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• Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

  - by jamiet

  I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. Some people have told me they’re having trouble with the iCalendar link in which case hit the HTML link and then click “View ICS” at the resultant web page: I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Lessons learned from Word 2007 automation with c# 2008

  - by robertphyatt

  My organization has an ongoing project to take documents produced for internal regulations and such, change some of the formatting and then export it as PDF. Our requirements were that only one person would be doing this, but it has been painfully tedious and sometimes error-prone to do by hand. Enter the fearless developer to automate the situation! Since I am one of those guys that just plain does not like VB, I wanted to do the automation in the ever-so-much-more-familiar C#. While Microsoft had made a dll that makes such a task easier, documentation on MSDN is pretty lame and most of the forumns and posts on the internet had little to do with my task. So, I feel like I can give back to the community and make a post here of the things I have learned so far. I hope this is helpful to whoever stumbles upon it. Steps to do this: 1) First of all, make some sort of a project and use some sort of a means to get the filename of the word document you are trying to open. I got the filename the user wanted with an openFileDialog tied to a button that I labeled 'Browse':        private void btnBrowse_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)        {            try            {                DialogResult myResult = openFileDialog1.ShowDialog();                if (myResult.Equals(DialogResult.OK))                {                    if (openFileDialog1.SafeFileName.EndsWith(".doc"))                    {                        txtFileName.Text = openFileDialog1.SafeFileName;                        paramSourceDocPath = openFileDialog1.FileName;                        paramExportFilePath = openFileDialog1.FileName.Replace(".doc", ".pdf");                    }                    else                    {                        txtFileName.Text = "only something that end with .doc, please";                    }                }            }            catch (Exception err)            {                lblError.Text = err.Message;            }        }   2) Add in "using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;" after setting your project to reference Microsoft.Office.Core and Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word so that you don't have to add "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word" to the front of everything. 3) Now you are ready to play. You will need to have a copy of word open and a copy of your word document that you want to modify open to be able to make the changes that are needed. The word interop dll likes using ref on all the parameters passed in, and likes to have them as objects. If you don't want to specify the parameter, you have to give it a "Type.Missing". I suggest creating some objects that you reuse all over the place to maintain sanity. object paramMissing = Type.Missing; ApplicationClass wordApplication = new ApplicationClass(); Document wordDocument = wordApplication.Documents.Open(                ref paramSourceDocPath, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing); 4) There are many ways to modify the text of the inside of the word document. One of the ways that was most effective for me was to break it down by paragraph and then do things on each paragraph by what style the particular paragraph had.            foreach (Paragraph thisParagraph in wordDocument.Content.Paragraphs)            {                string strStyleName = ((Style)thisParagraph.get_Style()).NameLocal;                string strText = thisParagraph.Range.Text;                //Do whatever you need to do            } 5) Sometimes you want to insert a new line character somewhere in the text or insert text into the document, etc.  There are a few ways you can do this: you can either modify the text of a paragraph by doing something like this ('\r' makes a new paragraph, '\v' will make a newline without making a new paragraph. If you remove a '\r' from the text, it will eliminate the paragraph you removed it from): thisParagraph.Range.Text = "A\vNew Paragraph!\r" + thisParagraph.Range.Text; OR you could select where you want to insert it and have it act like you were typing in Word like any normal user (note: if you do not collapse the range first, you will overwrite the thing you got the range from) object oCollapseDirectionEnd = WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseEnd; object oCollapseDirectionStart = WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseStart; Range rangeInsertAtBeginning = thisParagraph.Range; Range rangeInsertAtEnd = thisParagraph.Range; rangeInsertAtBeginning.Collapse(ref oCollapseDirectionStart); rangeInsertAtEnd.Collapse(ref oCollapseDirectionEnd); rangeInsertAtBeginning.Select(); wordApplication.Selection.TypeText("Blah Blah Blah"); rangeInsertAtEnd.Select(); wordApplication.Selection.TypeParagraph(); 6) If you want to make text columns, like a newspaper or newsletter, you have to modify the page layout of the document or a section of the document to make it happen. In my case, I only wanted a particular section to have that, and I wanted to have a black line before and after the newspaper-like text columns. First you need to do a section break on either side of what you wanted, then you take the section and modify the page layout. Then you can modify the borders of the section (or another object in the word document). I also show here how to modify the alignment of a paragraph.            object oSectionBreak = WdBreakType.wdSectionBreakContinuous;            //These ranges were set while I was going through the paragraphs of my document, like I was showing earlier            rangeHeaderStart.InsertBreak(ref oSectionBreak);            rangeHeaderEnd.InsertBreak(ref oSectionBreak);            //change the alignment to justify            object oRangeHeaderStart = rangeStartJustifiedAlignment.Start;            object oRangeHeaderEnd = rangeHeaderEnd.End;            Range rangeHeader = wordDocument.Range(ref oRangeHeaderStart, ref oRangeHeaderEnd);            rangeHeader.Paragraphs.Alignment = WdParagraphAlignment.wdAlignParagraphJustify;            //find the section break and make it into triple text columns            foreach (Section mySection in wordDocument.Sections)            {                if (mySection.Range.Start == rangeHeaderStart.Start)                {                    mySection.PageSetup.TextColumns.Add(ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing);                    mySection.PageSetup.TextColumns.Add(ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing);                    //I didn't like the default spacing and column widths. This is how I adjusted them.                    foreach (TextColumn txtc in mySection.PageSetup.TextColumns)                    {                        try                        {                            txtc.SpaceAfter = 151.6f;                            txtc.Width = 7;                        }                        catch (Exception)                        {                            txtc.Width = 151.6f;                        }                    }                }            } That is all  I have time for today! I hope this was helpful to someone!

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• WPF: Timers

  - by Ilya Verbitskiy

  I believe, once your WPF application will need to execute something periodically, and today I would like to discuss how to do that. There are two possible solutions. You can use classical System.Threading.Timer class or System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class, which is the part of WPF. I have created an application to show you how to use the API.     Let’s take a look how you can implement timer using System.Threading.Timer class. First of all, it has to be initialized.   1: private Timer timer; 2:   3: public MainWindow() 4: { 5: // Form initialization code 6: 7: timer = new Timer(OnTimer, null, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); 8: }   Timer’s constructor accepts four parameters. The first one is the callback method which is executed when timer ticks. I will show it to you soon. The second parameter is a state which is passed to the callback. It is null because there is nothing to pass this time. The third parameter is the amount of time to delay before the callback parameter invokes its methods. I use System.Threading.Timeout helper class to represent infinite timeout which simply means the timer is not going to start at the moment. And the final fourth parameter represents the time interval between invocations of the methods referenced by callback. Infinite timeout timespan means the callback method will be executed just once. Well, the timer has been created. Let’s take a look how you can start the timer.   1: private void StartTimer(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: timer.Change(TimeSpan.Zero, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1)); 4:   5: // Disable the start buttons and enable the reset button. 6: }   The timer is started by calling its Change method. It accepts two arguments: the amount of time to delay before the invoking the callback method and the time interval between invocations of the callback. TimeSpan.Zero means we start the timer immediately and TimeSpan(0, 0, 1) tells the timer to tick every second. There is one method hasn’t been shown yet. This is the callback method OnTimer which does a simple task: it shows current time in the center of the screen. Unfortunately you cannot simple write something like this:   1: clock.Content = DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss");   The reason is Timer runs callback method on a separate thread, and it is not possible to access GUI controls from a non-GUI thread. You can avoid the problem using System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher class.   1: private void OnTimer(object state) 2: { 3: Dispatcher.Invoke(() => ShowTime()); 4: } 5:   6: private void ShowTime() 7: { 8: clock.Content = DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss"); 9: }   You can build similar application using System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class. The class represents a timer which is integrated into the Dispatcher queue. It means that your callback method is executed on GUI thread and you can write a code which updates your GUI components directly.   1: private DispatcherTimer dispatcherTimer; 2:   3: public MainWindow() 4: { 5: // Form initialization code 6:   7: dispatcherTimer = new DispatcherTimer { Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1) }; 8: dispatcherTimer.Tick += OnDispatcherTimer; 9: } Dispatcher timer has nicer and cleaner API. All you need is to specify tick interval and Tick event handler. The you just call Start method to start the timer.   private void StartDispatcher(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dispatcherTimer.Start(); // Disable the start buttons and enable the reset button. } And, since the Tick event handler is executed on GUI thread, the code which sets the actual time is straightforward.   1: private void OnDispatcherTimer(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ShowTime(); 4: } We’re almost done. Let’s take a look how to stop the timers. It is easy with the Dispatcher Timer.   1: dispatcherTimer.Stop(); And slightly more complicated with the Timer. You should use Change method again.   1: timer.Change(Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); What is the best way to add timer into an application? The Dispatcher Timer has simple interface, but its advantages are disadvantages at the same time. You should not use it if your Tick event handler executes time-consuming operations. It freezes your window which it is executing the event handler method. You should think about using System.Threading.Timer in this case. The code is available on GitHub.

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• Amanda Todd&ndash;What Parents Can Learn From Her Story

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Amanda Todd was a bullied teenager who committed suicide this week. Her story has become headline news due in part to her You Tube video she posted telling her story:   The story is heartbreaking for so many reasons, but I wanted to talk about what we as parents can learn from this. Being the dad to two girls, one that’s 10, I’m very aware of the dangers that the internet holds. When I saw her story, one thing jumped out at me – unmonitored internet access at an early age. My daughter (then 9) came home from a friends place once and asked if she could be in a YouTube video with her friend. Apparently this friend was allowed to do whatever she wanted on the internet, including posting goofy videos. This set off warning bells and we ensured our daughter realized the dangers and that she was not to ever post videos of herself. In looking at Amanda’s story, the access to unmonitored internet time along with just being a young girl and being flattered by an online predator were the key events that ultimately led to her suicide. Yes, the reaction of her classmates and “friends” was horrible as well, I’m not diluting that. But our youth don’t fully understand yet that what they do on the internet today will follow them potentially forever. And the people they meet online aren’t necessarily who they claim to be. So what can we as parents learn from Amanda’s story? Parents Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Being Internet Police Our job as parents is in part to protect our kids and keep them safe, even if they don’t like our measures. This includes monitoring, supervising, and restricting their internet activities. In our house we have a family computer in the living room that the kids can watch videos and surf the web. It’s in plain view of everyone, so you can’t hide what you’re looking at. If our daughter goes to a friend’s place, we ask about what they did and what they played. If the computer comes up, we ask about what they did on it. Luckily our daughter is very up front and honest in telling us things, so we have very open discussions. Parents Need to Be Honest About the Dangers of the Internet I’m sure every generation says that “kids grow up so fast these days”, but in our case the internet really does push our kids to be exposed to things they otherwise wouldn’t experience. One wrong word in a Google search, a click of a link in a spam email, or just general curiosity can expose a child to things they aren’t ready for or should never be exposed to (and I’m not just talking about adult material – have you seen some of the graphic pictures from war zones posted on news sites recently?). Our stance as parents has been to be open about discussing the dangers with our kids before they encounter any content – be proactive instead of reactionary. Part of this is alerting them to the monsters that lurk on the internet as well. As kids explore the world wide web, they’re eventually going to encounter some chat room or some Facebook friend invite or other personal connection with someone. More than ever kids need to be educated on the dangers of engaging with people online and sharing personal information. You can think of it as an evolved discussion that our parents had with us about using the phone: “Don’t say ‘I’m home alone’, don’t say when mom or dad get home, don’t tell them any information, etc.” Parents Need to Talk Self Worth at Home Katie makes the point better than I ever could (one bad word towards the end): Our children need to understand their value beyond what the latest issue of TigerBeat says, or the media who continues flaunting physical attributes over intelligence and character, or a society that puts focus on status and wealth. They also have to realize that just because someone pays you a compliment, that doesn’t mean you should ignore personal boundaries and limits. What does this have to do with the internet? Well, in days past if you wanted to be social you had to go out somewhere. Now you can video chat with any number of people from the comfort of wherever your laptop happens to be – and not just text but full HD video with sound! While innocent children head online in the hopes of meeting cool people, predators with bad intentions are heading online too. As much as we try to monitor their online activity and be honest about the dangers of the internet, the human side of our kids isn’t something we can control. But we can try to influence them to see themselves as not needing to search out the acceptance of complete strangers online. Way easier said than done, but ensuring self-worth is something discussed, encouraged, and celebrated is a step in the right direction. Parental Wake Up Call This post is not a critique of Amanda’s parents. The reality is that cyber bullying/abuse is happening every day, and there are millions of parents that have no clue its happening to their children. Amanda’s story is a wake up call that our children’s online activities may be putting them in danger. My heart goes out to the parents of this girl. As a father of daughters, I can’t imagine what I would do if I found my daughter having to hide in a ditch to avoid a mob or call 911 to report my daughter had attempted suicide by drinking bleach or deal with a child turning to drugs/alcohol/cutting to cope. It would be horrendous if we as parents didn’t re-evaluate our family internet policies in light of this event. And in the end, Amanda’s video was meant to bring attention to her plight and encourage others going through the same thing. We may not be kids, but we can still honour her memory by helping safeguard our children.

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• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

  - by Tim Dexter

  I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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• ISACA Webcast follow up: Managing High Risk Access and Compliance with a Platform Approach to Privileged Account Management

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Last week we presented how Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) could be used to manage high risk, privileged accounts.  If you missed the webcast, here is a link to the replay: ISACA replay archive (NOTE: you will need to use Internet Explorer to view the archive) For those of you that did join us on the call, you will know that I only had a little bit of time for Q&A, and was only able to answer a few of the questions that came in.  So I wanted to devote this blog to answering the outstanding questions.  Here they are. 1. Can OPAM track admin or DBA activity details during a password check-out session? Oracle Audit Vault is monitoring these activities which can be correlated to check-out events. 2. How would OPAM handle simultaneous requests? OPAM can be configured to allow for shared passwords.  By default sharing is turned off. 3. How long are the passwords valid?  Are the admins required to manually check them in? Password expiration can be configured and set in the password policy according to your corporate standards.  You can specify if you want forced check-in or not. 4. Can 2-factor authentication be used with OPAM? Yes - 2-factor integration with OPAM is provided by integration with Oracle Access Manager, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. 5. How do you control access to OPAM to ensure that OPAM admins don't override the functionality to access privileged accounts? OPAM provides separation of duties by using Admin Roles to manage access to targets and privileged accounts and to control which operations admins can perform. 6. How and where are the passwords stored in OPAM? OPAM uses Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS) Credential Store Framework (CSF) to securely store passwords.  This is the same system used by Oracle Applications. 7. Does OPAM support hierarchical/level based privileges?  Is the log maintained for independent review/audit? Yes. OPAM uses the Fusion Middleware (FMW) Audit Framework to store all OPAM related events in a dedicated audit database.  8. Does OPAM support emergency access in the case where approvers are not available until later? Yes.  OPAM can be configured to release a password under a "break-glass" emergency scenario. 9. Does OPAM work with AIX? Yes supported UNIX version are listed in the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide at:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 10. Does OPAM integrate with Sun Identity Manager? Yes.  OPAM can be integrated with SIM using the REST  APIs.  OPAM has direct integration with Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. 11. Is OPAM available today and what does it cost? Yes.  OPAM is available now.  Ask your Oracle Account Manager for pricing. 12. Can OPAM be used in SAP environments? Yes, supported SAP version are listed in the "certified component section" of the SAP  connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e25327/intro.htm#autoId0 13. How would this product integrate, if at all, with access to a particular field in the DB that need additional security such as SSN's? OPAM can work with DB Vault and DB Firewall to provide the fine grained access control for databases. 14. Is VM supported? As a deployment platform Oracle VM is supported. For further details about supported Virtualization Technologies see Oracle Fusion Middleware Supported System configurations here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/ias/downloads/fusion-certification-100350.html 15. Where did this (OPAM) technology come from? OPAM was built by Oracle Engineering. 16. Are all Linux flavors supported?  How about BSD? BSD is not supported. For supported UNIX version see the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 17. What happens if users don't check passwords in at the end of a work task? In OPAM a time frame can be defined how long a password can be checked out. The security admin can force a check-in at any given time. 18. is MySQL supported? Yes, supported DB version are listed in the "certified component section" of the DB connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e28315/intro.htm#BABGJJHA 19. What happens when OPAM crashes and you need to use the password? OPAM can be configured for high availability, but if required, OPAM data can be backed up/recovered.  See the OPAM admin guide. 20. Is OPAM Standalone product or does it leverage other components from IDM? OPAM can be run stand-alone, but will also leverage other IDM components

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• SOA Suite 11g Dynamic Payload Testing with soapUI Free Edition

  - by Greg Mally

  Overview Many web service developers use soapUI for various tests like: smoke test, unit test, and load testing because you can get a free edition that is fairly robust. However, if you need to venture into more complex testing that requires a dynamic payload, then the free edition doesn't necessarily make it easy. This feature does exist in soapUI, but for obvious reasons it is in the Pro version. In this blog I will show you how to use soapUI free edition for dynamic payloads in a simplified example. Hopefully this will open the doors for you to expand into more complex scenarios. The following assumes that you have a working knowledge of soapUI and will not go into concepts like setting up a project etc. For the basics, please review the documentation for soapUI: http://www.soapui.org/Getting-Started/. Additionally, we will be using asynchronous web services and you can review the setup for this in my blog: SOA Suite 11g Asynchronous Testing with soapUI. Features in soapUI Free Edition Relating to this Topic The soapUI test tool provides a very feature rich environment that can do many things provided you are willing to go beyond point and click. For this example, we will be leveraging just a couple features for our dynamic payload example: Test Case Properties Scripting with Groovy Basically, we will be using a property as a global variable and we will manipulate that property using a Groovy script. Setting Up Our Property Properties are available throughout soapUI and here is a snippet from the soapUI website defining the locations: Projects : for handling Project scope values, for example a subscription ID TestSuite : for handling TestSuite scoped values, can be seen as "arguments" to a TestSuite TestCases : for handling TestCase scoped values, can be seen as "arguments" to a TestCase Properties TestStep : for providing local values/state within a TestCase Local TestStep properties : several TestStep types maintain their own list of properties specific to their functionality : DataSource, DataSink, Run TestCase MockServices : for handling MockService scoped values/arguments MockResponses : for handling MockResponse scoped values Global Properties : for handling Global properties, optionally from an external source For our example, we will be defining a custom property in a TestCase called SimpleAsyncPayload. The property can be created in either the Custom Properties tab located at the bottom of the Navigator panel when the TestCase is selected in the Navigator or the Properties label in the TestCase editor: Navigator Panel TestCase Editor You will notice that I set a value of “0” for the custom property. For this simplified example, we will need to retrieve that value and manipulate it prior to making the web service request invocation. In order to accomplish this, we will need to get Groovy ;) Let's Get Groovy We will now add a new Groovy Script step to the TestCase called Manipulate Payload: TestCase Editor > Append Step > Groovy Script Once we have added the Groovy Script step to our TestCase, we can open the Groovy Script editor to add the code to: Get the current value of the property we created called SimpleAsyncPayload. Convert the value of the property to an integer. Increment the value. Store the incremented value back into the TestCase property called SimpleAsyncPayload. The script should look something like the following: Groovy Script Editor – Manipulate Payload At this point we can test the script to see if it is working by simply running the TestCase (left-click on the green triangle in the upper left-hand corner of the TestCase editor). To verify if it ran correctly, we can look at the value of the SimpleAsyncPayload property which should now be 1: TestCase Editor – Run Results All that is left to complete the TestCase is to append another step of type Test Request. The information required to append the request is a name and an operation to invoke. In this example we will use the default name and select the SimpleAsyncBPELProcessBingd -> process as the operation (any other information being requested, simply use the defaults unless you are calling an asynchronous operation then do not add any assertions). We are now in familiar ground with the Test Request editor. Depending upon the type of operation you are invoking (synchronous or asynchronous), please update the request with the necessary information (e.g., callback information for asynchronous operations). We will now tweak the Test Request payload to retrieve the value of the SimpleAsyncPayload property. The soapUI editor makes this very simple: right-click in the payload and navigate to the property (e.g., right-click > Get Data.. > TestCase: [Groovy TestCase] > Property [SimpleAsyncPayload]): Test Request Editor – Insert Property Value Your payload should now look something like the following: Test Request Editor – Inserted Property Value Just like before, we are now ready to run the TestCase. If everything goes as expected we should see a response like the following: Message Viewer – Results of TestCase Run We are now setup to be able to run a stress test where the payload will change for each request. This simple example can be expanded to include multiple payload values, complex calculations in the scripts, or whatever can be done via the soapUI scripting. Hopefully you have found this useful and happy testing to you :)

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Populate a WCF syndication podcast using MP3 ID3 metadata tags

  - by brian_ritchie

  In the last post, I showed how to create a podcast using WCF syndication.  A podcast is an RSS feed containing a list of audio files to which users can subscribe.  The podcast not only contains links to the audio files, but also metadata about each episode.  A cool approach to building the feed is reading this metadata from the ID3 tags on the MP3 files used for the podcast. One library to do this is TagLib-Sharp.  Here is some sample code: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 2: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 3: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 4: { 5: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 6: size = fileInfo.Length, 7: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 8: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 9: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 10: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 11: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 12: id = fileInfo.Name 13: }; 14: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 15: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); This reads the ID3 tags into an object for later use in creating the syndication feed.  When the MP3 is created, these tags are set...or they can be set after the fact using the Properties dialog in Windows Explorer.  The only "hack" is that there isn't an easily accessible tag for "subtitle" or "published date" so I used other tags in this example. Feel free to change this to meet your purposes.  You could remove the subtitle & use the file modified data for example. That takes care of the episodes, for the feed level settings we'll load those from an XML file: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <iTunesPodcastFeed 3: baseUrl ="" 4: title="" 5: subTitle="" 6: description="" 7: copyright="" 8: category="" 9: ownerName="" 10: ownerEmail="" 11: mediaType="audio/mp3" 12: mediaFiles="*.mp3" 13: imageUrl="" 14: link="" 15: /> Here is the full code put together. Read the feed XML file and deserialize it into an iTunesPodcastFeed classLoop over the files in a directory reading the ID3 tags from the audio files .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: public static iTunesPodcastFeed CreateFeedFromFiles(string podcastDirectory, string podcastFeedFile) 2: { 3: XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(iTunesPodcastFeed)); 4: iTunesPodcastFeed feed; 5: using (var fs = File.OpenRead(Path.Combine(podcastDirectory, podcastFeedFile))) 6: { 7: feed = (iTunesPodcastFeed)serializer.Deserialize(fs); 8: } 9: foreach (var f in Directory.GetFiles(podcastDirectory, feed.mediaFiles)) 10: { 11: try 12: { 13: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 14: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 15: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 16: { 17: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 18: size = fileInfo.Length, 19: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 20: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 21: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 22: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 23: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 24: id = fileInfo.Name 25: }; 26: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 27: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); 28: feed.Items.Add(item); 29: } 30: catch 31: { 32: // ignore files that can't be accessed successfully 33: } 34: } 35: return feed; 36: } Usually putting a "try...catch" like this is bad, but in this case I'm just skipping over files that are locked while they are being uploaded to the web site.Here is the code from the last couple of posts.  

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• 5 minutes WIF: Make your ASP.NET application use test-STS

  - by DigiMortal

  Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) provides us with simple and dummy STS application we can use to develop our system with no actual STS in place. In this posting I will show you how to add STS support to your existing application and how to generate dummy application that plays you real STS. Word of caution! Although it is relatively easy to build your own STS using WIF tools I don’t recommend you to build it. Identity providers must be highly secure and stable in every means and this makes development of your own STS very complex task. If it is possible then use some known STS solution. I suppose you have WIF and WIF SDK installed on your development machine. If you don’t then here are the links to download pages: Windows Identity Foundation Windows Identity Foundation SDK Adding STS support to your web application Suppose you have web application and you want to externalize authentication so your application is able to detect users, send unauthenticated users to login and work in other terms exactly like it worked before. WIF tools provide you with all you need. 1. Click on your web application project and select “Add STS reference…” from context menu to start adding or updating STS settings for web application. 2. Insert your application URI in application settings window. Note that web.config file is already selected for you. I inserted URI that corresponds to my web application address under IIS Express. This URI must exist (later) because otherwise you cannot use dummy STS service. 3. Select “Create a new STS project in the current solution” and click Next button. 4. Summary screen gives you information about how your site will use STS. You can run this wizard always when you have to modify STS parameters. Click Finish. If everything goes like expected then new web site will be added to your solution and it is named as YourWebAppName_STS. Dummy STS application Image on right shows you dummy STS web site. Yes, it is created as web site project not as web application. But it still works nice and you don’t have to make there any modifications. It just works but it is dummy one. Why dummy STS? Some points about dummy STS web site: Dummy STS is not template for your own custom STS identity provider. Dummy STS is very good and simple replacement of real STS so you have more flexible development environment and you don’t have to authenticate yourself in real service. Of course, you can modify dummy STS web site to mimic some behavior of your real STS. Pages in dummy STS Dummy STS has two pages – Login.aspx and  Default.aspx. Default.aspx is the page that handles requests to STS service. Login.aspx is the page where authentication takes place. Dummy STS authenticates users using FBA. You can insert whatever username you like and dummy STS still works. You can take a look at the code behind these pages to get some idea about how this dummy service is built up. But again – this service is there to simplify your life as developer. Authenticating users using dummy STS If you are using development web server that ships with Visual Studio 2010 I suggest you to switch over to IIS or IIS Express and make some more configuration changes as described in my previous posting Making WIF local STS to work with your ASP.NET application. When you are done with these little modifications you are ready to run your application and see how authentication works. If everything is okay then you are redirected to dummy STS login page when running your web application. Adam Carter is provided as username by default. If you click on submit button you are authenticated and redirected to application page. In my case it looks like this. Conclusion As you saw it is very easy to set up your own dummy STS web site for testing purposes. You coded nothing. You just ran wizard, inserted some data, modified configuration a little bit and you were done. Later, when your application goes to production you can run again this STS configuration utility and it generates correct settings for your real STS service automatically.

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• .NET 4: &ldquo;Slim&rdquo;-style performance boost!

  - by Vitus

  RTM version of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 is available, and now we can do some test with it. Parallel Extensions is one of the most valuable part of .NET 4.0. It’s a set of good tools for easily consuming multicore hardware power. And it also contains some “upgraded” sync primitives – Slim-version. For example, it include updated variant of widely known ManualResetEvent. For people, who don’t know about it: you can sync concurrency execution of some pieces of code with this sync primitive. Instance of ManualResetEvent can be in 2 states: signaled and non-signaled. Transition between it possible by Set() and Reset() methods call. Some shortly explanation: Thread 1 Thread 2 Time mre.Reset(); mre.WaitOne(); //code execution 0 //wating //code execution 1 //wating //code execution 2 //wating //code execution 3 //wating mre.Set(); 4 //code execution //… 5 Upgraded version of this primitive is ManualResetEventSlim. The idea in decreasing performance cost in case, when only 1 thread use it. Main concept in the “hybrid sync schema”, which can be done as following:   internal sealed class SimpleHybridLock : IDisposable { private Int32 m_waiters = 0; private AutoResetEvent m_waiterLock = new AutoResetEvent(false);   public void Enter() { if (Interlocked.Increment(ref m_waiters) == 1) return; m_waiterLock.WaitOne(); }   public void Leave() { if (Interlocked.Decrement(ref m_waiters) == 0) return; m_waiterLock.Set(); }   public void Dispose() { m_waiterLock.Dispose(); } } It’s a sample from Jeffry Richter’s book “CLR via C#”, 3rd edition. Primitive SimpleHybridLock have two public methods: Enter() and Leave(). You can put your concurrency-critical code between calls of these methods, and it would executed in only one thread at the moment. Code is really simple: first thread, called Enter(), increase counter. Second thread also increase counter, and suspend while m_waiterLock is not signaled. So, if we don’t have concurrent access to our lock, “heavy” methods WaitOne() and Set() will not called. It’s can give some performance bonus. ManualResetEvent use the similar idea. Of course, it have more “smart” technics inside, like a checking of recursive calls, and so on. I want to know a real difference between classic ManualResetEvent realization, and new –Slim. I wrote a simple “benchmark”: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { ManualResetEventSlim mres = new ManualResetEventSlim(false); ManualResetEventSlim mres2 = new ManualResetEventSlim(false);   ManualResetEvent mre = new ManualResetEvent(false);   long total = 0; int COUNT = 50;   for (int i = 0; i < COUNT; i++) { mres2.Reset(); Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();   ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem((obj) => { //Method(mres, true); Method2(mre, true); mres2.Set(); }); //Method(mres, false); Method2(mre, false);   mres2.Wait(); sw.Stop();   Console.WriteLine("Pass {0}: {1} ms", i, sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); total += sw.ElapsedMilliseconds; }   Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("==============================="); Console.WriteLine("Done in average=" + total / (double)COUNT); Console.ReadLine(); }   private static void Method(ManualResetEventSlim mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } }   private static void Method2(ManualResetEvent mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } } } I use 2 concurrent thread (the main thread and one from thread pool) for setting and resetting ManualResetEvents, and try to run test COUNT times, and calculate average execution time. Here is the results (I get it on my dual core notebook with T7250 CPU and Windows 7 x64): ManualResetEvent ManualResetEventSlim Difference is obvious and serious – in 10 times! So, I think preferable way is using ManualResetEventSlim, because not always on calling Set() and Reset() will be called “heavy” methods for working with Windows kernel-mode objects. It’s a small and nice improvement! ;)

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• PeopleSoft at Alliance 2012 Executive Forum

  - by John Webb

  Guest Posting From Rebekah Jackson This week I jointed over 4,800 Higher Ed and Public Sector customers and partners in Nashville at our annual Alliance conference.   I got lost easily in the hallways of the sprawling Gaylord Opryland Hotel. I carried the resort map with me, and I would still stand for several minutes at a very confusing junction, studying the map and the signage on the walls. Hallways led off in many directions, some with elevators going down here and stairs going up there. When I took a wrong turn I would instantly feel stuck, lose my bearings, and occasionally even have to send out a call for help.    It strikes me that the theme for the Executive Forum this year outlines a less tangible but equally disorienting set of challenges that our higher education customer’s CIOs are facing: Making Decisions at the Intersection of Business Value, Strategic Investment, and Enterprise Technology. The forces acting upon higher education institutions today are not neat, straight-forward decision points, where one can glance to the right, glance to the left, and then quickly choose the best course of action. The operational, technological, and strategic factors that must be considered are complex, interrelated, messy…and the stakes are high. Michael Horn, co-author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns”, set the tone for the day. He introduced the model of disruptive innovation, which grew out of the research he and his colleagues have done on ‘Why Successful Organizations Fail’. Highly simplified, the pattern he shared is that things start out decentralized, take a leap to extreme centralization, and then experience progressive decentralization. Using computers as an example, we started with a slide rule, then developed the computer which centralized in the form of mainframes, and gradually decentralized to mini-computers, desktop computers, laptops, and now mobile devices. According to Michael, you have more computing power in your cell phone than existed on the planet 60 years ago, or was on the first rocket that went to the moon. Applying this pattern to Higher Education means the introduction of expensive and prestigious private universities, followed by the advent of state schools, then by community colleges, and now online education. Michael shared statistics that indicate 50% of students will be taking at least one on line course by 2014…and by some measures, that’s already the case today. The implication is that technology moves from being the backbone of the campus, the IT department’s domain, and pushes into the academic core of the institution. Innovative programs are underway at many schools like Bellevue and BYU Idaho, joined by startups and disruptive new players like the Khan Academy.   This presents both threat and opportunity for higher education institutions, and means that IT decisions cannot afford to be disconnected from the institution’s strategic plan. Subsequent sessions explored this theme.    Theo Bosnak, from Attain, discussed the model they use for assessing the complete picture of an institution’s financial health. Compounding the issue are the dramatic trends occurring in technology and the vendors that provide it. Ovum analyst Nicole Engelbert, shared her insights next and suggested that incremental changes are no longer an option, instead fundamental changes are affecting the landscape of enterprise technology in higher ed.    Nicole closed with her recommendation that institutions focus on the trends in higher education with an eye towards the strategic requirements and business value first. Technology then is the enabler.   The last presentation of the day was from Tom Fisher, Sr. Vice President of Cloud Services at Oracle. Tom runs the delivery arm of the Cloud Services group, and shared his thoughts candidly about his experiences with cloud deployments as well as key issues around managing costs and security in cloud deployments. Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground at this point, from financials planning, business strategy, and cloud computing, with the possibility that half of the institutions in the US might not be around in their current form 10 years from now. Did I forget to mention that was raised in the morning session? Seems a little hard to believe, and yet Michael Horn made a compelling point. Apparently 100 years ago, 8 of the top 10 education institutions in the world were German. Today, the leading German school is ranked somewhere in the 40’s or 50’s. What will the landscape be 100 years from now? Will there be an institution from China, India, or Brazil in the top 10? As Nicole suggested, maybe US parents will be sending their children to schools overseas much sooner, faced with the ever-increasing costs of a US based education. Will corporations begin to view skill-based certification from an online provider as a viable alternative to a 4 year degree from an accredited institution, fundamentally altering the education industry as we know it?

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• Why is my Ubuntu system not using the correct kernel?

  - by Brooks Moses

  We're having a bit of confusion on a Ubuntu remote system -- /boot/grub/menu.lst suggests the system should boot into kernel 2.6.35-30-generic, but it is actually running kernel 2.6.32-27-generic. Where should I look to start figuring out why this is happening and how to fix it? Specifically, /boot/grub/menu.lst has default 0 and the first entry is title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2- ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic Further, I've confirmed that /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic and /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic exist and have appropriate permissions. Meanwhile, uname -a returns: $ uname -a Linux cuda2 2.6.32-27-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 2 00:51:09 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux Edit: I've also tried re-running update-grub, and rebooting; no luck. Here's the full menu.lst, as requested by a commenter: # menu.lst - See: grub(8), info grub, update-grub(8) # grub-install(8), grub-floppy(8), # grub-md5-crypt, /usr/share/doc/grub # and /usr/share/doc/grub-legacy-doc/. ## default num # Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and # the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used. # # You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry # is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'. # WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use 'savedefault' or your # array will desync and will not let you boot your system. default 0 ## timeout sec # Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry # (normally the first entry defined). timeout 3 ## hiddenmenu # Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu) hiddenmenu # Pretty colours #color cyan/blue white/blue ## password ['--md5'] passwd # If used in the first section of a menu file, disable all interactive editing # control (menu entry editor and command-line) and entries protected by the # command 'lock' # e.g. password topsecret # password --md5 $1$gLhU0/$aW78kHK1QfV3P2b2znUoe/ # password topsecret # # examples # # title Windows 95/98/NT/2000 # root (hd0,0) # makeactive # chainloader +1 # # title Linux # root (hd0,1) # kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro # # # Put static boot stanzas before and/or after AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST ### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST ## lines between the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST markers will be modified ## by the debian update-grub script except for the default options below ## DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs ## ## Start Default Options ## ## default kernel options ## default kernel options for automagic boot options ## If you want special options for specific kernels use kopt_x_y_z ## where x.y.z is kernel version. Minor versions can be omitted. ## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro ## kopt_2_6_8=root=/dev/hdc1 ro ## kopt_2_6_8_2_686=root=/dev/hdc2 ro # kopt=root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro ## default grub root device ## e.g. groot=(hd0,0) # groot=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ## should update-grub create alternative automagic boot options ## e.g. alternative=true ## alternative=false # alternative=true ## should update-grub lock alternative automagic boot options ## e.g. lockalternative=true ## lockalternative=false # lockalternative=false ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the ## alternatives ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5 # defoptions=quiet splash ## should update-grub lock old automagic boot options ## e.g. lockold=false ## lockold=true # lockold=false ## Xen hypervisor options to use with the default Xen boot option # xenhopt= ## Xen Linux kernel options to use with the default Xen boot option # xenkopt=console=tty0 ## altoption boot targets option ## multiple altoptions lines are allowed ## e.g. altoptions=(extra menu suffix) extra boot options ## altoptions=(recovery) single # altoptions=(recovery mode) single ## controls how many kernels should be put into the menu.lst ## only counts the first occurence of a kernel, not the ## alternative kernel options ## e.g. howmany=all ## howmany=7 # howmany=all ## specify if running in Xen domU or have grub detect automatically ## update-grub will ignore non-xen kernels when running in domU and vice versa ## e.g. indomU=detect ## indomU=true ## indomU=false # indomU=detect ## should update-grub create memtest86 boot option ## e.g. memtest86=true ## memtest86=false # memtest86=true ## should update-grub adjust the value of the default booted system ## can be true or false # updatedefaultentry=false ## should update-grub add savedefault to the default options ## can be true or false # savedefault=false ## ## End Default Options ## title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-32-server uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-32-server (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-27-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-27-generic (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic title Chainload into GRUB 2 root 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/grub/core.img title Ubuntu 10.10, memtest86+ uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST To add complication and joy to my life, this is a desktop machine in a remote datacenter; we don't have either local access or serial-console access. Suggestions?

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• Trigger Happy

  - by Tim Dexter

  Its been a while, I know, we’ll say no more OK? I’ll just write …In the latest BIP 11.1.1.6 release and if I’m really honest; the release before this (we'll call it dot 5 for brevity.) The boys and gals in the engine room have been real busy enhancing BIP with some new functionality. Those of you that use the scheduling engine in OBIEE may already know and use the ‘conditional scheduling’ feature. This allows you to be more intelligent about what reports get run and sent to folks on a scheduled basis. You create a ‘trigger’ analysis (answer) that is executed at schedule time prior to the main report. When the schedule rolls around, the trigger is run, if it returns rows, then the main report is run and delivered. If there are no rows returned, then the main report is not run. Useful right? Your users are not bombarded with 20 reports in their inbox every week that they need to wade throu. They get a handful that they know they need to look at. If you ensure you use conditional formatting in the report then they can find the anomalous data in the reports very quickly and move on to the rest of their day more quickly. You could even think of OBIEE as a virtual team member, scouring the data on your behalf 24/7 and letting you know when its found an issue.BI Publisher, wanting the team t-shirt and the khaki pants, has followed suit. You can now set up ‘triggers’ for it to execute before it runs the main report. Just like its big brother, if the scheduled report trigger returns rows of data; it then executes the main report. Otherwise, the report is skipped until the next schedule time rolls around. Sound familiar?BIP differs a little, in that you only need to construct a query to act as the trigger rather than a complete report. Let assume we have a monthly wage by department report on a schedule. We only want to send the report to managers if their departmental wages reach and/or exceed a certain amount. The toughest part about this is coming up with the SQL to test the business rule you want to implement. For my example, its not that tough: select d.department_name, sum(e.salary) as wage_total from employees e, departments d where d.department_id = e.department_id group by d.department_name having sum(e.salary) > 230000 We're looking for departments where the wage cost is greater than 230,000 Dexter Dollars! With a bit of messing I found out you can parametrize the query. Users can then set a value at schedule time if they need to. To create the trigger is straightforward enough. You can create multiple triggers for users to select at schedule time. Notice I also used a parameter in the query, :wamount. Note the matching parameter in the tree on the left. You also dont need to return multiple columns, one is fine, the key is if there are rows returned. You can build the rest of your report as usual. At scheduling time the Schedule tab has a bit more on it. If your users want to set the trigger, they check the Use Trigger box. The page will then pop fields to pick the appropriate trigger they want to use, even a trigger on another data model if needed. Note it will also ask for the parameter value associated with the trigger. At this point you should note that the data model does not make a distinction between trigger and data model (extract) parameters. So users will see the parameters on the General and Schedule tabs. If per chance you do need to just have a trigger parameters. You can just hide them from the report using the Parameters popup in the report designer, just un-check the 'Show' box I have tested the opposite case where you do not want main report parameters seen in the trigger section. BIP handles that for you! Once the report hits its allotted schedule time, the trigger is executed. Based on the results the report will either run or be 'skipped.' Now, you have a smarter scheduler that will only deliver reports when folks need to see them and take action on the contents. More official info here for developers and here for users.

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• ResponseStatusLine protocol violation

  - by Tom Hines

  I parse/scrape a few web page every now and then and recently ran across an error that stated: "The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine".   After a few web searches, I found a couple of suggestions – one of which said the problem could be fixed by changing the HttpWebRequest ProtocolVersion to 1.0 with the command: 1: HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(strURI); 2: req.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version10;   …but that did not work in my particular case.   What DID work was the next suggestion I found that suggested the use of the setting: “useUnsafeHeaderParsing” either in the app.config file or programmatically. If added to the app.config, it would be: 1: <!-- after the applicationSettings --> 2: <system.net> 3: <settings> 4: <httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing ="true"/> 5: </settings> 6: </system.net>   If done programmatically, it would look like this: C++: 1: // UUHP_CPP.h 2: #pragma once 3: using namespace System; 4: using namespace System::Reflection; 5:   6: namespace UUHP_CPP 7: { 8: public ref class CUUHP_CPP 9: { 10: public: 11: static bool UseUnsafeHeaderParsing(String^% strError) 12: { 13: Assembly^ assembly = Assembly::GetAssembly(System::Net::Configuration::SettingsSection::typeid); //__typeof 14: if (nullptr==assembly) 15: { 16: strError = "Could not access Assembly"; 17: return false; 18: } 19:   20: Type^ type = assembly->GetType("System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSectionInternal"); 21: if (nullptr==type) 22: { 23: strError = "Could not access internal settings"; 24: return false; 25: } 26:   27: Object^ obj = type->InvokeMember("Section", 28: BindingFlags::Static | BindingFlags::GetProperty | BindingFlags::NonPublic, 29: nullptr, nullptr, gcnew array<Object^,1>(0)); 30:   31: if(nullptr == obj) 32: { 33: strError = "Could not invoke Section member"; 34: return false; 35: } 36:   37: FieldInfo^ fi = type->GetField("useUnsafeHeaderParsing", BindingFlags::NonPublic | BindingFlags::Instance); 38: if(nullptr == fi) 39: { 40: strError = "Could not access useUnsafeHeaderParsing field"; 41: return false; 42: } 43:   44: if (!(bool)fi->GetValue(obj)) 45: { 46: fi->SetValue(obj, true); 47: } 48:   49: return true; 50: } 51: }; 52: } C# (CSharp): 1: using System; 2: using System.Reflection; 3:   4: namespace UUHP_CS 5: { 6: public class CUUHP_CS 7: { 8: public static bool UseUnsafeHeaderParsing(ref string strError) 9: { 10: Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSection)); 11: if (null == assembly) 12: { 13: strError = "Could not access Assembly"; 14: return false; 15: } 16:   17: Type type = assembly.GetType("System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSectionInternal"); 18: if (null == type) 19: { 20: strError = "Could not access internal settings"; 21: return false; 22: } 23:   24: object obj = type.InvokeMember("Section", 25: BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.GetProperty | BindingFlags.NonPublic, 26: null, null, new object[] { }); 27:   28: if (null == obj) 29: { 30: strError = "Could not invoke Section member"; 31: return false; 32: } 33:   34: // If it's not already set, set it. 35: FieldInfo fi = type.GetField("useUnsafeHeaderParsing", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance); 36: if (null == fi) 37: { 38: strError = "Could not access useUnsafeHeaderParsing field"; 39: return false; 40: } 41:   42: if (!Convert.ToBoolean(fi.GetValue(obj))) 43: { 44: fi.SetValue(obj, true); 45: } 46:   47: return true; 48: } 49: } 50: }   F# (FSharp): 1: namespace UUHP_FS 2: open System 3: open System.Reflection 4: module CUUHP_FS = 5: let UseUnsafeHeaderParsing(strError : byref<string>) : bool = 6: // 7: let assembly : Assembly = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof<System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSection>) 8: if (null = assembly) then 9: strError <- "Could not access Assembly" 10: false 11: else 12: 13: let myType : Type = assembly.GetType("System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSectionInternal") 14: if (null = myType) then 15: strError <- "Could not access internal settings" 16: false 17: else 18: 19: let obj : Object = myType.InvokeMember("Section", BindingFlags.Static ||| BindingFlags.GetProperty ||| BindingFlags.NonPublic, null, null, Array.zeroCreate 0) 20: if (null = obj) then 21: strError <- "Could not invoke Section member" 22: false 23: else 24: 25: // If it's not already set, set it. 26: let fi : FieldInfo = myType.GetField("useUnsafeHeaderParsing", BindingFlags.NonPublic ||| BindingFlags.Instance) 27: if(null = fi) then 28: strError <- "Could not access useUnsafeHeaderParsing field" 29: false 30: else 31: 32: if (not(Convert.ToBoolean(fi.GetValue(obj)))) then 33: fi.SetValue(obj, true) 34: 35: // Now return true 36: true VB (Visual Basic): 1: Option Explicit On 2: Option Strict On 3: Imports System 4: Imports System.Reflection 5:   6: Public Class CUUHP_VB 7: Public Shared Function UseUnsafeHeaderParsing(ByRef strError As String) As Boolean 8:   9: Dim assembly As [Assembly] 10: assembly = [assembly].GetAssembly(GetType(System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSection)) 11:   12: If (assembly Is Nothing) Then 13: strError = "Could not access Assembly" 14: Return False 15: End If 16:   17: Dim type As Type 18: type = [assembly].GetType("System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSectionInternal") 19: If (type Is Nothing) Then 20: strError = "Could not access internal settings" 21: Return False 22: End If 23:   24: Dim obj As Object 25: obj = [type].InvokeMember("Section", _ 26: BindingFlags.Static Or BindingFlags.GetProperty Or BindingFlags.NonPublic, _ 27: Nothing, Nothing, New [Object]() {}) 28:   29: If (obj Is Nothing) Then 30: strError = "Could not invoke Section member" 31: Return False 32: End If 33:   34: ' If it's not already set, set it. 35: Dim fi As FieldInfo 36: fi = [type].GetField("useUnsafeHeaderParsing", BindingFlags.NonPublic Or BindingFlags.Instance) 37: If (fi Is Nothing) Then 38: strError = "Could not access useUnsafeHeaderParsing field" 39: Return False 40: End If 41:   42: If (Not Convert.ToBoolean(fi.GetValue(obj))) Then 43: fi.SetValue(obj, True) 44: End If 45:   46: Return True 47: End Function 48: End Class   Technorati Tags: C++,CPP,VB,Visual Basic,F#,FSharp,C#,CSharp,ResponseStatusLine,protocol violation

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• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

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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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• Upgrading SSIS Custom Components for SQL Server 2012

  Having finally got around to upgrading my custom components to SQL Server 2012, I thought I’d share some notes on the process. One of the goals was minimal duplication, so the same code files are used to build the 2008 and 2012 components, I just have a separate project file. The high level steps are listed below, followed by some more details. Create a 2012 copy of the project file Upgrade project, just open the new project file is VS2010 Change target framework to .NET 4.0 Set conditional compilation symbol for DENALI Change any conditional code, including assembly version and UI type name Edit project file to change referenced assemblies for 2012 Change target framework to .NET 4.0 Open the project properties. On the Applications page, change the Target framework to .NET Framework 4. Set conditional compilation symbol for DENALI Re-open the project properties. On the Build tab, first change the Configuration to All Configurations, then set a Conditional compilation symbol of DENALI. Change any conditional code, including assembly version and UI type name The value doesn’t have to be DENALI, it can actually be anything you like, that is just what I use. It is how I control sections of code that vary between versions. There were several API changes between 2005 and 2008, as well as interface name changes. Whilst we don’t have the same issues between 2008 and 2012, I still have some sections of code that do change such as the assembly attributes. #if DENALI [assembly: AssemblyDescription("Data Generator Source for SQL Server Integration Services 2012")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Copyright © 2012 Konesans Ltd")] [assembly: AssemblyVersion("3.0.0.0")] #else [assembly: AssemblyDescription("Data Generator Source for SQL Server Integration Services 2008")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Copyright © 2008 Konesans Ltd")] [assembly: AssemblyVersion("2.0.0.0")] #endif The Visual Studio editor automatically formats the code based on the current compilation symbols, hence in this case the 2008 code is grey to indicate it is disabled. As you can see in the previous example I have distinct assembly version attributes, ensuring I can run both 2008 and 2012 versions of my component side by side. For custom components with a user interface, be sure to update the UITypeName property of the DtsTask or DtsPipelineComponent attributes. As above I use the conditional compilation symbol to control the code. #if DENALI [DtsTask ( DisplayName = "File Watcher Task", Description = "File Watcher Task", IconResource = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTask.ico", UITypeName = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTaskUI,Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask,Version=3.0.0.0,Culture=Neutral,PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b", TaskContact = "File Watcher Task; Konesans Ltd; Copyright © 2012 Konesans Ltd; http://www.konesans.com" )] #else [DtsTask ( DisplayName = "File Watcher Task", Description = "File Watcher Task", IconResource = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTask.ico", UITypeName = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTaskUI,Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask,Version=2.0.0.0,Culture=Neutral,PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b", TaskContact = "File Watcher Task; Konesans Ltd; Copyright © 2004-2008 Konesans Ltd; http://www.konesans.com" )] #endif public sealed class FileWatcherTask: Task, IDTSComponentPersist, IDTSBreakpointSite, IDTSSuspend { // .. code goes on... } Shown below is another example I found that needed changing. I borrow one of the MS editors, and use it against a custom property, but need to ensure I reference the correct version of the MS controls assembly. This section of code is actually shared between the 2005, 2008 and 2012 versions of my component hence it has test for both DENALI and KATMAI symbols. #if DENALI const string multiLineUI = "Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls.ModalMultilineStringEditor, Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls, Version=11.0.00.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; #elif KATMAI const string multiLineUI = "Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls.ModalMultilineStringEditor, Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; #else const string multiLineUI = "Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls.ModalMultilineStringEditor, Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; #endif // Create Match Expression parameter IDTSCustomPropertyCollection100 propertyCollection = outputColumn.CustomPropertyCollection; IDTSCustomProperty100 property = propertyCollection.New(); property = propertyCollection.New(); property.Name = MatchParams.Name; property.Description = MatchParams.Description; property.TypeConverter = typeof(MultilineStringConverter).AssemblyQualifiedName; property.UITypeEditor = multiLineUI; property.Value = MatchParams.DefaultValue; Edit project file to change referenced assemblies for 2012 We now need to edit the project file itself. Open the MyComponente2012.cproj  in you favourite text editor, and then perform a couple of find and replaces as listed below: Find Replace Comment Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Change the assembly references version from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012. Microsoft SQL Server\100\ Microsoft SQL Server\110\ Change any assembly reference hint path locations from from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012. If you use any Build Events during development, such as copying the component assembly to the DTS folder, or calling GACUTIL to install it into the GAC, you can also change these now. An example of my new post-build event for a pipeline component is shown below, which uses the .NET 4.0 path for GACUTIL. It also uses the 110 folder location, instead of 100 for SQL Server 2008, but that was covered the the previous find and replace. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\gacutil.exe" /if "$(TargetPath)" copy "$(TargetPath)" "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DTS\PipelineComponents" /Y

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• Modifying Service URLs with LINQ to Twitter

  - by Joe Mayo

  It’s funny that two posts so close together speak about flexibility with the LINQ to Twitter provider.  There are certain things you know from experience on when to make software more flexible and when to save time.  This is another one of those times when I got lucky and made the right choice up front. I’m talking about the ability to switch URLs. It only makes sense that Twitter should begin versioning their API as it matures.  In fact, most of the entire API has moved to the v1 URL at “https://api.twitter.com/1/”, except for search and trends.  Recently, Twitter introduced the available and local trends, but hung them off the new v1, and left the rest of the trends API on the old URL. To implement this, I muscled my way into the expression tree during CreateRequestProcessor to figure out which trend I was dealing with; perhaps not elegant, but the code is in the right place and that’s what factories are for.  Anyway, the point is that I wouldn’t have to do this kind of stuff (as much fun as it is), if Twitter would have more consistency. Having went to Chirp last week and seeing the evolution of the API, it looks like my wish is coming true.  …now if they would just get their stuff together on the mess they made with geo-location and places… but again, that’s all transparent if your using LINQ to Twitter because I pulled all of that together in a consistent way so that you don’t have to. Normally, when Twitter makes a change, code breaks and I have to scramble to get the fixes in-place.  This time, in the case of a URL change, the adjustment is easy and no-one has to wait for me.  Essentially, all you need to do is change the URL passed to the TwitterContext constructor.  Here’s an example of instantiating a TwitterContext now: using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/")) The third parameter constructor is the SearchUrl, which is used for Search and Trend APIs. You probably know what’s coming next; another constructor, but with the SearchUrl parameter set to the new URL as follows: using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://api.twitter.com/1/")) One consequence of setting the URL this way is that you set the URL for both Trends and Search.  Since Search is still using the old URL, this is going to break for Search queries. You could always instantiate a special TwitterContext instance for Search queries, with the old URL set. Alternatively, you can use the TwitterContext’s SearchUrl property. Here’s an example: twitterCtx.SearchUrl = "https://api.twitter.com/1/"; var trends = (from trend in twitterCtx.Trends where trend.Type == TrendType.Daily && trend.Date == DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2).Date select trend) .ToList(); Notice how I set the SearchUrl property just-in-time for the query. This allows you to target the URL for each specific query. Whichever way you prefer to configure the URL, it’s your choice. So, now you know how to set the URL to be used for Trend queries and how to prevent whacking your Search queries. I’ll be updating the Trend API to use same URL as all other APIs soon, so the only API left to use the SearchUrl will be Search, but for the short term, it’s Trends and Search. Until I make this change, you’ll have a viable work-around by setting the URL yourself, as explained above. These were the Search and Trend URLs, but you might be curious about the second parameter of the TwitterContext constructor; that’s the URL for all other APIs (the BaseUrl), except for Trend and Search. Similarly, you can use the TwitterContext’s BaseUrl property to set the BaseUrl. Setting the BaseUrl can be useful when communicating with other services. In addition to Twitter changing URLs, the Twitter API has been adopted by other companies, such as Identi.ca, Tumblr, and  WordPress.  This capability lets you use LINQ to Twitter with any of these services.  This is a testament to the success of the Twitter API and it’s popularity. No doubt we’ll have hills and valleys to traverse as the Twitter API matures, but hopefully there will be enough flexibility in LINQ to Twitter to make these changes as transparent as possible for you. @JoeMayo

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• Design review for application facing memory issues

  - by Mr Moose

  I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part III

  - by Tara Kizer

  Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit.  Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”.  I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions.  Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session.  He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems.  Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats.  Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem.  He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem).  Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first).  This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%.  You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking.  One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT.  If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans.  The minimum size of a plan is 24k.  This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much.  You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column.  She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database.  I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear.  This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc.  This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing.  This helps with plan cache bloat.  I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql.  Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server.  He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”.  You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here.  One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have.  Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server.  This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers.  Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there.  BUT!  Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits.  Instead of that, dig deeper first.  Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level.  Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy.  What are your recoverability requirements?  Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB.  He said how fabulous it is.  I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems.  You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server.  If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover.  You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

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• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

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• What's New In 11.1.2.1 (Talleyrand SP1)

  - by russ.bishop

  This release is primarily about bug fixes and that's what we spent the most time on, but we also addressed a number of other things: 1. Performance improvements We've done a lot of work to improve the performance of page load and execution times. For example, the View Compare page is about half the size it was previously! We've also done a lot of work on the server to improve performance of queries, exports, action scripts, etc. We implemented some finer-grained locking so fewer operations will block other users while they are in progress. We made some optimizations to improve performance when you have a lot of network or database latency as well. Just a few examples: An Import that previously took 8 GB of memory and hours to complete now runs in about 30 minutes and never takes more than 1 GB of RAM. Searching by exact Node Name now completes within 2 seconds even for a hierarchy with millions of nodes. Another search that was taking 30 seconds to run now completes in less than 5 seconds. 2. Upgrade support This release supports automatic upgrade from previous releases, built right into the console. 3. Console Improvements The Console has been reorganized and made easier to use. It is also much more multi-threaded so it responds quicker without freezing up when you save changes or when it needs to get status. 4. Property Namespaces Properties now have a concept called a Namespace. This is tied into the Application Templates to prevent conflicts with duplicate property names. Right now, if you have an AccountType and you pull in the HFM template, it also has AccountType so you end up creating properties with decorations on the name like "Account Type (HFM)". This is no longer necessary. In addition, properties within a namespace must have unique labels but they can be duplicated across namespaces. So in the Property Grid when you click on the HFM category, you just see "AccountType". When you click on MyCategory, you see "AccountType", but they are different properties with different values. Within formulas, the names are still unique (eg: Custom.AccountType vs HFM.AccountType). I'll write more about this one later. 5. Single Sign On DRM now supports Single Sign-On via HSS. For example, if you are using Oracle's OAM as your SSO solution then you configure HSS to use OAM just like you would before. You also configure DRM to use HSS, again just like before. Then you configure OAM to protect the DRM web app, like you would any other website. However once you do those things, users are no longer prompted to enter their username/password. They simply get redirected to OAM if they don't already have a login token, otherwise they pick their application and sail right into DRM. You can also avoid having to pick an application (see the next item) 6. URL-based navigation You can now specify the application you want to log into via the URL. Combined with SSO and your Intranet, it becomes easy to provide links on our intranet portal that take users directly into a specific DRM application. We also support specifying the Version, Hierarchy, and Node. Again, this can be used on your internal portal, but the scenarios get even more interesting when you are using workflow like Oracle BPEL you can automatically generate links within emails that will take users directly to a specific node in the UI. 7. Job status and cancellation A lot of the jobs now report their status and support true cancellation. Action Scripts also report a progress complete percentage since the amount of work is known ahead of time. 8. Action Script Options Action scripts support Option declarations at the top of the file so a script can self-describe (when specified in the file, the corresponding item in the file is ignored). For example: Option|DetectDelimiter Option|UsePropertyNames|true This will tell DRM to automatically detect the delimiter (a pipe symbol in this case) and that all references to properties are by Name, not by Label. Note that when you load a script in the UI, if you use Labels we automatically try to match them up if they are unique. Any duplicates are indicated and you are presented with a choice to pick which property you actually referred to. This is somewhat similar to Version substitution, but tailored for properties. There are other more minor changes and like I said earlier a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements. Hopefully I will get a chance to dig into some of these things in future blog posts.

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• LIMBO fails on startup with Internal errors - invalid parameters received

  - by user61262

  I installed LIMBO from the Humble Bundle V and as far as I am aware, this has wine packaged with it (I also installed the latest from the repo's in case is was because of that). However the game doesn't even start and fails with the message: Wine Program Error Internal errors - invalid parameters received. Is there a way to log the error or does anyone know why this happens? This question was asked previously but it seems to have disappeared. My Graphics cards is a Geforece GT 250 Cheers ice. [edit: Wine outputs the following error: wine /opt/limbo/support/limbo/drive_c/Program\ Files/limbo/limbo.exe fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 59 (SPI_SETSTICKYKEYS) fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 53 (SPI_SETTOGGLEKEYS) fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 51 (SPI_SETFILTERKEYS) fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32f580,0x00000000), stub! err:x11settings:X11DRV_ChangeDisplaySettingsEx No matching mode found 1920x1080x32 @60! (XRandR) err:xrandr:X11DRV_XRandR_SetCurrentMode Resolution change not successful -- perhaps display has changed? wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address 0x48213e (thread 0009), starting debugger... The debugger has the following output: Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 in 32-bit code (0x0048213e). Register dump: CS:0073 SS:007b DS:007b ES:007b FS:0033 GS:003b EIP:0048213e ESP:0032f9f4 EBP:0037cdd0 EFLAGS:00010202( R- -- I - - - ) EAX:00000000 EBX:00000000 ECX:00000000 EDX:0037cf4c ESI:0037cda8 EDI:0037cdcc Stack dump: 0x0032f9f4: 0037cda8 0034c708 7bc35120 00000000 0x0032fa04: 0037cda8 0032fa38 0079fc58 00000000 0x0032fa14: 0048b7d4 00000001 0037cdcc 00000001 0x0032fa24: 00000780 00000438 0034c620 00000000 0x0032fa34: 0034c708 0032fa78 007a04e2 00000002 0x0032fa44: 0048c4bc 00000780 00000438 0037cda8 Backtrace: =>0 0x0048213e in limbo (+0x8213e) (0x0037cdd0) 0x0048213e: movl 0x0(%eax),%edx Modules: Module Address Debug info Name (103 modules) PE 400000- 926000 Export limbo PE 10000000-101ff000 Deferred d3dx9_43 ELF 79bb3000-7b800000 Deferred libnvidia-glcore.so.295.53 ELF 7b800000-7ba15000 Deferred kernel32<elf> \-PE 7b810000-7ba15000 \ kernel32 ELF 7bc00000-7bcc3000 Deferred ntdll<elf> \-PE 7bc10000-7bcc3000 \ ntdll ELF 7bf00000-7bf04000 Deferred <wine-loader> ELF 7d7e0000-7d7e4000 Deferred libnvidia-tls.so.295.53 ELF 7d7e4000-7d8bc000 Deferred libgl.so.1 ELF 7d9d0000-7d9d9000 Deferred librt.so.1 ELF 7d9d9000-7d9de000 Deferred libgpg-error.so.0 ELF 7d9de000-7d9f6000 Deferred libresolv.so.2 ELF 7d9f6000-7d9fa000 Deferred libkeyutils.so.1 ELF 7d9fa000-7da43000 Deferred libdbus-1.so.3 ELF 7da43000-7da55000 Deferred libp11-kit.so.0 ELF 7da55000-7dada000 Deferred libgcrypt.so.11 ELF 7dada000-7daec000 Deferred libtasn1.so.3 ELF 7daec000-7daf5000 Deferred libkrb5support.so.0 ELF 7daf5000-7dafa000 Deferred libcom_err.so.2 ELF 7dafa000-7db22000 Deferred libk5crypto.so.3 ELF 7db22000-7dbf1000 Deferred libkrb5.so.3 ELF 7dbf1000-7dc03000 Deferred libavahi-client.so.3 ELF 7dc03000-7dc11000 Deferred libavahi-common.so.3 ELF 7dc11000-7dcd5000 Deferred libgnutls.so.26 ELF 7dcd5000-7dd13000 Deferred libgssapi_krb5.so.2 ELF 7dd13000-7dd66000 Deferred libcups.so.2 ELF 7dd94000-7ddc8000 Deferred uxtheme<elf> \-PE 7dda0000-7ddc8000 \ uxtheme ELF 7ddc8000-7ddd3000 Deferred libxcursor.so.1 ELF 7ddd4000-7dde7000 Deferred gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so ELF 7de47000-7de4d000 Deferred libxfixes.so.3 ELF 7deac000-7ded6000 Deferred libexpat.so.1 ELF 7ded6000-7df0a000 Deferred libfontconfig.so.1 ELF 7df0a000-7df1a000 Deferred libxi.so.6 ELF 7df1a000-7df1e000 Deferred libxcomposite.so.1 ELF 7df1e000-7df27000 Deferred libxrandr.so.2 ELF 7df27000-7df31000 Deferred libxrender.so.1 ELF 7df31000-7df37000 Deferred libxxf86vm.so.1 ELF 7df37000-7df3b000 Deferred libxinerama.so.1 ELF 7df3b000-7df5d000 Deferred imm32<elf> \-PE 7df40000-7df5d000 \ imm32 ELF 7df5d000-7df64000 Deferred libxdmcp.so.6 ELF 7df64000-7df85000 Deferred libxcb.so.1 ELF 7df85000-7df9f000 Deferred libice.so.6 ELF 7df9f000-7e0d3000 Deferred libx11.so.6 ELF 7e0d3000-7e0e5000 Deferred libxext.so.6 ELF 7e0e5000-7e178000 Deferred winex11<elf> \-PE 7e0f0000-7e178000 \ winex11 ELF 7e178000-7e18e000 Deferred libz.so.1 ELF 7e18e000-7e228000 Deferred libfreetype.so.6 ELF 7e228000-7e247000 Deferred 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ld-linux.so.2 ELF b7760000-b7761000 Deferred [vdso].so Threads: process tid prio (all id:s are in hex) 00000008 (D) Z:\opt\limbo\support\limbo\drive_c\Program Files\limbo\limbo.exe 00000009 0 <== 0000000e services.exe 00000020 0 0000001f 0 00000019 0 00000018 0 00000017 0 00000015 0 00000010 0 0000000f 0 00000012 winedevice.exe 0000001d 0 0000001a 0 00000014 0 00000013 0 0000001b plugplay.exe 00000021 0 0000001e 0 0000001c 0 00000022 explorer.exe 00000023 0 System information: Wine build: wine-1.4 Platform: i386 Host system: Linux Host version: 3.2.0-24-generic-pae

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #053 – Final Post in Series

  - by Pinal Dave

  It has been a fantastic journey to write memory lane series for an entire year. This series gave me the opportunity to go back and see what I have contributed to this blog throughout the last 7 years. This was indeed fantastic series as this provided me the opportunity to witness how technology has grown throughout the year and how I have progressed in my career while writing this blog post. This series was indeed fantastic experience readers as many joined during the last few years and were not sure what they have missed in recent years. Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Get Current User – Get Logged In User Here is the straight script which list logged in SQL Server users. Disable All Triggers on a Database – Disable All Triggers on All Servers Question : How to disable all the triggers for a database? Additionally, how to disable all the triggers for all servers? For answer execute the script in the blog post. Importance of Master Database for SQL Server Startup I have received following questions many times. I will list all the questions here and answer them together. What is the purpose of Master database? Should our backup Master database? Which database is must have database for SQL Server for startup? Which are the default system database created when SQL Server 2005 is installed for the first time? What happens if Master database is corrupted? Answers to all of the questions are very much related. 2008 DECLARE Multiple Variables in One Statement SQL Server is a great product and it has many features which are very unique to SQL Server. Regarding feature of SQL Server where multiple variable can be declared in one statement, it is absolutely possible to do. 2009 How to Enable Index – How to Disable Index – Incorrect syntax near ‘ENABLE’ Many times I have seen that the index is disabled when there is a large update operation on the table. Bulk insert of very large file updates in any table using SSIS is usually preceded by disabling the index and followed by enabling the index. I have seen many developers running the following query to disable the index. 2010 List of all the Views from Database Many emails I received suggesting that they have hundreds of the view and now have no clue what is going on and how many of them have indexes and how many does not have an index. Some even asked me if there is any way they can get a list of the views with the property of Index along with it. Here is the quick script which does exactly the same. You can also include many other columns from the same view. Minimum Maximum Memory – Server Memory Options I was recently reading about SQL Server Memory Options over here. While reading this one line really caught my attention is minimum value allowed for maximum memory options. The default setting for min server memory is 0, and the default setting for max server memory is 2147483647. The minimum amount of memory you can specify for max server memory is 16 megabytes (MB). 2011 Fundamentals of Columnstore Index There are two kinds of storage in a database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data are relevant or not, column store queries need only to search a much lesser number of the columns. How to Ignore Columnstore Index Usage in Query In summary the question in simple words “How can we ignore using the column store index in selective queries?” Very interesting question – you can use I can understand there may be the cases when the column store index is not ideal and needs to be ignored the same. You can use the query hint IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX to ignore the column store index. The SQL Server Engine will use any other index which is best after ignoring the column store index. 2012 Storing Variable Values in Temporary Array or Temporary List SQL Server does not support arrays or a dynamic length storage mechanism like list. Absolutely there are some clever workarounds and few extra-ordinary solutions but everybody can;t come up with such solution. Additionally, sometime the requirements are very simple that doing extraordinary coding is not required. Here is the simple case. Move Database Files MDF and LDF to Another Location It is not common to keep the Database on the same location where OS is installed. Usually Database files are in SAN, Separate Disk Array or on SSDs. This is done usually for performance reason and manageability perspective. Now the challenges comes up when database which was installed at not preferred default location and needs to move to a different location. Here is the quick tutorial how you can do it. UNION ALL and ORDER BY – How to Order Table Separately While Using UNION ALL If your requirement is such that you want your top and bottom query of the UNION resultset independently sorted but in the same result set you can add an additional static column and order by that column. Let us re-create the same scenario. Copy Data from One Table to Another Table – SQL in Sixty Seconds #031 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVWIA-ACMNo Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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