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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• Alcatel-Lucent: Enterprise 2.0: The Top 5 Things I would Do Over

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Happy Monday! Does anyone else feel as if the weekend went entirely too quickly? At least for those of us in the United States, we have the 4th of July Holiday next week to look forward to This week on the blog, we are going to focus on "WebCenter by Example" and highlight best practices from customers and partners. I recently came across this article and I think this is a great example of how we can learn from one another when it comes to social collaboration adoption. Do you agree with Jem? What things or best practices have you learned in your organizations?  By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent  Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over? #5 Define your analytics solution from the start There is so much to do when you launch a community and initially growing it without complete chaos is quite a task.  It doesn’t take too long to get to a point where you want to focus your continued efforts in growing company collaboration.  Do people truly talk across regional boundaries or have we shifted siloed conversations to a new platform.  Is there one organization that doesn’t interact with another? If you are lucky you’ll have someone in your community team well versed in the world of databases and SQL queries, but it takes time to figure out what backend analytics data actually means. Professional support can be expensive and it may be hard to justify later as it typically has the community manager as the only main customer.  Figure out what you think you’ll want to know and how to get it early on. The sooner the better even if it doesn’t seem that critical at the time. #4 Lobbies guide you to the right places One piece of feedback that comes up more and more as we keep growing Engage is it’s hard to find stuff, or new people are not sure where to start. Something we’re doing now is defining some general topic areas of interest to be like “lobbies” into the platform and some common hashtags to go with them. I liken this to walking into a large medical or professional building for the first time.  There are hundreds of offices, and you look to a sign in the lobby to get guided to the right place for you.  We’re building that sign for members now, but again we missed the boat as the majority of the company has had their initial Engage experience. #3 Clean up, clean up, clean up Knowledge work and folksonomies are messy! The day we opened the doors to Engage I would have said we should keep everything ever created in Engage with an argument that it was a window into our collective knowledge so nothing should go.  Well, 6000+ groups and 200,000+ pieces of content later, I’ve changed my mind.  As previously mentioned, with too much “stuff” the system can be overwhelming to new members and it makes it harder to get what you’re looking for.   Do we need that help document about a tool we no longer have? NO!  Do we need that group that had 1 document and 2 discussions in the last two years? NO! Should we only have one group about a given topic instead of 4?  YES! Last fall, Engage defined a cleanup process for groups not used for a long time.  We also formed a volunteer cleaning army who are extra eyes on the hunt for “stuff” that should be updated, merged, or deleted.  It’s better late than never, but in line with what’s becoming a theme I wish these efforts had started earlier. #2 Communications & local community management One of the most important aspects of my job is to make sure people who should be talking to each other are actually doing it.  Connecting people to the other people they should know, the groups they should join, a piece of content that shouldn’t be missed.   I have worked both inside and outside of communications teams, and they are the best informed people in your company.  They know when something big is coming, how it impacts employees, how it fits with strategy, who else knows more, etc.  Having communications professionals who are power users can help scale up community management because they are already so well connected.  They also need to have the platform skills to pay attention without suffering email overload, how to grab someone’s attention, etc.  I wish I’d had figured this out much earlier.  If I had I would have groomed more communications colleagues into advocates and power members right at the start. #1 Grooming advocates vs. natural advocates I’ve just alluded to this above already. The very best advocates are those who naturally embrace your platform and automatically start to see new ways to work within it.  Those advocates seem to come out of the woodwork naturally since some of them are early adopters.  Not surprisingly, our best advocates today are those same people who were willing to come kick the tires when the community was completely empty.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get a global spread of those natural advocates.  I did ask around when we first launched for other people who might be good candidates, but didn’t push too hard as there were so many other things to get ready.  That was a mistake.  If I could get a redo I would have formally asked for people to be assigned where there were gaps and groomed them into an advocate.  Today as we find new advocates to fill the gaps, people are hesitant as the initial set has three years of practice are ahead of the curve power members; it definitely would have been easier earlier on. As fairly early adopters to corporate scale enterprise collaboration, there hasn’t been a roadmap to follow as we’ve grown Engage, which is part of the fun! It’s clear a lot of issues are more easily tackled the earlier you identify and begin to correct them, and I’ve identified the main five I wish I could redo.  In the spirit of collaboration, I hope someone else learns from my mistakes! View the original article by Jem here. 

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 10 &ndash; In Depth TCP/IP Networking

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Understand methods of network design unique to TCP/IP networks, including subnetting, CIDR, and address translation Explain the differences between public and private TCP/IP networks Describe protocols used between mail clients and mail servers, including SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Employ multiple TCP/IP utilities for network discovery and troubleshooting Designing TCP/IP-Based Networks The following sections explain how network and host information in an IPv4 address can be manipulated to subdivide networks into smaller segments. Subnetting Subnetting separates a network into multiple logically defined segments, or subnets. Networks are commonly subnetted according to geographic locations, departmental boundaries, or technology types. A network administrator might separate traffic to accomplish the following… Enhance security Improve performance Simplify troubleshooting The challenges of Classful Addressing in IPv4 (No subnetting) The simplest type of IPv4 is known as classful addressing (which was the Class A, Class B & Class C network addresses). Classful addressing has the following limitations. Restriction in the number of usable IPv4 addresses (class C would be limited to 254 addresses) Difficult to separate traffic from various parts of a network Because of the above reasons, subnetting was introduced. IPv4 Subnet Masks Subnetting depends on the use of subnet masks to identify how a network is subdivided. A subnet mask indicates where network information is located in an IPv4 address. The 1 in a subnet mask indicates that corresponding bits in the IPv4 address contain network information (likewise 0 indicates the opposite) Each network class is associated with a default subnet mask… Class A = 255.0.0.0 Class B = 255.255.0.0 Class C = 255.255.255.0 An example of calculating  the network ID for a particular device with a subnet mask is shown below.. IP Address = 199.34.89.127 Subnet Mask = 255.255.255.0 Resultant Network ID = 199.34.89.0 IPv4 Subnetting Techniques Subnetting breaks the rules of classful IPv4 addressing. Read page 490 for a detailed explanation Calculating IPv4 Subnets Read page 491 – 494 for an explanation Important… Subnetting only applies to the devices internal to your network. Everything external looks at the class of the IP address instead of the subnet network ID. This way, traffic directed to your network externally still knows where to go, and once it has entered your internal network it can then be prioritized and segmented. CIDR (classless Interdomain Routing) CIDR is also known as classless routing or supernetting. In CIDR conventional network class distinctions do not exist, a subnet boundary can move to the left, therefore generating more usable IP addresses on your network. A subnet created by moving the subnet boundary to the left is known as a supernet. With CIDR also came new shorthand for denoting the position of subnet boundaries known as CIDR notation or slash notation. CIDR notation takes the form of the network ID followed by a forward slash (/) followed by the number of bits that are used for the extended network prefix. To take advantage of classless routing, your networks routers must be able to interpret IP addresses that don;t adhere to conventional network class parameters. Routers that rely on older routing protocols (i.e. RIP) are not capable of interpreting classless IP addresses. Internet Gateways Gateways are a combination of software and hardware that enable two different network segments to exchange data. A gateway facilitates communication between different networks or subnets. Because on device cannot send data directly to a device on another subnet, a gateway must intercede and hand off the information. Every device on a TCP/IP based network has a default gateway (a gateway that first interprets its outbound requests to other subnets, and then interprets its inbound requests from other subnets). The internet contains a vast number of routers and gateways. If each gateway had to track addressing information for every other gateway on the Internet, it would be overtaxed. Instead, each handles only a relatively small amount of addressing information, which it uses to forward data to another gateway that knows more about the data’s destination. The gateways that make up the internet backbone are called core gateways. Address Translation An organizations default gateway can also be used to “hide” the organizations internal IP addresses and keep them from being recognized on a public network. A public network is one that any user may access with little or no restrictions. On private networks, hiding IP addresses allows network managers more flexibility in assigning addresses. Clients behind a gateway may use any IP addressing scheme, regardless of whether it is recognized as legitimate by the Internet authorities but as soon as those devices need to go on the internet, they must have legitimate IP addresses to exchange data. When a clients transmission reaches the default gateway, the gateway opens the IP datagram and replaces the client’s private IP address with an Internet recognized IP address. This process is known as NAT (Network Address Translation). TCP/IP Mail Services All Internet mail services rely on the same principles of mail delivery, storage, and pickup, though they may use different types of software to accomplish these functions. Email servers and clients communicate through special TCP/IP application layer protocols. These protocols, all of which operate on a variety of operating systems are discussed below… SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) The protocol responsible for moving messages from one mail server to another over TCP/IP based networks. SMTP belongs to the application layer of the ODI model and relies on TCP as its transport protocol. Operates from port 25 on the SMTP server Simple sub-protocol, incapable of doing anything more than transporting mail or holding it in a queue MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) The standard message format specified by SMTP allows for lines that contain no more than 1000 ascii characters meaning if you relied solely on SMTP you would have very short messages and nothing like pictures included in an email. MIME us a standard for encoding and interpreting binary files, images, video, and non-ascii character sets within an email message. MIME identifies each element of a mail message according to content type. MIME does not replace SMTP but works in conjunction with it. Most modern email clients and servers support MIME POP (Post Office Protocol) POP is an application layer protocol used to retrieve messages from a mail server POP3 relies on TCP and operates over port 110 With POP3 mail is delivered and stored on a mail server until it is downloaded by a user Disadvantage of POP3 is that it typically does not allow users to save their messages on the server because of this IMAP is sometimes used IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IMAP is a retrieval protocol that was developed as a more sophisticated alternative to POP3 The single biggest advantage IMAP4 has over POP3 is that users can store messages on the mail server, rather than having to continually download them Users can retrieve all or only a portion of any mail message Users can review their messages and delete them while the messages remain on the server Users can create sophisticated methods of organizing messages on the server Users can share a mailbox in a central location Disadvantages of IMAP are typically related to the fact that it requires more storage space on the server. Additional TCP/IP Utilities Nearly all TCP/IP utilities can be accessed from the command prompt on any type of server or client running TCP/IP. The syntaxt may differ depending on the OS of the client. Below is a list of additional TCP/IP utilities – research their use on your own! Ipconfig (Windows) & Ifconfig (Linux) Netstat Nbtstat Hostname, Host & Nslookup Dig (Linux) Whois (Linux) Traceroute (Tracert) Mtr (my traceroute) Route

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• ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

  - by ToStringTheory

  One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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• PASS Summit 2010 BI Workshop Feedbacks

  - by Davide Mauri

  As many other speakers already did, I’d like to share with the SQL Community the feedback of my PASS Summit 2010 Workshop. For those who were not there, my workshop was the “BI From A-Z” and the main objective of that workshop was to introduce people in the BI world not only from a technical point of view but insist a lot on the methodological and “engineered” approach. The will to put more engineering in the IT (and specially in the BI field) is something that has been growing stronger and stronger in me every day for of this last 5 years since is simply envy the fact that Airbus, Fincatieri, BMW (just to name a few) can create very complex machine “just” using putting people together and giving them some rules to follow (Of course this is an oversimplification but I think you get what I mean). The key point of engineering is that, after having defined the project blueprint, you have the possibility to give to a huge number of people, the rules to follow, the correct tools in order to implement the rules easily and semi-automatically and a way to measure the quality of the results. Could this be done in IT? Very big question, so my scope is now limited to BI. So that’s the main point of my workshop: and entry-level approach to BI (level was 200) in order to allow attendees to know the basics, to understand what tools they should use for which purpose and, above all, a set of rules and tools in order to make a BI solution scalable in terms of people working on it, while still maintaining a very good quality. All done not focusing only on the practice but explaining the theory behind to see how it can help *a lot* to build a correct solution despite the technology used to implement it. The idea is to reach a point where more then 70% of the work done to create a BI solution can be reused even if technologies changes. This is a very demanding challenge nowadays with the coming of Denali and its column-aligned storage and the shiny-new DAX language. As you may understand I was looking forward to get the feedback since you may have noticed that there’s a lot of “architectural” stuff in IT but really nothing on “engineering”. So how the session could be perceived by the attendees was really unknown to me. The feedback could also give a good indication if the need of more “engineering” is something I feel only by myself or if is something more broad. I’m very happy to be able to say that the overall score of 4.75 put my workshop in the TOP 20 session (on near 200 sessions)! Here’s the detailed evaluations: How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3    1         4    12        5    42               How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.80 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 1         4 : 9         5 : 45               How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.95 Answer:    # of Responses 4 :  3         5 : 52               How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 2         4 : 10         5 : 43               How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.44 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 7         4 : 17        5 : 31               How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? 4.62 Answer:    # of Responses 4 : 21        5 : 34 The comments where all very positive. Many of them asked for more time on the subject (or to shorten the very last topics). I’ll make treasure of these comments and will review the content accordingly. We’ll organize a two-day classes on this topic, where also more examples will be shown and some arguments will be explained more deeply. I’d just like to answer a comment that asks how much of what I shown is “universally applicable”. I can tell you that all of our BI project follow these rules and they’ve been applied to different markets (Insurance, Fashion, GDO) with different people and different teams and they allowed us to be “Adaptive” against the customer. The more the rules are well defined and the more there are tools that supports their implementations, the easier is to add new people to the project and to add or change solution features. Think of a car. How come that almost any mechanic can help you to fix a problem? Because they know what to expect. Because there a rules that allow them to identify the problem without having to discover each time how the car has been implemented build. And this is of course also true for car upgrades/improvements. Last but not least: thanks a lot to everyone for coming!

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• Webcast Q&A: ING on How to Scale Role Management and Compliance

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certifications to Thousands of Applications on Wed, April 11th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Mark Robison, Enterprise Architect at ING for walking us through ING’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the phased implementation strategy, results & metrics, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies between Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) to enforce streamlined user and role management and scalable compliance. Mark was also kind enough to walk us through specific solutions features that helped ING manage the problem of role explosion and implement closed loop remediation. Our host speaker, Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle rounded off the presentation by discussing common use cases and deployment scenarios we see organizations implement to automate user/identity administration and enforce closed-loop scalable compliance. Neil also called out the specific features in Oracle Identity Analytics 11gR1 that cater to expediting and streamlining compliance processes such as access certifications. While we tackled a few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to here; our sincere thanks to Mark Robison for taking the time to respond to questions specific to ING’s implementation and strategy. Q. Did you include business friendly entitlment descriptions, or is the business seeing application descriptors A. We include very business friendly descriptions.  The OIA tool has the facility to allow this. Q. When doing attestation on job change, who is in the workflow to review and confirm that the employee should continue to have access? Is that a best practice?   A. The new and old manager  are in the workflow.  The tool can check for any Separation of Duties (SOD) violations with both having similiar accesses.  It may not be a best practice, but it is a reality of doing your old and new job for a transition period on a transfer. Q. What versions of OIM and OIA are being used at ING?   A. OIM 11gR1 and OIA 11gR1; the very latest versions available. Q. Are you using an entitlements / role catalog?   A. Yes. We use both roles and entitlements. Q. What specific unexpected benefits did the Identity Warehouse provide ING?   A. The most unanticipated was to help Legal Hold identify user ID's in the various applications.   Other benefits included providing a one stop shop for all aggregated ID information. Q. How fine grained are your application and entitlements? Did OIA, OIM support that level of granularity?   A. We have some very fine grained entitlements, but we role this up into approved Roles to allow for easier management.   For managing very fine grained entitlements, Oracle offers the Oracle Entitlement Server.  We currently do not own this software but are considering it. Q. Do you allow any individual access or is everything truly role based?   A. We are a hybrid environment with roles and individual positive and negative entitlements Q. Did you use an Agile methodology like scrum to deliver functionality during your project? A. We started with waterfall, but used an agile approach to provide benefits after the initial implementation Q. How did you handle rolling out the standard ID format to existing users? A. We just used the standard IDs for new users.  We have not taken on a project to address the existing nonstandard IDs. Q. To avoid role explosion, how do you deal with apps that require more than a couple of entitlement TYPES? For example, an app may have different levels of access and it may need to know the user's country/state to associate them with particular customers.   A. We focus on the functional user and craft the role around their daily job requirements.  The role captures the required application entitlements.  To keep role explosion down, we use role mining in OIA and also meet and interview the business.  It is an iterative process to get role consensus. Q. Great presentation! How many rounds of Certifications has ING performed so far?  A. Around 7 quarters and constant certifications on transfer. Q. Did you have executive support from the top down   A. Yes  The executive support was key to our success. Q. For your cloud instance are you using OIA or OIM as SaaS?  A. No.  We are just provisioning and deprovisioning to various Cloud providers.  (Service Now is an example) Q. How do you ensure a role owner does not get more priviliges as are intended and thus violates another role, e,g, a DBA Roles should not get tor rigt to run somethings as root, as this would affect the root role? A. We have SOD  checks.  Also all Roles are initially approved by external audit and the role owners have to certify the roles and any changes Q. What is your ratio of employees to roles?   A. We are still in process going through our various lines of business, so I do not have a final ratio.  From what we have seen, the ratio varies greatly depending on the Line of Business and the diversity of Job Functions.  For standardized lines of business such as call centers, the ratio is very good where we can have a single role that covers many employees.  For specialized lines of business like treasury, it can be one or two people per role. Q. Is ING using Oracle On Demand service ?   A. No Q. Do you have to implement or migrate to OIM in order to get the Identity Warehouse, or can OIA provide the identity warehouse as well if you haven't reached OIM yet? A. No, OIM deployment is not required to implement OIA’s Identity Warehouse but as you heard during the webcast, there are tremendous deployment synergies in deploying both OIA and OIM together. Q. When is the Security Governor product coming out? A. Oracle Security Governor for Healthcare is available today. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in the Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series: Toyota: Putting Customers First – Identity Platform as a Business Enabler Wednesday, May 16th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST Register Today You can also register for a live event at a city near you where Aberdeen’s Derek Brink will discuss the survey results from the recently published report “Analyzing Platform vs. Point Solution Approach in Identity”. And, you can do a quick (& free)  online assessment of your identity programs by benchmarking it against the 160 organizations surveyed  in the Aberdeen report, compliments of Oracle. Here’s the slide deck from our ING webcast: ING webcast platform View more presentations from OracleIDM

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• Big data: An evening in the life of an actual buyer

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  Here I am, and this is an actual story of one of my evenings, trying to spend money with a company and ultimately failing. I just gave up and bought a service from another vendor, not the incumbent. Here is that story and how I think big data could actually fix this (and potentially prevent some of this from happening). In the end this story should illustrate how big data can benefit me (get me what I want without causing grief) and the company I am trying to buy something from. Note: Lots of details left out, I have no intention of being the annoyed blogger moaning about a specific company. What did I want to get? We watch TV, we have internet and we do have a land line. The land line is from a different vendor then the TV and the internet. I have decided that this makes no sense and I was going to get a bundle (no need to infer who this is, I just picked the generic bundle word as this is what I want to get) of all three services as this seems to save me money. I also want to not talk to people, I just want to click on a website when I feel like it and get it all sorted. I do think that is reality. I want to just do my shopping at 9.30pm while watching silly reruns on TV. Problem 1 - Bad links So, I'm an existing customer of the company I want to buy my bundle from. I go to the website, I click on offers. Turns out they are offers for new customers. After grumbling about how good they are, I click on offers for existing customers. Bummer, it goes to offers for new customers, so I click again on the link for offers for existing customers. No cigar... it just does not work. Big data solutions: 1) Do not show an existing customer the offers for new customers unless they are the same => This is only partially doable without login, but if a customer logs in the application should always know that this is an existing customer. But in general, imagine I do this from my home going through the internet service of this vendor to their domain... an instant filter should move me into the "existing customer route". 2) Flag dead or incorrect links => I've clicked the link for "existing customer offers" at least 3 times in under 5 seconds... Identifying patterns like this is easy in Hadoop and can very quickly make a list of potentially incorrect links. No need for realtime fixing, just the fact that this link can be pro-actively fixed across my entire web domain is a good thing. Preventative maintenance! Problem 2 - Purchase cannot be completed Apart from the fact that the browsing pattern to actually get to what I want is poorly designed, my purchase never gets past a specific point. In other words, I put something into my shopping cart and when I want to move on the application either crashes (with me going to an error page) or hangs or goes into something like chat. So I try again, and again and again. I think I tried this entire path (while being logged in!!) at least 10 times over the course of 20 minutes. I also clicked on the feedback button and, frustrated as I was, tried to explain this did not work... Big Data Solutions: 1) This web site does shopping cart analysis. I got an email next day stating I have things in my shopping cart, just click here to complete my purchase. After the above experience, this just added insult to my pain... 2) What should have happened, is a Hadoop job going over all logged in customers that are on the buy flow. It should flag anyone who is trying (multiple attempts from the same user to do the same thing), analyze the shopping card, the clicks to identify what the customers wants, his feedback provided (note: always own your own website feedback, never just farm this out!!) and in a short turn around time (30 minutes to 2 hours or so) email me with a link to complete my purchase. Not with a link to my shopping cart 12 hours later, but a link to actually achieve what I wanted... Why should this company go through the big data effort? I do believe this is relatively easy to do using our Oracle Event Processing and Big Data Appliance solutions combined. It is almost so simple (to my mind) that it makes no sense that this is not in place? But, now I am ranting... Why is this interesting? It is because of $$$$. After trying really hard, I mean I did this all in the evening, and again in the morning before going to work. I kept on failing, But I really wanted this to work... so an email that said, sorry, we noticed you tried to get a bundle (the log knows what I wanted, where I failed, so easy to generate), here is the link to click and complete your purchase. And here is 2 movies on us as an apology would have kept me as a customer, and got the additional $$$$ per month for the next couple of years. It would also lead to upsell on my phone package etc. Instead, I went to a completely different company, bought service from them. Lost money for company A, negative sentiment for company A and me telling this story at the water cooler so I'm influencing more people to think negatively about company A. All in all, a loss of easy money, a ding in sentiment and image where a relatively simple solution exists and can be in place on the software I describe routinely in this blog... For those who are coming to Openworld and maybe see value in solving the above, or are thinking of how to solve this, come visit us in Moscone North - Oracle Red Lounge or in the Engineered Systems Showcase.

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 4

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the characteristics of memory systems Describe the memory hierarchy Discuss cache memory principles Discuss issues relevant to cache design Describe the cache organization of the Pentium Computer Memory Systems There are key characteristics of memory… Location – internal or external Capacity – expressed in terms of bytes Unit of Transfer – the number of bits read out of or written into memory at a time Access Method – sequential, direct, random or associative From a users perspective the two most important characteristics of memory are… Capacity Performance – access time, memory cycle time, transfer rate The trade off for memory happens along three axis… Faster access time, greater cost per bit Greater capacity, smaller cost per bit Greater capacity, slower access time This leads to people using a tiered approach in their use of memory   As one goes down the hierarchy, the following occurs… Decreasing cost per bit Increasing capacity Increasing access time Decreasing frequency of access of the memory by the processor The use of two levels of memory to reduce average access time works in principle, but only if conditions 1 to 4 apply. A variety of technologies exist that allow us to accomplish this. Thus it is possible to organize data across the hierarchy such that the percentage of accesses to each successively lower level is substantially less than that of the level above. A portion of main memory can be used as a buffer to hold data temporarily that is to be read out to disk. This is sometimes referred to as a disk cache and improves performance in two ways… Disk writes are clustered. Instead of many small transfers of data, we have a few large transfers of data. This improves disk performance and minimizes processor involvement. Some data designed for write-out may be referenced by a program before the next dump to disk. In that case the data is retrieved rapidly from the software cache rather than slowly from disk. Cache Memory Principles Cache memory is substantially faster than main memory. A caching system works as follows.. When a processor attempts to read a word of memory, a check is made to see if this in in cache memory… If it is, the data is supplied, If it is not in the cache, a block of main memory, consisting of a fixed number of words is loaded to the cache. Because of the phenomenon of locality of references, when a block of data is fetched into the cache, it is likely that there will be future references to that same memory location or to other words in the block. Elements of Cache Design While there are a large number of cache implementations, there are a few basic design elements that serve to classify and differentiate cache architectures… Cache Addresses Cache Size Mapping Function Replacement Algorithm Write Policy Line Size Number of Caches Cache Addresses Almost all non-embedded processors support virtual memory. Virtual memory in essence allows a program to address memory from a logical point of view without needing to worry about the amount of physical memory available. When virtual addresses are used the designer may choose to place the cache between the MMU (memory management unit) and the processor or between the MMU and main memory. The disadvantage of virtual memory is that most virtual memory systems supply each application with the same virtual memory address space (each application sees virtual memory starting at memory address 0), which means the cache memory must be completely flushed with each application context switch or extra bits must be added to each line of the cache to identify which virtual address space the address refers to. Cache Size We would like the size of the cache to be small enough so that the overall average cost per bit is close to that of main memory alone and large enough so that the overall average access time is close to that of the cache alone. Also, larger caches are slightly slower than smaller ones. Mapping Function Because there are fewer cache lines than main memory blocks, an algorithm is needed for mapping main memory blocks into cache lines. The choice of mapping function dictates how the cache is organized. Three techniques can be used… Direct – simplest technique, maps each block of main memory into only one possible cache line Associative – Each main memory block to be loaded into any line of the cache Set Associative – exhibits the strengths of both the direct and associative approaches while reducing their disadvantages For detailed explanations of each approach – read the text book (page 148 – 154) Replacement Algorithm For associative and set associating mapping a replacement algorithm is needed to determine which of the existing blocks in the cache must be replaced by a new block. There are four common approaches… LRU (Least recently used) FIFO (First in first out) LFU (Least frequently used) Random selection Write Policy When a block resident in the cache is to be replaced, there are two cases to consider If no writes to that block have happened in the cache – discard it If a write has occurred, a process needs to be initiated where the changes in the cache are propagated back to the main memory. There are several approaches to achieve this including… Write Through – all writes to the cache are done to the main memory as well at the point of the change Write Back – when a block is replaced, all dirty bits are written back to main memory The problem is complicated when we have multiple caches, there are techniques to accommodate for this but I have not summarized them. Line Size When a block of data is retrieved and placed in the cache, not only the desired word but also some number of adjacent words are retrieved. As the block size increases from very small to larger sizes, the hit ratio will at first increase because of the principle of locality, which states that the data in the vicinity of a referenced word are likely to be referenced in the near future. As the block size increases, more useful data are brought into cache. The hit ratio will begin to decrease as the block becomes even bigger and the probability of using the newly fetched information becomes less than the probability of using the newly fetched information that has to be replaced. Two specific effects come into play… Larger blocks reduce the number of blocks that fit into a cache. Because each block fetch overwrites older cache contents, a small number of blocks results in data being overwritten shortly after they are fetched. As a block becomes larger, each additional word is farther from the requested word and therefore less likely to be needed in the near future. The relationship between block size and hit ratio is complex, and no set approach is judged to be the best in all circumstances.   Pentium 4 and ARM cache organizations The processor core consists of four major components: Fetch/decode unit – fetches program instruction in order from the L2 cache, decodes these into a series of micro-operations, and stores the results in the L2 instruction cache Out-of-order execution logic – Schedules execution of the micro-operations subject to data dependencies and resource availability – thus micro-operations may be scheduled for execution in a different order than they were fetched from the instruction stream. As time permits, this unit schedules speculative execution of micro-operations that may be required in the future Execution units – These units execute micro-operations, fetching the required data from the L1 data cache and temporarily storing results in registers Memory subsystem – This unit includes the L2 and L3 caches and the system bus, which is used to access main memory when the L1 and L2 caches have a cache miss and to access the system I/O resources

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• Combining Shared Secret and Certificates

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also combine this with certificates so that you can identify the sender of the message.   Prerequisites As in the previous article before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   Setting up the Certificates To keep the post and sample simple I am going to use the local computer store for all certificates but this bit is really just the same as setting up certificates for an example where you are using WCF without using Windows Azure Service Bus. In the sample I have included two batch files which you can use to create the sample certificates or remove them. Basically you will end up with: A certificate called PocServerCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the WCF Service component A certificate called PocClientCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the client application A root certificate in the Root store called PocRootCA with its associated revocation list which is the root from which the client and server certificates were created   For the sample Im just using development certificates like you would normally, and you can see exactly how these are configured and placed in the stores from the batch files in the solution using makecert and certmgr.   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our certificate like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element.     Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the certificate stuff in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use the clientCertificate check and also specifying the serviceCertificate with information on how to find the servers certificate in the store.     I have also added a serviceAuthorization section where I will implement my own authorization component to perform additional security checks after the service has validated that the message was signed with a good certificate. I also have the same serviceSecurityAudit configuration to log access to my service. My Authorization Manager The below picture shows you implementation of my authorization manager. WCF will eventually hand off the message to my authorization component before it calls the service code. This is where I can perform some logic to check if the identity is allowed to access resources. In this case I am simple rejecting messages from anyone except the PocClientCertificate.     The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a certificate over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding.   Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the token from a certificate with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This contains the normal transportClientEndpointBehaviour to setup the ACS shared secret configuration but we have also configured the clientCertificate to look for the PocClientCert.     Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF in exactly the normal way but the configuration will jump in and ensure that a token is passed representing the client certificate.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and certificate based token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.zip

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• Query optimization using composite indexes

  - by xmarch

  Many times, during the process of creating a new Coherence application, developers do not pay attention to the way cache queries are constructed; they only check that these queries comply with functional specs. Later, performance testing shows that these perform poorly and it is then when developers start working on improvements until the non-functional performance requirements are met. This post describes the optimization process of a real-life scenario, where using a composite attribute index has brought a radical improvement in query execution times.  The execution times went down from 4 seconds to 2 milliseconds! E-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca In the context of a new e-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca, Oracle Coherence has been used to calculate and store SKU prices. In this architecture, a Coherence cache stores the final SKU prices used for Endeca baseline indexing. Each SKU price is calculated from a base SKU price and a series of calculations based on information from corporate global discounts. Corporate global discounts information is stored in an auxiliary Coherence cache with over 800.000 entries. In particular, to obtain each price the process needs to execute six queries over the global discount cache. After the implementation was finished, we discovered that the most expensive steps in the price calculation discount process were the global discounts cache query. This query has 10 parameters and is executed 6 times for each SKU price calculation. The steps taken to optimise this query are described below; Starting point Initial query was: String filter = "levelId = :iLevelId AND  salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId "+ "AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND brand = :iBrand AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Map<String, Object> params = new HashMap<String, Object>(10); // Fill all parameters. params.put("iLevelId", xxxx); // Executing filter. Filter globalDiscountsFilter = QueryHelper.createFilter(filter, params); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(globalDiscountsFilter); With the small dataset used for development the cache queries performed very well. However, when carrying out performance testing with a real-world sample size of 800,000 entries, each query execution was taking more than 4 seconds. First round of optimizations The first optimisation step was the creation of separate Coherence index for each of the 10 attributes used by the filter. This avoided object deserialization while executing the query. Each index was created as follows: globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(new ReflectionExtractor("getXXX" ) , false, null); After adding these indexes the query execution time was reduced to between 450 ms and 1s. However, these execution times were still not good enough.  Second round of optimizations In this optimisation phase a Coherence query explain plan was used to identify how many entires each index reduced the results set by, along with the cost in ms of executing that part of the query. Though the explain plan showed that all the indexes for the query were being used, it also showed that the ordering of the query parameters was "sub-optimal".  Parameters associated to object attributes with high-cardinality should appear at the beginning of the filter, or more specifically, the attributes that filters out the highest of number records should be placed at the beginning. But examining corporate global discount data we realized that depending on the values of the parameters used in the query the “good” order for the attributes was different. In particular, if the attributes brand and family had specific values it was more optimal to have a different query changing the order of the attributes. Ultimately, we ended up with three different optimal variants of the query that were used in its relevant cases: String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId AND brand = :iBrand "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId  AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Using the appropriate query depending on the value of brand and family parameters the query execution time dropped to between 100 ms and 150 ms. But these these execution times were still not good enough and the solution was cumbersome. Third and last round of optimizations The third and final optimization was to introduce a composite index. However, this did mean that it was not possible to use the Coherence Query Language (CohQL), as composite indexes are not currently supporte in CohQL. As the original query had 8 parameters using EqualsFilter, 1 using GreaterEqualsFilter and 1 using LessEqualsFilter, the composite index was built for the 8 attributes using EqualsFilter. The final query had an EqualsFilter for the multiple extractor, a GreaterEqualsFilter and a LessEqualsFilter for the 2 remaining attributes.  All individual indexes were dropped except the ones being used for LessEqualsFilter and GreaterEqualsFilter. We were now running in an scenario with an 8-attributes composite filter and 2 single attribute filters. The composite index created was as follows: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(me, false, null); And the final query was: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); // Fill composite parameters.String SalesCompanyId = xxxx;...AndFilter composite = new AndFilter(new EqualsFilter(me,                   Arrays.asList(iSalesChannelId, iLevelId, iAreaId, iDepartmentId, iFamilyId, iManufacturer, iBrand, SalesCompanyId)),                                     new GreaterEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getEndDate" ), iEndDate)); AndFilter finalFilter = new AndFilter(composite, new LessEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getStartDate" ), iStartDate)); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(finalFilter);      Using this composite index the query improved dramatically and the execution time dropped to between 2 ms and  4 ms.  These execution times completely met the non-functional performance requirements . It should be noticed than when using the composite index the order of the attributes inside the ValueExtractor was not relevant.

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• Problem with RAID5 (mdadm) - disk detached

  - by poscaman

  Having these lines in /var/log/syslog Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816036] ata4: EH in SWNCQ mode,QC:qc_active 0x1 sactive 0x1 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816058] ata4: SWNCQ:qc_active 0x1 defer_bits 0x0 last_issue_tag 0x0 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816059] dhfis 0x1 dmafis 0x1 sdbfis 0x0 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816093] ata4: ATA_REG 0x40 ERR_REG 0x0 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816108] ata4: tag : dhfis dmafis sdbfis sacitve Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816125] ata4: tag 0x0: 1 1 0 1 Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816150] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816178] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816199] ata4.00: cmd 61/08:00:00:88:e0/00:00:e8:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 out Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816200] res 40/00:00:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816253] ata4.00: status: { DRDY } Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816272] ata4: hard resetting link Apr 18 16:53:05 Server kernel: [4487878.816274] ata4: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port Apr 18 16:53:06 Server kernel: [4487879.676029] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 18 16:53:07 Server kernel: [4487880.416749] ata4.00: n_sectors mismatch 3907029168 != 268435455 Apr 18 16:53:07 Server kernel: [4487880.416752] ata4.00: revalidation failed (errno=-19) Apr 18 16:53:07 Server kernel: [4487880.416773] ata4.00: limiting speed to UDMA/133:PIO2 Apr 18 16:53:11 Server kernel: [4487884.676024] ata4: hard resetting link Apr 18 16:53:11 Server kernel: [4487884.676027] ata4: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.144032] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.240185] ata4.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80) Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.240190] ata4.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5) Apr 18 16:53:12 Server kernel: [4487885.240210] ata4.00: disabled Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487890.144023] ata4: hard resetting link Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.024033] ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.033357] ata4.00: ATA-8: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1, 80.00A80, max UDMA/133 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.033360] ata4.00: 3907029168 sectors, multi 1: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32) Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048347] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048361] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048365] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Aborted Command [current] [descriptor] Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048369] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex): Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048371] 72 0b 00 00 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048378] 00 00 00 00 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048382] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: No additional sense information Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048385] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 e8 e0 88 00 00 00 08 00 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048393] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 3907028992 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048420] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048440] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048458] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 3907028992 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048477] md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048482] raid5: Disk failure on sdc, disabling device. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048483] raid5: Operation continuing on 3 devices. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048525] ata4: EH complete Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048554] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048576] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048596] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048615] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] READ CAPACITY(16) failed Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048617] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048620] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048624] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048643] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048663] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048681] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] READ CAPACITY failed Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048683] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048685] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available. Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048689] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048709] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048800] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.048860] sd 3:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049028] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Asking for cache data failed Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049048] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049071] sdc: detected capacity change from 2000398934016 to 0 Apr 18 16:53:17 Server kernel: [4487891.049080] ata4.00: detaching (SCSI 3:0:0:0) Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.061149] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Stopping disk Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485492] RAID5 conf printout: Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485496] --- rd:4 wd:3 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485500] disk 0, o:1, dev:sdb Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485502] disk 1, o:0, dev:sdc Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485504] disk 2, o:1, dev:sdd Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.485506] disk 3, o:1, dev:sde Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497014] RAID5 conf printout: Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497016] --- rd:4 wd:3 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497018] disk 0, o:1, dev:sdb Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497019] disk 2, o:1, dev:sdd Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.497021] disk 3, o:1, dev:sde Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838719] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA WDC WD20EARS-00S 80.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838886] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838911] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB) Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838964] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838967] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 Apr 18 16:53:18 Server kernel: [4487891.838988] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA Apr 18 16:53:20 Server kernel: [4487891.839147] sdf: unknown partition table Apr 18 16:53:20 Server kernel: [4487893.130026] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk Right now, i'm unable to do anything on /dev/sdc. Is there any way to try to re-attach it? I don't want to power-down the server unless absolutely necessary System: Debian Stable 2.6.32-5-amd64 mdadm version 3.1.4-1+8efb9d1 cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md0 : active raid5 sdb[0] sdc[4](F) sde[3] sdd[2] 5860543488 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU] unused devices: <none> mdadm --examine --scan ARRAY /dev/md0 UUID=1a7744b5:912ec7af:f82a9565:e3b453b4

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• Why are my USB 2.0 devices hanging Windows XP?

  - by BenAlabaster

  Background on the machine I'm having a problem with: The machine was inherited and appears to be circa 2003 (there's a date stamp on the power supply which leads me to this conclusion). I've got it set up as a Skype terminal for my 2 year old to keep in touch with her grandparents and other members of the family - which everyone loves. It has a DFI CM33-TL/G ATX (identified using SiSoft Sandra) motherboard hosting an Intel Celeron 1.3GHz CPU, 768Mb PC133 SDRAM, a D-LINK WDA-2320 54G Wi-Fi network card and a generic USB 2.0 expansion board based on the NEC uPD720102 chipset containing 3 external and 1 internal USB sockets. It's also hosting a 1.44Mb floppy drive on FDD0, a new 80Gb Western Digital hard drive running as master on IDE0 and a Panasonic DVD+/-RW running as master on IDE1. All this is sitting in a slimline case running off a Macron Power MPT-135 135W Flex power supply. The motherboard is running a version of Award BIOS 05/24/2002-601T-686B-6A6LID4AC-00. Could this be updated? If so, from where? I've raked through the manufacturer's website but can't find any hint of downloads for either drivers or BIOS updates. The hard disk is freshly formatted and built with Windows XP Professional/Service Pack 3 and is up to date with all current patches. In addition to Windows XP, the only other software it's running is Skype 4.1 (4.2 hangs the whole machine as soon as it starts up, requiring a hard boot to recover). It's got a Daytek MV150 15" touch screen hooked up to the on board VGA and COM1 sockets with the most current drivers from the Daytek website and the most current version of ELO-Touchsystems drivers for the touch component. The webcam is a Logitech Webcam C200 with the latest drivers from the Logitech website. The problem: If I hook any devices to the USB 2.0 sockets, it hangs the whole machine and I have to hard boot it to get it back up. If I have any devices attached to the USB 2.0 sockets when I boot up, it hangs before Windows gets to the login prompt and I have to hard boot it to recover. Workarounds found: I can plug the same devices into the on board USB 1.0 sockets and everything works fine, albeit at reduced performance. I've tried 3 different kinds of USB thumb drives, 3 different makes/models of webcams and my iPhone all with the same effect. They're recognized and don't hang the machine when I hook them to the USB 1.0 but if I hook them to the USB 2.0 ports, the machine hangs within a couple of seconds of recognizing the devices were connected. Attempted solutions: I've seen suggestions that this could be a power problem - that the PSU just doesn't have the wattage to drive these ports. While I'm doubtful this is the problem [after all the motherboard has the same standard connector regardless of the PSU wattage], I tried disabling all the on board devices that I'm not using - on board LAN, the second COM port, the AGP connector etc. through the BIOS in what I'm sure is a futile attempt to reduce the power consumption... I also modified the ACPI and power management settings. It didn't have any noticeable affect, although it didn't do any harm either. Could the wattage of the PSU really cause this problem? If it can, is there anything I need to be aware of when replacing it or do I just need to make sure it's got a higher wattage than the current one? My interpretation was that the wattage only affected the number of drives you could hook up to the power connectors, is that right? I've installed the USB card in another machine and it works without issue, so it's not a problem with the USB card itself, and Windows says the card is installed and working correctly... right up until I connect a device to it. The only thing I haven't done which I only just thought of while writing this essay is trying the USB 2.0 card in a different PCI slot, or re-ordering the wi-fi and USB cards in the slots... although I'm not sure if this will make any difference - does anyone have any experience that would suggest this might work? Other thoughts/questions: Perhaps this is an incompatibility between the USB 2.0 card and the BIOS, would re-flashing the BIOS with a newer version help? Do I need to be able to identify the manufacturer of the motherboard in order to be able to find a BIOS edition specific for this motherboard or will any version of Award BIOS function in its place? Question: Does anyone have any ideas that could help me get my USB 2.0 devices hooked up to this machine?

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• VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached

  - by Rick Koshi

  I'm running a Linux 2.6.36 kernel, and I'm seeing some random errors. Things like ls: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: cannot open shared object file: Error 23 Yes, my system can't consistently run an 'ls' command. :( I note several errors in my dmesg output: # dmesg | tail [2808967.543203] EXT4-fs (sda3): re-mounted. Opts: (null) [2837776.220605] xv[14450] general protection ip:7f20c20c6ac6 sp:7fff3641b368 error:0 in libpng14.so.14.4.0[7f20c20a9000+29000] [4931344.685302] EXT4-fs (md16): re-mounted. Opts: (null) [4982666.631444] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982666.764240] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982767.360574] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982901.904628] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982964.930556] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982966.352170] VFS: file-max limit 1231582 reached [4982966.649195] top[31095]: segfault at 14 ip 00007fd6ace42700 sp 00007fff20746530 error 6 in libproc-3.2.8.so[7fd6ace3b000+e000] Obviously, the file-max errors look suspicious, being clustered together and recent. # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 1231582 # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr 1231712 0 1231582 That also looks a bit odd to me, but the thing is, there's no way I have 1.2 million files open on this system. I'm the only one using it, and it's not visible to anyone outside the local network. # lsof | wc 16046 148253 1882901 # ps -ef | wc 574 6104 44260 I saw some documentation saying: file-max & file-nr: The kernel allocates file handles dynamically, but as yet it doesn't free them again. The value in file-max denotes the maximum number of file- handles that the Linux kernel will allocate. When you get lots of error messages about running out of file handles, you might want to increase this limit. Historically, the three values in file-nr denoted the number of allocated file handles, the number of allocated but unused file handles, and the maximum number of file handles. Linux 2.6 always reports 0 as the number of free file handles -- this is not an error, it just means that the number of allocated file handles exactly matches the number of used file handles. Attempts to allocate more file descriptors than file-max are reported with printk, look for "VFS: file-max limit reached". My first reading of this is that the kernel basically has a built-in file descriptor leak, but I find that very hard to believe. It would imply that any system in active use needs to be rebooted every so often to free up the file descriptors. As I said, I can't believe this would be true, since it's normal to me to have Linux systems stay up for months (even years) at a time. On the other hand, I also can't believe that my nearly-idle system is holding over a million files open. Does anyone have any ideas, either for fixes or further diagnosis? I could, of course, just reboot the system, but I don't want this to be a recurring problem every few weeks. As a stopgap measure, I've quit Firefox, which was accounting for almost 2000 lines of lsof output (!) even though I only had one window open, and now I can run 'ls' again, but I doubt that will fix the problem for long. (edit: Oops, spoke too soon. By the time I finished typing out this question, the symptom was/is back) Thanks in advance for any help. And another update: My system was basically unusable, so I decided I had no option but to reboot. But before I did, I carefully quit one process at a time, checking /proc/sys/fs/file-nr after each termination. I found that, predictably, the number of open files gradually went down as I closed things down. Unfortunately, it wasn't a large effect. Yes, I was able to clear up 5000-10000 open files, but there were still over 1.2 million left. I shut down just about everything. All interactive shells, except for the one ssh I left open to finish closing down, httpd, even nfs service. Basically everything in the process table that wasn't a kernel process, and there were still an appalling number of files apparently left open. After the reboot, I found that /proc/sys/fs/file-nr showed about 2000 files open, which is much more reasonable. Starting up 2 Xvnc sessions as usual, along with the dozen or so monitoring windows I like to keep open, brought the total up to about 4000 files. I can see nothing wrong with that, of course, but I've obviously failed to identify the root cause. I'm still looking for ideas, since I definitely expect it to happen again. And another update, the next day: I watched the system carefully, and discovered that /proc/sys/fs/file-nr showed a growth of about 900 open files per hour. I shut down the system's only NFS client for the night, and the growth stopped. Mind you, it didn't free up the resources, but it did at least stop consuming more. Is this a known bug with NFS? I'll be bringing the NFS client back online today, and I'll narrow it down further. If anyone is familiar with this behavior, feel free to jump in with "Yeah, NFS4 has this problem, go back to NFS3" or something like that.

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• Why are my USB 2.0 devices crashing Windows XP?

  - by BenAlabaster

  Background on the machine I'm having a problem with: The machine was inherited and appears to be circa 2003 (there's a date stamp on the power supply which leads me to this conclusion). I've got it set up as a Skype terminal for my 2 year old to keep in touch with her grandparents and other members of the family - which everyone loves. It has a generic ATX motherboard with no identifying markings other than one stamp that says "Rev.B". CPU-Z identifies the motherboard model as VT8601 but doesn't provide me with any manufacturer name. On board it has 1 x 10/100 LAN, 2 x USB 1.0, VGA, PS/2 for KB and mouse, parallel port, 2 x serial ports, 2 x IDE, 1 x floppy, 2 x SDRAM slots, 1 x CPU housing that is seating a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 3 x PCI, 1 x AGP - although you can only use 2 of the PCI slots if you use the AGP slot due to the physical layout of the board. It's got 768Mb PC133 SDRAM - 1 x 512Mb & 1 x 256Mb installed as well as a D-LINK WDA-2320 54G Wi-Fi network card and a generic USB 2.0 expansion board containing 3 x external + 1 x internal USB connectors. It has a DVD+/-RW running as master on IDE1 and a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy drive connected to the floppy connector. It has an 80Gb Western Digital hard drive running as master on IDE0. All this is sitting in a slimline case. I don't know the wattage of the PSU, but can post this later if this proves to be helpful. The motherboard is running a version of Award BIOS for which I don't have the version number to hand but can again post this later if it would be helpful. The hard disk is freshly formatted and built with Windows XP Professional/Service Pack 3 and is up to date with all current patches. In addition to Windows XP, the only other software it's running is Skype 4.1 (4.2 hangs the whole machine as soon as it starts up, requiring a hard boot to recover). It's got a Daytek MV150 15" touch screen hooked up to the on board VGA and COM1 sockets with the most current drivers from the Daytek website and the most current version of ELO-Touchsystems drivers for the touch component. The webcam is a Logitech Webcam C200 with the latest drivers from the Logitech website. The problem: If I hook any devices to the USB 2.0 sockets, it hangs the whole machine and I have to hard boot it to get it back up. If I have any devices attached to the USB 2.0 sockets when I boot up, it hangs before Windows gets to the login prompt and I have to hard boot it to recover. Workarounds found: I can plug the same devices into the on board USB 1.0 sockets and everything works fine, albeit at reduced performance. I've tried 3 different kinds of USB thumb drives, 3 different makes/models of webcams and my iPhone all with the same effect. They're recognized and don't hang the machine when I hook them to the USB 1.0 but if I hook them to the USB 2.0 ports, the machine hangs within a couple of seconds of recognizing the devices were connected. Attempted solutions: I've seen suggestions that this could be a power problem - that the PSU just doesn't have the wattage to drive these ports. While I'm doubtful this is the problem [after all the motherboard has the same standard connector regardless of the PSU wattage], I tried disabling all the on board devices that I'm not using - on board LAN, the second COM port, the AGP connector etc. through the BIOS in what I'm sure is a futile attempt to reduce the power consumption... I also modified the ACPI and power management settings. It didn't have any noticeable affect, although it didn't do any harm either. Could the wattage of the PSU really cause this problem? If it can, is there anything I need to be aware of when replacing it or do I just need to make sure it's got a higher wattage than the current one? My interpretation was that the wattage only affected the number of drives you could hook up to the power connectors, is that right? I've installed the USB card in another machine and it works without issue, so it's not a problem with the USB card itself, and Windows says the card is installed and working correctly... right up until I connect a device to it. The only thing I haven't done which I only just thought of while writing this essay is trying the USB 2.0 card in a different PCI slot, or re-ordering the wi-fi and USB cards in the slots... although I'm not sure if this will make any difference - does anyone have any experience that would suggest this might work? Other thoughts/questions: Perhaps this is an incompatibility between the USB 2.0 card and the BIOS, would re-flashing the BIOS with a newer version help? Do I need to be able to identify the manufacturer of the motherboard in order to be able to find a BIOS edition specific for this motherboard or will any version of Award BIOS function in its place? Question: Does anyone have any ideas that could help me get my USB 2.0 devices hooked up to this machine?

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• Why are my USB 2.0 devices hanging Windows XP?

  - by BenAlabaster

  Background on the machine I'm having a problem with: The machine was inherited and appears to be circa 2003 (there's a date stamp on the power supply which leads me to this conclusion). I've got it set up as a Skype terminal for my 2 year old to keep in touch with her grandparents and other members of the family - which everyone loves. It has a generic ATX motherboard with no identifying markings other than one stamp that says "Rev.B". CPU-Z identifies the motherboard model as VT8601 but doesn't provide me with any manufacturer name. On board it has 1 x 10/100 LAN, 2 x USB 1.0, VGA, PS/2 for KB and mouse, parallel port, 2 x serial ports, 2 x IDE, 1 x floppy, 2 x SDRAM slots, 1 x CPU housing that is seating a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 3 x PCI, 1 x AGP - although you can only use 2 of the PCI slots if you use the AGP slot due to the physical layout of the board. It's got 768Mb PC133 SDRAM - 1 x 512Mb & 1 x 256Mb installed as well as a D-LINK WDA-2320 54G Wi-Fi network card and a generic USB 2.0 expansion board containing 3 x external + 1 x internal USB connectors - it has a NEC uPD720102 chipset. It has a DVD+/-RW running as master on IDE1 and a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy drive connected to the floppy connector. It has an 80Gb Western Digital hard drive running as master on IDE0. All this is sitting in a slimline case. I don't know the wattage of the PSU, but can post this later if this proves to be helpful. The motherboard is running a version of Award BIOS for which I don't have the version number to hand but can again post this later if it would be helpful. The hard disk is freshly formatted and built with Windows XP Professional/Service Pack 3 and is up to date with all current patches. In addition to Windows XP, the only other software it's running is Skype 4.1 (4.2 hangs the whole machine as soon as it starts up, requiring a hard boot to recover). It's got a Daytek MV150 15" touch screen hooked up to the on board VGA and COM1 sockets with the most current drivers from the Daytek website and the most current version of ELO-Touchsystems drivers for the touch component. The webcam is a Logitech Webcam C200 with the latest drivers from the Logitech website. The problem: If I hook any devices to the USB 2.0 sockets, it hangs the whole machine and I have to hard boot it to get it back up. If I have any devices attached to the USB 2.0 sockets when I boot up, it hangs before Windows gets to the login prompt and I have to hard boot it to recover. Workarounds found: I can plug the same devices into the on board USB 1.0 sockets and everything works fine, albeit at reduced performance. I've tried 3 different kinds of USB thumb drives, 3 different makes/models of webcams and my iPhone all with the same effect. They're recognized and don't hang the machine when I hook them to the USB 1.0 but if I hook them to the USB 2.0 ports, the machine hangs within a couple of seconds of recognizing the devices were connected. Attempted solutions: I've seen suggestions that this could be a power problem - that the PSU just doesn't have the wattage to drive these ports. While I'm doubtful this is the problem [after all the motherboard has the same standard connector regardless of the PSU wattage], I tried disabling all the on board devices that I'm not using - on board LAN, the second COM port, the AGP connector etc. through the BIOS in what I'm sure is a futile attempt to reduce the power consumption... I also modified the ACPI and power management settings. It didn't have any noticeable affect, although it didn't do any harm either. Could the wattage of the PSU really cause this problem? If it can, is there anything I need to be aware of when replacing it or do I just need to make sure it's got a higher wattage than the current one? My interpretation was that the wattage only affected the number of drives you could hook up to the power connectors, is that right? I've installed the USB card in another machine and it works without issue, so it's not a problem with the USB card itself, and Windows says the card is installed and working correctly... right up until I connect a device to it. The only thing I haven't done which I only just thought of while writing this essay is trying the USB 2.0 card in a different PCI slot, or re-ordering the wi-fi and USB cards in the slots... although I'm not sure if this will make any difference - does anyone have any experience that would suggest this might work? Other thoughts/questions: Perhaps this is an incompatibility between the USB 2.0 card and the BIOS, would re-flashing the BIOS with a newer version help? Do I need to be able to identify the manufacturer of the motherboard in order to be able to find a BIOS edition specific for this motherboard or will any version of Award BIOS function in its place? Question: Does anyone have any ideas that could help me get my USB 2.0 devices hooked up to this machine? Edit: Updated the USB 2.0 info with reference to actual card - http://www.xpcgear.com/lpnec4u.html

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• How do I determine what Excel-2007 is removing when it repairs my file?

  - by sage

  Summary: Excel repairs my file, tells me what was removed, I go into the xml/zip structure to investigate, and I cannot figure out what was changed. Does anybody know what I can do to better understand what Excel changed? Is it futile to try to determine? It feels like this should be possible and like I'm almost there... Details: When I open a file that I have renamed unnamed.xlsm, I receive the following notice: "Excel found unreadable content in 'unnamed.xlsm'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the sounce of this workbook, click Yes." I know the file is safe, I click yes, and I receive a message that "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content." It provides the following summary, but also provides an xml file which seems to contain the same content so I did not show it. Summary: Removed Records: Shared formula from /xl/worksheets/sheet3.xml part Removed Records: Formula from /xl/calcChain.xml part (Calculation properties) In order to determine issue, I have created a copy of the offending file, renamed it to have a '.zip' ending, opened up the files that Excel says it modified (sheet3), and perused the xml content, but this was not informative. I tried saving the repaired file and doing a simple diff on the xml for sheet3, but there are many changes and this is not informative either. I did the same thing for calcChain.xml and this was more useful. After saving the displayed xml with line breaks in text format, it was easy to identify the items that have been removed, but now I want to make sense of them. Perhaps they give clues of what happened to shee3. The following comparison is long, but I don't know if the entire train of differences is relevant. FILE COMPARISON Produced: 1-7-2011 2:42:26 PM Mode: Just Differences Left file: u:\My Documents\[redacted]\calcChain_orig.xml Right file: u:\My Documents\[redacted]\calcChain_rep.xml 812 <c r="H18" i="8" /> <> 812 <c r="N2" i="8" /> 814 <c r="G18" /> +- 816 <c r="D19" /> +- 818 <c r="F19" /> +- 820 <c r="E18" /> +- 822 <c r="N2" i="8" /> +- 824 <c r="H18" /> +- -+ 820 <c r="H15" /> 821 <c r="H13" /> 822 <c r="O19" /> 823 <c r="O17" /> 824 <c r="O15" /> 825 <c r="M19" /> 826 <c r="M17" /> 827 <c r="M15" /> 828 <c r="M13" /> 829 <c r="J19" /> 830 <c r="J17" /> 831 <c r="J15" /> 832 <c r="J13" /> 833 <c r="O14" /> 834 <c r="H18" i="8" /> 835 <c r="G18" /> 836 <c r="D19" i="5" /> 837 <c r="F19" /> 838 <c r="E18" i="8" /> 839 <c r="H18" i="9" /> 827 <c r="H15" /> +- 829 <c r="H13" /> +- 831 <c r="O19" /> +- 833 <c r="O17" /> +- 835 <c r="O15" /> +- 837 <c r="M19" /> +- 839 <c r="M17" /> +- 841 <c r="M15" /> +- 843 <c r="M13" /> +- 845 <c r="J19" /> +- 847 <c r="J17" /> +- 849 <c r="J15" /> +- 851 <c r="J13" /> +- 853 <c r="O14" /> +- 1209 <c r="H48" /> +- 1210 <c r="H62" />

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• T60 Screen/LCD gets black after some minutes with a highpitched sound rising and fading

  - by edelwater

  Just now my T60 screen got "black" (so no display). On my second monitor: no problems so the VGA output works. Symptom: Screen blanks / no display, but it works on the second monitor Steps to reproduce: - boot - wait (it does not matter what you do you do not have to login or anything) - (now the monitor of the laptop slowly begins to make a ssssssssHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHWOEOEssssssss noise of about 10 seconds) - right after the sounds ends, the monitor gets black. Sometimes it seems to be the same each time. Software: Installed no new software before/after, running ZoneAlarm and antivirus. Other: It does not feel hot in any place, there don't seem to be running processes with strange behaviour. Warranty: Out of warranty What was I doing: Typing text on a website and doing some PHP coding in a text editor. What can I do here other than buy a new laptop? Does it sound familiar to known cases? Update 1: Exactly the same problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-Screen-Blackout/m-p/288772 and the second poster (garyj), http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/Black-Screen-on-T60/m-p/235053#M48627 And here: "I have that same problem. I replaced the CCRL on mine and it works fine when the screen is not screwed in. Once the frame of the LCD screen (metal portion) touches the metal on the laptop which holds the screen the screen goes black. If the metal is touching the screen when you boot up it boots up with it being very dimmly lit. " from http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-screen-problems/m-p/205047#M44995 (it seems replacing the LCD display is no use, he tried it three times). Same problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T60-black-screen/m-p/80604#M25914 Hmmm... not handy 3 or 4 months ago I ordered and installed a new fan. Now the LCD. Which does not seem the core issue but some electric issue so it seems replacing the LCD is not the thing to do here. If it is not the LCD that needs to be replaced (see other threads), which parts can I order to fix this? Is there any information which could lead me to identify the issue? I have read replacing the "inverter" AND the "backlightning" would that make sense? Update 2: I replaced the inverter with another inverter, but IO have the same problem. I DID notice that the inverter is the component that makes the sssssssssssssHHHHHHHHHH sound AND it becomes very hot in a few seconds. (So both the old and the test one) The problem is hmmm wat is then the thing that makes the inverter hot by (assumption) after which it shuts itself down. Is it either the input or the output? The output seems to me not, because the screen seems to function so it must be the electricity coming in. But what causes it to become so hot would it be the VGA card outputting some unusual high voltage seems unlikely? I am looking for the component to order / replace update 3: Great news. Ewendish gave me the hint to look in the BIOS. While I was in the BIOS I noticed that the screen did not switch off and there was not a high pitched sound. So I lowered some settings in the BIOS. I then noticed that with brightness turned to 0 (via FN End), it does not make a high pitched sound and does not turn off, with brightness turned up just three "stripes" it starts making the sound. So I could from now on work under lowest brightness modus or... see where the problem lies. So as stated below with either power management or display drivers / ATI Catalyst settings / Windows display settings. I'm trying to see where it lies, but I will google some first. Update 4: I wiped clean the Windows XP installation and installed Windows 7 on it. Unfortunately the problem remains: as soon as the brightness goes up the screen starts hissing. This means... back to original thought: it probably IS a hardware problem. Although ... again... if it is NOT the inverter, what is it? Could it be the backlightning component? I could try to switch that with a another T60... but this is quite tricky.

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• EWS - How to search for items [message] between dates ?

  - by SomFred

  Hi, I am trying to search for message items between two dates from the inbox folder. I use the following restrictionType but it throws this error: firmt.RootFolder = null What am I doing wrong? There is some messages between the mentionned dates ;-) Thanks for your suggestions. using (ExchangeServiceBinding esb = new ExchangeServiceBinding()) { esb.Url = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ExchangeWebServicesURL"].ToString(); esb.RequestServerVersionValue = new RequestServerVersion(); esb.RequestServerVersionValue.Version = ExchangeVersionType.Exchange2007_SP1; esb.PreAuthenticate = true; esb.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(email, password); FindItemType findItemRequest = new FindItemType(); // paging IndexedPageViewType ipvt = new IndexedPageViewType(); ipvt.BasePoint = IndexBasePointType.Beginning; ipvt.MaxEntriesReturned = nombreMessage; ipvt.MaxEntriesReturnedSpecified = true; ipvt.Offset = offset; findItemRequest.Item = ipvt; // filter by dates AndType andType = new AndType(); List<SearchExpressionType> searchExps = new List<SearchExpressionType>(); RestrictionType restriction = new RestrictionType(); PathToUnindexedFieldType pteft = new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.itemDateTimeSent }; IsGreaterThanOrEqualToType IsGreaterThanOrEqualTo = new IsGreaterThanOrEqualToType { Item = pteft, FieldURIOrConstant = new FieldURIOrConstantType { Item = new ConstantValueType { Value = DateTime.Today.AddDays(-6d).ToString() } } }; searchExps.Add(IsGreaterThanOrEqualTo); IsLessThanOrEqualToType IsLessThanOrEqualTo = new IsLessThanOrEqualToType { Item = pteft, FieldURIOrConstant = new FieldURIOrConstantType { Item = new ConstantValueType { Value = DateTime.Today.AddDays(1d).ToString() } } }; searchExps.Add(IsLessThanOrEqualTo); andType.Items = searchExps.ToArray(); restriction.Item = andType; findItemRequest.Restriction = restriction; //// Define the sort order of items. FieldOrderType[] fieldsOrder = new FieldOrderType[1]; fieldsOrder[0] = new FieldOrderType(); PathToUnindexedFieldType dateOrder = new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.itemDateTimeReceived }; fieldsOrder[0].Item = dateOrder; fieldsOrder[0].Order = SortDirectionType.Descending; findItemRequest.SortOrder = fieldsOrder; findItemRequest.Traversal = ItemQueryTraversalType.Shallow; // define which item properties are returned in the response findItemRequest.ItemShape = new ItemResponseShapeType { BaseShape = DefaultShapeNamesType.IdOnly }; // identify which folder to search DistinguishedFolderIdType[] folderIDArray = new DistinguishedFolderIdType[1]; folderIDArray[0] = new DistinguishedFolderIdType { Id = DistinguishedFolderIdNameType.inbox }; // add folders to request findItemRequest.ParentFolderIds = folderIDArray; // find the messages FindItemResponseType findItemResponse = esb.FindItem(findItemRequest); //------------- ArrayOfResponseMessagesType responseMessages = findItemResponse.ResponseMessages; ResponseMessageType responseMessage = responseMessages.Items[0]; if (responseMessage is FindItemResponseMessageType) { FindItemResponseMessageType firmt = (responseMessage as FindItemResponseMessageType); *******FindItemParentType fipt = firmt.RootFolder;******** object obj = fipt.Item; // FindItem contains an array of items. ArrayOfRealItemsType realitems = (obj as ArrayOfRealItemsType); ItemType[] items = realitems.Items; // if no messages were found, then return null -- we're done if (items == null || items.Count() <= 0) return null; // FindItem never gets "all" the properties, so now that we've found them all, we need to get them all. BaseItemIdType[] itemIds = new BaseItemIdType[items.Count()]; for (int i = 0; i < items.Count(); i++) itemIds[i] = items[i].ItemId; GetItemType getItemType = new GetItemType { ItemIds = itemIds, ItemShape = new ItemResponseShapeType { BaseShape = DefaultShapeNamesType.AllProperties, BodyType = BodyTypeResponseType.Text, BodyTypeSpecified = true, AdditionalProperties = new BasePathToElementType[] { new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.itemDateTimeSent }, new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.messageFrom }, new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.messageIsRead }, new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.messageSender }, new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.messageToRecipients }, new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.messageCcRecipients }, new PathToUnindexedFieldType { FieldURI = UnindexedFieldURIType.messageBccRecipients } } } }; GetItemResponseType getItemResponse = esb.GetItem(getItemType); messages = ReadItems(getItemResponse, items.Count()); }

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• WCF Publish/Subscribe and using callbacks to send data to specific users

  - by manemawanna

  Hello thanks for looking, I'm working on a project at the moment and have become a little stuck. I'm creating a client server app, which allows a client to subscribe to the server to have messages forwarded to it. The issue I'm having is that when the client subscribes I wish for them to only recieve updates that relate to them. The system basically passes messages from a SQL server DB which the server monitors. When a new message is recieved the server should only forward the message to the clients that it applys to, based on whos logged on the client machine. I've had a look and found code samples which sign up for messages to be broadcast across all clients who have subscribed, but not any that show how to identify individual clients and if messages apply to them. If anyone could help or point me in the right direction it would be appreciated. You can now find some of my code below: namespace AnnouncementServiceLibrary { [ServiceContract(CallbackContract = typeof(IMessageCallback))] public interface IMessageCheck { [OperationContract] void MessageCheck(); } } namespace AnnouncementServiceLibrary { public interface IMessageCallback { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void OnNewMessage(Mess message); } } public bool Subscribe() { try { IMessageCallback callback = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IMessageCallback>(); //If they dont already exist in the subscribers list, adds them to it if (!subscribers.Contains(callback)) subscribers.Add(callback); return true; } catch { //Otherwise if an error occurs returns false return false; } } Subscribe/Unsubscribe: private static readonly List<IMessageCallback> subscribers = new List<IMessageCallback>(); /// <summary> /// Unsubscribes the user from recieving new messages when they become avaliable /// </summary> /// <returns>Returns a bool that indicates whether the operation worked or not</returns> public bool Unsubscribe() { try { IMessageCallback callback = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IMessageCallback>(); //If they exist in the list of subscribers they are then removed if (subscribers.Contains(callback)) subscribers.Remove(callback); return true; } catch { //Otherwise if an error occurs returns false return false; } } Finally this at the moment isnt't working as basically when a user subscribes as it loops through I want it to filter based on the users userID: #region IMessageCheck Members /// <summary> /// This method checks for new messages recieved based on those who have subscribed for the service /// </summary> public void MessageCheck() { //A continuous loop to keep the method going while(true) { //Changes the thread to a sleep state for 2 mins? Thread.Sleep(200000); //Go through each subscriber based on there callback information subscribers.ForEach(delegate(IMessageCallback callback) { //Checks if the person who wanted the callback can still be communicated with if (((ICommunicationObject)callback).State == CommunicationState.Opened) { //Creates a link to the database and gets the required information List<Mess> mess = new List<Mess>(); List<Message> me; List<MessageLink> messLink; AnnouncementDBDataContext aDb = new AnnouncementDBDataContext(); me = aDb.Messages.ToList(); messLink = aDb.MessageLinks.ToList(); //Query to retrieve any messages which are newer than the time when the last cycle finished var result = (from a in messLink join b in me on a.UniqueID equals b.UniqueID where b.TimeRecieved > _time select new { b.UniqueID, b.Author, b.Title, b.Body, b.Priority, a.Read, b.TimeRecieved }); //Foreach result a new message is created and returned to the PC that subscribed foreach (var a in result) { Mess message = new Mess(a.UniqueID, a.Author, a.Title, a.Body, a.Priority, (bool)a.Read, a.TimeRecieved); callback.OnNewMessage(message); } } //If the requesting PC can't be contacted they are removed from the subscribers list else { subscribers.Remove(callback); } }); //Sets the datetime so the next cycle can measure against to see if new messages have been recieved _time = DateTime.Now; } } #endregion

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• Get information about AutocompleteTextView from resulting AutoCompleteTextView$DropDownListView

  - by Stev_k

  I'm using 3 AutocompleteTextViews to suggest entries from a database. I subclassed AutocompleteTextView to handle setting the default text to null when clicked and setting back to the default instructions if moved away and nothing is entered. I was using a SimpleCursorAdapter to bind to the view, but I discovered that there was no way I could get the id of the AutocompleteTextView from an OnItemClickListener, which I needed to put additional information from the selected row in a variable depending on which AutocompleteTextView it was from. All I could access was the AutoCompleteTextView$DropDownListView, which is an undocumented inner class that appears to offer no real functionality. Neither was there a way to go up the view hierarchy to get the original AutocompleteTextView. So I subclassed SimpleCursorAdapter and added an int to the constructor to identify which AutocompleteTextView the adapter was from, and I was able to access this from the view passed into OnItemClick(). So, although my solution works fine, I wonder if it is possible to get the id of an AutocompleteTextView from its DropDownListView? I am also using another database query which gets the id from the OnItemClick and then looks up the data for that item, because I couldn't find a way of converting more than one column to a string. Should I be using CursorAdapter for this, to save initiating another query? Oh, and another thing, do I need a database cursor initially (all_cursor) when all I'm doing is filtering on it to get a new cursor? Seems like overkill. Activity .... dbse.openDataBase(); Cursor all_Cursor = dbse.autocomplete_query(); startManagingCursor(all_Cursor); String[] from_all = new String[]{DbAdapter.KEY_NAME}; int[] to_all = new int[] {android.R.id.text1}; from_adapt = new AutocompleteAdapter(FROM_DBADAPTER, this,android.R.layout.simple_dropdown_item_1line, all_Cursor, from_all, to_all); from_adapt.setStringConversionColumn(1); from_adapt.setFilterQueryProvider(this); to_adapt = new AutocompleteAdapter(TO_DBADAPTER, this,android.R.layout.simple_dropdown_item_1line, all_Cursor, from_all, to_all); to_adapt.setStringConversionColumn(1); to_adapt.setFilterQueryProvider(this); from_auto_complete = (Autocomplete) findViewById(R.id.entry_from); from_auto_complete.setAdapter(from_adapt); from_auto_complete.setOnItemClickListener(this); to_auto_complete = (Autocomplete) findViewById(R.id.entry_to); to_auto_complete.setAdapter(to_adapt); to_auto_complete.setOnItemClickListener(this); public void onItemClick (AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) { Cursor selected_row_cursor = dbse.data_from_id(id); selected_row_cursor.moveToFirst(); String lat = selected_row_cursor.getString(1); String lon = selected_row_cursor.getString(2); int source = ((AutocompleteAdapter) parent.getAdapter()).getSource(); Autocomplete class: public class Autocomplete extends AutoCompleteTextView implements OnTouchListener,OnFocusChangeListener{ String textcontent; Context mycontext = null; int viewid = this.getId(); public Autocomplete(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super(context, attrs); textcontent = this.getText().toString(); mycontext = context; this.setOnFocusChangeListener(this); this.setOnTouchListener(this); } public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) { if (textcontent.equals(mycontext.getString(R.string.from_textbox)) | textcontent.equals(mycontext.getString(R.string.to_textbox)) | textcontent.equals(mycontext.getString(R.string.via_textbox))) { this.setText(""); } return false; } public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) { if (hasFocus == false) { int a = this.getText().length(); if (a == 0){ if (viewid == R.id.entry_from) {this.setText(R.string.from_textbox);} if (viewid == R.id.entry_to) {this.setText(R.string.to_textbox);} if (viewid == R.id.entry_via) {this.setText(R.string.via_textbox);} } } } } Adapter: public class AutocompleteAdapter extends SimpleCursorAdapter { int source; public AutocompleteAdapter(int query_source, Context context, int layout, Cursor c, String[] from, int[] to) { super(context, layout, c, from, to); source = query_source; } public int getSource() { return source; } } sorry that's a lot of code! Thanks for your help. Stephen

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• How do I use Sketchflow sample data for a ListBoxItem Template at design time?

  - by Boris Nikolaevich

  I am using Expression Blend 4 and Visual Studio 2010 to create a Sketchflow prototype. I have a Sample Data collection and a ListBox that is bound to it. This displays as I would expect both at design time and at run time. However, the ListBoxItem template it just complex enough that I wanted to pull it out into its own XAML file. Even though the items still render as expected in the main ListBox where the template is used, when I open the template itself, all of the databound controls are empty. If I add a DataContext to the template, I can see and work with the populated objects while in the template, but then that local DataContext overrides the DataContext set on the listbox. A bit of code will illustrate. Start by creating a Sketchflow project (I am using Silverlight, but it should work the same for WPF), then add a project data source called SampleDataSource. Add a collection called ListData, with a single String property called Title. Here is the (scaled down) code for the main Sketchflow screen, which we'll call Main.xaml: <UserControl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:local="clr-namespace:DemoScreens" mc:Ignorable="d" x:Class="DemoScreens.Main" Width="800" Height="600"> <UserControl.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="ProjectDataSources.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <DataTemplate x:Key="ListBoxItemTemplate"> <local:DemoListBoxItemTemplate d:IsPrototypingComposition="True" Margin="0,0,5,0" Width="748"/> </DataTemplate> </ResourceDictionary> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#5c87b2" DataContext="{Binding Source={StaticResource SampleDataSource}}"> <ListBox Background="White" x:Name="DemoList" Style="{StaticResource ListBox-Sketch}" Margin="20,100,20,20" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource ListBoxItemTemplate}" ItemsSource="{Binding ListData}" ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled"/> </Grid> </UserControl> You can see that it references the DemoListBoxItemTemplate, which is defined in its own DemoListBoxItemTemplate.xaml: <UserControl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:local="clr-namespace:DemoScreens" mc:Ignorable="d" x:Class="DemoScreens.DemoListBoxItemTemplate"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}" Style="{StaticResource BasicTextBlock-Sketch}" Width="150"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Obviously, this is way simpler than my actual listbox, but it should be enough to illustrate my problem. When you open Main.xaml in the Expression designer, the list box is populated with sample data. But when you open DemoListBoxItemTemplate.xaml, there is no data context and therefore no data to display—which makes it more difficult to identify controls visually. How can I have sample data displayed when I am working with the template, while still allowing the larger set of sample data to be used for the ListBox itself?

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• Apache mod_rewrite driving me mad

  - by WishCow

  The scenario I have a webhost that is shared among multiple sites, the directory layout looks like this: siteA/ - css/ - js/ - index.php siteB/ - css/ - js/ - index.php siteC/ . . . The DocumentRoot is at the top level, so, to access siteA, you type http://webhost/siteA in your browser, to access siteB, you type http://webhost/siteB, and so on. Now I have to deploy my own site, which was designed with having 3 VirtualHosts in mind, so my structure looks like this: siteD/ - sites/sitename.com/ - log/ - htdocs/ - index.php - sites/static.sitename.com - log/ - htdocs/ - css - js - sites/admin.sitename.com - log/ - htdocs/ - index.php As you see, the problem is that my index.php files are not at the top level directory, unlike the already existing sites on the webhost. Each VirtualHost should point to the corresponding htdocs/ folder: http://siteD.com -> siteD/sites/sitename.com/htdocs http://static.siteD.com -> siteD/sites/static.sitename.com/htdocs http://admin.siteD.com -> siteD/sites/admin.sitename.com/htdocs The problem I cannot have VirtualHosts on this host, so I have to emulate it somehow, possibly with mod_rewrite. The idea Have some predefined parts in all of the links on the site, that I can identify, and route accordingly to the correct file, with mod_rewrite. Examples: http://webhost/siteD/static/js/something.js -> siteD/sites/static.sitename.com/htdocs/js/something.js http://webhost/siteD/static/css/something.css -> siteD/sites/static.sitename.com/htdocs/css/something.css http://webhost/siteD/admin/something -> siteD/sites/admin.sitename.com/htdocs/index.php http://webhost/siteD/admin/sub/something -> siteD/sites/admin.sitename.com/htdocs/index.php http://webhost/siteD/something -> siteD/sites/sitename.com/htdocs/index.php http://webhost/siteD/sub/something -> siteD/sites/sitename.com/htdocs/index.php Anything that starts with http://url/sitename/admin/(.*) will get rewritten, to point to siteD/sites/admin.sitename.com/htdocs/index.php Anything that starts with http://url/sitename/static/(.*) will get rewritten, to point to siteD/sites/static.sitename.com/htdocs/$1 Anything that starts with http://url/sitename/(.*) AND did not have a match already from above, will get rewritten to point to siteD/sites/sitename.com/htdocs/index.php The solution Here is the .htaccess file that I've come up with: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/siteD/static/(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^siteD/static/(.*)$ siteD/sites/static/htdocs/$1 [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/siteD/admin/(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^siteD/(.*)$ siteD/sites/admin/htdocs/index.php [L,QSA] So far, so good. It's all working. Now to add the last rule: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/siteD/(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^siteD/(.*)$ siteD/sites/public/htdocs/index.php [L,QSA] And it's broken. The last rule catches everything, even the ones that have static/ or admin/ in them. Why? Shouldn't the [L] flag stop the rewriting process in the first two cases? Why is the third case evaluated? Is there a better way of solving this? I'm not sticking to rewritemod, anything is fine as long as it does not need access to server-level config. I don't have access to RewriteLog, or anything like that. Please help :(

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• NSURLConnection request seems to disappear into thin air

  - by ibergmark

  Hi Everybody! I'm having trouble with a NSURLConnection request. My app calls a routine called sayHello to identify a user's device. This code works fine for all devices I've tested it on, but for some devices the request just seems to disappear into thin air with no errors or popups on the device. One specific device that fails is an iPod Touch 2G running OS 3.1.3. The app start's fine and doesn't crash, and none of my error popup messages are displayed. I just can't understand why my server never receives the request since the call to initWithRequest returns a pointer. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks. Here's the relevant header info: @interface Globals : NSObject { UserItem *userData; NSURLConnection *urlConnection; NSString *imageCacheLocation; NSOperationQueue *opQueue; } Here's the implementation of sayHello: - (void)sayHello:(BOOL)updateVisits; { NSString *updString; if (updateVisits) updString = @"Y"; else updString = @"N"; NSDictionary *dataDict = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys: [[UIDevice currentDevice] uniqueIdentifier], @"id", kProgVersion, @"pv", @"1", @"pr", userData.tagID, @"tg", updString, @"uv", nil]; NSString *urlString = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:kHelloURL]; urlConnection = [self localPOST:dataDict toUrl:urlString delegate:self]; [dataDict release]; [urlString release]; } - (NSURLConnection *)localPOST:(NSDictionary *)dictionary toUrl:(NSString *)urlString delegate:(id)delegate { NSString *myBounds = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"0xKmYbOuNdArY"]; NSMutableData *myPostData = [[NSMutableData alloc] initWithCapacity:10]; NSArray *formKeys = [dictionary allKeys]; for (int i = 0; i < [formKeys count]; i++) { [myPostData appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"--%@\n", myBounds] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; [myPostData appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat: @"Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"%@\"\n\n%@\n", [formKeys objectAtIndex:i], [dictionary valueForKey:[formKeys objectAtIndex:i]]] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; } [myPostData appendData:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"--%@--\n", myBounds] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; NSURL *myURL = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:urlString]; NSMutableURLRequest *myRequest = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:myURL cachePolicy:NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringCacheData timeoutInterval:30]; NSString *myContent = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat: @"multipart/form-data; boundary=%@", myBounds]; [myRequest setValue:myContent forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"]; [myRequest setHTTPMethod:@"POST"]; [myRequest setHTTPBody:myPostData]; NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:myRequest delegate:delegate]; if (!connection) { [[Globals sharedGlobals] showAlertWithTitle: NSLocalizedString( @"Connection failed", @"alert title - connection failed") message: NSLocalizedString( @"Could not open a connection.", @"alert message - connection failed")]; } [myBounds release]; [myPostData release]; [myURL release]; [myRequest release]; [myContent release]; return connection; } - (void)handleNetworkError:(NSError *)error { if (networkErrorAlert) return; networkErrorAlert = YES; [[Globals sharedGlobals] showAlertWithTitle: NSLocalizedString( @"Network error", @"alert title - network error") message: [NSString stringWithFormat: NSLocalizedString( @"This app needs a network connection to function properly.", @"alert message - network error")] otherButtons:nil delegate:self]; } - (void) connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection { [urlConnection release]; urlConnection = nil; } - (void) connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didFailWithError:(NSError *)error { [self handleNetworkError:error]; [urlConnection release]; urlConnection = nil; }

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• Struts 2- problem with s:action tag

  - by Raghave

  Here is a small test application that does following things ask user to enter his name and submit - (index.jsp) as a result of index.jsp is the welcome.jsp page that asks user to select his/her blood group index.jsp <%@ page language="java" import="java.util.*" pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%> <%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags" %> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> </head> <body> <form action="MyName"> <s:textfield name="UserName" label="Enter Your Name"/> <s:submit/> </form><br> </body> </html> struts.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.1//EN" "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.1.dtd"> <struts> <package name="module1" namespace="" extends="struts-default"> <action name="MyName" class="module1.User"> <result>/Welcome.jsp</result> </action> <action name="Blood_Group" class="module1.SelectBloodGroup" method="bloodGroupList"/> </package> </struts> SelectBloodGroup.java package module1; import java.util.ArrayList; import com.opensymphony.xwork2.ActionSupport; public class SelectBloodGroup extends ActionSupport{ private ArrayList<BloodGroup> bglist; public String bloodGroupList(){ bglist = new ArrayList<BloodGroup>(); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("1","A+")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("2","B+")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("3","AB+")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("4","O+")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("5","A-")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("6","B-")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("7","AB-")); bglist.add(new BloodGroup("8","O-")); return "SUCCESS"; } public ArrayList<BloodGroup> getBglist(){ return bglist; } } class BloodGroup{ private String id; private String bg; BloodGroup(String id,String bg){ this.id=id; this.bg=bg; } } welcome.jsp <%@ page language="java" import="java.util.*" pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%> <%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags" %> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> </head> <body> <s:action name="Blood_Group" executeResult="false"/> //***************here is the problem*************** <s:select list="bglist" listKey="id" listValue="bg"/> //*********************************************** </body> </html> Struts is unable to identify bglist as a collection or Array or List or iterator. WHAT SHOULD I ASSIGN TO list ATTRIBUTE IN THE s:select TAG IN THE FILE welcome.jsp What is wrong with the code please tell me in detail. If you could send me the correted version. WHY IS THE s:action Tag not working ? This is the error i am getting Apr 13, 2010 1:49:19 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher invoke SEVERE: Servlet.service() for servlet jsp threw exception tag 'select', field 'list': The requested list key 'bglist' could not be resolved as a collection/array/map/enumeration/iterator type. Example: people or people.{name} - [unknown location]

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