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• Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp - Reading (UK) - October 1-12, 2012

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  REGISTER NOW: Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp Reading, UK, October 1-12, 2012! OPN invites you to join us for a 10-day implementation bootcamp on Oracle ATG Web Commerce in Reading, UK from October 1-12, 2012.This 10-day boot camp is designed to provide partners with hands-on experience and technical training to successfully build and deploy Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Applications. This particular boot camp is focused on helping partners develop the essential skills needed to implement every aspect of an ATG Commerce Application from scratch, (not CRS-based), with a specific goal of enabling experienced Java/J2EE developers with a path towards becoming functional, effective, and contributing members of an ATG implementation team. Built for both new and experienced ATG developers alike, the collaborative nature of this program and its exercises, have proven to be highly effective and extremely valuable in learning the best practices for implementing ATG solutions. Though not required, this bootcamp provides a structured path to earning a Certified Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Specialization! What Is Covered: This boot camp is for Application Developers and Software Architects wanting to gain valuable insight into ATG application development best practices, as well as relevant and applicable implementation experience on projects modeled after four of the most common types of applications built on the ATG platform. The following learning objectives are all critical, and are of equal priority in enabling this role to succeed. This learning boot camp will help with: Building a basic functional transaction-ready ATG Web Commerce 10 Application. Utilizing ATG’s platform features such as scenarios, slots, targeters, user profiles and segments, to create a personalized user experience. Building Nucleus components to support and/or extend application functionality. Understanding the intricacies of ATG order checkout and fulfillment. Specifying, designing and implementing new commerce features in ATG 10. Building a functional commerce application modeled after four of the most common types of applications built on the ATG platform, within an agile-based project team environment and under simulated real-world project conditions. Duration: The Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp is an instructor-led workshop spanning 10 days. Audience: Application Developers Software Architects Prerequisite Training and Environment Requirements: Programming and Markup Experience with Java J2EE, JavaScript, XML, HTML and CSS Completion of Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Specialist Development Guided Learning Path modules Participants will be required to bring their own laptop that meets the minimum specifications:   64-bit PC and OS (e.g. Windows 7 64-bit) 4GB RAM or more 40GB Hard Disk Space Laptops will require access to the Internet through Remote Desktop via Windows. Agenda Topics: Week 1 – Day 1 through 5 Build a Basic Commerce Application In week one of the boot camp training, we will apply knowledge learned from the ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Guided Learning Path modules, towards building a basic transaction-ready commerce application. There will be little to no lectures delivered in this boot camp, as developers will be fully engaged in ATG Application Development activities and best practices. Developers will work independently on the following lab assignments from day's 1 through 5: Lab Assignments  1 Environment Setup 2 Build a dynamic Home Page 3 Site Authentication 4 Build Customer Registration 5 Display Top Level Categories 6 Display Product Sub-Categories 7 Display Product List Page 8 Display Product Detail Page 9 ATG Inventory 10 Build “Add to Cart” Functionality 11 Build Shopping Cart 12 Build Checkout Page  13 Build Checkout Review Page 14 Create an Order and Build Order Confirmation Page 15 Implement Slots and Targeters for Personalization 16 Implement Pricing and Promotions 17 Order Fulfillment Back to top Week 2 – Day 6 through 10 Team-based Case Project In the second week of the boot camp training, participants will be asked to join a project team that will select a case project for the team to implement. Teams will be able to choose from four of the most common application types developed and deployed on the ATG platform. They are as follows: Hard goods with physical fulfillment, Soft goods with electronic fulfillment, a Service or subscription case example, a Course/Event registration case example. Team projects will have approximately 160 hours of use cases/stories for each team to build (40 hours per developer). Each day's Use Cases/Stories will build upon the prior day's work, and therefore must be fully completed at the end of each day. Please note that this boot camp intends to simulate real-world project conditions, and as such will likely require the need for project teams to possibly work beyond normal business hours. To promote further collaboration and group learning, each team will be asked to present their work and share the methodologies and solutions that they've applied to their cases at the end of each day. Location: Oracle Reading CVC TPC510 Room: Wraysbury Reading, UK 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM  Registration Fee (10 Days): US $3,375 Please click on the following link to REGISTER or  visit the Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp page for more information. Questions: Patrick Ty Partner Enablement, Oracle Commerce Phone: 310.343.7687 Mobile: 310.633.1013 Email: [email protected]

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• Oracle Delivers Latest Release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Scott McNeil

  Richer Service Catalog for Database and Middleware as a Service; Enhanced Database and Middleware Management Help Drive Enterprise-Scale Private Cloud Adoption News Summary IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 meets that requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk. News Facts Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4, available today, lets organizations rapidly adopt Oracle-based, enterprise-scale private clouds. New capabilities provide advanced technology stack management, secure database administration, and enterprise service governance, enabling Oracle customers and partners to maximize database and application performance and drive innovation using self-service IT platforms. The enhancements have been driven by customers and the growing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ecosystem, comprised of more than 750 Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partners. Oracle and its partners and customers have built over 140 plug-ins and connectors for Oracle Enterprise Manager. Watch the video highlights. Automation for Broader Cloud Services Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog. The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance along with greater operational control through a flexible and extensible showback mechanism. Enhanced Database Management A new performance warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis and helps identify database problems before they occur. New enterprise data-governance capabilities enhance security by helping systematically discover and protect sensitive data. Step-by-step orchestration of upgrades with the ability to rollback changes enables faster adoption of Oracle Database 12c. Expanded Fusion Middleware Management A new consolidated view of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployments with a guided management capability lets administrators apply best management practices to diverse middleware environments and identify performance issues quickly. A Java VM Diagnostics as a Service feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions of defects and performance optimization. New automated provisioning for SOA lets middleware administrators perform mass SOA provisioning with ease. Superior Enterprise-Grade Management Private roles and preferred credentials have been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide additional fine-grained security for organizations with complex access control requirements. A new security console provides a single point of control for managing the security of Oracle Enterprise Manager environments. Support for the latest industry standard SNMP v3 protocol, including encryption, enables more secure heterogeneous management. “Smart monitoring” adapts to observed environmental changes and adds self-management capabilities to help Oracle Enterprise Manager run at peak performance, while demanding less IT supervision. Supporting Quotes “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a strong tradition of technology breakthroughs and leadership. As a member of Oracle’s Customer Advisory Board for Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have consistently provided feedback and guidance in the areas of enterprise-scale cloud, self-diagnosability, and secure administration for the product,” said Tim Frazier, CIO, NIF and Photon Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We intend to take advantage of the Release 4 features that support enterprise-scale availability and fine-grained security capabilities for private cloud deployments.” “IDC's most recent CloudTrack survey shows that most enterprises plan to adopt hybrid cloud architectures over the next three years,” said Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “These organizations plan to deploy a wide range of workloads into cloud environments including mission critical database and middleware services that require high levels of fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Such capabilities were traditionally custom configured for each application but cloud offers the possibility to incorporate such properties within the service definition, enabling organizations to adopt cloud without compromise. With the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle is providing customers with an out-of-the-box experience for delivering highly-resilient cloud services for databases and applications.” “Since its inception, Oracle has been leading the way in innovative, scalable and high performance solutions for the enterprise. With this release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are extending this leadership by providing enterprise-scale capabilities for planning, delivering, and managing private clouds. We call this ‘zero-to-cloud – accelerated.’ These enhancements help our customers to expedite their adoption of cloud computing and prepares them for the next generation of self-service IT,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of Systems and Cloud Management at Oracle. Supporting Resources Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Video: Cerner Delivers High Performance Private Cloud Video: BIAS Achieves Outstanding Results with Private Cloud Press Release Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• MySQL Connect Only 10 Days Away - Focus on InnoDB Sessions

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Time flies and MySQL Connect is only 10 days away! You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Mat recently blogged about the MySQL Cluster sessions you’ll have the opportunity to attend, and below are those focused on InnoDB. Remember you can plan your schedule with Schedule Builder. Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: 10 Things You Should Know About InnoDB—Calvin Sun, Oracle InnoDB is the default storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL as of MySQL Release 5.5. It provides the standard ACID-compliant transactions, row-level locking, multiversion concurrency control, and referential integrity. InnoDB also implements several innovative technologies to improve its performance and reliability. This presentation gives a brief history of InnoDB; its main features; and some recent enhancements for better performance, scalability, and availability. Saturday, 5.30 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: Demystified MySQL/InnoDB Performance Tuning—Dimitri Kravtchuk, Oracle This session covers performance tuning with MySQL and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL and explains the main improvements made in MySQL Release 5.5 and Release 5.6. Which setting for which workload? Which value will be better for my system? How can I avoid potential bottlenecks from the beginning? Do I need a purge thread? Is it true that InnoDB doesn't need thread concurrency anymore? These and many other questions are asked by DBAs and developers. Things are changing quickly and constantly, and there is no “silver bullet.” But understanding the configuration setting’s impact is already a huge step in performance improvement. Bring your ideas and problems to share them with others—the discussion is open, just moderated by a speaker. Sunday, 10.15 am, Room Golden Gate 4: Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations—Calvin Sun, Oracle Many top Web properties rely on Oracle’s MySQL as a critical piece of infrastructure for serving millions of users. Database availability has become increasingly important. One way to enhance availability is to give users full access to the database during data definition language (DDL) operations. The online DDL operations in recent MySQL releases offer users the flexibility to perform schema changes while having full access to the database—that is, with minimal delay of operations on a table and without rebuilding the entire table. These enhancements provide better responsiveness and availability in busy production environments. This session covers these improvements in the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL for online DDL operations such as add index, drop foreign key, and rename column. Sunday, 11.45 am, Room Golden Gate 7: Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster—Andrew Morgan and John Duncan, Oracle Ever-increasing performance demands of Web-based services have generated significant interest in providing NoSQL access methods to MySQL (MySQL Cluster and the InnoDB storage engine of MySQL), enabling users to maintain all the advantages of their existing relational databases while providing blazing-fast performance for simple queries. Get the best of both worlds: persistence; consistency; rich SQL queries; high availability; scalability; and simple, flexible APIs and schemas for agile development. This session describes the memcached connectors and examines some use cases for how MySQL and memcached fit together in application architectures. It does the same for the newest MySQL Cluster native connector, an easy-to-use, fully asynchronous connector for Node.js. Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: InnoDB Performance Tuning—Inaam Rana, Oracle The InnoDB storage engine has always been highly efficient and includes many unique architectural elements to ensure high performance and scalability. In MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, InnoDB includes many new features that take better advantage of recent advances in operating systems and hardware platforms than previous releases did. This session describes unique InnoDB architectural elements for performance, new features, and how to tune InnoDB to achieve better performance. Sunday, 4.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: InnoDB Compression for OLTP—Nizameddin Ordulu, Facebook and Inaam Rana, Oracle Data compression is an important capability of the InnoDB storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL. Compressed tables reduce the size of the database on disk, resulting in fewer reads and writes and better throughput by reducing the I/O workload. Facebook pushes the limit of InnoDB compression and has made several enhancements to InnoDB, making this technology ready for online transaction processing (OLTP). In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of InnoDB compression. You will also learn the enhancements the Facebook team has made to improve InnoDB compression, such as reducing compression failures, not logging compressed page images, and allowing changes of compression level. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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• Inside Red Gate - Project teams

  - by Simon Cooper

  Within each division in Red Gate, development effort is structured around one or more project teams; currently, each division contains 2-3 separate teams. These are self contained units responsible for a particular development project. Project team structure The typical size of a development team varies, but is normally around 4-7 people - one project manager, two developers, one or two testers, a technical author (who is responsible for the text within the application, website content, and help documentation) and a user experience designer (who designs and prototypes the UIs) . However, team sizes can vary from 3 up to 12, depending on the division and project. As an rule, all the team sits together in the same area of the office. (Again, this is my experience of what happens. I haven't worked in the DBA division, and SQL Tools might have changed completely since I moved to .NET. As I mentioned in my previous post, each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit.) Depending on the project, and the other needs in the division, the tech author and UX designer may be shared between several projects. Generally, developers and testers work on one project at a time. If the project is a simple point release, then it might not need a UX designer at all. However, if it's a brand new product, then a UX designer and tech author will be involved right from the start. Developers, testers, and the project manager will normally stay together in the same team as they work on different projects, unless there's a good reason to split or merge teams for a particular project. Technical authors and UX designers will normally go wherever they are needed in the division, depending on what each project needs at the time. In my case, I was working with more or less the same people for over 2 years, all the way through SQL Compare 7, 8, and Schema Compare for Oracle. This helped to build a great sense of camaraderie wihin the team, and helped to form and maintain a team identity. This, in turn, meant we worked very well together, and so the final result was that much better (as well as making the work more fun). How is a project started and run? The product manager within each division collates user feedback and ideas, does lots of research, throws in a few ideas from people within the company, and then comes up with a list of what the division should work on in the next few years. This is split up into projects, and after each project is greenlit (I'll be discussing this later on) it is then assigned to a project team, as and when they become available (I'm sure there's lots of discussions and meetings at this point that I'm not aware of!). From that point, it's entirely up to the project team. Just as divisions are autonomous, project teams are also given a high degree of autonomy. All the teams in Red Gate use some sort of vaguely agile methodology; most use some variations on SCRUM, some have experimented with Kanban. Some store the project progress on a whiteboard, some use our bug tracker, others use different methods. It all depends on what the team members think will work best for them to get the best result at the end. From that point, the project proceeds as you would expect; code gets written, tests pass and fail, discussions about how to resolve various problems are had and decided upon, and out pops a new product, new point release, new internal tool, or whatever the project's goal was. The project manager ensures that everyone works together without too much bloodshed and that thrown missiles are constrained to Nerf bullets, the developers write the code, the testers ensure it actually works, and the tech author and UX designer ensure that people will be able to use the final product to solve their problem (after all, developers make lousy UI designers and technical authors). Projects in Red Gate last a relatively short amount of time; most projects are less than 6 months. The longest was 18 months. This has evolved as the company has grown, and I suspect is a side effect of the type of software Red Gate produces. As an ISV, we sell packaged software; we only get revenue when customers purchase the ready-made tools. As a result, we only get a sellable piece of software right at the end of a project. Therefore, the longer the project lasts, the more time and money has to be invested by the company before we get any revenue from it, and the riskier the project becomes. This drives the average project time down. Small project teams are the core of how Red Gate produces software, and are what the whole development effort of the company is built around. In my next post, I'll be looking at the office itself, and how all 200 of us manage to fit on two floors of a small office building.

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• Java2Days 2012 Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  Java2Days 2012 was held in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria on October 25-26. For those of you not familiar with it, this is the third installment of the premier Java conference for the Balkan region. It is an excellent effort by admirable husband and wife team Emo Abadjiev and Iva Abadjieva as well as the rest of the Java2Days team including Yoana Ivanova and Nadia Kostova. Thanks to their hard work, the conference continues to grow vigorously with almost a thousand enthusiastic, bright young people attending this year and no less than three tracks on Java, the Cloud and Mobile. The conference is a true gem in this region of the world and I am very proud to have been a part of it again, along with the other world class speakers the event rightfully attracts. It was my honor to present the first talk of the conference. It was a full-house session on Java EE 7 and 8 titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". The talk was primarily along the same lines as Arun Gupta's JavaOne 2012 technical keynote. I covered the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JCache, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1 and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possible contents of Java EE 8. My stretch goal was to gather some feedback on some open issues in the Java EE EG (more on that soon) but I ran out of time in the short format forty-five minute session. The talk was received well and I had some pretty good discussions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from reza_rahman To my delight, the Java2Days folks were very interested in my domain-driven design/Java EE 6 talk (titled "Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6"). I've had this talk in my inventory for a long time now but it always gets overridden by less theoretical talks on APIs, tools, etc. The talk has three parts -- a brief overview of DDD theory, mapping DDD to Java EE and actual running DDD code in Java EE 6/GlassFish. For the demo, I converted the well-known DDD sample application (http://dddsample.sourceforge.net/) written mostly in Spring 2 and Hibernate 2 to Java EE 6. My eventual plan is to make the code available via a top level java.net project. Even despite the broad topic and time constraints, the talk went very well. It was a full house, the Q & A was excellent and one of the other speakers even told me they thought this was the best talk of the conference! The slides for the talk are here: Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6 from Reza Rahman The code examples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/reza/resource/dddsample.zip for now, as a simple zip file. Give me a shout if you would like to get it up and running. It was also a great honor to present the last session of the conference. It was a talk on the Java API for WebSocket/JSR 356 titled "Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 and GlassFish". The talk is based on Danny Coward's JavaOne 2012 talk. The talk covers the basic of WebSocket, the JSR 356 API and a simple demo using Tyrus/GlassFish. The talk went very well and there were some very good questions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with GlassFish and JSR 356 from Reza Rahman The code samples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/resource/totd183-HelloWebSocket.zip. You'll need the latest promoted GlassFish 4 build to run the code. Give me a shout if you need help. Besides presenting my talks, I got to attend some great sessions on OSGi, HTML5, cloud, agile and Java 8. I got an invite to speak at the Macedonia JUG when possible. Victor Grazi of InfoQ wrote about my sessions and Java2Days here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/Java2DaysConference. Stoyan Rachev was very kind to blog about my sessions here: http://www.stoyanr.com/2012/11/java2days-2012-java-ee.html. I definitely enjoyed Java2Days 2012 and hope to be part of the conference next year!

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• What Counts For A DBA: Foresight

  - by drsql

  Of all the valuable attributes of a DBA covered so far in this series, ranging from passion to humility to practicality, perhaps one of the most important attributes may turn out to be the most seemingly-nebulous: foresight. According to Free Dictionary foresight is the "perception of the significance and nature of events before they have occurred". Foresight does not come naturally to most people, as the parent of any teenager will attest. No matter how clearly you see their problems coming they won't listen, and have to fail before eventually (hopefully) learning for themselves. Having graduated from the school of hard knocks, the DBA, the naive teenager no longer, acquires the ability to foretell how events will unfold in response to certain actions or attitudes with the unerring accuracy of a doom-laden prophet. Like Simba in the Lion King, after a few blows to the head, we foretell that a sore head that will be the inevitable consequence of a swing of Rafiki's stick, and we take evasive action. However, foresight is about more than simply learning when to duck. It's about taking the time to understand and prevent the habits that caused the stick to swing in the first place. And based on this definition, I often think there is a lot less foresight on display in my industry than there ought to be. Most DBAs reading this blog will spot a line such as the following in a piece of "working" code, understand immediately why it is less than optimimum, and take evasive action. …WHERE CAST (columnName as int) = 1 However, the programmers who regularly write this sort of code clearly lack that foresight, and this and numerous other examples of similarly-malodorous code prevail throughout our industry (and provide premium-grade fertilizer for the healthy growth of many a consultant's bank account). Sometimes, perhaps harried by impatient managers and painfully tight deadlines, everyone makes mistakes. Yes, I too occasionally write code that "works", but basically stinks. When the problems manifest, it is sometimes accompanied by a sense of grim recognition that somewhere in me existed the foresight to know that that approach would lead to this problem. However, in the headlong rush, warning signs got overlooked, lessons learned previously, which could supply the foresight to the current project, were lost and not applied.   Of course, the problem often is a simple lack of skills, training and knowledge in the relevant technology and/or business space; programmers and DBAs forced to do their best in the face of inadequate training, or to apply their skills in areas where they lack experience. However, often the problem goes deeper than this; I detect in some DBAs and programmers a certain laziness of attitude.   They veer from one project to the next, going with "whatever works", unwilling or unable to take the time to understand where their actions are leading them. Of course, the whole "Agile" mindset is often interpreted to favor flexibility and rapid production over aiming to get things right the first time. The faster you try to travel in the dark, frequently changing direction, the more important it is to have someone who has the foresight to know at least roughly where you are heading. This is doubly true for the data tier which, no matter how you try to deny it, simply cannot be "redone" every month as you learn aspects of the world you are trying to model that, with a little bit of foresight, you would have seen coming.   Sometimes, when as a DBA you can glance briefly at 200 lines of working SQL code and know instinctively why it will cause problems, foresight can feel like magic, but it isn't; it's more like muscle memory. It is acquired as the consequence of good experience, useful communication with those around you, and a willingness to learn continually, through continued education as well as from failure. Foresight can be deployed only by finding time to understand how the lessons learned from other DBAs, and other projects, can help steer the current project in the right direction.   C.S. Lewis once said "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." It cannot be avoided; the quality of what you build now is going to affect you, and others, at some point in the future. Take the time to acquire foresight; it is a love letter to your future self, to say you cared.

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• Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

  - by Gagan Chawla

  Note – Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c DBaaS is platform agnostic and is designed to work on Exadata/non-Exadata, physical/virtual, Oracle/non Oracle platforms and it’s not a mandatory requirement to use Exadata as the base platform. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important trend these days and the top business drivers motivating customers towards private database cloud model include constant pressure to reduce IT Costs and Complexity, and also to be able to improve Agility and Quality of Service. The first step many enterprises take in their journey towards cloud computing is to move to a consolidated and standardized environment and Exadata being already a proven best-in-class popular consolidation platform, we are seeing now more and more customers starting to evolve from Exadata based platform into an agile self service driven private database cloud using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Together Exadata Database Machine and Enterprise Manager 12c provides industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution to transform from a typical silo’ed environment into enterprise class database cloud with self service, rapid elasticity and pay-per-use capabilities.   In today’s post, I’ll list down the important steps to enable DBaaS on Exadata using Enterprise Manager 12c. These steps are chalked down based on a recent DBaaS implementation from a real customer engagement - Project Planning - First step involves defining the scope of implementation, mapping functional requirements and objectives to use cases, defining high availability, network, security requirements, and delivering the project plan. In a Cloud project you plan around technology, business and processes all together so ensure you engage your actual end users and stakeholders early on in the project right from the scoping and planning stage. Setup your EM 12c Cloud Control Site – Once the project plan approval and sign off from stakeholders is achieved, refer to EM 12c Install guide and these are some important tips to follow during the site setup phase - Review the new EM 12c Sizing paper before you get started with install Cloud, Chargeback and Trending, Exadata plug ins should be selected to deploy during install Refer to EM 12c Administrator’s guide for High Availability, Security, Network/Firewall best practices and options Your management and managed infrastructure should not be combined i.e. EM 12c repository should not be hosted on same Exadata where target Database Cloud is to be setup Setup Roles and Users – Cloud Administrator (EM_CLOUD_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service Administrator (EM_SSA_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service User (EM_SSA_USER) are the important roles required for cloud lifecycle management. Roles and users are managed by Super Administrator via Setup menu –> Security option. For Self Service/SSA users custom role(s) based on EM_SSA_USER should be created and EM_USER, PUBLIC roles should be revoked during SSA user account creation. Configure Software Library – Cloud Administrator logs in and in this step configures software library via Enterprise menu –> provisioning and patching option and the storage location is OMS shared filesystem. Software Library is the centralized repository that stores all software entities and is often termed as ‘local store’. Setup Self Update – Self Update is one of the most innovative and cool new features in EM 12c framework. Self update can be accessed via Setup -> Extensibility option by Super Administrator and is the unified delivery mechanism to get all new and updated entities (Agent software, plug ins, connectors, gold images, provisioning bundles etc) in EM 12c. Deploy Agents on all Compute nodes, and discover Exadata targets – Refer to Exadata discovery cookbook for detailed walkthrough to ensure successful discovery of Exadata targets. Configure Privilege Delegation Settings – This step involves deployment of privilege setting template on all the nodes by Super Administrator via Setup menu -> Security option with the option to define whether to use sudo or powerbroker for all provisioning and patching operations. Provision Grid Infrastructure with RAC Database on Compute Nodes – Software is provisioned in this step via a provisioning profile using EM 12c database provisioning. In case of Exadata, Grid Infrastructure and RAC Database software is already deployed on compute nodes via OneCommand from Oracle, so SSA Administrator just needs to discover Oracle Homes and Listener as EM targets. Databases will be created as and when users request for databases from cloud. Customize Create Database Deployment Procedure – the actual database creation steps are "templatized" in this step by Self Service Administrator and the newly saved deployment procedure will be used during service template creation in next step. This is an important step and make sure you have locked all the required variables marked as locked as ‘Y’ in this table. Setup Self Service Portal – This step involves setting up of zones, user quotas, service templates, chargeback plan. The SSA portal is setup by Self Service Administrator via Setup menu -> Cloud -> Database option and following guided workflow. Refer to DBaaS cookbook for details. You also have an option to customize SSA login page via steps documented in EM 12c Cloud Administrator’s guide Final Checks – Define and document process guidelines for SSA users and administrators. Get your SSA users trained on Self Service Portal features and overall DBaaS model and SSA administrators should be familiar with Self Service Portal setup pieces, EM 12c database lifecycle management capabilities and overall EM 12c monitoring framework. GO LIVE – Announce rollout of Database-as-a-Service to your SSA users. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and request/monitor/view their databases in Exadata based database cloud. Congratulations! You just delivered a successful database cloud implementation project! In future posts, we will cover these additional useful topics around database cloud – DBaaS Implementation tips and tricks – right from setup to self service to managing the cloud lifecycle ‘How to’ enable real production databases copies in DBaaS with rapid provisioning in database cloud Case study of a customer who recently achieved success with their transformational journey from traditional silo’ed environment on to Exadata based database cloud using Enterprise Manager 12c. More Information – Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Exadata Discovery Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

  - by Greg Malcolm

  I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

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• Easing the Journey to the Private Cloud with Oracle Consulting

  - by MichaelM-Oracle

  By Sanjai Marimadaiah, Senior Director, Strategy & Business Development – Cloud Solutions, Oracle Consulting Services Business leaders are now leading the charge on how their firms can profit from cloud solutions. Agility and innovation are becoming the primary drivers of the business case for the cloud, even more than the anticipated cost savings. Leaders need to find the right strategy and optimize the use of cloud-based applications across their enterprise-computing infrastructure. The Problem – Current State With prevalent IT practices, many organizations find that they run multiple IT solutions serving similar business needs. This has led to the proliferation of technology stacks, for example: Oracle 10g on Sun T4 running Solaris 9; Oracle 11g on Exadata running Linux; or Oracle 12c on commodity x86 servers. This variance has a huge impact on an organization’s agility and expenses, and requires IT professionals with varied skills as well as on-going training for different systems and tools. Fortunately there is a practical business strategy to overcome this unneeded redundancy. Thus begins a journey to the right cloud computing solution. The Solution – Cloud Services from Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) Oracle Consulting Services (OCS ) works closely with our clients as trusted advisors to proactively respond to business needs and IT concerns. OCS understands that making the transition to cloud solutions begins with a strategic conversation, based on its deep expertise for successfully completing private cloud service engagements with several companies. For a journey to the cloud, Oracle Consulting Services leads the client through four phases– standardization, consolidation, service delivery, and enterprise cloud – to achieve optimal returns. Phase 1 - Standardization Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) works with clients to evaluate their business requirements and propose a set of standard solutions stacks for various IT solutions. This is an opportune time to evaluate cloud ready solutions, such as Oracle 12c, Oracle Exadata, and the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). The OCS consultants, together with the delivery team, then turn to upgrading and migrating existing solution stacks to standardized offerings. OCS has the expertise and tools to complete this stage in a fraction of the time required by other IT services companies. Clients quickly realize cost savings in tools, processes, and type/number of resources required. This standardization also improves agility of the IT organizations and their abilities to respond to the needs of various business units. Phase 2 - Consolidation During the consolidation phase, OCS consultants programmatically consolidate hundreds of databases into a smaller number of servers to improve utilization, reduce floor space, and optimize maintenance costs. Consolidation helps clients realize huge savings in CapEx investments and shrink OpEx costs. The use of engineered systems, such as Oracle Exadata, greatly reduces the client’s risk of moving to a new solution stack. OCS recommends clients to pursue Phase 1 (Standardization) and Phase 2 (Consolidation) simultaneously to reduce the overall time, effort, and expense of the cloud journey. Phase 3 - Service Delivery Once a client is on a path of standardization and consolidation, OCS consultants create Service Catalogues based on the SLAs requirements and the criticality of the solutions. The number and types of Service Catalogues (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, etc.) vary from client to client. OCS consultants also implement a variety of value-added cloud solutions, including monitoring, metering, and charge-back solutions. At this stage, clients are able to achieve a high level of understanding in their cloud journey. Their IT organizations are operating efficiently and are more agile in responding to the needs of business units. Phase 4 - Enterprise Cloud In the final phase of the cloud journey, the economics of the IT organizations change. Business units can request services on-demand; applications can be deployed and consumed on a pay-as-you-go model. OCS has the expertise and capabilities to establish processes, programs, and solutions required for IT organizations to transform how they interact with business units. The Promise of Cloud Solutions Depending the size and complexity of their business model, some clients are able to abbreviate some phases of their cloud journey. Cloud solutions are still evolving and there is rapid pace of innovation to transform how IT organizations operate. The lesson is clear. Cloud solutions hold a lot of promise for business agility. Business leaders can now leverage an additional set of capabilities and services. They can ramp up their pace of innovation. With cloud maturity, they can compete more effectively in their respective markets. But there are certainly challenges ahead. A skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help clients succeed on their journey to the cloud.

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• Seizing the Moment with Mobility

  - by Divya Malik

  Empowering people to work where they want to work is becoming more critical now with the consumerisation of technology. Employees are bringing their own devices to the workplace and expecting to be productive wherever they are. Sales people welcome the ability to run their critical business applications where they can be most effective which is typically on the road and when they are still with the customer. Oracle has invested many years of research in understanding customer's Mobile requirements. “The keys to building the best user experience were building in a lot of flexibility in ways to support sales, and being useful,” said Arin Bhowmick, Director, CRM, for the Applications UX team. “We did that by talking to and analyzing the needs of a lot of people in different roles.” The team studied real-life sales teams. “We wanted to study salespeople in context with their work,” Bhowmick said. “We studied all user types in the CRM world because we wanted to build a user interface and user experience that would cater to sales representatives, marketing managers, sales managers, and more. Not only did we do studies in our labs, but also we did studies in the field and in mobile environments because salespeople are always on the go.” Here is a recent post from Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps which was featured on the Oracle Applications Blog.  Mobile devices are forcing a paradigm shift in the workplace – they’re changing the way businesses can do business and the type of cultures they can nurture. As our customers talk about their mobile needs, we hear them saying they want instant-on access to enterprise data so workers can be more effective at their jobs anywhere, anytime. They also are interested in being more cost effective from an IT point of view. The mobile revolution – with the idea of BYOD (bring your own device) – has added an interesting dynamic because previously IT was driving the employee device strategy and ecosystem. That's been turned on its head with the consumerization of IT. Now employees are figuring out how to use their personal devices for work purposes and IT has to figure out how to adapt. Blurring the Lines between Work and Personal Life My vision of where businesses will be five years from now is that our work lives and personal lives will be more interwoven together. In turn, enterprises will have to determine how to make employees’ work lives fit more into the fabric of their personal lives. And personal devices like smartphones are going to drive significant business value because they let us accomplish things very incrementally. I can be sitting on a train or in a taxi and be productive. At the end of any meeting, I can capture ideas and tasks or follow up with people in real time. Mobile devices enable this notion of seizing the moment – capitalizing on opportunities that might otherwise have slipped away because we're not connected. For the industry shapers out there, this is game changing. The lean and agile workforce is definitely the future. This notion of the board sitting down with the executive team to lay out strategic objectives for a three- to five-year plan, bringing in HR to determine how they're going to staff the strategic activities, kicking off the execution, and then revisiting the plan in three to five years to create another three- to five-year plan is yesterday's model. Businesses that continue to approach innovating in that way are in the dinosaur age. Today it's about incremental planning and incremental execution, which requires a lot of cohesion and synthesis within the workforce. There needs to be this interweaving notion within the workforce about how ideas cascade down, how people engage, how they stay connected, and how insights are shared. How to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Marketplace The notion of Facebook isn’t new. We lived it pre-Internet days with America Online and Prodigy – Facebook is just the renaissance of these services in a more viral and pervasive way. And given the trajectory of the consumerization of IT with people bringing their personal tooling to work, the enterprise has no option but to adapt. The sooner that businesses realize this from a top-down point of view the sooner that they will be able to really drive significant innovation and adapt to the marketplace. There are a small number of companies right now (I think it's closer to 20% rather than 80%, but the number is expanding) that are able to really innovate in this incremental marketplace. So from a competitive point of view, there's no choice but to be social and stay connected. By far the majority of users on Facebook and LinkedIn are mobile users – people on iPhones, smartphones, Android phones, and tablets. It's not the couch people, right? It's the on-the-go people – those people at the coffee shops. Usually when you're sitting at your desk on a big desktop computer, typically you have better things to do than to be on Facebook. This is a topic I'm extremely passionate about because I think mobile devices are game changing. Mobility delivers significant value to businesses – it also brings dramatic simplification from a functional point of view and transforms our work life experience. Hernan Capdevila Vice President, Oracle Applications Development

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• Private Cloud: Putting some method behind the madness

  - by Sudip Datta

  Finally, I decided to join the blogging community. And what could be a better time to start than the week after OpenWorld 2012. 50K+ attendees, demonstrations, speaker sessions and a whole lot of buzz on Oracle Cloud..It was raining clouds in this year's Openworld. I am not here to write about Oracle's cloud strategy in general, but on Enterprise Manager's cloud management capabilities. This year's Openworld was the first after we announced the 12c Cloud Control and we were happy to share the stage with quite a few early adopters. Stay tuned for videos from our customers and partners, I will post them as they get published. I met a number of platform administrators in Oracle-DBAs, Middleware Admins, SOA Admins...The cloud has affected them all, at least to the point where it beckoned more than just curiosity..Most IT infrastructure are already heavily virtualized (on VMWare and on others including Oracle VM), and some would claim they are already on “cloud” (at least their Sysadmins told them so). But none of them were confident of the benefits because their pain points continued to grow.. Isn't cloud supposed to ease those? Instead, they were chasing hundreds of databases running on hundreds of VMs, often with as much certainty propounded by Heisenberg. What happened to the age-old IT discipline around administration, compliance, configuration management? VMs are great for what they are. I personally think they have opened the doors to new approaches in which an application stack gets provisioned and updated. In fact, Enterprise Manager 12c is possibly the only tool out there that can provision full-fledged application as VM Assemblies. In this year's Openworld, customers talked on how they provisioned RAC and Siebel assemblies, which as the techies out there know, are not trivial (hearing provisioning time for Siebel down from weeks to hours was gratifying indeed). However, I do have an issue with a "one-size fits all" approach to cloud. In a week's span, I met several personas: Project owners requiring an EC2 like VM instance for their projects Admins needing the same for Sparc-Solaris. DBAs requiring dedicated databases for new projects APEX Developers needing just a ready-to-consume schema as a service Java Developers looking for a runtime platform QA engineers needing a fast clone of their production environment If you drill down further, you will end up peeling more layers of the details. For example, the requirements for Load testing and Functional testing are very different. For Load testing the test environment should ideally be the same as the production. You shouldn't run production on Exadata and load test on a VM; they will just not be good representations of one another. For Functional testing it does not possibly matter. DBAs seem to be at the worst affected of the lot. It seems they have been asked to choose between agile provisioning and  faster runtime performance. And in some cases, it is really a Hobson's choice, because their infrastructure provider made no distinction between the OLTP application and the Virtual desktop! Sad indeed. When one looks at the portfolio of services that we already offer (vanilla IaaS, VM Assembly based PaaS, DBaaS) or have announced (Java PaaS, Instant Cloning, Schema-aaS), one can possibly think that we are trying to be the "renaissance man" ! Well I would have possibly digested that had it not been for the various personas that I described above. Getting the use cases right is very important for an application such as cloud management. We iterate and iterate over these over and over again and re-validate them in CABs (Customer Advisory Boards). We consider over the major aspects of tenancy: service placement, resource isolation (can a tenant execute an expensive SQL and run away with all the resources), quota and security. We, in Engineering, keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with enterprise clouds. We owe it to our customer base ! In the coming posts, I will drill down more into each of the services. In the meanwhile, here are some collateral and  demos for starters with EM 12c. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/cloud-mgmt/index.html Sudip Datta The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter --

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• Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In

  - by yaldahhakim

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power. Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud. Cloud computing is more than just consuming an "application as service", and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud is about making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn't seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing something. Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on premise applications. This is where a shared services  platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.) Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain. Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way. In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social, mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across business processes. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.

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• Lessons learnt in implementing Scrum in a Large Organization that has traditional values

  - by MarkPearl

  I recently had the experience of being involved in a “test” scrum implementation in a large organization that was used to a traditional project management approach. Here are some lessons that I learnt from it. Don’t let the Project Manager be the Product Owner First lesson learnt is to identify the correct product owner – in this instance the product manager assumed the role of the product owner which was a mistake. The product owner is the one who has the most to loose if the project fails. With a methodology that advocates removing the role of the project manager from the process then it is not in the interests of the person who is employed as a project manager to be the product owner – in fact they have the most to gain should the project fail. Know the time commitments of team members to the Project Second lesson learnt is to get a firm time commitment of the members on a team for the sprint and to hold them to it. In this project instance many of the issues we faced were with team members having to double up on supporting existing projects/systems and the scrum project. In many situations they just didn’t get round to doing any work on the scrum project for several days while they tried to meet other commitments. Initially this was not made transparent to the team – in stand up team members would say that had done some work but would be very vague on how much time they had actually spent using the blackhole of their other legacy projects as an excuse – putting up a time burn down chart made time allocations transparent and easy to hold the team to. In addition, how can you plan for a sprint without knowing the actual time available of the members – when I mean actual time, the exercise of getting them to go through all their appointments and lunch times and breaks and removing them from their time commitment helps get you to a realistic time that they can dedicate. Make sure you meet your minimum team sizes In a recent post I wrote about the difference between a partnership and a team. If you are going to do scrum in a large organization make sure you have a minimum team size of at least 3 developers. My experience with larger organizations is that people have a tendency to be sick more, take more leave and generally not be around – if you have a team size of two it is so easy to loose momentum on the project – the more people you have in the team (up to about 9) the more the momentum the project will have when people are not around. Swapping from one methodology to another can seem as waste to the customer It sounds bad, but most customers don’t care what methodology you use. Often they have bought into the “big plan upfront”. If you can, avoid taking a project on midstream from a traditional approach unless the customer has not bought into the process – with this particular project they had a detailed upfront planning breakaway with the customer using the traditional approach and then before the project started we moved onto a scrum implementation – this seemed as waste to the customer. We should have managed the customers expectation properly. Don’t play the role of the scrum master if you can’t be the scrum master With this particular implementation I was the “scrum master”. But all I did was go through the process of the formal meetings of scrum – I attended stand up, retrospectives and planning – but I was not hands on the ground. I was not performing the most important role of removing blockages – and by the end of the project there were a number of blockages “cropping up”. What could have been a better approach was to take someone on the team and train them to be the scrum master and be present to coach them. Alternatively actually be on the team on a fulltime basis and be the scrum master. By just going through the meetings of scrum didn’t mean we were doing scrum. So we failed with this one, if you fail look at it from an agile perspective As this particular project drew to a close and it became more and more apparent that it was not going to succeed the failure of it became depressing. Emotions were expressed by various people on the team that we not encouraging and enforced the failure. Embracing the failure and looking at it for what it is instead of taking it as the end of the world can change how you grow from the experience. Acknowledging that it failed and then focussing on learning from why and how to avoid the failure in the future can change how you feel emotionally about the team, the project and the organization.

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• Ubuntu: Failure to login with multiple video adapters

  - by tsilb

  Forgive my ignorance, for I am a complete linux noob. I have a computer with three video cards and six monitors. Works great on Windows. Trying to get it to run Ubuntu as well. It loads fine when I have it configured to run on one adapter; detects both screens, runs ok. But I want to turn the other 4 monitors on and run the whole thing as one extended desktop (one session, etc). So I downloaded and installed the newest ATI driver for Linux, which seems to work, kinda. I ran this to set up the screens: aticonfig --adapter=all --initial -f Now when I boot, Ubuntu seems to turn on all the screens (3 viewports, each with two cloned displays from what I can tell). When I enter my login info OR move the mouse off the main screen, the screens freeze and the kbd/ms become unresponsive. aticonfig generated xorg.conf included below. Have tried the following: aticonfig -initial -f - works, but only detects the primary adapter and 2 screens aticccle - Tells me I have to reboot after enabling the other cards. Then goes into above described freezing state. aticonfig --adapter=all --initial -f - see above Manually editing xorg.conf file with my limited knowledge - Was able to get two adapters running, but only the second adapter initialized while the primary stopped at the Ubuntu boot screen. Was unable to see the login prompt. Froze after I logged in blindly (was able to hear the login sound). Using generic "radeon" driver instead of ATI Proprietary driver with the above init attempts Toggling xinerama Various combinations of the above Hardware: Intel Core 2 Quad q6600 8GB DDR2 (3x) ATI Radeon HD 4680 5 monitors (21W, 21W, 22W Portrait, 22W Portrait, 19")and an HDTV (26"W, HDMI) in a horizontal arrangement I know next to nothing about Linux/Ubuntu aside from basic filesystem navigation, editing text files, and accessing my local and networked Windows stores and shares. Basically this is the most advanced thing I've had to do. I installed today. Please advise how to make this configuration work. my xorg.conf: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0 Screen "aticonfig-Screen[1]-0" RightOf "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" Screen "aticonfig-Screen[2]-0" RightOf "aticonfig-Screen[1]-0" Option "RenderAccel" "true" Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "Module" EndSection Section "ServerFlags" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0" Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver" Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor" Option "DPMS" "true" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[1]-0" Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver" Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor" Option "DPMS" "true" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[2]-0" Option "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver" Option "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor" Option "DPMS" "true" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0" Driver "fglrx" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "aticonfig-Device[1]-0" Driver "fglrx" BusID "PCI:3:0:0" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "aticonfig-Device[2]-0" Driver "fglrx" BusID "PCI:4:0:0" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0" Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[1]-0" Device "aticonfig-Device[1]-0" Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[1]-0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[2]-0" Device "aticonfig-Device[2]-0" Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[2]-0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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• Initial Cisco ASA 5510 Config

  - by Brendan ODonnell

  Fair warning, I'm a but of a noob so please bear with me. I'm trying to set up a new ASA 5510. I have a pretty simple set up with one /24 on the inside NATed to a DHCP address on the outside. Everything on the inside works and I can ping the outside interface from external devices. No matter what I do I can't get anything internal to route across the border to the outside and back. To try and eliminate ACL issues as a possibility I added permit any any rules to the incoming access lists on the inside and outside interfaces. I'd appreciate any help I can get. Here's the sh run. : Saved : ASA Version 8.4(3) ! hostname gateway domain-name xxx.local enable password xxx encrypted passwd xxx encrypted names ! interface Ethernet0/0 nameif outside security-level 0 ip address dhcp setroute ! interface Ethernet0/1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 ! interface Ethernet0/2 shutdown no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface Ethernet0/3 shutdown no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface Management0/0 nameif management security-level 100 ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 management-only ! ftp mode passive dns domain-lookup inside dns server-group DefaultDNS name-server 10.x.x.x domain-name xxx.local same-security-traffic permit inter-interface same-security-traffic permit intra-interface object network inside-network subnet 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 object-group protocol TCPUDP protocol-object udp protocol-object tcp access-list outside_access_in extended permit ip any any access-list inside_access_in extended permit ip any any pager lines 24 logging enable logging buffered informational logging asdm informational mtu management 1500 mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1500 no failover icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 icmp permit any inside icmp permit any outside no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 ! object network inside-network nat (any,outside) dynamic interface access-group inside_access_in in interface inside access-group outside_access_in in interface outside timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout pat-xlate 0:00:30 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute timeout tcp-proxy-reassembly 0:01:00 timeout floating-conn 0:00:00 dynamic-access-policy-record DfltAccessPolicy user-identity default-domain LOCAL aaa authentication ssh console LOCAL aaa authentication http console LOCAL http server enable http 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 management http 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 inside http authentication-certificate management http authentication-certificate inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart warmstart telnet timeout 5 ssh 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 management ssh 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 inside ssh timeout 5 ssh version 2 console timeout 0 dhcp-client client-id interface outside dhcpd address 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254 management dhcpd enable management ! threat-detection basic-threat threat-detection statistics access-list no threat-detection statistics tcp-intercept webvpn username xxx password xxx encrypted ! class-map inspection_default match default-inspection-traffic ! ! policy-map type inspect dns preset_dns_map parameters message-length maximum client auto message-length maximum 512 policy-map global_policy class inspection_default inspect dns preset_dns_map inspect ftp inspect h323 h225 inspect h323 ras inspect rsh inspect rtsp inspect esmtp inspect sqlnet inspect skinny inspect sunrpc inspect xdmcp inspect sip inspect netbios inspect tftp inspect ip-options inspect icmp ! service-policy global_policy global prompt hostname context no call-home reporting anonymous Cryptochecksum:fe19874e18fe7107948eb0ada6240bc2 : end no asdm history enable

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• VirtualBox - Public Static IP for a Debian Guest on a Dedicated Server

  - by user86296

  Goal: I want to run a Debian-squeeze-Guest in VirtualBox and it's own public static ip. I found tons of threads about this topic, but all in all I'm now trying for 10 hours (reading the manual, the forums, trying to learn about networking concepts & commands) to give a Guest his own public static ip (so that the Guest is similar to a vServer you can order from a hosting company), but wasn't able to. Since I'm a big noob as far as networking stuff is concerned, I'm probably doing something wrong.(please bear with me :-) ) Situation: VirtualBox 4.0.10 (headless no gui) is running on a dedicated Debian-Server, the Guest OS is Debian as well. The server has a static ip and I ordered an additional ip for a VM. Problem description: Upto now I was able to use NAT to access the VM from the outside and to setup an internal network between several Guests and all of this worked very well. When setting NIC 1 to bridged and configuring a public static ip on the guest, the guest was unpingable. (neither from outside, nor from the host) I could connect to the guest via the internal network, from another vm, though. ( VBoxManage controlvm VMGuest nic1 bridged eth0 ) ( configuration attempt of static-ip on the guest '/etc/network/interfaces' is below) Please let me know what I'm doing wrong, or what I can try to get it to work, or if you need more info. I think I've read that with a current VirtualBox-version for bridged networking no special host-configuration is necessary, is that accurate, or might that be the problem? Additional Info Info I got from the hosting company about the additional IP Please note that you can use the IP address only for this server. IP: 46.4.xx.xx Gateway: 46.4.xx.xx Mask: 255.255.255.248 VBoxManage showvminfo VMGuest |less ... NIC 1: MAC: 080027D72F7B, Attachment: Bridged Interface 'eth0', Cable connected: on, Trace: off (file: none), Type: 82540EM, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0 NIC 2: MAC: 080027B03B75, Attachment: Internal Network 'InternalNet1', Cable connected: on, Trace: off (file: none), Type: Am79C973, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0 NIC 3: disabled (...rest is disabled) cat /etc/network/interfaces on the Host-machine # Loopback device: auto lo iface lo inet loopback # device: eth0 auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 46.4.xx.xx broadcast 46.4.xx.xx netmask 255.255.255.224 gateway 46.4.xx.xx post-up mii-tool -F 100baseTx-FD eth0 # default route to access subnet up route add -net 46.4.xx.xx netmask 255.255.255.224 gw 46.4.xx.xx eth0 cat /etc/network/interfaces on the Guest-VM # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface allow-hotplug eth0 auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 46.4.xx.xx netmask 255.255.255.248 gateway 46.4.xx.xx auto eth1 iface eth1 inet dhcp ifconfig -a on the Guest shows the correct static ip for eth0 but the Guest is unreachable "over eth0" eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:00:27:d7:2f:7b inet addr:46.4.xx.xx Bcast:46.4.xx.xx Mask:255.255.255.248 inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fed7:2f7b/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:21 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:69 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:1260 (1.2 KiB) TX bytes:3114 (3.0 KiB) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:00:27:b0:3b:75 inet addr:192.168.10.3 Bcast:192.168.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:feb0:3b75/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:142 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:92 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:15962 (15.5 KiB) TX bytes:14540 (14.1 KiB) Interrupt:16 Base address:0xd240 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:123 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:123 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:25156 (24.5 KiB) TX bytes:25156 (24.5 KiB)

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• Hard drive mounted at / , duplicate mounted hard drive after using MountManager

  - by HellHarvest

  possible duplicate post I'm running 12.04 64bit. My system is a dual boot for both Ubuntu and Windows7. Both operating systems are sharing the drive named "Elements". My volume named "Elements" is a 1TB SATA NTFS hard drive that shows up twice in the side bar in nautilus. One of the icons is functional and even has the convenient "eject" icon next to it. Below is a picture of the left menu in Nautilus, with System Monitor-File Systems tab open on top of it. Can someone advise me about how to get rid of this extra icon? I think the problem is much more deep-rooted than just a GUI glitch on Nautilus' part. The other icon does nothing but spit out the following error when I click on it (image below). This only happened AFTER I tried using Mount Manager to automate mounting the drive at start up. I've already uninstalled Mount Manager, and restarted, but the problem didn't go away. The hard drive does mount automatically now, so I guess that's cool. But now, every time I boot up now and open Nautilus, BOTH of these icons appear, one of which is fictitious and useless. According to the image above and the outputs of several other commands, it appears to be mounted at / In which case, no matter where I am in Nautilus when I try to click on that icon, of course it will tell me that that drive is in use by another program... Nautilus. I'm afraid of trying to unmount this hard drive (sdb6) because of where it appears to be mounted. I'm kind of a noob, and I have this gut feeling that tells me trying to unmount a drive at / will destroy my entire file system. This fear was further strengthened by the output of "$ fsck" at the very bottom of this post. Error immediately below when that 2nd "Elements" hard drive is clicked in Nautilus: Unable to mount Elements Mount is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened. The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command. It's odd to me that that error message above claims that it's an NTFS volume when everything else tell me that it's an ext4 volume. The actual hard drive "Elements" is in fact an NTFS volume. Here's the output of a few commands and configuration files that may be of interest: $ fuser -a / /: 2120r 2159rc 2160rc 2172r 2178rc 2180rc 2188r 2191rc 2200rc 2203rc 2205rc 2206r 2211r 2212r 2214r 2220r 2228r 2234rc 2246rc 2249rc 2254rc 2260rc 2261r 2262r 2277rc 2287rc 2291rc 2311rc 2313rc 2332rc 2334rc 2339rc 2343rc 2344rc 2352rc 2372rc 2389rc 2422r 2490r 2496rc 2501rc 2566r 2573rc 2581rc 2589rc 2592r 2603r 2611rc 2613rc 2615rc 2678rc 2927r 2981r 3104rc 4156rc 4196rc 4206rc 4213rc 4240rc 4297rc 5032rc 7609r 7613r 7648r 9593rc 18829r 18833r 19776r $ sudo df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb6 496G 366G 106G 78% / udev 2.0G 4.0K 2.0G 1% /dev tmpfs 791M 1.5M 790M 1% /run none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none 2.0G 672K 2.0G 1% /run/shm /dev/sda1 932G 312G 620G 34% /media/Elements /home/solderblob/.Private 496G 366G 106G 78% /home/solderblob /dev/sdb2 188G 100G 88G 54% /media/A2B24EACB24E852F /dev/sdb1 100M 25M 76M 25% /media/System Reserved $ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00093cab Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 1953519615 976758784 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT Disk /dev/sdb: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e8d9b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb2 206848 392378768 196085960+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb3 392380414 1465147391 536383489 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 1456762880 1465147391 4192256 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb6 392380416 1448374271 527996928 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 1448376320 1456758783 4191232 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order $ cat /etc/fstab # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> UUID=77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e / ext4 defaults 0 1 UUID=F6549CC4549C88CF /media/Elements ntfs-3g users 0 0 $ sudo blkid /dev/sda1: LABEL="Elements" UUID="F6549CC4549C88CF" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="5CDE130FDE12E156" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb2: UUID="A2B24EACB24E852F" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb6: UUID="77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e" TYPE="ext4" $ sudo blkid -c /dev/null (appears to be exactly the same as above) /dev/sda1: LABEL="Elements" UUID="F6549CC4549C88CF" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="System Reserved" UUID="5CDE130FDE12E156" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb2: UUID="A2B24EACB24E852F" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sdb6: UUID="77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e" TYPE="ext4" $ mount /dev/sdb6 on / type ext4 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/sda1 on /media/Elements type fuseblk (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) /home/solderblob/.Private on /home/solderblob type ecryptfs (ecryptfs_check_dev_ruid,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs,ecryptfs_sig=76a47b0175afa48d,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=391b2d8b155215f7) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/solderblob/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=solderblob) /dev/sdb2 on /media/A2B24EACB24E852F type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096) /dev/sdb1 on /media/System Reserved type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096) $ ls -a . A2B24EACB24E852F Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS amd64 .. Elements System Reserved $ cat /proc/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 udev /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=2013000k,nr_inodes=503250,mode=755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=809872k,mode=755 0 0 /dev/disk/by-uuid/77039a2a-83d4-47a1-8a8c-a2ec4e4dfd0e / ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 none /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0 none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,relatime 0 0 none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw,relatime 0 0 none /run/lock tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k 0 0 none /run/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime 0 0 /dev/sda1 /media/Elements fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 /home/solderblob/.Private /home/solderblob ecryptfs rw,relatime,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=391b2d8b155215f7,ecryptfs_sig=76a47b0175afa48d,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs 0 0 gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/solderblob/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000 0 0 /dev/sdb2 /media/A2B24EACB24E852F fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /media/System\040Reserved fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0 gvfs-fuse-daemon /root/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0 0 0 $ fsck fsck from util-linux 2.20.1 e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) /dev/sdb6 is mounted. WARNING!!! The filesystem is mounted. If you continue you ***WILL*** cause ***SEVERE*** filesystem damage. Do you really want to continue<n>? no check aborted.

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• WhatsApp &amp; Tasker for Android &ndash; Read &amp; Write messages

  - by Shaurya Anand

  So, I finally gave up on all my previous the Microsoft Mobile/Phone OS devices and made my switch to Android this year. I am using my Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 with CyanogenMod 9.1.0 (http://get.cm/get/jenkins/7086/cm-9.1.0-n7000.zip) and ClockworkMod 6.0.1.2 (http://download2.clockworkmod.com/recoveries/recovery-clockwork-6.0.1.2-n7000.zip) since August this year and I am so happy with the performance and the flexibility it offers me. As a software developer by profession, I would expect most of my gadget to be highly customizable and programmable (one time or at intervals) to suit my needs as close as it can. I was introduced to Automation for Android – Tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en) via reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/tasker) and the word ‘automation’ was enough for me to dive right into this app. Only automation that I did earlier was switching profiles depending on location on there phones. And now, just imagine a complete set of possibilities that can be automate on the phone or via the phone. I did my research and found a couple of other tools that do the same/as close as what Tasker can do and few of them are even free. There’s one even by Microsoft called on{X} (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.onx.app&hl=en). Microsoft’s on{X} really caught my eye. You can write code for your phone on the web application by them, deploy it on your phone and even trace the flow all using your PC. Really brilliant, I love the fact that it’s all JavaScript. Here comes the but, it is still very very young and it’s policy of accessing my News Feed on Facebook is not something that I can not digest. On{X} is good, but as I said earlier, the API is not very mature and hence, I gave up on it. I bought Tasker, the best 5,00 € I spent in ages and I want to talk about it in this post. I am still a “noob” while operating this tool, but I tried my shot at automating WhatsApp (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp&hl=en), a popular messenger for various platform. The requirement for the automation is that, if I send a WhatsApp ‘wru’ message to the phone, it should respond back giving the location and battery level of my phone. It could be useful, if you like to locate your misplaced phone or automatically reply to your partner/friend, honestly, I don’t know what you will use it - through this post, I am just introducing automating WhatsApp using Tasker. Before we begin, the following script only works when your phone is rooted as we will be accessing the WhatsApp database and type some special characters like ‘:’. Let’s follow the code line by line: Profile:         Location request from XYZ. (12) // Name of your profile. Event:         Notification [ Owner Application:WhatsApp Title:* ] // When a new notification comes from WhatsApp, this event is fired. Read the end note, if you face problems with Chrome app after enabling Tasker accessibility. Enter:         A1: Run Shell [ Command:sqlite3 // We will access the WhatsApp database and check if the message comes from designated phone number or not. We mustn’t reply to every message.                 /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db "SELECT _id, data FROM                  messages WHERE key_from_me='0' AND key_remote_jid LIKE '%XXXXXXXXXXX%' // Replace XXXXXXXXXXX with the phone number of your message sender.                 ORDER BY _id DESC LIMIT 1;" Timeout (Seconds):10 Use Root:On Store // I made a timeout for 10 seconds, if in case WhatsApp is busy accessing the database.                 Result In:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ] // Store the read Id and the last message on to the variable %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ         A2: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ~R .*[wW][rR][uU].* ] // Check if the pattern of the message is correct and we are all set to send the location.                 A3: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ !~ %WHATSAPP_LASTREQ ] // Verify that the message is different from the last request. Remember every message has a unique Id.                         A4: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request... Text:Sending location // Just a notification that the location message is being prepared.                                 to Krati Gupta... Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:On Priority:3 ] // Make a note it is a permanent notification, we will clear it later.                         A5: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Disabled // I am disabling the pattern lock, that I use using the plugin Secure Settings.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure // You can download the plugin from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin&hl=en                                 Settings ]                         A6: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Disabled // Disable the keygaurd, it is useful, when your phone is on lock and you want to automate everything, even the typing.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A7: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Enabled // Pretty clear, turn on the GPS and get location at A8                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A8: AutoShortcut [ Configuration:WhatsApp: Some One // I am using AutoShortcut plugin (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut) to start WhatsApp with the indented recipient.                                 Package:com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut Name:AutoShortcut ] // Replace Some One, actually choose it from the plugin, the right recipient.                         A9: Get Location [ Source:Any Timeout (Seconds):30 Continue Task // I am getting the location, timeout is 30 seconds, adjust it accordingly.                                 Immediately:Off Keep Tracking:Off ]                         A10: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Screen Dim // Now, this extension of the plugin Secure Settings, wakes your device so that you can type out the string on the WhatsApp app.                                 5 Seconds Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin                                 Name:Secure Settings ]                         A11: Run Shell [ Command:input text // Now, I am using the shell script to type the text to the window, because the ‘:’ while not be typed from the Type task in Tasker.                                 LOCATION:maps.google.com/maps?q=%LOC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On // And also, this is way faster, but remember you need root for this, not for the other way of typing.                                 Store Result In: ]                         A12: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] // Focus the Send button                         A13: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] // And press it.                         A14: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] // Get back to the typing box.                         A15: Run Shell [ Command:input text LOCATION_ACCURACY:%LOCACC Timeout                                 (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ]                         A16: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ]                         A17: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ]                         A18: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ]                         A19: Run Shell [ Command:input text BATTERY_LEVEL:%BATT% Timeout // I am adding Battery level in my case as well.                                 (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ]                         A20: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ]                         A21: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ]                         A22: Variable Set [ Name:%WHATSAPP_LASTREQ To:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ Do // And now, we say, request is done.                                 Maths:Off Append:Off ]                         A23: Button [ Button:Back ] // I am exiting the WhatsApp nicely and not killing it. If you are the murderer kind, kill it, just know, you don’t have any place in the heaven.                         A24: Button [ Button:Back ]                         A25: Notify Cancel [ Title: Warn Not Exist:Off ] // Remove the permanent notification.                         A26: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request Text:Location sent // Make a temporary notification, and say, location is sent.                                 successfully. Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:Off Priority:3 ]                                                         A27: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Disabled // Disable all the horrible things we turned on earlier.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A28: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Enabled                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A29: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Enabled                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                 A30: End If         A31: End If Download this Task from here: http://db.tt/9vRmbhyb That’s it in the above small example – you can read/write messages from/to WhatsApp app. I am using n7000-cm9.1-cwr6. Oh yea, and if you are having the Talkback auto enabled for Chrome browser, you need to turn Off the Web scripts to run. Tasker is amazing, I have automated a lot of tasks using this tool. I will share a few none generic ones with you in my coming post here.

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• Sudo apt-get update -f does not work?

  - by BrianO09

  I am a bit of a noob with Linux. Several months ago I updated to Ubuntu 12.04, then stopped using Ubuntu for a while for a variety of reasons. Now I would like to go back to it, but I have a couple of problems. For one thing, the Software Center will simply not load. I click on the icon, the program comes up, but it never loads, and when I close it I get a "window not responding" message. While reading some threads to fix this issue, the common theme was that the main solution was to update by running: sudo apt-get install --reinstall software-center However, when I run that, I get the following (long): bcoleary@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall software-center [sudo] password for bcoleary: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: kdelibs-bin : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed kdelibs5-plugins : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkntlm4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed kdoctools : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkcmutils4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkde3support4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkpty4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkdeclarative5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkdewebkit5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkdnssd4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkemoticons4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkfile4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkhtml5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkidletime4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkio5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkjsembed4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkmediaplayer4 : Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libknewstuff3-4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libknotifyconfig4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkparts4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkrosscore4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libktexteditor4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libnepomuk4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libnepomukquery4a : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libnepomukutils4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libplasma3 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libthreadweaver4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). So the next thing I tried was: sudo apt-get -f install The following has been cut down, but you get the idea: Errors were encountered while processing: libkdeclarative5 libkcmutils4 libnepomuk4 libkio5 libnepomukquery4a libnepomukutils4 libkparts4 libkdewebkit5 libkdnssd4 libknewstuff3-4 libplasma3 libnepomuksync4 libkemoticons4 libkfile4 libktexteditor4 libkhtml5 libkidletime4 libkmediaplayer4 libknotifyconfig4 libnepomukdatamanagement4 libkde3support4 libkjsembed4 libkrosscore4 kdoctools kdelibs-bin libkatepartinterfaces4 katepart kdelibs5-plugins plasma-scriptengine-javascript kde-runtime amarok libkdcraw20 libkgeomap1 libkipi8 libkvkontakte1 kipi-plugins digikam libkonq-common libkonq5abi1 dolphin kde-baseapps-bin kdebase-runtime libkcddb4 kdemultimedia-kio-plugins kdepimlibs-kio-plugins libkonqsidebarplugin4a konqueror konqueror-nsplugins libakonadi-kde4 libakonadi-calendar4 libkabc4 Processing was halted because there were too many errors. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Basically it said a ton of stuff was missing. Maybe this happened when I upgraded, I am not sure. Is there a way to fix this? And if not what is the best way to un-install and re-install Ubuntu? It is currently dual-booted with Windows 7. If you need anymore info, please let me know. Thank you for helping a beginner! :)

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• What's the best/most efficent way to create a semi-intelligent AI for a tic tac toe game?

  - by Link

  basically I am attempting to make a a efficient/smallish C game of Tic-Tac-Toe. I have implemented everything other then the AI for the computer so far. my squares are basically structs in an array with an assigned value based on the square. For example s[1].value = 1; therefore it's a x, and then a value of 3 would be a o. My question is whats the best way to create a semi-decent game playing AI for my tic-tac-toe game? I don't really want to use minimax, since It's not what I need. So how do I avoid a a lot of if statments and make it more efficient. Here is the rest of my code: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <time.h> struct state{ // defined int state; // 0 is tie, 1 is user loss, 2 is user win, 3 is ongoing game int moves; }; struct square{ // one square of the board int value; // 1 is x, 3 is o char sign; // no space used }; struct square s[9]; //set up the struct struct state gamestate = {0,0}; //nothing void setUpGame(){ // setup the game int i = 0; for(i = 0; i < 9; i++){ s[i].value = 0; s[i].sign = ' '; } gamestate.moves=0; printf("\nHi user! You're \"x\"! I'm \"o\"! Good Luck :)\n"); } void displayBoard(){// displays the game board printf("\n %c | %c | %c\n", s[6].sign, s[7].sign, s[8].sign); printf("-----------\n"); printf(" %c | %c | %c\n", s[3].sign, s[4].sign, s[5].sign); printf("-----------\n"); printf(" %c | %c | %c\n\n", s[0].sign, s[1].sign, s[2].sign); } void getHumanMove(){ // get move from human int i; while(1){ printf(">>:"); char line[255]; // input the move to play fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); while(sscanf(line, "%d", &i) != 1) { //1 match of defined specifier on input line printf("Sorry, that's not a valid move!\n"); fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); } if(s[i-1].value != 0){printf("Sorry, That moves already been taken!\n\n");continue;} break; } s[i-1].value = 1; s[i-1].sign = 'x'; gamestate.moves++; } int sum(int x, int y, int z){return(x*y*z);} void getCompMove(){ // get the move from the computer } void checkWinner(){ // check the winner int i; for(i = 6; i < 9; i++){ // check cols if((sum(s[i].value,s[i-3].value,s[i-6].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[i].value,s[i-3].value,s[i-6].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} } for(i = 0; i < 7; i+=3){ // check rows if((sum(s[i].value,s[i+1].value,s[i+2].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[i].value,s[i+1].value,s[i+2].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} } if((sum(s[0].value,s[4].value,s[8].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[0].value,s[4].value,s[8].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} if((sum(s[2].value,s[4].value,s[6].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[2].value,s[4].value,s[6].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} } void playGame(){ // start playing the game gamestate.state = 3; //set-up the gamestate srand(time(NULL)); int temp = (rand()%2) + 1; if(temp == 2){ // if two comp goes first temp = (rand()%2) + 1; if(temp == 2){ s[4].value = 2; s[4].sign = 'o'; gamestate.moves++; }else{ s[2].value = 2; s[2].sign = 'o'; gamestate.moves++; } } displayBoard(); while(gamestate.state == 3){ if(gamestate.moves<10); getHumanMove(); if(gamestate.moves<10); getCompMove(); checkWinner(); if(gamestate.state == 3 && gamestate.moves==9){ printf("The game is a tie :p\n"); break; } displayBoard(); } } int main(int argc, const char *argv[]){ printf("Welcome to Tic Tac Toe\nby The Elite Noob\nEnter 1-9 To play a move, standard numpad\n1 is bottom-left, 9 is top-right\n"); while(1){ // while game is being played printf("\nPress 1 to play a new game, or any other number to exit;\n>>:"); char line[255]; // input whether or not to play the game fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); int choice; // user's choice about playing or not while(sscanf(line, "%d", &choice) != 1) { //1 match of defined specifier on input line printf("Sorry, that's not a valid option!\n"); fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); } if(choice == 1){ setUpGame(); // set's up the game playGame(); // Play a Game }else {break;} // exit the application } printf("\nThank's For playing!\nHave a good Day!\n"); return 0; }

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• Why is code quality not popular?

  - by Peter Kofler

  I like my code being in order, i.e. properly formatted, readable, designed, tested, checked for bugs, etc. In fact I am fanatic about it. (Maybe even more than fanatic...) But in my experience actions helping code quality are hardly implemented. (By code quality I mean the quality of the code you produce day to day. The whole topic of software quality with development processes and such is much broader and not the scope of this question.) Code quality does not seem popular. Some examples from my experience include Probably every Java developer knows JUnit, almost all languages implement xUnit frameworks, but in all companies I know, only very few proper unit tests existed (if at all). I know that it's not always possible to write unit tests due to technical limitations or pressing deadlines, but in the cases I saw, unit testing would have been an option. If a developer wanted to write some tests for his/her new code, he/she could do so. My conclusion is that developers do not want to write tests. Static code analysis is often played around in small projects, but not really used to enforce coding conventions or find possible errors in enterprise projects. Usually even compiler warnings like potential null pointer access are ignored. Conference speakers and magazines would talk a lot about EJB3.1, OSGI, Cloud and other new technologies, but hardly about new testing technologies or tools, new static code analysis approaches (e.g. SAT solving), development processes helping to maintain higher quality, how some nasty beast of legacy code was brought under test, ... (I did not attend many conferences and it propably looks different for conferences on agile topics, as unit testing and CI and such has a higer value there.) So why is code quality so unpopular/considered boring? EDIT: Thank your for your answers. Most of them concern unit testing (and has been discussed in a related question). But there are lots of other things that can be used to keep code quality high (see related question). Even if you are not able to use unit tests, you could use a daily build, add some static code analysis to your IDE or development process, try pair programming or enforce reviews of critical code.

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• Is One Tool or a Suite of Tools Better for Scrum?

  - by Rob Wells

  G'day, Edit: We've been using Scrum very successfully for several years on several projects of varying sizes. In fact, our team developed the successful iPlayer project for the BBC using a classical Scrum approach. After using various combinations of tools, some high-tech, some low-tech, across these projects we now wish to try adopting a suitable tool suite. Our manager is to some extent attempting to force the adoption of a single suite of tools for Scrum. I've looked at the SO question "Best Scrum tools" and most people seem to recommend either: a suite of low-tech solutions, e.g. whiteboards, post-its, index cards, etc., or a monolithic tool that tries to satisfy as much as possible of the process, e.g. Agilo, Mingle, ScrumWorks, Target Process, etc. Our team is currently evaluating several different Scrum tools. However, we are looking at selecting a single, monolithic tool, e.g. Agilo. All of the "one-stop" solutions have their strengths and weaknesses with the serious enterprise type solutions being the best sort of fit. But all have some short comings. After reading the paper "Peer Code Review: An Agile Process" over at SmartBear I started wondering if we were trying to force adoption of a tool on a "best fit" basis. I think you can take a couple of reference artefacts of the Scrum development process, say user stories, epics and themes, and the code base which must use a well-known SCM, e.g. SVN, Hg, etc. Then if we take that as the common reference points for the tools employed then we would be able to use a group of tools to handle the different aspects of the Scrum process rather than try forcing a fit of a single tool would is a bit like forcing a square peg into the round hole. In this way, providing you've agreed your common reference points, you can use several tools, each performing their role better than a could be done by a single component in a monolithic tool suite. Is this a more sensible approach? Are the two reference points I mentioned above suitable, or is their a better choice of points where the tools would meet? cheers,

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• What was "The Next Big Thing" when you were just starting out in programming?

  - by Andrew

  I'm at the beginning of my career and there are lots of things which are being touted as "The Next Big Thing". For example: Dependency Injection (Spring, etc) MVC (Struts, ASP.NET MVC) ORMs (Linq To SQL, Hibernate) Agile Software Development These things have probably been around for some time, but I've only just started out. And don't get me wrong, I think these things are great! So, what was "The Next Big Thing" when you were starting out? When was it? Were people sceptical of it at first? Why? Did you think it would catch on? Did it pan out and become widely accepted/used? If not, why not? EDIT It's been nearly a week since I first posted this question and I can safely say that I did not expect such explosive interest. I asked the question so that I could gain a perspective of what kinds of innovations in programming people thought were most important when they were starting out. At the time of writing this I have read ~95% of all answers. To answer a few questions, the "Next Big Things" I listed are ones that I am currently really excited about and that I had not really been exposed to until I started working. I'm hoping to implement some or all of these in the near future at my current workplace. To many people they are probably old news. In regards to the "is this a real question" debate, I can see that obviously hasn't been settled yet. I feel bad whenever I read a comment saying that these kinds of questions take away from the real meaning of SO. I'm not wholly convinced that it doesn't. On the other hand, I have seen a lot of comments saying what a great question it is. Anyway, I have chosen "The Internet!" as my answer to this question. I don't think (in my very humble opinion, and, it seems many SOers opinions) that many things related to programming can compare. Nowadays every business and their dog has a website which can do anything from simply supplying information to purchasing goods halfway around the world to updating your blog. And of course, all these businesses need people like us. Thanks to everyone for all the great answers!

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• Using JUnit as an acceptance test framework

  - by Chris Knight

  OK, so I work for a company who has openly adopted agile practices for development in recent years. Our unit tests and code quality are improving. One area we still are working on is to find what works best for us in the automated acceptance test arena. We want to take our well formed user stories and use these to drive the code in a test driven manner. This will also give us acceptance level tests for each user story which we can then automate. To date, we've tried Fit, Fitnesse and Selenium. Each have their advantages, but we've also had real issues with them as well. With Fit and Fitnesse, we can't help but feel they overcomplicate things and we've had many technical issues using them. The business haven't fully bought in these tools and aren't particularly keen on maintaining the scripts all the time (and aren't big fans of the table style). Selenium is really good, but slow and relies on real time data and resources. One approach we are now considering is the use of the JUnit framework to provide similiar functionality. Rather than testing just a small unit of work using JUnit, why not use it to write a test (using the JUnit framework) to cover an acceptance level swath of the application? I.e. take a new story ("As a user I would like to see basic details of my policy...") and write a test in JUnit which starts executing application code at the point of entry for the policy details link but covers all code and logic down to the stubbed data access layer and back to the point of forwarding to the next page in the application, asserting on what data the user should see on that page. This seems to me to have the following advantages: Simplicity (no additional frameworks required) Zero effort to integrate with our Continuous Integration build server (since it already handles our JUnit tests) Full skillset already present in the team (its just a JUnit test after all) And the downsides being: Less customer involvement (though they are heavily involved in writing the user stories in the first place from which the acceptance tests will be written) Perhaps more difficult to understand (or make understood) the user story and acceptance criteria in a JUnit class verses a freetext specification ala Fit or Fitnesse So, my question is really, have you ever tried this method? Ever considered it? What are your thoughts? What do you like and dislike about this approach? Finally, please only mention alternative frameworks if you can say why you like or dislike them more than this approach.

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• How to make freelance clients understand the costs of developing and maintaining mature products?

  - by John

  I have a freelance web application project where the client requests new features every two weeks or so. I am unable to anticipate the requirements of upcoming features. So when the client requests a new feature, one of several things may happen: I implement the feature with ease because it is compatible with the existing platform I implement the feature with difficulty because I have to rewrite a significant portion of the platform's foundation Client withdraws request because it costs too much to implement against existing platform At the beginning of the project, for about six months, all feature requests fell under category 1) because the system was small and agile. But for the past six months, most feature implementation fell under category 2). The system is mature, forcing me to refactor and test everytime I want to add new modules. Additionally, I find myself breaking things that use to work, and fixing it (I don't get paid for this). The client is starting to express frustration at the time and cost for me to implement new features. To them, many of the feature requests are of the same scale as the features they requested six months ago. For example, a client would ask, "If it took you 1 week to build a ticketing system last year, why does it take you 1 month to build an event registration system today? An event registration system is much simpler than a ticketing system. It should only take you 1 week!" Because of this scenario, I fear feature requests will soon land in category 3). In fact, I'm already eating a lot of the cost myself because I volunteer many hours to support the project. The client is often shocked when I tell him honestly the time it takes to do something. The client always compares my estimates against the early months of a project. I don't think they're prepared for what it really costs to develop, maintain and support a mature web application. When working on a salary for a full time company, managers were more receptive of my estimates and even encouraged me to pad my numbers to prepare for the unexpected. Is there a way to condition my clients to think the same way? Can anyone offer advice on how I can continue to work on this web project without eating too much of the cost myself? Additional info - I've only been freelancing full time for 1 year. I don't yet have the high end clients, but I'm slowly getting there. I'm getting better quality clients as time goes by.

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