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• SQL Server Master class winner

  - by Testas

   The winner of the SQL Server MasterClass competition courtesy of the UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine!    Steve Hindmarsh     There is still time to register for the seminar yourself at:  www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql     More information about the seminar     Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London  When: Thursday 17th June 2010  This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will: Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour    Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data    Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to change  Sessions Abstracts  KEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production    Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.   SESSION ONE: SQL Server Mythbusters  It's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained.   SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest  Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted!   SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward   Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys!   SESSION 4: Essential Database Maintenance  In this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. Speaker Biographies     Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.   Speaker Testimonials  "To call them good trainers is an epic understatement. They know how to deliver technical material in ways that illustrate it well. I had to stop Paul at one point and ask him how long it took to build a particular slide because the animations were so good at conveying a hard-to-describe process." "These are not beginner presenters, and they put an extreme amount of preparation and attention to detail into everything that they do. Completely, utterly professional." "When it comes to the instructors themselves, Kimberly and Paul simply have no equal. Not only are they both ultimate authorities, but they have endless enthusiasm about the material, and spot on delivery. If either ever got tired they never showed it, even after going all day and all week. We witnessed countless demos over the course of the week, some extremely involved, multi-step processes, and I can’t recall one that didn’t go the way it was supposed to." "You might think that with this extreme level of skill comes extreme levels of egotism and lack of patience. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... They simply know how to teach, and are approachable, humble, and patient." "The experience Paul and Kimberly have had with real live customers yields a lot more information and things to watch out for than you'd ever get from documentation alone." “Kimberly, I just wanted to send you an email to let you know how awesome you are! I have applied some of your indexing strategies to our website’s homegrown CMS and we are experiencing a significant performance increase. WOW....amazing tips delivered in an exciting way!  Thanks again” 

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• Apache outputs all urls of a second domain as a subfolder of the primary domain name

  - by s_rathbone

  Hi all, would anyone be able to possibly give me some guidance.. Basically, i have a 'shared hosting' account with a large internet hosting provider, and my account lets me have multiple seperate domains within this folder structure.(note: not aliased domains and not sub domains). so, my goal is to have 2 domains set up. i have already purchased the two domain names i need: The first domain is the 'primary' domain name for the root folder(eg. www.example1.com) and the second domain name is set for one of its sub folders(eg. www.example2.com is set to the folder www.example1.com/sites/music). The problem is that when apache returns a page of the second domain back to the browser, apache writes the hyperlinks as if it's a sub folder of the first domain ( eg. www.example2.com/index.html. comes out as http://www.example1.com/sites/music/index.html). Now, I have done some reading on this, looking though "Apache: the definitive guide"(o'reilly), and although it was useful, couldn't really find the answer. i'm guessing this issue is most likely an apache setup issue in http.conf, rather than an issue with the hosting company itself (which is why im posting it here) and I have also been to the official documentation for apache site, and i am guessing i might need to use something like the rewritebase directive in htaccess files.. but im really not sure, im more of a java programmer guy, and have been struggling with this for a couple of days. Any guidance would be REALLY appreciated. If it helps, my hosting company is godaddy, and my sites are hosted on linux. My problem was originally with wordpress which i reinstalled a number of times in various ways to correct the problem, but ive just done a test with a very simple static html, and it still has the same issue with relative urls like this: <html> <head></head><body><a href="images/dog.html">Pictures of Dogs</a></body> </html> However, it is fine if i hardcode the urls like this: <html> <head></head><body><a href="http://www.example2.com/images/dog.html">Pictures of Dogs</a></body> </html> Thanks heaps, Steve R NOW FIXED Ok, the problem has now been fixed, and i didn't need to modify any .conf or .htaccess files. The problem was, that when I went to install the second application into a second domain from the godaddy site, one of the setup questions is that it asks you which site you want it installed to. after that it asks for the desired folder path. However, the problem was that the second domain name was already pointing to the correct subfolder of the primary domain. So when I started installing wordpress again and came to the menu to select which site it was for, and it listed only the primary domain as an option, i assumed that this was like a label of "which hosting account?", or "which primary domain will your application will be installed under?" because I already knew that in the next step i was specifiying the folder. In order to correct this, you must make sure that your second domain is added to your domain list so that it will be listed as an option during the installation process. For further details please read tystips.com/archives/52/how2-save-money-host-multiple-wordpress-blogs-on-a-single-godaddy-hosting-account/

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• Build an Organization Chart In Visio 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  With trying to manage a business these days, it’s very important to have an Organization Chart to keep everything manageable. Here we’ll show you how to build one in Visio 2010. This Guest Article was written by our friends over at Office 2010 Club. Need for Organization Charts The need of creating Organization Charts are becoming indispensable these days, as companies start focusing on extensive hiring for far reach availability, increase in productivity and targeting diverse markets. Considering this rigorous change, creating an organization chart can help stakeholders in comprehending the ever growing organization structure & hierarchy with an ease. It shows the basic structure of organization along with defining the relationships between employees working in different departments. Opportunely, Microsoft Visio 2010 offers an easy way to create Organization chart. As before now, orthodox ways of listing organization hierarchy have been used for defining the structure of departments along with communication possible including; horizontal and vertical communications. To transform these lists which defines organizational structure, into a detailed chart, Visio 2010 includes an add-in for importing Excel spreadsheet, which comes in handy for pulling out data from spreadsheet to create an organization chart. Importantly, you don’t need to indulge yourself in maze of defining organizational hierarchies and chalking-out structure, as you just need to specify the column & row headers, along with data you need to import and it will automatically create out chart defining; organizational hierarchies with specified credentials of each employee, categorized in their corresponding departments. Creating Organization Charts in Visio 2010 To start off with, we have created an Excel spreadsheet having fields, Name, Supervisor, Designation, Department and Phone. The Name field contains name of all the employees working in different departments, whereas Supervisor field contains name of supervisors or team leads. This field is vital for creating Organization Chart, as it defines the basic structure & hierarchy in chart. Now launch Visio 2010, head over to View tab, under Add-Ons menu, from Business options, click Organization Chart Wizard. This will start Organization Chart Wizard, in the first step, enable Information that’s already stored in a file or database option, and click Next. As we are importing Excel sheet, select the second option for importing Excel spreadsheet. Specify the Excel file path and click Next to continue. In this step, you need to specify the fields which actually defines the structure of an organization. In our case, these are Name & Supervisor fields. After specifying fields, click Next to Proceed further. As organization chart is primarily for showing the hierarchy of departments/employees working in organization along with how they are linked together, and who supervises whom. Considering this, in this step we will leave out Supervisor field, because it’s inclusion wouldn’t be necessary as Visio automatically chalks-out the basic structure defined in Excel sheet. Add the rest of the fields under Displayed fields category, and click Next. Now choose the fields which you want to include in Organization Chart’s shapes and click Next. This step is about breaking the chart into multiple pages, if you are dealing with 100+ employees, you may want to specify numbers of pages on which Organization Chart will be displayed. But in our case, we are dealing with much less amount of data, so we will enable I want the wizard to automatically break my organization chart across pages option. Specify the name you need to show on the top of the page. If you are having less than 20 hierarchies, enter the name of the highest ranked employee in organization and click Finish to end the wizard. It will instantly create an Organization chart out of specified Excel spreadsheet. Highest ranked employee will be shown on top of the organization chart, supervising various employees from different departments. As shown below, his immediate subordinates further manages other employees and so on. For advance customizations, head over to Org Chart tab, here you will find different groups for setting up the Org Chart’s hierarchy and manage other employees’ positions. Under Arrange group, shapes’ arrangements can be changed and it provides easy navigation through the chart. You can also change the type of the position and hide subordinates of selected employee. From Picture group, you can insert a picture of the employees, departments, etc. From synchronization group, you have the option of creating a synced copy and expanding subordinates of selected employee. Under Organization Data group, you can change whole layout of Organization chart from Display Options including; shape display, show divider, enable/disable imported fields, change block position, and fill colors, etc. If at any point of time, you need to insert new position or announce vacancy, Organization Chart stencil is always available on the left sidebar. Drag the desired Organization Chart shape into main diagram page, to maintain the structure integrity, i.e, for inserting subordinates for a specific employee, drag the position shape over the existing employee shape box. For instance, We have added a consultant in organization, who is directly under CEO, for maintaining this, we have dragged the Consultant box and just dropped it over the CEO box to make the immediate subordinate position. Adding details to new position is a cinch, just right-click new position box and click Properties. This will open up Shape Data dialog, start filling in all the relevant information and click OK. Here you can see the newly created position is easily populated with all the specified information. Now expanding an Organization Chart doesn’t require maintenance of long lists any more. Under Design tab, you can also try out different designs & layouts over organization chart to make it look more flamboyant and professional.  Conclusion An Organization Chart is a great way of showing detailed organizational hierarchies; with defined credentials of employees, departments structure, new vacancies, newly hired employees, recently added departments, and importantly shows most convenient way of interaction between different departments & employees, etc. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Reviews: Using Dia as a Free Replacement for Microsoft VisioMysticgeek Blog: Create Appealing Charts In Excel 2007Create Charts in Excel 2007 the Easy Way with Chart AdvisorCreate a Hyperlink in a Word 2007 Flow Chart and Hide Annoying ScreenTipsCreate A Flow Chart In Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video

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• Week in Geek: IPv6 Capable Smartphones Compromise User Privacy Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “clone a disk, resize static windows, and create system function shortcuts”, use 45 different services, sites, and apps to help read favorite sites, add MP3 support to Audacity (for saving in MP3 format), install a Wii game loader for easy backups and fast load times, create a Blue Screen of Death in any color, and more. Photo by legofenris. Weekly News Links Photo by The H Security. IPv6: Smartphones compromise users’ privacy Since version 4 of the iOS operating system, Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods have been capable of handling IPv6, and most Android devices have been capable since version 2.1. However, the operating systems transfer an ID that discloses information about their users. Dumb phones can be attacked too Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack. SCADA exploit – the dragon awakes The recent publication of an exploit for KingView, a software package for visualising industrial process control systems, appears to be having an effect. Threatpost reports that both the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted. Sophos: Spam to get more malicious Spam is becoming more malicious in nature as trickery tactics change in line with current user interests, according to a new report released Tuesday by Sophos. Global spam traffic rebounds as Rustock wakes Spam is on the rise after the Rustock botnet awoke from its Christmas slumber, according to Symantec. Cracking WPA keys in the cloud At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution Provides a link to more details about the vulnerability and shows a work-around/fix for the problem. Adobe plans to make it easier to delete Flash cookies in web browsers The new API, NPAPI:ClearSiteData, will allow Flash cookies – also known as Local Shared Objects (LSO) – to be deleted directly in the browser’s settings. Firefox beta getting new database standard The ninth beta version of Firefox is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer. MetroPCS accused of blocking certain Net content MetroPCS is violating the FCC’s recently approved Net neutrality rules by blocking certain Internet content, say several public interest groups. Server and Tools chief Muglia to leave Microsoft in summer 2011 Microsoft veteran and Server & Tools Business (STB) President Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft, according to an email that CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees on January 10. Report: DOJ nearing decision on Google-ITA The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a possible formal antitrust investigation into whether or not Google should be allowed to purchase travel software company ITA Software, according to a report. South Korea says Google Street View broke law Police in South Korea reportedly say Google broke the country’s law when its Street View service captured personal data from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. The backlash over Google’s HTML5 video bet Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage. Random TinyHacker Links A Special GiveAway: a Great Book & Great Security Software The team from 7 Tutorials has a special giveaway running during the month of January. Signed copies of their latest book, full 1-year licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and free 3-month trials for everyone willing to participate. One Click Rooting For Android Phones Here’s a nice tool that helps you root your Android phone effortlessly. New Angry Birds Free version 1.0 Available in the App Store. Google Code University Learn programming at Google Code University. Capture and Share Your Favorite Part Of a YouTube Video SnipSnip.it lets you share only the part of the video that you like. Super User Questions More great questions and answers from this past week’s popular topics at Super User. What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? Does OS X support linux-like features? What is the easiest way to make a backup of an entire hard disk? Will shifting from Wireless to Wired network result in better performance? Is it legal to install Windows 7 Home Premium Retail inside VMware virtual machine? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Enjoy reading through our hottest articles from this past week. The 50 Best Ways to Disable Built-in Windows Features You Don’t Want The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal One Year Ago on How-To Geek More great articles from one year ago filled with helpful geeky goodness for you to enjoy. Share Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.it Start Portable Firefox in Safe Mode Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible Extensions Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe Lock Prying Eyes Out of Your Minimized Windows Custom Crocheted Cylon-Cthulhu Hybrid What happens when you let your Cylon Centurion figure and your crocheted Cthulhu spend too many lonely nights together? A Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid, of course! You can get your own from the Cthulhu Chick store over on Etsy. Note: This is not an ad…Ruth is a friend of ours, and this Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid makes the perfect guard for the new MVP trophy in our office. The Geek Note Whether it is a geeky indoor project or just getting outside, we hope that you and your families have a terrific fun-filled weekend! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by qwrrty. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery

  - by SGWellens

  So, I'm browsing though some questions over on the Stack Overflow website and I found a good jQuery question just a few minutes old. Here is a link to it. It was a tough question; I knew that by answering it, I could learn new stuff and reinforce what I already knew: Reading is good, doing is better. Maybe I could help someone in the process too. I cut and pasted the HTML from the question into my Visual Studio IDE and went back to Stack Overflow to reread the question. Dang, someone had already answered it! And it was a great answer. I never even had a chance to start analyzing the issue. Now I know what a one-legged man feels like in an ass-kicking contest. Nevertheless, since the question and answer were so interesting, I decided to dissect them and learn as much as possible. The HTML consisted of some divs separated by h3 headings.  Note the elements are laid out sequentially with no programmatic grouping: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div></form></body>  The requirement was to wrap a div around each h3 heading and the subsequent divs grouping them into sections. Why? I don't know, I suppose if you screen-scrapped some HTML from another site, you might want to reformat it before displaying it on your own. Anyways… Here is the marvelously, succinct posted answer: $('.heading').each(function(){ $(this).nextUntil('.heading').andSelf().wrapAll('<div class="section">');}); I was familiar with all the parts except for nextUntil and andSelf. But, I'll analyze the whole answer for completeness. I'll do this by rewriting the posted answer in a different style and adding a boat-load of comments: function Test(){ // $Sections is a jQuery object and it will contain three elements var $Sections = $('.heading'); // use each to iterate over each of the three elements $Sections.each(function () { // $this is a jquery object containing the current element // being iterated var $this = $(this); // nextUntil gets the following sibling elements until it reaches // an element with the CSS class 'heading' // andSelf adds in the source element (this) to the collection $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading').andSelf(); // wrap the elements with a div $this.wrapAll('<div class="section" >'); });}  The code here doesn't look nearly as concise and elegant as the original answer. However, unless you and your staff are jQuery masters, during development it really helps to work through algorithms step by step. You can step through this code in the debugger and examine the jQuery objects to make sure one step is working before proceeding on to the next. It's much easier to debug and troubleshoot when each logical coding step is a separate line of code. Note: You may think the original code runs much faster than this version. However, the time difference is trivial: Not enough to worry about: Less than 1 millisecond (tested in IE and FF). Note: You may want to jam everything into one line because it results in less traffic being sent to the client. That is true. However, most Internet servers now compress HTML and JavaScript by stripping out comments and white space (go to Bing or Google and view the source). This feature should be enabled on your server: Let the server compress your code, you don't need to do it. Free Career Advice: Creating maintainable code is Job One—Maximum Priority—The Prime Directive. If you find yourself suddenly transferred to customer support, it may be that the code you are writing is not as readable as it could be and not as readable as it should be. Moving on… I created a CSS class to enhance the results: .section{ background-color: yellow; border: 2px solid black; margin: 5px;} Here is the rendered output before:   …and after the jQuery code runs.   Pretty Cool! But, while playing with this code, the logic of nextUntil began to bother me: What happens in the last section? What stops elements from being collected since there are no more elements with the .heading class? The answer is nothing.  In this case it stopped collecting elements because it was at the end of the page.  But what if there were additional HTML elements? I added an anchor tag and another div to the HTML: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div><a>this is a link</a><div>unrelated div</div> </form></body> The code as-is will include both the anchor and the unrelated div. This isn't what we want.   My first attempt to correct this used the filter parameter of the nextUntil function: nextUntil('.heading', 'div')  This will only collect div elements. But it merely skipped the anchor tag and it still collected the unrelated div:   The problem is we need a way to tell the nextUntil function when to stop. CSS selectors to the rescue! nextUntil('.heading, a')  This tells nextUntil to stop collecting elements when it gets to an element with a .heading class OR when it gets to an anchor tag. In this case it solved the problem. FYI: The comma operator in a CSS selector allows multiple criteria.   Bingo! One final note, we could have broken the code down even more: We could have replaced the andSelf function here: $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a').andSelf(); With this: // get all the following siblings and then add the current item$this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a');$this.add(this);  But in this case, the andSelf function reads real nice. In my opinion. Here's a link to a jsFiddle if you want to play with it. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• Rapid Evolution of Society & Technology

  - by Michael Snow

  We caught up with Brian Solis on the phone the other day and Christie Flanagan had a chance to chat with him and learn a bit more about him and some of the concepts he'll be addressing in our Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast on Thursday 12/13/12. «--- Interview with Brian Solis  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast- mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Be sure and register for this week's webcast ---» ------------------- Guest post by Brian Solis. Reposted (Borrowed) from his posting of May 24, 2012 Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise? - Brian Solis You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words. You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people. Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors. You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself. You’re a change agent and you truly wish to bring about change, but you’ve not invested time or resources to answer “why” in your endeavors to become a connected or social business. If we are to truly change, we must find purpose. We must uncover the essence of our business and the value it delivers to traditional and connected consumers. We must rethink the spirit of today’s embrace and clearly articulate how transformation is going to improve customer and employee experiences and relationships now and over time. Without doing so, any attempts at evolution will be thwarted by reality. In an era of Digital Darwinism, no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed. These are undisciplined times which require alternative approaches to recognize and pursue new opportunities. But everything begins with acknowledging the 360 view of the world that you see today is actually a filtered view of managed and efficient convenience. Today, many organizations that were once inspired by innovation and engagement have fallen into a process of marketing, operationalizing, managing, and optimizing. That might have worked for the better part of the last century, but for the next 10 years and beyond, new vision, leadership and supporting business models will be written to move businesses from rigid frameworks to adaptive and agile entities. I believe that today’s executives will undergo a great test; a test of character, vision, intention, and universal leadership. It starts with a simple, but essential question…what is your promise? Notice, I didn’t ask about your brand promise. Nor did I ask for you to cite your mission and vision statements. This is much more than value propositions or manufactured marketing language designed to hook audiences and stakeholders. I asked for your promise to me as your consumer, stakeholder, and partner. This isn’t about B2B or B2C, but instead, people to people, person to person. It is this promise that will breathe new life into an organization that on the outside, could be misdiagnosed as catatonic by those who are disrupting your markets. A promise, for example, is meant to inspire. It creates alignment. It serves as the foundation for your vision, mission, and all business strategies and it must come from the top to mean anything. For without it, we cannot genuinely voice what it is we stand for or stand behind. Think for a moment about the definition of community. It’s easy to confuse a workplace or a market where everyone simply shares common characteristics. However, a community in this day and age is much more than belonging to something, it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter The next few years will force a divide where companies are separated by intention as measured by actions and words. But, becoming a social business is not enough. Becoming more authentic and transparent doesn’t serve as a mantra for a renaissance. A promise is the ink that inscribes the spirit of the relationship between you and me. A promise serves as the words that influence change from within and change beyond the halls of our business. It is the foundation for a renewed embrace, one that must then find its way to every aspect of the organization. It’s the difference between a social business and an adaptive business. While an adaptive business can also be social, it is the culture of the organization that strives to not just use technology to extend current philosophies or processes into new domains, but instead give rise to a new culture where striving for relevance is among its goals. The tools and networks simply become enablers of a greater mission You are reading this because you believe in something more than what you’re doing today. While you fight for change within your organization, remember to aim for a higher purpose. Organizations that strive for innovation, imagination, and relevance will outperform those that do not. Part of your job is to lead a missionary push that unites the groundswell with a top down cascade. Change will only happen because you and other internal champions see what others can’t and will do what other won’t. It takes resolve. It takes the ability to translate new opportunities into business value. And, it takes courage. “This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us”-Steve Jobs ----------------------------------------------------------------- So -- where do you begin to evaluate the kind of experience you are delivering for your customers, partners, and employees?  Take a look at this White Paper: Creating a Successful and Meaningful Customer Experience on the Web and then have a cup of coffee while you listen to the sage advice of Guy Kawasaki in a short video below.   An interview with Guy Kawasaki on Maximizing Social Media Channels 

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• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery

  - by SGWellens

  So, I'm browsing though some questions over on the Stack Overflow website and I found a good jQuery question just a few minutes old. Here is a link to it. It was a tough question; I knew that by answering it, I could learn new stuff and reinforce what I already knew: Reading is good, doing is better. Maybe I could help someone in the process too. I cut and pasted the HTML from the question into my Visual Studio IDE and went back to Stack Overflow to reread the question. Dang, someone had already answered it! And it was a great answer. I never even had a chance to start analyzing the issue. Now I know what a one-legged man feels like in an ass-kicking contest. Nevertheless, since the question and answer were so interesting, I decided to dissect them and learn as much as possible. The HTML consisted of some divs separated by h3 headings.  Note the elements are laid out sequentially with no programmatic grouping: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div></form></body>  The requirement was to wrap a div around each h3 heading and the subsequent divs grouping them into sections. Why? I don't know, I suppose if you screen-scrapped some HTML from another site, you might want to reformat it before displaying it on your own. Anyways… Here is the marvelously, succinct posted answer: $('.heading').each(function(){ $(this).nextUntil('.heading').andSelf().wrapAll('<div class="section">');}); I was familiar with all the parts except for nextUntil and andSelf. But, I'll analyze the whole answer for completeness. I'll do this by rewriting the posted answer in a different style and adding a boat-load of comments: function Test(){ // $Sections is a jQuery object and it will contain three elements var $Sections = $('.heading'); // use each to iterate over each of the three elements $Sections.each(function () { // $this is a jquery object containing the current element // being iterated var $this = $(this); // nextUntil gets the following sibling elements until it reaches // an element with the CSS class 'heading' // andSelf adds in the source element (this) to the collection $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading').andSelf(); // wrap the elements with a div $this.wrapAll('<div class="section" >'); });}  The code here doesn't look nearly as concise and elegant as the original answer. However, unless you and your staff are jQuery masters, during development it really helps to work through algorithms step by step. You can step through this code in the debugger and examine the jQuery objects to make sure one step is working before proceeding on to the next. It's much easier to debug and troubleshoot when each logical coding step is a separate line. Note: You may think the original code runs much faster than this version. However, the time difference is trivial: Not enough to worry about: Less than 1 millisecond (tested in IE and FF). Note: You may want to jam everything into one line because it results in less traffic being sent to the client. That is true. However, most Internet servers now compress HTML and JavaScript by stripping out comments and white space (go to Bing or Google and view the source). This feature should be enabled on your server: Let the server compress your code, you don't need to do it. Free Career Advice: Creating maintainable code is Job One—Maximum Priority—The Prime Directive. If you find yourself suddenly transferred to customer support, it may be that the code you are writing is not as readable as it could be and not as readable as it should be. Moving on… I created a CSS class to see the results: .section{ background-color: yellow; border: 2px solid black; margin: 5px;} Here is the rendered output before:   …and after the jQuery code runs.   Pretty Cool! But, while playing with this code, the logic of nextUntil began to bother me: What happens in the last section? What stops elements from being collected since there are no more elements with the .heading class? The answer is nothing.  In this case it stopped because it was at the end of the page.  But what if there were additional HTML elements? I added an anchor tag and another div to the HTML: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div><a>this is a link</a><div>unrelated div</div> </form></body> The code as-is will include both the anchor and the unrelated div. This isn't what we want.   My first attempt to correct this used the filter parameter of the nextUntil function: nextUntil('.heading', 'div')  This will only collect div elements. But it merely skipped the anchor tag and it still collected the unrelated div:   The problem is we need a way to tell the nextUntil function when to stop. CSS selectors to the rescue: nextUntil('.heading, a')  This tells nextUntil to stop collecting sibling elements when it gets to an element with a .heading class OR when it gets to an anchor tag. In this case it solved the problem. FYI: The comma operator in a CSS selector allows multiple criteria.   Bingo! One final note, we could have broken the code down even more: We could have replaced the andSelf function here: $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a').andSelf(); With this: // get all the following siblings and then add the current item$this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a');$this.add(this);  But in this case, the andSelf function reads real nice. In my opinion. Here's a link to a jsFiddle if you want to play with it. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• 3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

  - by David

  I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

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• JSP Precompilation for ADF Applications

  - by Duncan Mills

  A question that comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to build automation, is how to best pre-compile the .jspx and .jsff files in an ADF application. Thus ensuring that the app is ready to run as soon as it's installed into WebLogic. In the normal run of things, the first poor soul to hit a page pays the price and has to wait a little whilst the JSP is compiled into a servlet. Everyone else subsequently gets a free lunch. So it's a reasonable thing to want to do... Let Me List the Ways So forth to Google (other search engines are available)... which lead me to a fairly old article on WLDJ - Removing Performance Bottlenecks Through JSP Precompilation. Technololgy wise, it's somewhat out of date, but the one good point that it made is that it's really not very useful to try and use the precompile option in the weblogic.xml file. That's a really good observation - particularly if you're trying to integrate a pre-compile step into a Hudson Continuous Integration process. That same article mentioned an alternative approach for programmatic pre-compilation using weblogic.jspc. This seemed like a much more useful approach for a CI environment. However, weblogic.jspc is now obsoleted by weblogic.appc so we'll use that instead.  Thanks to Steve for the pointer there. And So To APPC APPC has documentation - always a great place to start, and supports usage both from Ant via the wlappc task and from the command line using the weblogic.appc command. In my testing I took the latter approach. Usage, as the documentation will show you, is superficially pretty simple.  The nice thing here, is that you can pass an existing EAR file (generated of course using OJDeploy) and that EAR will be updated in place with the freshly compiled servlet classes created from the JSPs. Appc takes care of all the unpacking, compiling and re-packing of the EAR for you. Neat.  So we're done right...? Not quite. The Devil is in the Detail  OK so I'm being overly dramatic but it's not all plain sailing, so here's a short guide to using weblogic.appc to compile a simple ADF application without pain.  Information You'll Need The following is based on the assumption that you have a stand-alone WLS install with the Application Development  Runtime installed and a suitable ADF enabled domain created. This could of course all be run off of a JDeveloper install as well 1. Your Weblogic home directory. Everything you need is relative to this so make a note.  In my case it's c:\builds\wls_ps4. 2. Next deploy your EAR as normal and have a peek inside it using your favourite zip management tool. First of all look at the weblogic-application.xml inside the EAR /META-INF directory. Have a look for any library references. Something like this: <library-ref>    <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref>   Make a note of the library ref (adf.oracle.domain in this case) , you'll need that in a second. 3. Next open the nested WAR file within the EAR and then have a peek inside the weblogic.xml file in the /WEB-INF directory. Again  make a note of the library references. 4. Now start the WebLogic as per normal and run the WebLogic console app (e.g. http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure navigator, select Deployments. 5. For each of the libraries you noted down drill into the library definition and make a note of the .war, .ear or .jar that defines the library. For example, in my case adf.oracle.domain maps to "C:\ builds\ WLS_PS4\ oracle_common\ modules\ oracle. adf. model_11. 1. 1\ adf. oracle. domain. ear". Note the extra spaces that are salted throughout this string as it is displayed in the console - just to make it annoying, you'll have to strip these out. 6. Finally you'll need the location of the adfsharebean.jar. We need to pass this on the classpath for APPC so that the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listener can be found. In a more complex app of your own you may need additional classpath entries as well.  Now we're ready to go, and it's a simple matter of applying the information we have gathered into the relevant command line arguments for the utility A Simple CMD File to Run APPC  Here's the stub .cmd file I'm using on Windows to run this. @echo offREM Stub weblogic.appc Runner setlocal set WLS_HOME=C:\builds\WLS_PS4 set ADF_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\oracle_common\modulesset COMMON_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\common\deployable-libraries set ADF_WEBAPP=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.view_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.webapp.war set ADF_DOMAIN=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.ear set JSTL=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jstl-1.2.war set JSF=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jsf-1.2.war set ADF_SHARE=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.share_11.1.1\adfsharembean.jar REM Set up the WebLogic Environment so appc can be found call %WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd CLS REM Now compile away!java weblogic.appc -verbose -library %ADF_WEBAPP%,%ADF_DOMAIN%,%JSTL%,%JSF% -classpath %ADF_SHARE% %1 endlocal Running the above on a target ADF .ear  file will zip through and create all of the relevant compiled classes inside your nested .war file in the \WEB-INF\classes\jsp_servlet\ directory (but don't take my word for it, run it and take a look!) And So... In the immortal words of  the Pet Shop Boys, Was It Worth It? Well, here's where you'll have to do your own testing. In  my case here, with a simple ADF application, pre-compilation shaved an non-scientific "3 Elephants" off of the initial page load time for the first access of each page. That's a pretty significant payback for such a simple step to add into your CI process, so why not give it a go.

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• Issues Converting Plain Text Into Microsoft Word Bulleted Lists

  - by user787832

  I'm a programmer. I hate status reports. I found a way to live with it. While I am working in my IDE ( Visual Slickedit ) I keep a plain text file open in one of the file/buffer tabs. As I finish things I just jot down a quick note into that file. At the end of the week that becomes my weekly status report. Example entries: The Datatables.net plugin runs very slowly in IE 8 with more than 2,000 records. I changed the way I did the server side code to process the data to make less work for the plugin to get decent performance for the IE 8 users. I made a class to wrap data from the new data collection objects into the legacy data holder objects. This will let the new database code be backward compatible with the legacy code until we can replace it. I found the bug reported by Jane. The software is fine. The database we use for the test site has data that is corrupted in a way it wouldn't be for production site At the end of the month I go back to each weekly *.txt file and paste all of the entries into a MS Word file for a monthly report. I give the monthly report to a liason to the contracting company who has to compile everyone's monthly reports into a single MS Word 2007 document. His problem, soon to be my problem, comes when he highlights my paragraphs like the ones above to put bullets in front of my paragraphs. When he highlights my notes to put bullets in front of them with MS Word 2007, Word rearranges the text a bit and the new line chars/carriage returns stagger the text so the text is no longer in neat chunks. This: I found the bug reported by Jane. The software is fine. The database we use for the test site has data that is corrupted in a way it wouldn't be for production site Becomes This: I found the bug reported by Jane. The software is fine. The database we use for the test site has data that is corrupted in a way it wouldn't be for production site I tried turning word wrap on in my IDE for the text files I put my status notes in. It just puts some kind of newline character in anyway. Searching/Replacing those chars in the text files has the result of destroying the paragraphs. Once my notes are pasted into MS Word, Word automatically translates them into paragraph breaks. Searching/Replacing them there has similar results. Blank lines separating the notes disappears. One big mess. What I would like is to be able to keep adding my status notes to a text file as I am now, but do something different when I paste the notes into MS Word such that my liason can select the text, hit the bulleting command and NOT have the staggered text as shown above. Any ideas? Thanks much in advance Steve

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• ?Oracle Database 12c????Information Lifecycle Management ILM?Storage Enhancements

  - by Liu Maclean(???)

  Oracle Database 12c????Information Lifecycle Management ILM ?????????Storage Enhancements ???????? Lifecycle Management ILM ????????? Automatic Data Placement ??????, ??ADP? ?????? 12c???????Datafile??? Online Move Datafile, ????????????????datafile???????,??????????????? ????(12.1.0.1)Automatic Data Optimization?heat map????????: ????????? (CDB)?????Automatic Data Optimization?heat map Row-level policies for ADO are not supported for Temporal Validity. Partition-level ADO and compression are supported if partitioned on the end-time columns. Row-level policies for ADO are not supported for in-database archiving. Partition-level ADO and compression are supported if partitioned on the ORA_ARCHIVE_STATE column. Custom policies (user-defined functions) for ADO are not supported if the policies default at the tablespace level. ADO does not perform checks for storage space in a target tablespace when using storage tiering. ADO is not supported on tables with object types or materialized views. ADO concurrency (the number of simultaneous policy jobs for ADO) depends on the concurrency of the Oracle scheduler. If a policy job for ADO fails more than two times, then the job is marked disabled and the job must be manually enabled later. Policies for ADO are only run in the Oracle Scheduler maintenance windows. Outside of the maintenance windows all policies are stopped. The only exceptions are those jobs for rebuilding indexes in ADO offline mode. ADO has restrictions related to moving tables and table partitions. ??????row,segment???????????ADO??,?????create table?alter table?????? ????ADO??,??????????????,???????????????? storage tier , ?????????storage tier?????????, ??????????????ADO??????????? segment?row??group? ?CREATE TABLE?ALERT TABLE???ILM???,??????????????????ADO policy? ??ILM policy???????????????? ??????? ????ADO policy, ?????alter table  ???????,?????????????? CREATE TABLE sales_ado (PROD_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, CUST_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, TIME_ID DATE NOT NULL, CHANNEL_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, PROMO_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, QUANTITY_SOLD NUMBER(10,2) NOT NULL, AMOUNT_SOLD NUMBER(10,2) NOT NULL ) ILM ADD POLICY COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 6 MONTHS OF NO ACCESS; SQL> SELECT SUBSTR(policy_name,1,24) AS POLICY_NAME, policy_type, enabled 2 FROM USER_ILMPOLICIES; POLICY_NAME POLICY_TYPE ENABLED -------------------- -------------------------- -------------- P41 DATA MOVEMENT YES ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM ADD POLICY COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 6 MONTHS OF NO ACCESS; SELECT SUBSTR(policy_name,1,24) AS POLICY_NAME, policy_type, enabled FROM USER_ILMPOLICIES; POLICY_NAME POLICY_TYPE ENABLE ------------------------ ------------- ------ P1 DATA MOVEMENT YES P2 DATA MOVEMENT YES /* You can disable an ADO policy with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DISABLE POLICY P1; /* You can delete an ADO policy with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DELETE POLICY P1; /* You can disable all ADO policies with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DISABLE_ALL; /* You can delete all ADO policies with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DELETE_ALL; /* You can disable an ADO policy in a partition with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM DISABLE POLICY P2; /* You can delete an ADO policy in a partition with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM DELETE POLICY P2; ILM ???????: ?????ILM ADP????,???????: ?????? ???? activity tracking, ????2????????,???????????????????: SEGMENT-LEVEL???????????????????? ROW-LEVEL????????,??????? ????????: 1??????? SEGMENT-LEVEL activity tracking ALTER TABLE interval_sales ILM  ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING SEGMENT ACCESS ???????INTERVAL_SALES??segment level  activity tracking,?????????????????? 2? ??????????? ALTER TABLE emp ILM ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING (CREATE TIME , WRITE TIME); 3????????? ALTER TABLE emp ILM ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING  (READ TIME); ?12.1.0.1.0?????? ??HEAT_MAP??????????, ?????system??session?????heap_map????????????? ?????????HEAT MAP??,? ALTER SYSTEM SET HEAT_MAP = ON; ?HEAT MAP??????,??????????????????????????  ??SYSTEM?SYSAUX????????????? ???????HEAT MAP??: ALTER SYSTEM SET HEAT_MAP = OFF; ????? HEAT_MAP????, ?HEAT_MAP??? ?????????????????????? ?HEAT_MAP?????????Automatic Data Optimization (ADO)??? ??ADO??,Heat Map ?????????? ????V$HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT ??????? HEAT MAP?? SQL> select * from V$heat_map_segment; no rows selected SQL> alter session set heat_map=on; Session altered. SQL> select * from scott.emp; EMPNO ENAME JOB MGR HIREDATE SAL COMM DEPTNO ---------- ---------- --------- ---------- --------- ---------- ---------- ---------- 7369 SMITH CLERK 7902 17-DEC-80 800 20 7499 ALLEN SALESMAN 7698 20-FEB-81 1600 300 30 7521 WARD SALESMAN 7698 22-FEB-81 1250 500 30 7566 JONES MANAGER 7839 02-APR-81 2975 20 7654 MARTIN SALESMAN 7698 28-SEP-81 1250 1400 30 7698 BLAKE MANAGER 7839 01-MAY-81 2850 30 7782 CLARK MANAGER 7839 09-JUN-81 2450 10 7788 SCOTT ANALYST 7566 19-APR-87 3000 20 7839 KING PRESIDENT 17-NOV-81 5000 10 7844 TURNER SALESMAN 7698 08-SEP-81 1500 0 30 7876 ADAMS CLERK 7788 23-MAY-87 1100 20 7900 JAMES CLERK 7698 03-DEC-81 950 30 7902 FORD ANALYST 7566 03-DEC-81 3000 20 7934 MILLER CLERK 7782 23-JAN-82 1300 10 14 rows selected. SQL> select * from v$heat_map_segment; OBJECT_NAME SUBOBJECT_NAME OBJ# DATAOBJ# TRACK_TIM SEG SEG FUL LOO CON_ID -------------------- -------------------- ---------- ---------- --------- --- --- --- --- ---------- EMP 92997 92997 23-JUL-13 NO NO YES NO 0 ??v$heat_map_segment???,?v$heat_map_segment??????????????X$HEATMAPSEGMENT V$HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT displays real-time segment access information. Column Datatype Description OBJECT_NAME VARCHAR2(128) Name of the object SUBOBJECT_NAME VARCHAR2(128) Name of the subobject OBJ# NUMBER Object number DATAOBJ# NUMBER Data object number TRACK_TIME DATE Timestamp of current activity tracking SEGMENT_WRITE VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has write access: (YES or NO) SEGMENT_READ VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has read access: (YES or NO) FULL_SCAN VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has full table scan: (YES or NO) LOOKUP_SCAN VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has lookup scan: (YES or NO) CON_ID NUMBER The ID of the container to which the data pertains. Possible values include:   0: This value is used for rows containing data that pertain to the entire CDB. This value is also used for rows in non-CDBs. 1: This value is used for rows containing data that pertain to only the root n: Where n is the applicable container ID for the rows containing data The Heat Map feature is not supported in CDBs in Oracle Database 12c, so the value in this column can be ignored. ??HEAP MAP??????????????????,????DBA_HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT???????? ???????HEAT_MAP_STAT$?????? ??Automatic Data Optimization??????: ????1: SQL> alter system set heat_map=on; ?????? ????????????? scott?? http://www.askmaclean.com/archives/scott-schema-script.html SQL> grant all on dbms_lock to scott; ????? SQL> grant dba to scott; ????? @ilm_setup_basic C:\APP\XIANGBLI\ORADATA\MACLEAN\ilm.dbf @tktgilm_demo_env_setup SQL> connect scott/tiger ; ???? SQL> select count(*) from scott.employee; COUNT(*) ---------- 3072 ??? 1 ?? SQL> set serveroutput on SQL> exec print_compression_stats('SCOTT','EMPLOYEE'); Compression Stats ------------------ Uncmpressed : 3072 Adv/basic compressed : 0 Others : 0 PL/SQL ???????? ???????3072?????? ????????? ????policy ???????????? alter table employee ilm add policy row store compress advanced row after 3 days of no modification / SQL> set serveroutput on SQL> execute list_ilm_policies; -------------------------------------------------- Policies defined for SCOTT -------------------------------------------------- Object Name------ : EMPLOYEE Subobject Name--- : Object Type------ : TABLE Inherited from--- : POLICY NOT INHERITED Policy Name------ : P1 Action Type------ : COMPRESSION Scope------------ : ROW Compression level : ADVANCED Tier Tablespace-- : Condition type--- : LAST MODIFICATION TIME Condition days--- : 3 Enabled---------- : YES -------------------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> select sysdate from dual; SYSDATE -------------- 29-7? -13 SQL> execute set_back_chktime(get_policy_name('EMPLOYEE',null,'COMPRESSION','ROW','ADVANCED',3,null,null),'EMPLOYEE',null,6); Object check time reset ... -------------------------------------- Object Name : EMPLOYEE Object Number : 93123 D.Object Numbr : 93123 Policy Number : 1 Object chktime : 23-7? -13 08.13.42.000000 ?? Distnt chktime : 0 -------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? ?policy?chktime???6??, ????set_back_chktime???????????????“????”?,?????????,???????? ?????? alter system flush buffer_cache; alter system flush buffer_cache; alter system flush shared_pool; alter system flush shared_pool; SQL> execute set_window('MONDAY_WINDOW','OPEN'); Set Maint. Window OPEN ----------------------------- Window Name : MONDAY_WINDOW Enabled? : TRUE Active? : TRUE ----------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> exec dbms_lock.sleep(60) ; PL/SQL ???????? SQL> exec print_compression_stats('SCOTT', 'EMPLOYEE'); Compression Stats ------------------ Uncmpressed : 338 Adv/basic compressed : 2734 Others : 0 PL/SQL ???????? ??????????????? Adv/basic compressed : 2734 ??????? SQL> col object_name for a20 SQL> select object_id,object_name from dba_objects where object_name='EMPLOYEE'; OBJECT_ID OBJECT_NAME ---------- -------------------- 93123 EMPLOYEE SQL> execute list_ilm_policy_executions ; -------------------------------------------------- Policies execution details for SCOTT -------------------------------------------------- Policy Name------ : P22 Job Name--------- : ILMJOB48 Start time------- : 29-7? -13 08.37.45.061000 ?? End time--------- : 29-7? -13 08.37.48.629000 ?? ----------------- Object Name------ : EMPLOYEE Sub_obj Name----- : Obj Type--------- : TABLE ----------------- Exec-state------- : SELECTED FOR EXECUTION Job state-------- : COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY Exec comments---- : Results comments- : --- -------------------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? ILMJOB48?????policy?JOB,?12.1.0.1??J00x???? ?MMON_SLAVE???M00x???15????????? select sample_time,program,module,action from v$active_session_history where action ='KDILM background EXEcution' order by sample_time; 29-7? -13 08.16.38.369000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.17.38.388000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.17.39.390000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.23.38.681000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M002) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.32.38.968000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.33.39.993000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M003) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.33.40.993000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M003) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.36.40.066000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.42.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.43.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.44.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.38.42.386000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M001) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution select distinct action from v$active_session_history where action like 'KDILM%' KDILM background CLeaNup KDILM background EXEcution SQL> execute set_window('MONDAY_WINDOW','CLOSE'); Set Maint. Window CLOSE ----------------------------- Window Name : MONDAY_WINDOW Enabled? : TRUE Active? : FALSE ----------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> drop table employee purge ; ????? ???? ????? spool ilm_usecase_1_cleanup.lst @ilm_demo_cleanup ; spool off

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• ???Past Image(pi)

  - by todd.bao(at)oracle.com

  Past Image???RAC??????????,????????????????????????????????,Past Image??????????,?????????????????,?????????????????,??????????????(pi)?????????????????Past Image,????????????:HR.EMPLOYEES??100????101?????5????88???????????????,???????????# ??1: ?????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and block#=88;no rows selected# ??1???(???Steve King, ????24000????)SYS@RAC1//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=1 where employee_id=100;1 row updated.# ??2: ????1??xcur????????????,?????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + xcur1 row selected.# ??2???SYS@RAC2//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=2 where employee_id=101;1 row updated.# ??3: ????2?,?????1??pi??Past Image,???????????????????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + pi         2 + Y + xcur2 rows selected.# ??1???SYS@RAC1//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=3 where employee_id=100;1 row updated.# ??4: ????1?,?????2???1???????2???????1???????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + pi         1 + Y + xcur         2 + Y + pi3 rows selected.# ??2????SYS@RAC2//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=4 where employee_id=101;1 row updated.# ??5: ????2?,??????????????,DBWR??,??????,??(pi)?????????????(cr)??????????????????????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + N + cr         1 + N + cr         2 + Y + xcur3 rows selected.# ?????1???SYS@RAC1//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=5 where employee_id=100;1 row updated.# ??6: ????1?,?????2????????????????,?????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + xcur         1 + N + cr         1 + N + cr         2 + Y + pi4 rows selected.# ??2???SYS@RAC2//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=6 where employee_id=101;1 row updated.# ??7: ????2?,?????1?2????1???????2?????????????4,????????????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + pi         2 + Y + pi         2 + Y + xcur3 rows selected.# ??1???SYS@RAC1//scripts> update hr.employees set salary=7 where employee_id=100;1 row updated.# ??8: ????1?,?????2?1????2???????1????????????2????????????????????????????????????(????????)????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and  block#=88;   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + pi         1 + Y + xcur         2 + Y + pi         2 + N + cr4 rows selected.??????????, ?xcur??????????:??????xcur????pi?????pi?(?????)???cr?,???cr?????,pi????????????????????????????:?????????????A?B?A:SYS@RAC1//scripts> run  1  begin  2  for i in 1..100000 loop  3  update hr.employees set salary=i where employee_id=100;  4  end loop;  5* end;B:SYS@RAC2//scripts> run  1  begin  2  for i in 1..100000 loop  3  update hr.employees set salary=i where employee_id=101;  4  end loop;  5* end;?????????,???5???88?????buffer cache???????:SYS@RAC2//scripts> select count(*) from gv$bh where file#=5 and block#=88;  COUNT(*)----------       4121 row selected.??409?????????(cur):SYS@RAC2//scripts> select count(*) from gv$bh where file#=5 and block#=88 where status='cr';  COUNT(*)----------       4091 row selected.1????????(xcur):SYS@RAC2//scripts> select count(*) from gv$bh where file#=5 and block#=88 where status='xcur';  COUNT(*)----------           11 row selected.??...2??????--????(pi)??????????SYS@RAC1//scripts> select inst_id,dirty,status from gv$bh where file#=5 and block#=88 and status='pi';   INST_ID + D + STATUS---------- + - + -------         1 + Y + pi         2 + Y + pi2 rows selected.????,???RAC??????????????(cr)?,????????????????????????xcur?pi??cr??????pi?????? ?????????,???????????pi???cr?,?????????cr???,???xcur???????,pi??????xcur?,[email protected]

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• Help with Design for Vacation Tracking System (C#/.NET/Access/WebServices/SOA/Excel) [closed]

  - by Aaronaught

  I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?) Many thanks for your advices, Aaron

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• Design for Vacation Tracking System

  - by Aaronaught

  I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?)

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• Jquery Live Function

  - by marharépa

  Hi! I want to make this script to work as LIVE() function. Please help me! $(".img img").each(function() { $(this).cjObjectScaler({ destElem: $(this).parent(), method: "fit" }); }); the cjObjectScaler script (called in the html header) is this: (thanks for Doug Jones) (function ($) { jQuery.fn.imagesLoaded = function (callback) { var elems = this.filter('img'), len = elems.length; elems.bind('load', function () { if (--len <= 0) { callback.call(elems, this); } }).each(function () { // cached images don't fire load sometimes, so we reset src. if (this.complete || this.complete === undefined) { var src = this.src; // webkit hack from http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev/browse_thread/thread/eee6ab7b2da50e1f this.src = '#'; this.src = src; } }); }; })(jQuery); /* CJ Object Scaler */ (function ($) { jQuery.fn.cjObjectScaler = function (options) { /* user variables (settings) ***************************************/ var settings = { // must be a jQuery object method: "fill", // the parent object to scale our object into destElem: null, // fit|fill fade: 0 // if positive value, do hide/fadeIn }; /* system variables ***************************************/ var sys = { // function parameters version: '2.1.1', elem: null }; /* scale the image ***************************************/ function scaleObj(obj) { // declare some local variables var destW = jQuery(settings.destElem).width(), destH = jQuery(settings.destElem).height(), ratioX, ratioY, scale, newWidth, newHeight, borderW = parseInt(jQuery(obj).css("borderLeftWidth"), 10) + parseInt(jQuery(obj).css("borderRightWidth"), 10), borderH = parseInt(jQuery(obj).css("borderTopWidth"), 10) + parseInt(jQuery(obj).css("borderBottomWidth"), 10), objW = jQuery(obj).width(), objH = jQuery(obj).height(); // check for valid border values. IE takes in account border size when calculating width/height so just set to 0 borderW = isNaN(borderW) ? 0 : borderW; borderH = isNaN(borderH) ? 0 : borderH; // calculate scale ratios ratioX = destW / jQuery(obj).width(); ratioY = destH / jQuery(obj).height(); // Determine which algorithm to use if (!jQuery(obj).hasClass("cf_image_scaler_fill") && (jQuery(obj).hasClass("cf_image_scaler_fit") || settings.method === "fit")) { scale = ratioX < ratioY ? ratioX : ratioY; } else if (!jQuery(obj).hasClass("cf_image_scaler_fit") && (jQuery(obj).hasClass("cf_image_scaler_fill") || settings.method === "fill")) { scale = ratioX < ratioY ? ratioX : ratioY; } // calculate our new image dimensions newWidth = parseInt(jQuery(obj).width() * scale, 10) - borderW; newHeight = parseInt(jQuery(obj).height() * scale, 10) - borderH; // Set new dimensions & offset jQuery(obj).css({ "width": newWidth + "px", "height": newHeight + "px"//, // "position": "absolute", // "top": (parseInt((destH - newHeight) / 2, 10) - parseInt(borderH / 2, 10)) + "px", // "left": (parseInt((destW - newWidth) / 2, 10) - parseInt(borderW / 2, 10)) + "px" }).attr({ "width": newWidth, "height": newHeight }); // do our fancy fade in, if user supplied a fade amount if (settings.fade > 0) { jQuery(obj).fadeIn(settings.fade); } } /* set up any user passed variables ***************************************/ if (options) { jQuery.extend(settings, options); } /* main ***************************************/ return this.each(function () { sys.elem = this; // if they don't provide a destObject, use parent if (settings.destElem === null) { settings.destElem = jQuery(sys.elem).parent(); } // need to make sure the user set the parent's position. Things go bonker's if not set. // valid values: absolute|relative|fixed if (jQuery(settings.destElem).css("position") === "static") { jQuery(settings.destElem).css({ "position": "relative" }); } // if our object to scale is an image, we need to make sure it's loaded before we continue. if (typeof sys.elem === "object" && typeof settings.destElem === "object" && typeof settings.method === "string") { // if the user supplied a fade amount, hide our image if (settings.fade > 0) { jQuery(sys.elem).hide(); } if (sys.elem.nodeName === "IMG") { // to fix the weird width/height caching issue we set the image dimensions to be auto; jQuery(sys.elem).width("auto"); jQuery(sys.elem).height("auto"); // wait until the image is loaded before scaling jQuery(sys.elem).imagesLoaded(function () { scaleObj(this); }); } else { scaleObj(jQuery(sys.elem)); } } else { console.debug("CJ Object Scaler could not initialize."); return; } }); }; })(jQuery);

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• Subscript out of range error in VBScript script

  - by user3912

  I'm trying to move my entire User folder in Windows Vista to a non-system partition. To do so with a minimum hassle I'm following the directions provided at Ben's Blog, specifically the VBScript he provides. However executing the script throws up an error which I can't resolve myself. Here's the VBScript code followed by the text file it works from, and finally my error message. How do I correct the problem? VBScript Code: '# Perform dir /a c:\users > c:\dir.txt '# place this script file in c:\ too '# double click to run it '# run resulting script.bat from recovery mode repprefix = " Directory of..." ' Modify to your language sourcedrive = "C:\" targetdrive = "D:\" altsourcedrive = "C:\" 'leave same as target drive unless otherwise indicated alttargetdrive = "E:\" 'leave same as target drive unless otherwise indicated inname = "dir.txt" outname = "script.bat" userroot = "Users" set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") ' construct batch commands for saving rights, then link, the recreating rights Function GetCommand(curroot, line, typ, keyword) ' first need to get source and target pos = Instr(line, keyword) + Len(keyword) tuple = Trim(Mid(line, pos)) arr = Split(tuple, "[") oldtarget = Replace(arr(1), "]", "") oldlink = curroot & "\" & Trim(arr(0)) ' need to determine if we are pointing back to old disk newlink = replace(oldlink, sourcedrive, targetdrive) if(Instr(oldtarget, sourcedrive & userroot)) then newtarget = Replace(oldtarget, sourcedrive, targetdrive) else newtarget = oldtarget ' still pointing to original target end if ' comment out = "echo " & newlink & " --- " & newtarget & vbCrLf ' save permissions out = out & "icacls """ & replace(oldlink, sourcedrive, altsourcedrive) & """ /L /save " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" & vbCrLf ' create link newlink = replace(newlink, targetdrive, alttargetdrive) if typ = "junction" then out = out & "mklink /j """ & newlink & """ """ & newtarget & """" & vbCrLf else ' typ = "symlink" out = out & "mklink /d """ & newlink & """ """ & newtarget & """" & vbCrLf end if 'set hidden attribute out = out & "attrib +h """ & newlink & """ /L" & vbCrLf ' apply permissions shortlink = Left(newlink, InstrRev(newlink, "\") - 1) 'icacls works strangely - non-orthogonal for restore out = out & "icacls """ & shortlink & """ /L /restore " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" & vbCrLf GetCommand = out & vbCrLf End Function Sub WriteToFile(file, text) ForWriting = 2 Create = true set outfile = fso.OpenTextFile(file, ForWriting, Create) Call outfile.Write(text) Call outfile.Close() End Sub outtext = "ROBOCOPY " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " " & alttargetdrive & userroot & " /E /COPYALL /XJ" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf set intext = fso.OpenTextFile(inname) while not intext.AtEndOfStream line = intext.ReadLine() if Instr(line, repprefix) then curroot = Replace(line, repprefix, "") elseif Instr(line, juncname) then outtext = outtext & GetCommand(curroot, line, "junction", juncname) elseif Instr(line, linkname) then outtext = outtext & GetCommand(curroot, line, "symlink", linkname) end if Wend outtext = outtext & "icacls " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " /L /save " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" & vbCrLf outtext = outtext & "ren " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " _" & userroot & vbCrLf outtext = outtext & "mklink /j " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " " & targetdrive & userroot & vbCrLf outtext = outtext & "icacls " & altsourcedrive & " /L /restore " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" Call intext.Close() Call WriteToFile(outname, outtext) MsgBox("Done writing to " & outname) dir.txt: Volume in drive C is ACER Volume Serial Number is 08D7-C0CC Directory of c:\users 07/16/2009 12:29 PM {DIR} . 07/16/2009 12:29 PM {DIR} .. 11/02/2006 09:02 AM {SYMLINKD} All Users [C:\ProgramData] 11/02/2006 09:02 AM {DIR} Default 11/02/2006 09:02 AM {JUNCTION} Default User [C:\Users\Default] 08/21/2008 08:37 AM 174 desktop.ini 11/02/2006 08:50 AM {DIR} Public 07/19/2009 08:54 PM {DIR} Steve 1 File(s) 174 bytes 7 Dir(s) 5,679,947,776 bytes free Error Message: Windows Script Host Script: C:\user location.vbs Line: 25 Char: 2 Error: Subscript out of range: '[number: 1]' Code: 800A0009 Source: Microsoft VBScript runtime error (In the VBScript script that I'm using on my system, I believe that 'Line 25' corresponds to the line beginning with oldtarget = Replace(arr(1), "]", "").

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• Subscript out of range error in VBScript script

  - by SteveW

  I'm trying to move my entire User folder in Windows Vista to a non-system partition. To do so with a minimum hassle I'm following the directions provided at Ben's Blog, specifically the VBScript he provides. However executing the script throws up an error which I can't resolve myself. Here's the VBScript code followed by the text file it works from, and finally my error message. How do I correct the problem? VBScript Code: '# Perform dir /a c:\users > c:\dir.txt '# place this script file in c:\ too '# double click to run it '# run resulting script.bat from recovery mode repprefix = " Directory of..." ' Modify to your language sourcedrive = "C:\" targetdrive = "D:\" altsourcedrive = "C:\" 'leave same as target drive unless otherwise indicated alttargetdrive = "E:\" 'leave same as target drive unless otherwise indicated inname = "dir.txt" outname = "script.bat" userroot = "Users" set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") ' construct batch commands for saving rights, then link, the recreating rights Function GetCommand(curroot, line, typ, keyword) ' first need to get source and target pos = Instr(line, keyword) + Len(keyword) tuple = Trim(Mid(line, pos)) arr = Split(tuple, "[") oldtarget = Replace(arr(1), "]", "") oldlink = curroot & "\" & Trim(arr(0)) ' need to determine if we are pointing back to old disk newlink = replace(oldlink, sourcedrive, targetdrive) if(Instr(oldtarget, sourcedrive & userroot)) then newtarget = Replace(oldtarget, sourcedrive, targetdrive) else newtarget = oldtarget ' still pointing to original target end if ' comment out = "echo " & newlink & " --- " & newtarget & vbCrLf ' save permissions out = out & "icacls """ & replace(oldlink, sourcedrive, altsourcedrive) & """ /L /save " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" & vbCrLf ' create link newlink = replace(newlink, targetdrive, alttargetdrive) if typ = "junction" then out = out & "mklink /j """ & newlink & """ """ & newtarget & """" & vbCrLf else ' typ = "symlink" out = out & "mklink /d """ & newlink & """ """ & newtarget & """" & vbCrLf end if 'set hidden attribute out = out & "attrib +h """ & newlink & """ /L" & vbCrLf ' apply permissions shortlink = Left(newlink, InstrRev(newlink, "\") - 1) 'icacls works strangely - non-orthogonal for restore out = out & "icacls """ & shortlink & """ /L /restore " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" & vbCrLf GetCommand = out & vbCrLf End Function Sub WriteToFile(file, text) ForWriting = 2 Create = true set outfile = fso.OpenTextFile(file, ForWriting, Create) Call outfile.Write(text) Call outfile.Close() End Sub outtext = "ROBOCOPY " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " " & alttargetdrive & userroot & " /E /COPYALL /XJ" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf set intext = fso.OpenTextFile(inname) while not intext.AtEndOfStream line = intext.ReadLine() if Instr(line, repprefix) then curroot = Replace(line, repprefix, "") elseif Instr(line, juncname) then outtext = outtext & GetCommand(curroot, line, "junction", juncname) elseif Instr(line, linkname) then outtext = outtext & GetCommand(curroot, line, "symlink", linkname) end if Wend outtext = outtext & "icacls " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " /L /save " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" & vbCrLf outtext = outtext & "ren " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " _" & userroot & vbCrLf outtext = outtext & "mklink /j " & altsourcedrive & userroot & " " & targetdrive & userroot & vbCrLf outtext = outtext & "icacls " & altsourcedrive & " /L /restore " & altsourcedrive & "permissions.txt" Call intext.Close() Call WriteToFile(outname, outtext) MsgBox("Done writing to " & outname) dir.txt: Volume in drive C is ACER Volume Serial Number is 08D7-C0CC Directory of c:\users 07/16/2009 12:29 PM {DIR} . 07/16/2009 12:29 PM {DIR} .. 11/02/2006 09:02 AM {SYMLINKD} All Users [C:\ProgramData] 11/02/2006 09:02 AM {DIR} Default 11/02/2006 09:02 AM {JUNCTION} Default User [C:\Users\Default] 08/21/2008 08:37 AM 174 desktop.ini 11/02/2006 08:50 AM {DIR} Public 07/19/2009 08:54 PM {DIR} Steve 1 File(s) 174 bytes 7 Dir(s) 5,679,947,776 bytes free Error Message: Windows Script Host Script: C:\user location.vbs Line: 25 Char: 2 Error: Subscript out of range: '[number: 1]' Code: 800A0009 Source: Microsoft VBScript runtime error (In the VBScript script that I'm using on my system, I believe that 'Line 25' corresponds to the line beginning with oldtarget = Replace(arr(1), "]", "").

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• Calling Web Service Functions Asynchronously from a Web Page

  - by SGWellens

  Over on the Asp.Net forums where I moderate, a user had a problem calling a Web Service from a web page asynchronously. I tried his code on my machine and was able to reproduce the problem. I was able to solve his problem, but only after taking the long scenic route through some of the more perplexing nuances of Web Services and Proxies. Here is the fascinating story of that journey. Start with a simple Web Service     public class Service1 : System.Web.Services.WebService    {        [WebMethod]        public string HelloWorld()        {            // sleep 10 seconds            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10 * 1000);            return "Hello World";        }    } The 10 second delay is added to make calling an asynchronous function more apparent. If you don't call the function asynchronously, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to be rendered back to the client. If the call is made from a Windows Forms application, the application freezes for about 10 seconds. Add the web service to a web site. Right-click the project and select "Add Web Reference…" Next, create a web page to call the Web Service. Note: An asp.net web page that calls an 'Async' method must have the Async property set to true in the page's header: <%@ Page Language="C#"          AutoEventWireup="true"          CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs"          Inherits="_Default"           Async='true'  %> Here is the code to create the Web Service proxy and connect the event handler. Shrewdly, we make the proxy object a member of the Page class so it remains instantiated between the various events. public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page {    localhost.Service1 MyService;  // web service proxy     // ---- Page_Load ---------------------------------     protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyService = new localhost.Service1();        MyService.HelloWorldCompleted += EventHandler;          } Here is the code to invoke the web service and handle the event:     // ---- Async and EventHandler (delayed render) --------------------------     protected void ButtonHelloWorldAsync_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        // blocks        ODS("Pre HelloWorldAsync...");        MyService.HelloWorldAsync();        ODS("Post HelloWorldAsync");    }    public void EventHandler(object sender, localhost.HelloWorldCompletedEventArgs e)    {        ODS("EventHandler");        ODS("    " + e.Result);    }     // ---- ODS ------------------------------------------------    //    // Helper function: Output Debug String     public static void ODS(string Msg)    {        String Out = String.Format("{0}  {1}", DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss.ff"), Msg);        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(Out);    } I added a utility function I use a lot: ODS (Output Debug String). Rather than include the library it is part of, I included it in the source file to keep this example simple. Fire up the project, open up a debug output window, press the button and we get this in the debug output window: 11:29:37.94 Pre HelloWorldAsync... 11:29:37.94 Post HelloWorldAsync 11:29:48.94 EventHandler 11:29:48.94 Hello World   Sweet. The asynchronous call was made and returned immediately. About 10 seconds later, the event handler fires and we get the result. Perfect….right? Not so fast cowboy. Watch the browser during the call: What the heck? The page is waiting for 10 seconds. Even though the asynchronous call returned immediately, Asp.Net is waiting for the event to fire before it renders the page. This is NOT what we wanted. I experimented with several techniques to work around this issue. Some may erroneously describe my behavior as 'hacking' but, since no ingesting of Twinkies was involved, I do not believe hacking is the appropriate term. If you examine the proxy that was automatically created, you will find a synchronous call to HelloWorld along with an additional set of methods to make asynchronous calls. I tried the other asynchronous method supplied in the proxy:     // ---- Begin and CallBack ----------------------------------     protected void ButtonBeginHelloWorld_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        ODS("Pre BeginHelloWorld...");        MyService.BeginHelloWorld(AsyncCallback, null);        ODS("Post BeginHelloWorld");    }    public void AsyncCallback(IAsyncResult ar)    {        String Result = MyService.EndHelloWorld(ar);         ODS("AsyncCallback");        ODS("    " + Result);    } The BeginHelloWorld function in the proxy requires a callback function as a parameter. I tested it and the debug output window looked like this: 04:40:58.57 Pre BeginHelloWorld... 04:40:58.57 Post BeginHelloWorld 04:41:08.58 AsyncCallback 04:41:08.58 Hello World It works the same as before except for one critical difference: The page rendered immediately after the function call. I was worried the page object would be disposed after rendering the page but the system was smart enough to keep the page object in memory to handle the callback. Both techniques have a use: Delayed Render: Say you want to verify a credit card, look up shipping costs and confirm if an item is in stock. You could have three web service calls running in parallel and not render the page until all were finished. Nice. You can send information back to the client as part of the rendered page when all the services are finished. Immediate Render: Say you just want to start a service running and return to the client. You can do that too. However, the page gets sent to the client before the service has finished running so you will not be able to update parts of the page when the service finishes running. Summary: YourFunctionAsync() and an EventHandler will not render the page until the handler fires. BeginYourFunction() and a CallBack function will render the page as soon as possible. I found all this to be quite interesting and did a lot of searching and researching for documentation on this subject….but there isn't a lot out there. The biggest clues are the parameters that can be sent to the WSDL.exe program: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7h3ystb6(VS.100).aspx Two parameters are oldAsync and newAsync. OldAsync will create the Begin/End functions; newAsync will create the Async/Event functions. Caveat: I haven't tried this but it was stated in this article. I'll leave confirming this as an exercise for the student J. Included Code: I'm including the complete test project I created to verify the findings. The project was created with VS 2008 SP1. There is a solution file with 3 projects, the 3 projects are: Web Service Asp.Net Application Windows Forms Application To decide which program runs, you right-click a project and select "Set as Startup Project". I created and played with the Windows Forms application to see if it would reveal any secrets. I found that in the Windows Forms application, the generated proxy did NOT include the Begin/Callback functions. Those functions are only generated for Asp.Net pages. Probably for the reasons discussed earlier. Maybe those Microsoft boys and girls know what they are doing. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• Communication Between Your PC and Azure VM via Windows Azure Connect

  - by Shaun

  With the new release of the Windows Azure platform there are a lot of new features available. In my previous post I introduced a little bit about one of them, the remote desktop access to azure virtual machine. Now I would like to talk about another cool stuff – Windows Azure Connect.   What’s Windows Azure Connect I would like to quote the definition of the Windows Azure Connect in MSDN With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IP-sec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. IP-sec protects communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks through the use of cryptographic security services. There’s an image available at the MSDN as well that I would like to forward here As we can see, using the Windows Azure Connect the Worker Role 1 and Web Role 1 are connected with the development machines and database servers which some of them are inside the organization some are not. With the Windows Azure Connect, the roles deployed on the cloud could consume the resource which located inside our Intranet or anywhere in the world. That means the roles can connect to the local database, access the local shared resource such as share files, folders and printers, etc.   Difference between Windows Azure Connect and AppFabric It seems that the Windows Azure Connect are duplicated with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Both of them are aiming to solve the problem on how to communication between the resource in the cloud and inside the local network. The table below lists the differences in my understanding. Category Windows Azure Connect Windows Azure AppFabric Purpose An IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure roles. An application service running on the cloud. Connectivity IP-sec, Domain-joint Net Tcp, Http, Https Components Windows Azure Connect Driver Service Bus, Access Control, Caching Usage Azure roles connect to local database server Azure roles use local shared files,  folders and printers, etc. Azure roles join the local AD. Expose the local service to Internet. Move the authorization process to the cloud. Integrate with existing identities such as Live ID, Google ID, etc. with existing local services. Utilize the distributed cache.   And also some scenarios on which of them should be used. Scenario Connect AppFabric I have a service deployed in the Intranet and I want the people can use it from the Internet.   Y I have a website deployed on Azure and need to use a database which deployed inside the company. And I don’t want to expose the database to the Internet. Y   I have a service deployed in the Intranet and is using AD authorization. I have a website deployed on Azure which needs to use this service. Y   I have a service deployed in the Intranet and some people on the Internet can use it but need to be authorized and authenticated.   Y I have a service in Intranet, and a website deployed on Azure. This service can be used from Internet and that website should be able to use it as well by AD authorization for more functionalities. Y Y   How to Enable Windows Azure Connect OK we talked a lot information about the Windows Azure Connect and differences with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Now let’s see how to enable and use the Windows Azure Connect. First of all, since this feature is in CTP stage we should apply before use it. On the Windows Azure Portal we can see our CTP features status under Home, Beta Program page. You can send the apply to join the Beta Programs to Microsoft in this page. After a few days the Microsoft will send an email to you (the email of your Live ID) when it’s available. In my case we can see that the Windows Azure Connect had been activated by Microsoft and then we can click the Connect button on top, or we can click the Virtual Network item from the left navigation bar.   The first thing we need, if it’s our first time to enter the Connect page, is to enable the Windows Azure Connect. After that we can see our Windows Azure Connect information in this page.   Add a Local Machine to Azure Connect As we explained below the Windows Azure Connect can make an IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure role instances. So that we firstly add a local machine into our Azure Connect. To do this we will click the Install Local Endpoint button on top and then the portal will give us an URL. Copy this URL to the machine we want to add and it will download the software to us. This software will be installed in the local machines which we want to join the Connect. After installed there will be a tray-icon appeared to indicate this machine had been joint our Connect. The local application will be refreshed to the Windows Azure Platform every 5 minutes but we can click the Refresh button to let it retrieve the latest status at once. Currently my local machine is ready for connect and we can see my machine in the Windows Azure Portal if we switched back to the portal and selected back Activated Endpoints node.   Add a Windows Azure Role to Azure Connect Let’s create a very simple azure project with a basic ASP.NET web role inside. To make it available on Windows Azure Connect we will open the azure project property of this role from the solution explorer in the Visual Studio, and select the Virtual Network tab, check the Activate Windows Azure Connect. The next step is to get the activation token from the Windows Azure Portal. In the same page there is a button named Get Activation Token. Click this button then the portal will display the token to me. We copied this token and pasted to the box in the Visual Studio tab. Then we deployed this application to azure. After completed the deployment we can see the role instance was listed in the Windows Azure Portal - Virtual Connect section.   Establish the Connect Group The final task is to create a connect group which contains the machines and role instances need to be connected each other. This can be done in the portal very easy. The machines and instances will NOT be connected until we created the group for them. The machines and instances can be used in one or more groups. In the Virtual Connect section click the Groups and Roles node from the left side navigation bar and clicked the Create Group button on top. This will bring up a dialog to us. What we need to do is to specify a group name, description; and then we need to select the local computers and azure role instances into this group. After the Azure Fabric updated the group setting we can see the groups and the endpoints in the page. And if we switch back to the local machine we can see that the tray-icon have been changed and the status turned connected. The Windows Azure Connect will update the group information every 5 minutes. If you find the status was still in Disconnected please right-click the tray-icon and select the Refresh menu to retrieve the latest group policy to make it connected.   Test the Azure Connect between the Local Machine and the Azure Role Instance Now our local machine and azure role instance had been connected. This means each of them can communication to others in IP level. For example we can open the SQL Server port so that our azure role can connect to it by using the machine name or the IP address. The Windows Azure Connect uses IPv6 to connect between the local machines and role instances. You can get the IP address from the Windows Azure Portal Virtual Network section when select an endpoint. I don’t want to take a full example for how to use the Connect but would like to have two very simple tests. The first one would be PING.   When a local machine and role instance are connected through the Windows Azure Connect we can PING any of them if we opened the ICMP protocol in the Filewall setting. To do this we need to run a command line before test. Open the command window on the local machine and the role instance, execute the command as following netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv6" dir=in action=allow enable=yes protocol=icmpv6 Thanks to Jason Chen, Patriek van Dorp, Anton Staykov and Steve Marx, they helped me to enable  the ICMPv6 setting. For the full discussion we made please visit here. You can use the Remote Desktop Access feature to logon the azure role instance. Please refer my previous blog post to get to know how to use the Remote Desktop Access in Windows Azure. Then we can PING the machine or the role instance by specifying its name. Below is the screen I PING my local machine from my azure instance. We can use the IPv6 address to PING each other as well. Like the image following I PING to my role instance from my local machine thought the IPv6 address.   Another example I would like to demonstrate here is folder sharing. I shared a folder in my local machine and then if we logged on the role instance we can see the folder content from the file explorer window.   Summary In this blog post I introduced about another new feature – Windows Azure Connect. With this feature our local resources and role instances (virtual machines) can be connected to each other. In this way we can make our azure application using our local stuff such as database servers, printers, etc. without expose them to Internet.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community – August 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Lucas Jellema ?Published an article about organizing Fusion Middleware Administration: http://technology.amis.nl/2012/07/31/organizing-fusion-middleware-administration-in-a-smart-and-frugal-way … - many organizations are struggling with this. ServiceTechSymposium Countdown to the Early Bird Registration Discount deadline. Only 4 days left! http://ow.ly/cBCiv demed ?Good chatting w Bob Rhubart, Thomas Erl & Tim Hall on SOA & Cloud Symposium https://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/podcast_show_notes_thomas_erl … @soaschool @OTNArchBeat -- CU in London! SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community July 2012 - are you one of them? If yes please rt! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-july-2012/ … #soacommunity SOA Community ?Are You a facebook member - do You follow http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity ? #soacommunity #soa SOA Community ?SOA 24/7 - Home Page: http://soa247.com/#.UBJsN8n3kyk.twitter … #soacommunity OracleBlogs ?Handling Large Payloads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1lFAih OracleBlogs ?SOA Community Newsletter July 2012 http://ow.ly/1lFx6s OTNArchBeat Podcast Show Notes: Thomas Erl on SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology http://bit.ly/OOHTUJ SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter July 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-s7 OTNArchBeat ?OTN ArchBeat Podcast: Thomas Erl on SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology - Part 1 http://pub.vitrue.com/fMti OProcessAccel ?Just released! White Paper: Oracle Process Accelerators Best Practices http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/processaccelbestpracticeswhitepaper-1708910.pdf … OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud, and Service Technologies - Part 1 of 4 - A conversation with SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology Symposiu... http://ow.ly/1lDyAK OracleBlogs ?SOA Suite 11g PS5 Bundled Patch 3 (11.1.1.6.3) http://ow.ly/1lCW1S Simon Haslam My write-up of the virtues of the #ukoug App Server & Middleware SIG http://bit.ly/LMWdfY What's important to you for our next meeting? SOA Community SOA Partner Community Survey 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-qY Simone Geib ?RT @jswaroop: #Oracle positioned in the Leader's quadrant - Gartner Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure (SOA & SOA Gov)... ServiceTechSymposium New Supporting Organization, IBTI has joined the Symposium! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM 11g Task Form Version Considerations http://ow.ly/1lA7XS OTNArchBeat Oracle content at SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium (and discount code!) http://pub.vitrue.com/FPcW OracleBlogs ?BPM 11g Task Form Version Considerations http://ow.ly/1lzOrX OTNArchBeat BPM 11g #ADF Task Form Versioning | Christopher Karl Chan #fusionmiddleware http://pub.vitrue.com/0qP2 OTNArchBeat Lightweight ADF Task Flow for BPM Human Tasks Overview | @AndrejusB #fusionmiddleware http://pub.vitrue.com/z7x9 SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Lisbon report by Link Consulting http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/oracle-fusion-middleware-summer-camps-in-lisbon/ … #ofmsummercamps #soa #bpm SOA Community ?Clemens Utschig-Utschig & Manas Deb The Successful Execution of the SOA and BPM Vision Using a Business Capability Framework: Concepts… Simone Geib ?RT @oprocessaccel: Just released! White Paper: Oracle Process Accelerators Best Practices http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/processaccelbestpracticeswhitepaper-1708910.pdf … jornica ?Report from Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Munich: SOA Suite 11g advanced training experiences @soacommunity http://bit.ly/Mw3btE Simone Geib ?Bruce Tierney: Update - SOA & BPM Customer Insights Webcast Series: | https://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/entry/update_soa_bpm_customer_insights … OTNArchBeat Business SOA: Thinking is Dead | @mosesjones http://pub.vitrue.com/k8mw esentri ?had 3 great days in Munich at #Oracle #soacommunity Summercamp! Special thanks to Geoffroy de Lamalle from eProseed! Danilo Schmiedel ?Used my time in train to setup the ps5 soa/bpm vbox-image.Works like a dream. Setup-Readme is perfect! Saves a lot of time!!! @soacommunity 18 Jul SOA Community ?THANKS for the excellent OFM summer camps - save trip home - share your pictures at http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #ofmsummercamps #soacommunity doors BBQ-party with Oracle @soacommunity. 5Star! #lovemunich #ofmsummercamps pic.twitter.com/ztfcGn2S leonsmiers ?New #Capgemini blog post "Continuous Improvement of Business Agility" http://bit.ly/Lr0EwG #bpm #yam Eric Elzinga ?MDS Explorer utility, http://see.sc/4qdb43 #soasuite ServiceTechSymposium ?@techsymp New speaker Demed L’Her from Oracle has been added to the symposium calendar. http://ow.ly/cjnyw SOA Community ?Last day of the Fusion Middleware summer camps - we continue at 9.00 am. send us your barbecue pictures! #ofmsummercamps #soacommunity SOA Community ?Delivering SOA Governance with EAMS and Oracle Enterprise Repository by Link Consulting http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/delivering-soa-governance-with-eams-and-oracle-enterprise-repository/ … #soacommunity #soa #oer OracleBlogs ?Process Accelerator Kit http://ow.ly/1loaCw 15 Jul SOA Community ?Sun is back in Munich! Send your pictures Middleware summer camps! #ofmsummercamps We start tomorrow 11.00 at Oracle pic.twitter.com/6FStxomk Walter Montantes ?Gracias, Obrigado, Thank you, Danke a Lisboa y a @soacommunity @wlscommunity. From the Mexican guys!! cc @mikeintoch #ofmsummercamps Andrejus Baranovskis Tips & Tricks How to Run Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Workspace from Custom ADF 11g Application http://fb.me/1zOf3h2K8 JDeveloper & ADF ?Fusion Apps Enterprise Repository - Explained http://dlvr.it/1rpjWd Steve Walker ?Oracle #Exalogic is the logical choice for running business applications. Exalogic Software 2.0 launches 7/25. Reg at http://bit.ly/NedQ9L A. Chatziantoniou ?Landed in rainy Amsterdam after a great week in Lisbon for the #ofmsummercamps - multo obrigado for Jürgen for another fantastic event SOA Community ?Teams present #BPM11g POC results at #ofmsummercamps - great job! #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/0d4txkWF Sabine Leitner ?#DOAG SIG Middleware 29.08.2012 Köln über MW, Administration, Monitoring http://bit.ly/P47w82 @soacommunity @OracleMW @OracleFMW 12 Jul philmulhall ?Thanks @soacommunity for a great week at the #ofmsummercamps. Hard work done so time for a few cold ones in Lisboa. pic.twitter.com/LVUUuwTh peter230769 ?RT: andrea_rocco_31: RT @soacommunity: Enjoy the networking event at #ofmsummercamps want to attend next time ... pic.twitter.com/D1HRndi4 Niels Gorter ?#ofmsummercamps dinner in Lisbon. Great weather, scenery, training, people, on and on. Big THANKS @soacommunity JDeveloper & ADF ?Running Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Worklist Task Flow and Human Task Form on Non-SOA Domain http://dlvr.it/1r0c2j Andrea Rocco ?RT @soacommunity: Jamy pastry at cafe Belem - who is the ghost there?!? http://via.me/-2x33uk6 Simon Haslam ?Sounds great - sorry I couldn't make it. RT @soacommunity: 6pm BPM advanced training hard work to build the POC #ofmsummercamps philmulhall ?A well earned rest after a hard days work @soacommunity #summercamps pic.twitter.com/LKK7VOVS philmulhall ?Some more hard working delegates @soacommunity #summercamps pic.twitter.com/gWpk1HZh SOA Community ?Error message at the BPM POC - will The #ace director understand the message and solve it? #ofmsummercamps pic.twitter.com/LFTEzNck Daniel Kleine-Albers ?posted on the #thecattlecrew blog: Assigning more memory to JDeveloper http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/jdeveloper-quicktip-assigning-more-memory/ … OTNArchBeat ?BAM design pointers | Kavitha Srinivasan http://pub.vitrue.com/TOhP SOA Community ?Did you receive the July SOA community newsletter? read it! Want to become a member http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity #soa #opn OracleBlogs ?Markus Zirn, Big Data with CEP and SOA @ SOA, Cloud &amp; Service Technology Symposium 2012 http://ow.ly/1lcSkb Andrejus Baranovskis Running Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Worklist Task Flow and Human Task Form on Non-SOA Eric Elzinga ?Service Facade design pattern in OSB, http://bit.ly/NnOExN Eric Elzinga ?New BPEL Thread Pool in SOA 11g for Non-Blocking Invoke Activities from 11.1.1.6 (PS5), http://bit.ly/NnOc2G Gilberto Holms New Post: Siebel Connection Pool in Oracle Service Bus 11g http://wp.me/pRE8V-2z Oracle UPK & Tutor ?UPK Pre-Built Content Update: UPK pre-built content development efforts are always underway and growing. Ove... http://bit.ly/R2HeTj JDeveloper & ADF ?Troubleshooting BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 http://dlvr.it/1p0FfS orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BAM design pointers - In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discove... http://ow.ly/1kYqES SOA Community BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/bpmn-process-editor-problems-in-11-1-1-6 … #soacommunity #bpm OTNArchBeat ?SOA Learning Library: free short, topic-focused training on Oracle SOA & BPM products | @SOACommunity http://pub.vitrue.com/NE1G Andrejus Baranovskis ?ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) http://fb.me/1coX4r1X1 OTNArchBeat ?A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic –Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koser http://pub.vitrue.com/mQVZ OTNArchBeat ?BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson http://pub.vitrue.com/3PR0 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Do’s and Don’ts Building SharePoint Applications

  - by Bil Simser

  SharePoint is a great platform for building quick LOB applications. Simple things from employee time trackers to server and software inventory to full blown Help Desks can be crafted up using SharePoint from just customizing Lists. No programming necessary. However there are a few tricks I’ve painfully learned over the years that you can use for your own solutions. DO What’s In A Name? When you create a new list, column, or view you’ll commonly name it something like “Expense Reports”. However this has the ugly effect of creating a url to the list as “Expense%20Reports”. Or worse, an internal field name of “Expense_x0x0020_Reports” which is not only cryptic but hard to remember when you’re trying to find the column by internal name. While “Expense Reports 2011” is user friendly, “ExpenseReports2011” is not (unless you’re a programmer). So that’s not the solution. Well, not entirely. Instead when you create your column or list or view use the scrunched up name (I can’t think of the technical term for it right now) of “ExpenseReports2011”, “WomenAtTheOfficeThatAreMen” or “KoalaMeatIsGoodWhenBroiled”. After you’ve created it, go back and change the name to the more friendly “Silly Expense Reports That Nobody Reads”. The original internal name will be the url and code friendly one without spaces while the one used on data entry forms and view headers will be the human version. Smart Columns When building a view include columns that make sense. By default when you add a column the “Add to default view” is checked. Resist the urge to be lazy and leave it checked. Uncheck that puppy and decide consciously what columns should be included in the view. Pick columns that make sense to what the user is trying to do. This means you have to talk to the user. Yes, I know. That can be trying at times and even painful. Go ahead, talk to them. You might learn something. Find out what’s important to them and why. If they’re doing something repetitively as part of their job, try to make their life easier by including what’s most important to them. Do they really need to see the Created *and* Modified date of a document or do they just need the title and author? You’ll only find out after talking to them (or getting them drunk in a bar and leaving them in the back alley handcuffed to a garbage bin, don’t ask). Gotta Keep it Separated Hey, views are there for a reason. Use them. While “All Items” is a fine way to present a list of well, all items, it’s hardly sufficient to present a list of servers built before the Y2K bug hit. You’ll be scrolling the list for hours finally arriving at Page 387 of 12,591 and cursing that SharePoint guy for convincing you that putting your hardware into a list would be of any use to anyone. Next to collecting the data, presenting it is just as important. Views are often overlooked and many times ignored or misused. They’re the way you can slice and dice the data up so that you’re not trying to consume 3,000 years of human evolution on a single web page. Remember views can be filtered so feel free to create a view for each status or one for each operating system or one for each species of Information Worker you might be putting in that list or document library. Not only will it reduce the number of items someone sees at one time, it’ll also make the information that much more relevant. Also remember that each view is a separate page. Use it in navigation by creating a menu on the Quick Launch to each view. The discoverability of the Views menu isn’t overly obvious and if you violate the rule of columns (see Horizontally Scrolling below) the view menu doesn’t even show up until you shuffle the scroll bar to the left. Navigation links, big giant buttons, a screaming flashing “CLICK ME NOW” will help your users find their way. Sort It! Views are great so we’re building nice, rich views for the user. Awesomesauce. However sort is not very discoverable by the user. For example when you’re looking at a view how do you know if it’s ascending or descending and what is it sorted on. Maybe it’s sorted using two fields so what’s that all about? Help your users by letting them know the information they’re looking at is sorted. Maybe you name the view something appropriate like “Bogus Expense Claims Sorted By Deadbeats”. If you use the naming strategy just make sure you keep the name consistent with the description. In the previous example their better be a Deadbeat column so I can see the sort in action. Having a “Loser” column, while equally correct, is a little obtuse to the average Information Worker. Remember, they usually don’t use acronyms and even if they knew how to, it’s not immediately obvious to them that’s what you’re trying to convey. Another option is to simply drop a Content Editor Web Part above the list and explain exactly the view they’re looking at. Each view is it’s own page so one CEWP won’t be used across the board. Be descriptive in what the user is seeing but try to keep it brief. Dumping the first chapter of I, Claudius might be informative to the data but can gobble up screen real estate and miss the point of having the list. DO NOT Useless Attachments The attachments column is, in a word, useless. For the most part. Sure it indicates there’s an attachment on the list item but in the grand scheme of things that’s not overly informative. Maybe it is and by all means, if it makes sense to you include it. Colour it. Make it shine and stand like the Return of Clippy on every SharePoint list. Without it being functional it can be boring. EndUserSharePoint.com has an article to make the son of Clippy that much more useful so feel free to head over and check out this blog post by Paul Grenier on the task (Warning code ahead! Danger Will Robinson!) In any case, I would suggest you remove it from your views. Again if it’s important then include it but consider the jQuery solution above to make it functional. It’s added by default to views and one of things that people forget to clean up. Horizontal Scrolling Screen real estate is premium so building a list that contains 8,000 columns and stretches horizontally across 15 screens probably isn’t the most user friendly experience. Most users can’t figure out how to scroll vertically let alone horizontally so don’t make it even that more confusing for them. Take the Steve Krug approach in your view designs and try not to make the user think. Again views are your friend. Consider splitting up the data into views where one view contains 10 columns and other view contains the other 10. Okay, maybe your information doesn’t work that way but humans can only process 7 pieces of data at a time, 10 at most (then their heads explode and you don’t want to clean that mess up, especially on a Friday night before the big dance). It drives me batshit crazy when I see a view with 80 columns of data. I often ask the user “So what do you do with all this information”. The response is usually “With this data [the first 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to fire everyone, and with this data [the next 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to set the building on fire and collect the insurance”. It’s at that point I show them how to create two new views “People Who Are About To Get The Axe” and “Beach Time For The Executives”. Again, talk to your users and try to reason with them on cutting down the number of columns they see at once. Vertical Scrolling Another big faux pas I find is the use of multi-line comment fields in views. It’s not so bad when you have a statement like this in your view: “I really like, oh my god, thought I was going to scream when I saw this turtle then I decided what I was going to have for dinner and frankly I hate having to work late so when I was talking to the customer I thought, oh my god, what if the customer has turtles and then it appeared to me that I really was hungry so I'm going to have lunch now.” It’s fine if that’s the only column along with two or three others, but once you slap those 20 columns of data into the list, the comment field wraps and forms a new multi-page novel that takes up your entire screen. Do everyone a favour and just avoid adding the column to views. Train the user to just click through to the item if they need to see the contents. Duplicate Information Duplication is never good. Views and great as you can group data together. For example create a view of project status reports grouped by author. Then you can see what project manager is being a dip and not submitting their report. However if you group by author do you really need the Created By field as well in the view? Or if the view is grouped by Project then Author do you need both. Horizontal real estate is always at a premium so try not to clutter up the view with duplicate data like this. Oh  yeah, if you’re scratching your head saying “But Bil, if I don’t include the Project name in the view and I have a lot of items then how do I know which one I’m looking at”. That’s a hint that your grouping is too vague or you have too much data in the view based on that criteria. Filter it down a notch, create some views, and try to keep the group down to a single screen where you can see the group header at the top of the page. Again it’s just managing the information you have. Redundant, See Redundant This partially relates to duplicate information and smart columns but basically remember to not include the obvious in a view. Remember, don’t make me think. If you’ve gone to the trouble (and it was a lot of trouble wasn’t it?) to create separate views of your data by creating a “September Zombie Brain Sales”, “October Zombie Brain Sales”, etc. then please for the love of all that is holy do not include the Month and Product columns in your view. Similarly if you create a “My” view of anything (“My Favourite Brands of Spandex”, “My Co-Workers I Find The Urge To Disinfect”) then again, do not include the owner or author field (or whatever field you use to identify “My”). That’s just silly. Hope that helps! Happy customizing!

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• Observable Collections

  - by SGWellens

  I didn't think it was possible, but .NET surprised me yet again with a cool feature I never knew existed: The ObservableCollection. This became available in .NET 3.0. In essence, an ObservableCollection is a collection with an event you can connect to. The event fires when the collection changes. As usual, working with the .NET classes is so ridiculously easy, it feels like cheating. The following is small test program to illustrate how the ObservableCollection works. To start, create an ObservableCollection and then store it in the Session object so it will persist between page post backs. I also added the code to pull it out of Session state when there is a page post back:   public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page{    public ObservableCollection<int> MyInts;     // ---- Page_Load ------------------------------     protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        if (IsPostBack == false)        {            MyInts = new ObservableCollection<int>();            MyInts.CollectionChanged += CollectionChangedHandler;             Session["MyInts"] = MyInts;  // store for use between postbacks        }        else        {            MyInts = Session["MyInts"] as ObservableCollection<int>;        }    } Here's the event handler I hooked up to the ObservableCollection, it writes status strings to a ListBox. Note: The event handler fires in a different thread than the IIS process thread.     // ---- CollectionChangedHandler -----------------------------------    //    // Something changed in the Observable collection     public void CollectionChangedHandler(object sender, NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e)    {        // need to dig around to get the current page and control to write to:        // (because this is in a separate thread)        Page CurrentPage = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Handler as Page;        ListBox LB = CurrentPage.FindControl("ListBoxHistory") as ListBox;         switch (e.Action)        {            case NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Add:                LB.Items.Add("Add: " + e.NewItems[0]);                               break;             case NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Remove:                LB.Items.Add("Remove: " + e.OldItems[0]);                break;             case NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Reset:                LB.Items.Add("Reset: ");                break;             default:                LB.Items.Add(e.Action.ToString());                break;                     }    }  Next, add some buttons and code to exercise the ObservableCollection:     <br />    <asp:Button ID="ButtonAdd" runat="server" Text="Add" OnClick="ButtonAdd_Click" />    <asp:Button ID="ButtonRemove" runat="server" Text="Remove" OnClick="ButtonRemove_Click" />    <asp:Button ID="ButtonReset" runat="server" Text="Reset" OnClick="ButtonReset_Click" />    <asp:Button ID="ButtonList" runat="server" Text="List" OnClick="ButtonList_Click" />    <br />    <asp:TextBox ID="TextBoxInt" runat="server" Width="51px"></asp:TextBox>    <br />    <asp:ListBox ID="ListBoxHistory" runat="server" Height="255px" Width="195px">    </asp:ListBox>    // ---- Add Button --------------------------------------     protected void ButtonAdd_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        int Temp;        if (int.TryParse(TextBoxInt.Text, out Temp) == true)            MyInts.Add(Temp);    }     // ---- Remove Button --------------------------------------     protected void ButtonRemove_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        int Temp;        if (int.TryParse(TextBoxInt.Text, out Temp) == true)            MyInts.Remove(Temp);    }     // ---- Button Reset -----------------------------------     protected void ButtonReset_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyInts.Clear();    }     // ---- Button List --------------------------------------     protected void ButtonList_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        ListBoxHistory.Items.Add("MyInts:");        foreach (int i in MyInts)        {            // a bit of tweaking to get the text to be indented            ListItem LI = new ListItem("&nbsp;&nbsp;" + i.ToString());            LI.Text = Server.HtmlDecode(LI.Text);            ListBoxHistory.Items.Add(LI);        }    } Here's what it looks like after entering some numbers and clicking some buttons: An interesting note is that I had to use: System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response to write to a control on the page. As mentioned earlier, this implies that the notification event is in a thread separate from the IIS thread. Another interesting note: From the online help: Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe What does that mean to Asp.Net developers? If you are going to share an ObservableCollection among different sessions, you'd better make it a static object. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• Glassfish alive or dead? WebLogic SE cost is less than Glassfish!

  - by JuergenKress

  Is a hot discussion in the community in the last few days! Send us your opinion on tiwtter @wlscommunity #Glassfish #WebLogicCommunity We posted theGlassFishStrategy.pptx at our WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required). Please read also the Java EE and GlassFish Server Roadmap Update Bruno Borges ?Another great article covering story about #GlassFish. Comments starting to be reasonable ;-) 6 facts helped a lot http://adtmag.com/articles/2013/11/08/oracle-drops-glassfish.aspx … Adam Bien ?What Oracle Could Do For GlassFish Now: Move the sources to GitHub (GitHub is the most popular collaboration p... http://bit.ly/1d1uo24 JAXenter.com ?Oracle evangelist: “GlassFish Open Source Edition is not dead” http://jaxenter.com/oracle-evangelist-glassfish-open-source-edition-is-not-dead-48830.html … GlassFish 6 Facts About #GlassFish Announcement and the Future of #JavaEE http://bit.ly/1bbSVPf via @brunoborges David Blevins ?In support of our #GlassFish friends and open source in general: Feed the Fish http://www.tomitribe.com/blog/2013/11/feed-the-fish/ … #JavaEE #opensource #manifesto GlassFish ?GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 is scheduled for 2014. Version 5.0 as impl for #JavaEE8 https://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/entry/java_ee_and_glassfish_server … #Community focused C2B2 Consulting ?C2B2 continues to offer support for your operational #JEE applications running on #GlassFish http://blog.c2b2.co.uk/2013/11/oracle-dropping-commercial-support-of.html … #Java Markus Eisele ?RT @InfoQ: #GlassFish Commercial Edition is Dead http://bit.ly/17eFB0Z < at least they agree to my points... Adam Bien suggests: Move the sources to GitHub (GitHub is the most popular collaboration platform). It is more likely for an individual to contribute via GitHub, than the current infrastructure. Introduce a business friendlier license like e.g. the Apache license. Companies interesting in providing added value (and commercial support) on top of existing sources would appreciate it. Implement GitHub-based, open source, CI system with nightly builds. Introduce a transparent voting process / pull-request acceptance process. Release more frequently. Keep https://glassfish.java.net as the main hub. C2B2 offers Glassfish support by Steve Millidge Oracle have just announced that commercial support for GlassFish 4 will not be available from Oracle. In light of this announcement I thought I would put together some thoughts about how I see this development. I think the key word in this announcement is "commercial", nowhere does Oracle announce the "death of GlassFish" in contrary Oracle reaffirm; GlassFish Server Open Source Edition continues to be the strategic foundation for Java EE reference implementation going forward. And for developers, updates will be delivered as needed to continue to deliver a great developer experience for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition so GlassFish is not about to go away soon. In a similar fashion RedHat do not provide commercial support for WildFly and only provide commercial support for JBoss EAP. Admittedly JBoss EAP and WildFly are much closer together than GlassFish and WebLogic but WildFly and JBoss EAP are absolutely NOT the same thing. The key going forward to the viability of GlassFish as a production platform is how the GlassFish community develops; How often does the community release binary builds? How open is the community to bug fixes? How much engineering resource does Oracle commit to GlassFish? At this stage we just don't know the answers to these questions. If the GlassFish open source project continues on it's current trajectory without a commercial support offering then I don't see much of a problem. Oracle just have to work harder to sell migration paths to WebLogic in the same way as RedHat have to sell migration paths from WildFly to JBoss EAP. In the meantime C2B2 continues to offer support for your operational JEE applications running on GlassFish and we will endeavour to work with the community to get any bugs fixed. The key difference is we can no longer back our Expert Support with a support contract from Oracle for patches and fixes for any release greater than 3.x. Read the complete article here. 6 Facts About GlassFish Announcement By Bruno.Borges Fact #1 - GlassFish Open Source Edition is not dead GlassFish Server Open Source Edition will remain the reference implementation of Java EE. The current trunk is where an implementation for Java EE 8 will flourish, and this will become the future GlassFish 5.0. Calling "GlassFish is dead" does no good to the Java EE ecosystem. The GlassFish Community will remain strong towards the future of Java EE. Without revenue-focused mind, this might actually help the GlassFish community to shape the next version, and set free from any ties with commercial decisions. Fact #2 - OGS support is not over As I said before, GlassFish Server Open Source Edition will continue. Main change is that there will be no more future commercial releases of Oracle GlassFish Server. New and existing OGS 2.1.x and 3.1.x commercial customers will continue to be supported according to the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. In parallel, I believe there's no other company in the Java EE business that offers commercial support to more than one build of a Java EE application server. This new direction can actually help customers and partners, simplifying decision through commercial negotiations. Fact #3 - WebLogic is not always more expensive than OGS Oracle GlassFish Server ("OGS") is a build of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition bundled with a set of commercial features called GlassFish Server Control and license bundles such as Java SE Support. OGS has at the moment of this writing the pricelist of U$ 5,000 / processor. One information that some bloggers are mentioning is that WebLogic is more expensive than this. Fact 3.1: it is not necessarily the case. The initial edition of WebLogic is called "Standard Edition" and falls into a policy where some “Standard Edition” products are licensed on a per socket basis. As of current pricelist, US$ 10,000 / socket. If you do the math, you will realize that WebLogic SE can actually be significantly more cost effective than OGS, and a customer can save money if running on a CPU with 4 cores or more for example. Quote from the price list: “When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name (with the exception of Java SE Support, Java SE Advanced, and Java SE Suite), a processor is counted equivalent to an occupied socket; however, in the case of multi-chip modules, each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket.” For more details speak to your Oracle sales representative - this is clearly at list price and every customer typically has a relationship with Oracle (like they do with other vendors) and different contractual details may apply. And although OGS has always been production-ready for Java EE applications, it is no secret that WebLogic has always been more enterprise, mission critical application server than OGS since BEA. Different editions of WLS provide features and upgrade irons like the WebLogic Diagnostic Framework, Work Managers, Side by Side Deployment, ADF and TopLink bundled license, Web Tier (Oracle HTTP Server) bundled licensed, Fusion Middleware stack support, Oracle DB integration features, Oracle RAC features (such as GridLink), Coherence Management capabilities, Advanced HA (Whole Service Migration and Server Migration), Java Mission Control, Flight Recorder, Oracle JDK support, etc. Fact #4 - There’s no major vendor supporting community builds of Java EE app servers There are no major vendors providing support for community builds of any Open Source application server. For example, IBM used to provide community support for builds of Apache Geronimo, not anymore. Red Hat does not commercially support builds of WildFly and if I remember correctly, never supported community builds of former JBoss AS. Oracle has never commercially supported GlassFish Server Open Source Edition builds. Tomitribe appears to be the exception to the rule, offering commercial support for Apache TomEE. Fact #5 - WebLogic and GlassFish share several Java EE implementations It has been no secret that although GlassFish and WebLogic share some JSR implementations (as stated in the The Aquarium announcement: JPA, JSF, WebSockets, CDI, Bean Validation, JAX-WS, JAXB, and WS-AT) and WebLogic understands GlassFish deployment descriptors, they are not from the same codebase. Fact #6 - WebLogic is not for GlassFish what JBoss EAP is for WildFly WebLogic is closed-source offering. It is commercialized through a license-based plus support fee model. OGS although from an Open Source code, has had the same commercial model as WebLogic. Still, one cannot compare GlassFish/WebLogic to WildFly/JBoss EAP. It is simply not the same case, since Oracle has had two different products from different codebases. The comparison should be limited to GlassFish Open Source / Oracle GlassFish Server versus WildFly / JBoss EAP. Read the complete article here WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Glassfish,training,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Tools of the Trade

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!  I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.  For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward.  I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago.  Let’s just say that things have improved.  One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees.  Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week.  But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too.  This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured.  Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company.  My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team.  So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive.  This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2.  Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server.  For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server.  There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server.  Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it.  It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team.  And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more.  SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational.  SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases.  SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT.  And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control.  I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December.  This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits.  Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs.  Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast.  Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language.  Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files).  Provides in-context preview of the search results.  Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files.  It has language-specific syntax highlighting.  I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems.  Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace.  Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs?  SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls.  We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon.  Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs.  Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids.  Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance.  Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool.  SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge.  For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases.  This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system.  The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups.  Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing.  I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for.  We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager.  But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design.  The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow.  I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync.  I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them.  FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard.  Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps.  I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68.   Whew!  That’s a lot.  No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it.  Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time.  Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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