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  • WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Regency Centers Corporation

    - by me
    Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryRegency Centers Corporation, based in Jacksonville, FL, is a leading national owner, operator, and developer of grocery-anchored and community shopping centers. Regency grew rapidly over much of the last decade. To keep up with the monthly and yearly administrative processes required to manage thousands of tenants, including reconciling yearly pass-through expenses, the customer upgraded to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Version 9.0 and deployed Oracle WebCenter Imaging, Process Management and Oracle BI Publisher, to streamline invoice processing and reporting. Using Oracle WebCenter Imaging - Regency accelerated and improved vendor invoice accuracy  which increases process integrity by identifying potential duplicate bills while enabling rapid approval of electronic invoice documents. Company Overview Regency Centers Corporation, based in Jacksonville, FL,  is a leading national owner, operator, and developer of grocery-anchored and community shopping centers. The company owns 367 centers, totaling nearly 50 million square feet, located in top markets throughout the United States. Founded in 1963 and operating as a fully integrated real estate company, Regency is a qualified real estate investment trust that is self-administered and self-managed, operating from 17 regional offices around the country.  Business Challenges Ensure continued support of vital business applications that drive the real estate developer’s key business processes, including property management and tenant payment processing Streamline year-end expense recognition and calculation, enabling faster tenant billing Move to a Web-based platform to deliver greater mobility and convenience to employees Minimize system customizations to reduce IT management costs and burden moving forward Solution DeployedRecency Centers Corporation worked with the  Oracle Partner ICS to upgrade to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Version 9.0, migrating to a more user-friendly, Web-based platform and realizing numerous new efficiencies in property management and tenant payment processing. They accelerated and improved vendor invoice accuracy with Oracle WebCenter Imaging, which increases process integrity by identifying potential duplicate bills while enabling rapid approval of electronic invoice documents. Business Results Enabled faster and more accurate tenant billing for year-end expenses, accelerating collections of millions of dollars in revenue Gained full audit and drill-down capabilities that facilitate understanding various aspects of calculations for expense participation generation Increases process integrity by identifying potential duplicate bills while enabling rapid approval of electronic invoice documents Helped to ensure on-time payments to hundreds of vendors, including contractors and utilities "We have realized numerous efficiencies with Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0, particularly around tenant billings. It accelerates our year-end expense reconciliation process and enables us to create and process billings more quickly.” James Chiang, Vice President of Real Estate Accounting Regency Centers Corporation Additional Information Regency Centers Corporation Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Imaging JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financials 9.0 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Project Costing JD Edwards EnterpiseOne Real Estate Management Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Oracle Essbase

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  • Sysadmin 101: How can I figure out why my server crashes and monitor performance?

    - by bflora
    I have a Drupal-powered site that seems to have neverending performance problems. It was butt-slow about 5 months ago. I brought in some guys who installed nginx for anonymous visitors, ajaxified a few queries so they wouldn't fire during page load, and helped me find a few bottlenecks in the code. For about a month, the site was significantly faster, though not "fast" by any stretch of the word. Meanwhile, I'm now shelling out $400/month to Slicehost to host a site that gets less than 5,000/uniques a day. Yes, you read that right. Go Drupal. Recently the site started crashing again and is slow again. I can't afford to hire people to come in, study my code from top to bottom, and make changes that may or may not help anymore. And I can't afford to throw more hardware at the problem. So I need to figure out what the problem is myself. Questions: When apache crashes, is it possible to find out what caused it to crash? There has to be a way, right? If so, how can I do this? Is there software I can use that will tell me which process caused my server to die? (e.g. "Apache crashed because someone visited page X." or "Apache crashed because you were importing too many RSS items from feed X.") There's got to be a way to learn this, right? What's a good, noob-friendly way to monitor my current apache performance? My developer friends tell me to "just use Top, dude," but Top shows me a bunch of numbers without any context. I have no clue what qualifies as a bad number or a good number in Top, or which processes are relevant and which aren't. Are there any noob-friendly server monitoring tools out there? Ideally, I could have a page that would give me a color-coded indicator about how apache is performing and then show me a list of processes or pages that are sucking right now. This way, I could know when performance is bad and then what's causing it to be so bad. Why does PHP memory matter? My apparently has a 30MB memory foot print. Will it run faster if I bring that number down? Thanks for any advice. I spent a year or so trying to boost my advertising income so I could hire a contractor to solve my performance woes. I didn't want to have to learn all this sysadmin voodoo. I'm now resigned to the fact that might not have a choice.

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  • Has anyone managed to build php5-xapian on Ubuntu 12.04?

    - by jetboy
    As Xapian's been dropped from the Ubuntu repositories, I'm attempting to build my own .deb from the instructions here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/8855 http://beeznest.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/howto-build-your-own-binaries-of-php-xapian-bindings-for-debian/ I can only get things to progress beyond the first few seconds by leaving out 'rm debian/control', but if I do, it looks as if the Python and Ruby bindings are building and passing their versions of smoketest correctly. However, the PHP part of the build is failing with this error: /home/charlie/xapian-bindings-1.2.8/php/smoketest.php:38: include(xapian.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory FAIL: smoketest.php There's a xapian.php file in /home/charlie/xapian-bindings-1.2.8/php/php5/ but if I copy it to /home/charlie/xapian-bindings-1.2.8/php/ or change the path to it in smoketest.php, the build fails right near the start with: dpkg-source: error: aborting due to unexpected upstream changes Unfortunately I'm out of my comfort zone building from source. Anyone got any ideas? Edit post James' answer: Builds fine if I follow instructions exactly. I built it on a test VM initially, but that didn't build the PHP package as PHP itself wasn't installed. Obvious gotcha, but worth mentioning. Installing generated the following error: Setting up php5-xapian (1.2.8-1) ... Processing triggers for libapache2-mod-php5 ... dpkg (subprocess): unable to execute installed post-installation script (/var/lib/dpkg/info/libapache2-mod-php5.postinst): Permission denied ssion denied dpkg: error processing libapache2-mod-php5 (--install): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: libapache2-mod-php5 It's only a script for restarting Apache. Stopping Apache before running sudo dpkg -i php5-xapian_*.deb prevents the error. Xapian now shows up in phpinfo(). Job done. Thanks.

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  • I can play "test" sounds, but no other audio works

    - by Callum
    I'm running Windows XP, and last night my PC was infected by a frustrating virus (one of those viruses that won't let you open virus checkers, etc). I finally killed it 2 hours later, but it involved some heavy duty anti-dote. One side effect is my audio is now gone. Except it's not entirely gone, because when I open the Realtek HD Audio Manager in the task bar, I can play all the "test" sounds. The speakers, the sound card, etc, are therefore working fine. But things like YouTube or Windows Media Player, there's no sound. I'm guessing there's a setting that needs to be reconfigured somewhere.. but where? Maybe relevant: One thing I did do last night was "play" with the system registry. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. SOLVED! The two hour battle with my computer virus resulted in my computer permanently thinking it was in Safe Mode, regardless of how it booted up. I was able to "fix" this by following the post by hsandler in this thread: http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=23032&page=2 I then rebooted.. and let me tell you, the Windows Startup music has never sounded so sweet. Thanks to all, especially James, whose advice gave me a major clue as to what the problem was.

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  • SFTP, Chroot problems on Redhat

    - by Curtis_w
    I'm having problems setting up sftp with a ChrootDirectory. I've done an equivalent setup on other distros, but for some reason I cannot get it to work on a Redhat AMI. The changes to my sshd_config file are: Subsystem sftp internal-sftp Match Group ftponly PasswordAuthentication yes X11Forwarding no ChrootDirectory %h ForceCommand internal-sftp AllowTcpForwarding no I have the concerned usere's homes at /home/user, owned by root. After connecting with a user in the ftponly group, I'm dropped into / without permissions for anything, and am unable to do anything. sftp bob@localhost Connecting to localhost... bob@localhost's password: sftp> pwd Remote working directory: / I can connect normally with users not in the ftponly group. openssh version 5.3 I've experimented with different permissions, as well as having users own their own home directory (gives a Write failed: Broken pipe error), and so far, nothing has seemed to work. I'm sure it's a permissions error, or something equally as trivial, but at this point my eyes are beginning to glaze over, and any help would be greatly appreciated. EDIT: James and Madhatter, thanks for clarifying. I was confused by chroot dropping me in /... just didn't think through it properly. I've added the appropriate directories and permissions to get read access. One other key part was enabling write access to chrooted homes: setsebool -P ssh_chroot_rw_homedirs on in order to get write access. I think I'm all set now. Thanks for the help.

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  • UCARP: prevent the original master from taking over the VIP when it comes back after failure?

    - by quanta
    Keepalived can do this by combining the nopreempt option and the BACKUP state on the both nodes: Prevent VRRP Master from becoming Master once it has failed Prevent master to fall back to master after failure How about the UCARP? Name : ucarp Arch : x86_64 Version : 1.5.2 Release : 1.el5.rf Size : 81 k Repo : installed Summary : Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP) for Unix URL : http://www.ucarp.org/ License : BSD Description: UCARP allows a couple of hosts to share common virtual IP addresses in order : to provide automatic failover. It is a portable userland implementation of the : secure and patent-free Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP, OpenBSD's : alternative to the patents-bloated VRRP). : Strong points of the CARP protocol are: very low overhead, cryptographically : signed messages, interoperability between different operating systems and no : need for any dedicated extra network link between redundant hosts. If I don't use the --preempt option and set the --advskew to the same value, both nodes become master. /etc/sysconfig/carp/vip-010.conf # Virtual IP configuration file for UCARP # The number (from 001 to 255) in the name of the file is the identifier # $Id: vip-001.conf.example 1527 2004-07-09 15:23:54Z dude $ # Set the same password on all mamchines sharing the same virtual IP PASSWORD="pa$$w0rd" # You are required to have an IPADDR= line in the configuration file for # this interface (so no DHCP allowed) BIND_INTERFACE="eth0" # Do *NOT* use a main interface for the virtual IP, use an ethX:Y alias # with the corresponding /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX:Y file # already configured and ith ONBOOT=no VIP_INTERFACE="eth0:0" # If you have extra options to add, see "ucarp --help" output # (the lower the "-k <val>" the higher priority and "-P" to become master ASAP) OPTIONS="-z -k 255" /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:0 DEVICE=eth0:0 ONBOOT=no BOOTPROTO= IPADDR=192.168.6.8 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 USERCTL=yes IPV6INIT=no node 1: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether c6:9b:8e:af:a7:69 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.6.192/24 brd 192.168.6.255 scope global eth0 inet 192.168.6.8/24 brd 192.168.6.255 scope global secondary eth0:0 inet6 fe80::c49b:8eff:feaf:a769/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever node 2: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether 00:30:48:f7:0f:81 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.6.38/24 brd 192.168.6.255 scope global eth1 inet 192.168.6.8/24 brd 192.168.6.255 scope global secondary eth1:0 inet6 fe80::230:48ff:fef7:f81/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

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  • Using Truecrypt to secure mySQL database, any pitfalls?

    - by Saul
    The objective is to secure my database data from server theft, i.e. the server is at a business office location with normal premises lock and burglar alarm, but because the data is personal healthcare data I want to ensure that if the server was stolen the data would be unavailable as encrypted. I'm exploring installing mySQL on a mounted Truecrypt encrypted volume. It all works fine, and when I power off, or just cruelly pull the plug the encrypted drive disappears. This seems a load easier than encrypting data to the database, and I understand that if there is a security hole in the web app , or a user gets physical access to a plugged in server the data is compromised, but as a sanity check , is there any good reason not to do this? @James I'm thinking in a theft scenario, its not going to be powered down nicely and so is likely to crash any DB transactions running. But then if someone steals the server I'm going to need to rely on my off site backup anyway. @tomjedrz, its kind of all sensitive, individual personal and address details linked to medical referrals/records. Would be as bad in our field as losing credit card data, but means that almost everything in the database would need encryption... so figured better to run the whole DB in an encrypted partition. If encrypt data in the tables there's got to be a key somewhere on the server I'm presuming, which seems more of a risk if the box walks. At the moment the app is configured to drop a dump of data (weekly full and then deltas only hourly using rdiff) into a directory also on the Truecrypt disk. I have an off site box running WS_FTP Pro scheduled to connect by FTPs and synch down the backup, again into a Truecrypt mounted partition.

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  • Allow outgoing connections for DNS

    - by Jimmy
    I'm new to IPtables, but I am trying to setup a secure server to host a website and allow SSH. This is what I have so far: #!/bin/sh i=/sbin/iptables # Flush all rules $i -F $i -X # Setup default filter policy $i -P INPUT DROP $i -P OUTPUT DROP $i -P FORWARD DROP # Respond to ping requests $i -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type any -j ACCEPT # Force SYN checks $i -A INPUT -p tcp ! --syn -m state --state NEW -j DROP # Drop all fragments $i -A INPUT -f -j DROP # Drop XMAS packets $i -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL ALL -j DROP # Drop NULL packets $i -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL NONE -j DROP # Stateful inspection $i -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT # Allow established connections $i -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT # Allow unlimited traffic on loopback $i -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT $i -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT # Open nginx $i -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT $i -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT # Open SSH $i -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT However I've locked down my outgoing connections and it means I can't resolve any DNS. How do I allow that? Also, any other feedback is appreciated. James

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  • WCF REST on .Net 4.0

    - by AngelEyes
    A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began.  One of the things that caught my attention about early start-ups using the AJAX/REST/Web 2.0 model was how nice the URIs were for their applications.  Those were my first impressions of REST; pretty URIs.  Turns out there is a little more to it than that. REST is an architectural style that focuses on resources and structured ways to access those resources via the web.  REST evolved as an “anti-SOAP” movement, driven by developers who did not want to deal with all the complexity SOAP introduces (which is al lot when you don’t have frameworks hiding it all).  One of the biggest benefits to REST is that browsers can talk to rest services directly because REST works using URIs, QueryStrings, Cookies, SSL, and all those HTTP verbs that we don’t have to think about anymore. If you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC then you have been exposed to rest at some level.  MVC is relies heavily on routing to generate consistent and clean URIs.  REST for WCF gives you the same type of feel for your services.  Let’s dive in. WCF REST in .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 This post will cover WCF REST in .NET 4 which drew heavily from the REST Starter Kit and community feedback.  There is basic REST support in .NET 3.5 SP1 and you can also grab the REST Starter Kit to enable some of the features you’ll find in .NET 4. This post will cover REST in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Getting Started To get started we’ll create a basic WCF Rest Service Application using the new on-line templates option in VS 2010: When you first install a template you are prompted with this dialog: Dude Where’s my .Svc File? The WCF REST template shows us the new way we can simply build services.  Before we talk about what’s there, let’s look at what is not there: The .Svc File An Interface Contract Dozens of lines of configuration that you have to change to make your service work REST in .NET 4 is greatly simplified and leverages the Web Routing capabilities used in ASP.NET MVC and other parts of the web frameworks.  With REST in .NET 4 you use a global.asax to set the route to your service using the new ServiceRoute class.  From there, the WCF runtime handles dispatching service calls to the methods based on the Uri Templates. global.asax using System; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.Web; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     public class Global : HttpApplication     {         void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             RegisterRoutes();         }         private static void RegisterRoutes()         {             RouteTable.Routes.Add(new ServiceRoute("TimeService",                 new WebServiceHostFactory(), typeof(TimeService)));         }     } } The web.config contains some new structures to support a configuration free deployment.  Note that this is the default config generated with the template.  I did not make any changes to web.config. web.config <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration>   <system.web>     <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />   </system.web>   <system.webServer>     <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">       <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,            System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     </modules>   </system.webServer>   <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"/>     <standardEndpoints>       <webHttpEndpoint>         <!--             Configure the WCF REST service base address via the global.asax.cs file and the default endpoint             via the attributes on the <standardEndpoint> element below         -->         <standardEndpoint name="" helpEnabled="true" automaticFormatSelectionEnabled="true"/>       </webHttpEndpoint>     </standardEndpoints>   </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Building the Time Service We’ll create a simple “TimeService” that will return the current time.  Let’s start with the following code: using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.ServiceModel.Web; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     [ServiceContract]     [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]     [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerCall)]     public class TimeService     {         [WebGet(UriTemplate = "CurrentTime")]         public string CurrentTime()         {             return DateTime.Now.ToString();         }     } } The endpoint for this service will be http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService.  To get the current time http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService/CurrentTime will do the trick. The Results Are In Remember That Route In global.asax? Turns out it is pretty important.  When you set the route name, that defines the resource name starting after the host portion of the Uri. Help Pages in WCF 4 Another feature that came from the starter kit are the help pages.  To access the help pages simply append Help to the end of the service’s base Uri. Dropping the Soap Having dabbled with REST in the past and after using Soap for the last few years, the WCF 4 REST support is certainly refreshing.  I’m currently working on some REST implementations in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 and am looking forward to working on REST in .NET 4 and VS 2010.

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  • Getting a Web Resource Url in non WebForms Applications

    - by Rick Strahl
    WebResources in ASP.NET are pretty useful feature. WebResources are resources that are embedded into a .NET assembly and can be loaded from the assembly via a special resource URL. WebForms includes a method on the ClientScriptManager (Page.ClientScript) and the ScriptManager object to retrieve URLs to these resources. For example you can do: ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources), ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE); GetWebResourceUrl requires a type (which is used for the assembly lookup in which to find the resource) and the resource id to lookup. GetWebResourceUrl() then returns a nasty old long URL like this: WebResource.axd?d=-b6oWzgbpGb8uTaHDrCMv59VSmGhilZP5_T_B8anpGx7X-PmW_1eu1KoHDvox-XHqA1EEb-Tl2YAP3bBeebGN65tv-7-yAimtG4ZnoWH633pExpJor8Qp1aKbk-KQWSoNfRC7rQJHXVP4tC0reYzVw2&t=634533278261362212 While lately excessive resource usage has been frowned upon especially by MVC developers who tend to opt for content distributed as files, I still think that Web Resources have their place even in non-WebForms applications. Also if you have existing assemblies that include resources like scripts and common image links it sure would be nice to access them from non-WebForms pages like MVC views or even in plain old Razor Web Pages. Where's my Page object Dude? Unfortunately natively ASP.NET doesn't have a mechanism for retrieving WebResource Urls outside of the WebForms engine. It's a feature that's specifically baked into WebForms and that relies specifically on the Page HttpHandler implementation. Both Page.ClientScript (obviously) and ScriptManager rely on a hosting Page object in order to work and the various methods off these objects require control instances passed. The reason for this is that the script managers can inject scripts and links into Page content (think RegisterXXXX methods) and for that a Page instance is required. However, for many other methods - like GetWebResourceUrl() - that simply return resources or resource links the Page reference is really irrelevant. While there's a separate ClientScriptManager class, it's marked as sealed and doesn't have any public constructors so you can't create your own instance (without Reflection). Even if it did the internal constructor it does have requires a Page reference. No good… So, can we get access to a WebResourceUrl generically without running in a WebForms Page instance? We just have to create a Page instance ourselves and use it internally. There's nothing intrinsic about the use of the Page class in ClientScript, at least for retrieving resources and resource Urls so it's easy to create an instance of a Page for example in a static method. For our needs of retrieving ResourceUrls or even actually retrieving script resources we can use a canned, non-configured Page instance we create on our own. The following works just fine: public static string GetWebResourceUrl(Type type, string resource ) { Page page = new Page(); return page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resource); } A slight optimization for this might be to cache the created Page instance. Page tends to be a pretty heavy object to create each time a URL is required so you might want to cache the instance: public class WebUtils { private static Page CachedPage { get { if (_CachedPage == null) _CachedPage = new Page(); return _CachedPage; } } private static Page _CachedPage; public static string GetWebResourceUrl(Type type, string resource) { return CachedPage.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resource); } } You can now use GetWebResourceUrl in a Razor page like this: <!DOCTYPE html> <html <head> <script src="@WebUtils.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources),ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE)"> </script> </head> <body> <div class="errordisplay"> <img src="@WebUtils.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources),ControlResources.WARNING_ICON_RESOURCE)" /> This is only a Test! </div> </body> </html> And voila - there you have WebResources served from a non-Page based application. WebResources may be a on the way out, but legacy apps have them embedded and for some situations, like fallback scripts and some common image resources I still like to use them. Being able to use them from non-WebForms applications should have been built into the core ASP.NETplatform IMHO, but seeing that it's not this workaround is easy enough to implement.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

    - by Brian Schroer
    Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

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  • SQL Developer Data Modeler v3.3 Early Adopter: Collaborative Design via Excel?

    - by thatjeffsmith
    As you may have heard last week, we have a new version of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler now available as an Early Adopter release. Version 3.3 has quite a few new features and I’ll be previewing them here. Today’s topic is our new Excel integration. It builds off of last week’s lesson: Search, so you may want to go read that first. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes a team to build a data model. You have your techie folks, your business folks, your in-betweeners, and your database geeks. Who gets to define how customers are represented and stored in your database? That data lives forever, so you better get it right from the beginning, or you’ll be living in a hacker’s paradise for years to come. Lots of good rantings, ravings, and advice on this topic in general on Karen Lopez’s (@datachick) blog. But let’s say you are the primary modeler on a project. You dutifully interview the business folks for their requirements. You sit down and start to model and think you’re pretty close. Now you need someone to confirm your assumptions and provide some feedback. Do you send your model over? Take a screenshot and blow it up on a whiteboard? Export to HTML and let them take a magic marker to their monitors? Or maybe you bite the bullet and install your modeling software on their desktops and take the hours or days required to train them up on how to use the the tool. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just mark up their corrections in Excel and let you suck the updates back in? This is what we have started to build in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Let’s say you have a new table called ‘UT_STARTUPS.’ It looks a little something like this: A table in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler What I would like to do is have my team or co-worker review how I have defined those columns. Perhaps TIMESTAMP is overkill or maybe the column names themselves aren’t up to snuff. What I am going to do is now search for all the columns in my table, then export that to Excel. So do a search for UT_STARTUPS. Search, filter, then Report With the filter set to ‘Columns,’ if I do a report I’ll be only getting the columns that are resolving to my search term. So as long as my table name is unique in the model, I should get what I’m looking for. Here’s what I see when I click on the Report button: XLS or XLSX, either format is just fine I want to decide how the Column data is exported to Excel though, so I’m going to create a report template that I can use going forward. So click the ‘Manage’ button and setup a new template. I’m going to call mine ‘CollaborativeDevelopment.’ The templates allow me to define what properties are included in the reports. Once this is set, I’ll have the XLS file generated, and get to work Now let the Excel junkies do their stuff Note that not ALL of the report properties are update-able (yes, I made up a new word there) via Excel. We’ll have the full list of properties documented going forward, but in my Excel sheet, note that I can’t change the table name or the data types for the columns. I’m going to update some column names and supply ‘nice’ comments so the database users know what’s what. Here’s my input for the designer/architect/database dude: Be kind, please rew…use comments. Save the file, email it back to your modeler. Update the model from Excel That’s right, it’s a right mouse click from your model in the tree If everything goes right, you’ll see a nice confirmation message: It’s alive! Another to-do item on tap – making this dialog more informative. We’ll be showing exactly what in your model was updated from Excel. Let’s take another look at the model now Voila! Why are we doing this again? The goal is to reduce the number of round-trips from the modeler and the business process owner. One is used to working with Excel – why not allow them to mark up their changes in the tool they already know? This is an early adopter release and I anticipate this feature getting a good bit of tuning up before we release. Why don’t you download 3.3, give it a whirl, and let us know what you think?

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  • Weekend With #iPad

    - by andrewbrust
    Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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  • SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff)

    - by jamiet
    Recently I noticed a tweet from notable SQL Server author and community dude-at-large Steve Jones in which he asked how many SQL Server developers were putting their SQL Server source code (i.e. DDL) under source control (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact tweet and Twitter’s search functionality is useless). The question surprised me slightly as I thought a more pertinent question would be “how many SQL Server developers are not using source control?” because I have been doing just that for many years now and I simply assumed that use of source control is a given in this day and age. Then I started thinking about it. “Perhaps I’m wrong” I pondered, “perhaps the SQL Server folks that do use source control in their day-to-day jobs are in the minority”. So, dear reader, I’m interested to know a little bit more about your use of source control. Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? Why did you make those particular software choices? Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? To encourage you to contribute I have five pairs of licenses for Red Gate SQL Source Control and Red Gate SQL Connect to give away to what I consider to be the five best replies (“best” is totally subjective of course but this is my blog so my decision is final ), if you want to be considered don’t forget to leave contact details; email address, Twitter handle or similar will do. To start you off and to perhaps get the brain cells whirring, here are my answers to the questions above: Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? As I think I’ve already said…yes. Always. If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? I move around a lot between many clients so it changes on a fairly regular basis; my current client uses Team Foundation Server (aka TFS) and as part of a separate project is trialing the use of Team Foundation Service. I have used SVN extensively in the past which I am a fan of (I generally prefer it to TFS) and am trying to get my head around Git by using it for ObjectStorageHelper. What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? On my current project, Team Explorer. In the past I have used Tortoise to connect to SVN. Why did you make those particular software choices? I generally use whatever the client uses and given that I work with SQL Server I find that the majority of my clients use TFS, I guess simply because they are Microsoft development shops. Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? Not an anecdote as such but I am going to share some frustrations about TFS. In many ways TFS is a great product because it integrates many separate functions (source control, work item tracking, build agents) into one whole and I’m firmly of the opinion that that is a good thing if for no reason other than being able to associate your check-ins with a work-item. However, like many people there are aspects to TFS source control that annoy me day-in, day-out. Chief among them has to be the fact that it uses a file’s read-only property to determine if a file should be checked-out or not and, if it determines that it should, it will happily do that check-out on your behalf without you even asking it to. I didn’t realise how ridiculous this was until I first used SVN about three years ago – with SVN you make any changes you wish and then use your source control client to determine which files have changed and thus be checked-in; the notion of “check-out” doesn’t even exist. That sounds like a small thing but you don’t realise how liberating it is until you actually start working that way. Hoping to hear some more anecdotes and opinions in the comments. Remember….free software is up for grabs! @jamiet 

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  • Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

    - by AjarnMark
    I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

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  • Simple Scripting for your Exalogic Storage

    - by Trond Strømme
    As part of my job in Oracle ACS (Advanced Customer Services) I'm handling lots of different systems and customers. Among the recent systems I worked with have been Oracle's Exalogic engineered systems. One of the things I'd never had much exposure to as a system developer/architect/middleware guy/Java dude has been storage; outside of consuming it for my photography needs.. Well, I'm always ready for a new challenge... I'd downloaded the 7000 series storage simulator when it was released in the good old Sun days, found it fun and instructive to play around with, but as I never touched storage in any way (besides consuming it..) I forgot about it. A couple of years ago when I started working with Exalogic engineered systems it again came into light as an invaluable learning and testing tool for the embedded storage in an Exalogic;  Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage 7320 Appliance.  aaaanyway... I've been "booted" into a part-time role as the interim storage/system admin/middleware/Java guy for a client and found I needed to create the occasional report or summary or whatever.. of what's using the storage in the 7320 (as default configured for an Exalogic, 40T of disk in a mirrored configuration, yielding 18T of actual space.) Reading the nice documentation and some articles on the Oracle Technology Network I saw great possibilities with the embedded ECMAScript3/JavaScript engine in the 7000 series.  In my personal opinion anyone who's dealing with Exalogic administration, or exposed to any of the 7000 series of storage appliances and servers that Oracle offers should have a VirtualBox instance of it kicking around. For development and testing it's a fantastic tool. (It can save you from explaining (most) of the embarrassing FAILS you can do if you test something in a production system to your management...) So download, and install.  A small sidestep, if after firing up the 7000 series simulator in VirtualBox you've forgotten what it's IP address is, the following will sort you out if you log in directly via the running VirtualBox VM. So in my case I can ssh to 192.168.56.101 or point a browser to https://192.168.56.101:215 to log into the storage appliance. One simple way of executing a script on the 7320 is to ssh to the device and redirecting a file with the script in it to ssh. ssh [email protected] < myscript.js One question I got from my client and the people who will take over the systems was: "how can we see the quotas and allocations for all projects/shares in one easy go so we don't have to go navigating around in the BUI for all the hundreds of shares the 7320 is hosting just to check if anything is running dry?" Easy! JavaScript time, VirtualBox and emacs! //NOTE! this script is available 'as is' It has ben run on a couple of 7320's, (running 2010.08.17.3.0,1-1.25 & // 2011.04.24.1.0,1-1.8) a 7420 and the VB image, but I personally //offer no guarantee whatsoever that it won't make your server topple, catch fire or in any way go pear shaped.. //run at your own risk or learn from my code and or mistakes.. script run('cd /'); run('shares'); //get all projects: proj = list(); function spaceToGig(bytes){ return bytes/1073741824; //convert bytes to GB } function fullInPercent(quota, space_data){ tmp = (space_data/quota)*100; return tmp; } //print header, slightly good looking printf(" %s/%-15s %8s(GB) %7s(GB) %5s(GB) %7s(GB) %3s\n","Project", "Share","Quota","Ref", "Snap", "Total","%full"); printf("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n") //for each project, get all shares. check for quota and calculate percentage and human readable figures.. for (i=0;i<proj.length;i++){ run('select ' + proj[i]); //get all shares for a project var pshares = list(); //for each share get quota properties for (j=0;j<pshares.length;j++){ run('select ' + pshares[j]); quota = get('quota'); //properties associated with a share or inherited from a project spaceData = get('space_data'); spaceSnap = get('space_snapshots'); spaceTotal = get('space_total'); if(quota>0){ //has quota printf(" %s/%-15s \t%4.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%5.2f%%\n",proj[i], pshares[j],spaceToGig(quota),spaceToGig(spaceData),spaceToGig(spaceSnap),spaceToGig(spaceTotal),fullInPercent(quota,spaceTotal)); }else{ //no quota printf(" %s/%-15s \t%8s\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%s\n",proj[i],pshares[j], "N/A", spaceToGig(spaceData),spaceToGig(spaceSnap),spaceToGig(spaceTotal),"N/A"); } run('cd ..'); } run('done'); } The resulting output should look something like this: Project/Share Quota(GB) Ref(GB) Snap(GB) Total(GB) %full ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACSExalogicSystem/domains N/A 0.04GB 0.00GB 0.04GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/logs N/A 0.01GB 0.00GB 0.01GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/nodemgrs N/A 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/stores N/A 0.04GB 0.00GB 0.04GB N/A ***_dev/FMW_***_1 133GB 4.24GB 0.01GB 4.25GB 3.19% ***_dev/FMW_***_2 N/A 4.25GB 0.01GB 4.26GB N/A ***_dev/applications 10GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00% ***_dev/domains 50GB 10.75GB 3.55GB 14.30GB 28.61% ***_dev/logs 20GB 0.32GB 0.01GB 0.33GB 1.66% ***_dev/softwaredepot 20GB 4.15GB 0.00GB 4.15GB 20.73% ***_dev/stores 20GB 0.01GB 0.00GB 0.01GB 0.05% ###_dev/FMW_###_1 400GB 17.63GB 0.12GB 17.75GB 4.44% ###_dev/applications N/A 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB N/A ###_dev/domains 120GB 14.21GB 5.53GB 19.74GB 16.45% ###_dev/logs 15GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00% ###_dev/softwaredepot 250GB 73.55GB 0.02GB 73.57GB 29.43% …snip My apologies if the output is a bit mis-aligned here and there, I only bothered making it look good, not perfect :/ I also removed some of the project names (*,#)

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  • Reflections from the Young Prisms

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
     By Karen Shamban The Young Prisms began their musical journey in San Francisco, and it's here they return to bring their unique sound to the Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival.  We asked them to tell us their thoughts on music, performing, and what they like in an audience.  Here's what they had to say: Q. What do you like best about performing in front of a live audience?A. There are a lot of things to love about playing in front of people. The best part is definitely the nights when the energy the audience brings shows through. Although it always differs from city to city and person to person, when you play to a full house and people are really getting into it, it's like no other feeling.Q. How do you use technology in creating and delivering your music?A. Well, we actually use a lot more electronic components than people realize. Pretty much every string instrument played either live or on recording has been filtered through numerous electronic effects. Matt uses somewhere around 12 or 14 every time we play live. Giovanni has six. Most of our writing and demoing is done with drum sequencers and samplers too, so it's safe to say we use technology to our advantage in the writing process. Live is a bit different, since we keep it to the basics with guitars and acoustic drums. We also tend to use projections when we play live, so technology helps us do that fairly easily as well.Q. Do you prefer smaller, intimate venues or larger, louder ones?  Why?A. Couldn’t say we have a real preference in venue size. I mean, its always great to get to play through a massive killer sound system, but small venues when packed full are equally as special if not more so, because of the intimacy of it. Some of my favorite shows I've seen as an audience member/ fan have been at the smaller venues in San Francisco.Q. What about your fans surprises you?A. Sometimes the older guys are a surprise. We've played shows where there are more older guys in their 40s and 50s, who come and stare and take notes at our effects pedals. Then there are kids our age or in their 20s. Sometimes it's surprising to think that the older guys relate to what we're doing more than our peers and friends in our age group.Q. What about your live act surprises your fans?A. I think people are often surprised by how shy we can be. It feels like people expect us to be really rowdy and throw things and make really loud noises and get really aggressive on stage because some of the sounds we use can have an abrasive element to them. People expect Matt to have some kind of Kurt Cobain attitude, which he doesn’t at all. So it seems it surprises people to see musicians playing loud and noisy songs in their early and mid 20s being fairly tame and calm on stage.Q. There are going to be a lot of technical people (you could call them geeks) in the Oracle crowd -- what are they going to love about your performance?A. Hopefully most of them are pedal nerds like we are and like the previously mentioned “older dude crowd.” Besides that I hope they’d be into the projections and group of songs we're going to play for them.Q. What's new and different in the music you're making today, versus a year or two ago?A. I'd say there is more focus on the songwriting now and less of the noise today than last year. I think it's pretty evident on the new record compared to the last two. On the first two records we made as YP, we had another guitar player and songwriter who no longer plays with us. So the process in which we develop songs is different as well.Q. Have you been on tour recently? If so, what do you like about touring, and what do you dislike?A. Touring is amazing. Some people might tell you different if they've been doing it for what they'd call too long, but for us it's really a great chance to play for people who care about the music we're making and also to see and explore the world. Getting to visit so many different cities and explore so many different cultures is amazing. Of course we love getting into cultural foods too. Stefanie is a fashion geek so getting to go to New York as often as we do as well as getting to play in London and Paris is always especially fun for her.Q. Ever think about playing another kind of music? If so, what, and why?A. Never really thought about wanting to do anything drastically different. I think the style of music we play has a lot to do with the stuff we have been listening to both growing up and now. It wasn’t really a conscious decision to make sure it was a certain sound, so I'm not sure we've ever thought about doing a way different genre or whatever like electronic music or country. Although there have been times we've had conversations where we discuss possibly doing quiet sets or using the string synth sounds.Q. What are the top three things people should know about your music?A1. We like noise.A2. We use ambience and atmosphere as much as as we can.A3. Yes, the vocals are supposed to be mixed in with the guitars. Get more info: Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival Young Prisms

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  • The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List

    - by grepsedawk
    After more than a few questions about deciding on C++ books I thought we could make a better community wiki version. Providing QUALITY books and an approximate skill level. Maybe we can add a short blurb/description about each book that you have personally read / benefited from. Feel free to debate quality, headings, etc. Note: There is a similar post for C: The Definitive C Book Guide and List Reference Style - All Levels The C++ Programming Language - Bjarne Stroustrup C++ Standard Library Tutorial and Reference - Nicolai Josuttis Beginner Introductory: C++ Primer - Stanley Lippman / Josée Lajoie / Barbara E. Moo Accelerated C++ - Andrew Koenig / Barbara Moo Thinking in C++ - Bruce Eckel (2 volumes, 2nd is more about standard library, but still very good) Best practices: Effective C++ - Scott Meyers Effective STL - Scott Meyers Intermediate More Effective C++ - Scott Meyers Exceptional C++ - Herb Sutter More Exceptional C++ - Herb Sutter C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices - Herb Sutter / Andrei Alexandrescu C++ Templates The Complete Guide - David Vandevoorde / Nicolai M. Josuttis Large Scale C++ Software Design - John Lakos Above Intermediate Modern C++ Design - Andrei Alexandrescu C++ Template Metaprogramming - David Abrahams and Aleksey Gurtovoy Inside the C++ Object Model - Stanley Lippman Classics / Older Note: Some information contained within these books may not be up to date and no longer considered best practice. The Design and Evolution of C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup Ruminations on C++ Andrew Koenig / Barbara Moo Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms - James Coplien

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  • TFS Build errors TF224003, TF215085, TF215076

    - by iamdudley
    Hi, I am using TFS2008 and VS2008. I run nightly builds for about 20 applications using one build agent and the builds are scheduled for either 1am or 2am. Most of the build succeed, however 6 of them fail regularly with similar errors. The errors are either the first two below, or the third one by itself: TF215085: An error occurred while connecting to agent \xxxx\BUILDMACHINE: TF215076: Team Foundation Build on computer BUILDMACHINE (port 9191) is not responding. (Detail Message: The request was aborted: The operation has timed out.) 11/04/2010 2:10:10 AM TF224003: An exception occurred on the build computer BUILDMACHINE: The build (vstfs:///Build/Build/2632) has already completed and cannot be started again.. TF215085: An error occurred while connecting to agent \yyyyy\BA_WKSTFSBUILD: Team Foundation services are not available from server srvtfs. Technical information (for administrator): The operation has timed out It looks to me like some kind of communication error, maybe the port gets over loaded - can this happen? Should I spread the builds out a bit more? In the build definition it says "Queue the build on the default build agent at", so I figured if I scheduled them to start at the same time they would be queued and occur sequentially. Most of the suggestions I've found online for these errors are for all or nothing scenarios where no builds work at all whereas my problem is most build but some consistently do not. Judging by the dates of the last successful builds of these 6 failing builds I believe it is the same 6 failing every night. (I'm editing the build definitions now to keep the failed builds so I can get some more info on the problem) Any help on this would be much appreciated. James.

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  • .NET "must-have" development tools

    - by nzpcmad
    James Avery wrote a classic article a while back entitled Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now which is a companion to Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now and Scott Hanselman has an excellent list on his blog but if you were on a desert island and were only allowed three .NET development tools which ones would you pick? Update: Assuming you already have an IDE like Visual Studio ... Update (5) : Up to 08/01 : The current state of play: Reflector 13 Resharper 9 NUnit + TestDriven.Net 7 Refactor Pro 4 Process Explorer (other Sysinternals) 3 SnippetCompiler 3 CodeRush 3 MSDN Library 2 LinqPad 2 Cruisecontrol.net 2 VMWare 2 RhinoMocks 2 Fiddler 2 PowerShell 2 PowerCommands for VS 2008 1 Sandcastle 1 SQL Profiler 1 Redgate ANTS profiler 11 NCover 1 VisualSVN 1 Rubber Ducky 1 WinMerge 1 NAnt 1 ViEmu 1 AnkhSVN 1 dotTrace Profiler 1 BeyondCompare 1 DPack VS Plugin 1 WCF Trace Viewer (SDK) 1 xUnit.net 1 SourceGear DiffMerge 1 Ghostdoc 1 Expression Studio 1 XAML Pad 1 KaXaml 1 Blender for 3D modeling 1 Snoop a WPF tool 1 DiffMerge 1 DPack 1 NDepend 1 Kodos 1 WatiN 1 HTTPWatch Basic Edition 1 Paint.Net 1 Mole For VS 1 What I find particularly interesting about this is that "NUnit + TestDriven.Net " is right up there in third place which shows the growing emphasis on testing as an integral part of the development process rather than as an adjunct which is simply bolted on. And I'm somewhat perplexed that Codesmith didn't receive a single vote?

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  • Top-Rated JavaScript Blogs

    - by Andreas Grech
    I am currently trying to find some blogs that talk (almost solely) on the JavaScript Language, and this is due to the fact that most of the time, bloggers with real life experience at work or at home development can explain more clearly and concisely certain quirks and hidden features than most 'Official Language Specifications' Below find a list of blogs that are JavaScript based (will update the list as more answers flow in): DHTML Kitchen, by Garrett Smith Robert's Talk, by Robert Nyman EJohn, by John Resig (of jQuery) Crockford's JavaScript Page, by Douglas Crockford Dean.edwards.name, by Dean Edwards Ajaxian, by various (@Martin) The JavaScript Weblog, by various SitePoint's JavaScript and CSS Page, by various AjaxBlog, by various Eric Lippert's Blog, by Eric Lippert (talks about JScript and JScript.Net) Web Bug Track, by various (@scunliffe) The Strange Zen Of JavaScript , by Scott Andrew Alex Russell (of Dojo) (@Eran Galperin) Ariel Flesler (@Eran Galperin) Nihilogic, by Jacob Seidelin (@llimllib) Peter's Blog, by Peter Michaux (@Borgar) Flagrant Badassery, by Steve Levithan (@Borgar) ./with Imagination, by Dustin Diaz (@Borgar) HedgerWow (@Borgar) Dreaming in Javascript, by Nosredna spudly.shuoink.com, by Stephen Sorensen Yahoo! User Interface Blog, by various (@Borgar) remy sharp's b:log, by Remy Sharp (@Borgar) JScript Blog, by the JScript Team (@Borgar) Dmitry Baranovskiy’s Web Log, by Dmitry Baranovskiy James Padolsey's Blog (@Kenny Eliasson) Perfection Kills; Exploring JavaScript by example, by Juriy Zaytsev DailyJS (@Ric) NCZOnline (@Kenny Eliasson), by Nicholas C. Zakas Which top-rated blogs am I currently missing from the above list, that you think should be imperative to any JavaScript developer to read (and follow) concurrently?

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  • nHibernate, Automapping and Chained Abstract Classes

    - by Mr Snuffle
    I'm having some trouble using nHibernate, automapping and a class structure using multiple chains of abstract classes It's something akin to this public abstract class AbstractClassA {} public abstract class AbstractClassB : AbstractClassA {} public class ClassA : AbstractClassB {} When I attempt to build these mappings, I receive the following error "FluentNHibernate.Cfg.FluentConfigurationException was unhandled Message: An invalid or incomplete configuration was used while creating a SessionFactory. Check PotentialReasons collection, and InnerException for more detail. Database was not configured through Database method." However, if I remove the abstract keyword from AbstractClassB, everything works fine. The problem only occurs when I have more than one abstract class in the class hierarchy. I've manually configured the automapping to include both AbstractClassA and AbstractClassB using the following binding class public class BindItemBases : IManualBinding { public void Bind(FluentNHibernate.Automapping.AutoPersistenceModel model) { model.IncludeBase<AbstractClassA>(); model.IncludeBase<AbstractClassB>(); } } I've had to do a bit of hackery to get around this, but there must be a better way to get this working. Surely nHibernate supports something like this, I just haven't figured out how to configure it right. Cheers, James

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  • Reachability sometimes fails, even when we do have an internet connection

    - by stoutyhk
    Hi I've searched but can't see a similar question. I've added a method to check for an internet connection per the Reachability example. It works most of the time, but when installed on the iPhone, it quite often fails even when I do have internet connectivity (only when on 3G/EDGE - WiFi is OK). Basically the code below returns NO. If I switch to another app, say Mail or Safari, and connect, then switch back to the app, then the code says the internet is reachable. Kinda seems like it needs a 'nudge'. Anyone seen this before? Any ideas? Many thanks James + (BOOL) doWeHaveInternetConnection{ BOOL success; // google should always be up right?! const char *host_name = [@"google.com" cStringUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]; SCNetworkReachabilityRef reachability = SCNetworkReachabilityCreateWithName(NULL, host_name); SCNetworkReachabilityFlags flags; success = SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags(reachability, &flags); BOOL isAvailable = success && (flags & kSCNetworkFlagsReachable) && !(flags & kSCNetworkFlagsConnectionRequired); if (isAvailable) { NSLog(@"Google is reachable: %d", flags); }else{ NSLog(@"Google is unreachable"); } return isAvailable; }

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  • Nested dereferencing arrows in Perl: to omit or not to omit?

    - by DVK
    In Perl, when you have a nested data structure, it is permissible to omit de-referencing arrows to 2d and more level of nesting. In other words, the following two syntaxes are identical: my $hash_ref = { 1 => [ 11, 12, 13 ], 3 => [31, 32] }; my $elem1 = $hash_ref->{1}->[1]; my $elem2 = $hash_ref->{1}[1]; # exactly the same as above Now, my question is, is there a good reason to choose one style over the other? It seems to be a popular bone of stylistic contention (Just on SO, I accidentally bumped into this and this in the space of 5 minutes). So far, none of the usual suspects says anything definitive: perldoc merely says "you are free to omit the pointer dereferencing arrow". Conway's "Perl Best Practices" says "whenever possible, dereference with arrows", but it appears to only apply to the context of dereferencing the main reference, not optional arrows on 2d level of nested data structures. "MAstering Perl for Bioinfirmatics" author James Tisdall doesn't give very solid preference either: "The sharp-witted reader may have noticed that we seem to be omitting arrow operators between array subscripts. (After all, these are anonymous arrays of anonymous arrays of anonymous arrays, etc., so shouldn't they be written [$array-[$i]-[$j]-[$k]?) Perl allows this; only the arrow operator between the variable name and the first array subscript is required. It make things easier on the eyes and helps avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. On the other hand, you may prefer to keep the dereferencing arrows in place, to make it clear you are dealing with references. Your choice." Personally, i'm on the side of "always put arrows in, since itg's more readable and obvious tiy're dealing with a reference".

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  • Color scheme: Smooth Dark

    - by xsl
    As requested by James McNellis I exported my Visual Studio color scheme and posted it here. It is basically the default Visual Studio color scheme with a dark background and slightly modified colors. Visual Studio 2010 Download: http://www.file-upload.net/download-2588083/Smooth-Dark.vssettings.html Installation: Select Tools > Import and Export Settings. Choose Import Selected Environment Settings. Select the file you downloaded. Import only the color settings. Click Finish. Console2 Installation In the file console.xml replace the color element with: <colors> <color id="0" r="23" g="27" b="32"/> <color id="1" r="120" g="150" b="180"/> <color id="2" r="139" g="163" b="137"/> <color id="3" r="119" g="181" b="181"/> <color id="4" r="181" g="122" b="119"/> <color id="5" r="186" g="141" b="183"/> <color id="6" r="168" g="171" b="129"/> <color id="7" r="182" g="182" b="182"/> <color id="8" r="114" g="114" b="114"/> <color id="9" r="120" g="150" b="180"/> <color id="10" r="139" g="163" b="137"/> <color id="11" r="119" g="181" b="181"/> <color id="12" r="181" g="122" b="119"/> <color id="13" r="186" g="141" b="183"/> <color id="14" r="168" g="171" b="129"/> <color id="15" r="255" g="255" b="255"/> </colors>

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