a job to write those ten complicated lines of code... Maybe I should question my choice of vendors, because if they truly "cannot" then they are to stupid to have my business. It is both amusing and sad. I'll be posting this in every forum I am a member of.

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  • Becoming a professional programmer / software engineer

    - by Matt
    This isn't strictly about programming, more about being a programmer, so I'm sorry if its not the right kind of question to ask on this forum (mod, please delete if it isn't) I'm a computer tech in the US Army, and once I'm out I'll have eight years on the job. I'm about to start a degree through an online school (the only way I can get the army to pay for it while I'm still in), and I'm seriously looking at getting a computer science degree. I'm great with computers. I can take one apart and put it back together with my eyes closed. I'm A+ and Network+ certified and I'm getting a couple other CompTIA certs before I get out. I can work Windows as well as anyone on this planet and I'm not terrible with Linux. A job in computers is something I've always wanted. But, aside from being a computer technician, it seems that every job in the field requires programming ability. I like programming as a hobby. I programmed TI BASIC in high school and I'm teaching myself Python, but that's as far as my experience goes. That sort of brings me to my questions: I've always heard that the first language is the most difficult, and once you learn it well then all the others sort of fall into place for you. Is that true? Like, if I spend the next eight months mastering Python, will I pretty much be able to pick up at least fair proficiency in any other OO language within a month of studying it or whatever? How easy is it to burn out? the biggest thing I'm afraid of is just burning out on programming. I can go all day long if I'm programming strictly for my own personal desire, but I can imagine it being really easy to burn out after a few years of programming to deadlines and certain specifications. Especially if its a big project involving a dozen different designers. From what I told you about myself, would I already be qualified to work as a regular technician (geek squad type or maybe running a computer repair shop). Is Python a good base to learn from? I've heard that it makes you hate other languages because they feel more convoluted when learning, but also that its a great beginner language. If you're a professional programmer, did you have any of the same fears? Would you recommend that I stick to computer repair and Python rather than try to get into corporate programming? (just from what you've read in this thread, anyway) Thanks for taking the time to read all this and answer (if you did)

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  • Delaying emails in PHP to avoid exceeding server limit

    - by Andrew P.
    Okay, so here's my problem: I have a list of members on a website, and periodically one of the admins my site (who are not very web or tech savvy) will send a newsletter to the memberlist. My current memberlist is well over 800 individuals long. So, I wrote an email script that sends the email to the full memberlist, with the members listed in the Bcc header. However, I've discovered that my host server has a limit of 300 emails per hour, which I apparently exceed even though the members are listed in the Bcc field. (I wasn't previously aware that the behaviour of Bcc was to send separate emails for each name on the list...) After some thought, I've come to the conclusion that my only solution is to have my script send only the email to only the first 300 emails, wait an hour, and send a second email to the next three hundred, wait another hour, and so on until I've sent the email to the whole member list. Looking around on the internet, I've seen some other solutions people have come up with for delaying emails in PHP. Sleep() is obviously not an option, because I can't just leave the script open and running for 3 or four hours. I've seen some people suggest cron jobs, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be to create three new cron jobs every time I send an email, use them once, and then delete them afterward. The final (and what I think is the smartest) solution I've seen, is to have a table in my database to temporarily store the emails to be delayed and sent later, and then create a cron job that checks this sql table every hour or so, compares the timestamp of the row to the current timestamp, and then sends the email if an hour has passed. So I'm asking you all which method you would recommend. Is there an easier solution that I've completely looked over (aside from getting a different hosting plan. ha!), or is there a cleaner way to do it than the database / cron job approach? tl;dr: I have 800 emails to send in an hour on a server that limits me to 300/hr. Using PHP, find a way to get around this problem in a way that the person sending the email needs only to click "send."

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  • Stumbleupon type query...

    - by Chris Denman
    Wow, makes your head spin! I am about to start a project, and although my mySql is OK, I can't get my head around what required for this: I have a table of web addresses. id,url 1,http://www.url1.com 2,http://www.url2.com 3,http://www.url3.com 4,http://www.url4.com I have a table of users. id,name 1,fred bloggs 2,john bloggs 3,amy bloggs I have a table of categories. id,name 1,science 2,tech 3,adult 4,stackoverflow I have a table of categories the user likes as numerical ref relating to the category unique ref. For example: user,category 1,4 1,6 1,7 1,10 2,3 2,4 3,5 . . . I have a table of scores relating to each website address. When a user visits one of these sites and says they like it, it's stored like so: url_ref,category 4,2 4,3 4,6 4,2 4,3 5,2 5,3 . . . So based on the above data, URL 4 would score (in it's own right) as follows: 2=2 3=2 6=1 What I was hoping to do was pick out a random URL from over 2,000,000 records based on the current users interests. So if the logged in user likes categories 1,2,3 then I would like to ORDER BY a score generated based on their interest. If the logged in user likes categories 2 3 and 6 then the total score would be 5. However, if the current logged in user only like categories 2 and 6, the URL score would be 3. So the order by would be in context of the logged in users interests. Think of stumbleupon. I was thinking of using a set of VIEWS to help with sub queries. I'm guessing that all 2,000,000 records will need to be looked at and based on the id of the url it will look to see what scores it has based on each selected category of the current user. So we need to know the user ID and this gets passed into the query as a constant from the start. Ain't got a clue! Chris Denman

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  • NfcAdapter.getDefaultAdapter(this) returns null in emulator

    - by DixieFlatline
    I am trying to test ForegroundDispatch (http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/ApiDemos/src/com/example/android/apis/nfc/ForegroundDispatch.html) in emulator API 10 (Android 2.3.3). When i call NfcAdapter.getDefaultAdapter(this), i get null. Why is this so? Code: public class ForegroundDispatch extends Activity { private NfcAdapter mAdapter; private PendingIntent mPendingIntent; private IntentFilter[] mFilters; private String[][] mTechLists; private TextView mText; private int mCount = 0; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedState) { super.onCreate(savedState); setContentView(R.layout.foreground_dispatch); mText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text); mText.setText("Scan a tag"); mAdapter = NfcAdapter.getDefaultAdapter(this); // Create a generic PendingIntent that will be deliver to this activity. The NFC stack // will fill in the intent with the details of the discovered tag before delivering to // this activity. mPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, new Intent(this, getClass()).addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP), 0); // Setup an intent filter for all MIME based dispatches IntentFilter ndef = new IntentFilter(NfcAdapter.ACTION_NDEF_DISCOVERED); try { ndef.addDataType("*/*"); } catch (MalformedMimeTypeException e) { throw new RuntimeException("fail", e); } mFilters = new IntentFilter[] { ndef, }; // Setup a tech list for all NfcF tags mTechLists = new String[][] { new String[] { NfcF.class.getName() } }; } @Override public void onResume() { super.onResume(); mAdapter.enableForegroundDispatch(this, mPendingIntent, mFilters, mTechLists); //CRASHES HERE BECAUSE mAdapter IS NULL } @Override public void onNewIntent(Intent intent) { Log.i("Foreground dispatch", "Discovered tag with intent: " + intent); mText.setText("Discovered tag " + ++mCount + " with intent: " + intent); } @Override public void onPause() { super.onPause(); mAdapter.disableForegroundDispatch(this); } } My manifest: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.neka.znacka" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0"> <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="10" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.NFC"></uses-permission> <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.nfc" android:required="true" /> <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"> <activity android:name=".Uvodna" android:label="@string/app_name"> <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity> <activity android:name="Simulator"> </activity> </application> Any ideas?

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  • Starting company and getting a good deal

    - by Dan
    Hi, I'm having the possibility to start a small company with someone else. I'm a software programmer and been working on a field where there isn't much competition, at least in the platform I'm developing, which is the one with highest market share. This other person comes from marketing so he would find / provide clients and be in charge of the business side. So initially it would be me, the tech guy with the knowledge to develop our product and products based on my development, and this person who would become CEO (basically a 50/50 share). The idea is getting a product on our own, but also perform projects for others in order to get some cash. The problem is that his idea is doing this without initial capital. He tells me that he could get some customers from past business (which is mostly true as he has been in the business for some time) and then with the money obtained from such development, we could hire some freelance developers and build our own platform. I've already discussed with him that I don't find this the best way, provided that we need to compete against other companies some of who are VC funded and have many developers working fulltime. But most of all, I'm thinking of whether this is a fair deal to do, provided that this person is not providing anything other than clients, and I'd be the one having to do the work and dedicate time, thus also taking most of the risks. In all fairness, I'd expect him to put some initial capital, given that initially I'm putting some of my code which in some way is money given the time I've dedicated to it. So the question here is, does this seem fair to you? Is this the way it is usually done? My only concern here is that I don't have previous experience with such deals, and I ignore whether this is the usual thing to do in other cases. Certainly having a marketing person helps a lot. As you probably know being a programmer doesn't make me the most indicated person for marketing ;-) but at the same time I'm not sure if this could be a good deal or I'd just be making a pretty inconvenient deal. Hope I made my point clear, but feel free to let me know if more details are needed. Thanks in advance

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  • Generating custom-form documents from base-form plus XML?

    - by KlaymenDK
    Hi all, this is my first stack overflow, and it's a complex one. Sorry. My task is to generate custom documents from a basic template plus some XML without having a custom form design element for each case. Here's the whole picture: We are building a Lotus Notes (client, not web) application for world-wide application access control; the scope is something like 400.000 users being able to request access to any of 1000+ applications. Each application needs its own request form -- different number of approvers, various info required, that sort of thing. We simply can't have a thousand forms in a database (one per application), and anyway their maintenance really needs to be pushed from the developers to the application owners. So instead of custom forms, we'd like to create a generic "template" form that stores a block of basic fields, but then allows application owners to define another block of fields dynamically -- "I want a mandatory plain-text field named 'Name' here, and then a date field named 'Due' here that must be later than today's date, and then ...". I hope this makes sense (if not, think of it as a generic questionnaire application). I pretty much have the structure in place for designing the dynamic fields (form builder GUI - XML-encoded data - pre-rendered DXL for injecting into a form), including mark-up for field types, value options, and rudimentary field validation instructions. My problem is generating a document with this dynamic content injected at the proper location (without needing a custom form design element for each case). Doing the dynamic content via HTML is out. The Notes client web rendering is simply way too poor, and it would be quite a challenge to implement things like field validation instructions, date selectors, and name look-ups. DXL, on the other hand, would allow us to use native Notes fields and code. As a tech demo, I've managed to implement a custom form generator that injects the pre-rendered DXL for the dynamic content into a base form; but as I said, we don't want a ton of custom form design elements. I've tried to implement a way to create a document with the "store form in document" flag set, but once I've created the document from the base form, I can't get DXL access to the stored form design, and so I can't inject my dynamic content. I know this is not something Notes was ever intended to do. Has anyone ever tried something like it (and gotten away with it)? Thanks for reading this far. With a boatload of thanks in advance, Jan Gundtofte-Bruun

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  • How do you remind your Scrum Product Owner about his promises/actions?

    - by Felix Ogg
    ** EDIT: Rephrased the question to re-focus ** Our Scrum team meets as seldomly as possible, but we meet with the product owner every chance we get. We track everyone's agreed action points (particularly theirs). We are 100% agile, but our product owner lives in traditional world, we remain off-site. We facilitate him in crossing over to our fast-paced world. There's not much wrong. The team and the PO are in good spirits. PO is present at every meeting and positively energized. Just imagine this person as a 70 year old, slow grandpa, who is forgetful, yet kind. In reality he isn't, but he is used to a working environment (public servants) that is much slooooower. Manyana-manyana etc. It is frustrating for my team to cooperate: PO lives in a non-prioritized environment, and everyone in it has learned the productivity-technique of NGTD (Not Getting Things Done). He WANTS to, it's just that he forgets or 'sinks' somewhere along the away. We have experimented with a text file, maintained by the Scrum master (low-tech), which he broadcasts by e-mail every day JIRA, our issue tracker. Turns out this is nice for programmers, but too steep for 'regular people' I Googled for Issue tracking webtools but came up empty handed: All tools are aimed at IT issue tracking, instead of meeting action point tracking/planning for mere mortals. I did find TODO-lists like RememberTheMilk, but they don't track comments, and - to be honest - I doubt we could get our product owner to use it (too complicated). We have three requirements: Register action points, assign to a team member and a deadline Offer anyone to 'comment' on progress of any action point Do not build our own tool from scratch We do not need: - impressive authorization models, - multi-project, - workflow, - crosslinking. Is there any trick/tool you use to assist your product owner 'fly' like the rest of the rest of the team? Communication before tools I agree with the general consensus that one should not try to apply technology to a communication problem, however in this case I am merely looking for a tool to save me time in setting up prioritized lists. I found www.thymer.com today, may be what I am looking for. The guys are cool. It is getting rather feature-bloated though.

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