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• Computer crashes on resume from standby almost every time

  - by Los Frijoles

  I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Core i5 2500K and ASRock Z68 Pro3-M motherboard (no graphics card, hd is a WD Green 1TB, and cd drive is some cheap lite-on drive). Since installing 12.04, my computer has been freezing after resume, but not every time. When I start to resume, it starts going normally with a blinking cursor on the screen and then sometimes it will continue on to the gnome 3 unlock screen. Most of the time, however, it will blink for a little bit and then the monitor will flip modes and shut off due to no signal. Pressing keys on the keyboard gets no response (num lock light doesn't respond, Ctrl-Alt-F1 fails to drop it into a terminal, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work) and so I assume the computer is crashed. The worst part is, the logs look entirely normal. Here is my system log during one of these crashes and my subsequent hard poweroff and restart: Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-1, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[12419]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 22:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[9061]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[22142]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 22:39:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26909]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560822] show_signal_msg: 36 callbacks suppressed Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560828] chromium-browse[9139]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:05:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [58586.415158] chromium-browse[21025]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[13542]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.317590] usb 2-1.7: USB disconnect, device number 8 Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319672] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Synchronizing SCSI cache Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319737] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Jun 6 23:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26580]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 29925[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30131 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30162 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30163 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30166 of process 30166 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop pulseaudio[30166]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running. Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 2942[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 29925[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 1286[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.6" x-pid="1053" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd-2039: Could not open output pipe '/dev/xconsole' [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ] Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Ericsson MBM Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Sierra Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Generic Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Huawei Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Linktop Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Failed to init gatt_example plugin Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Listening for HCI events on hci0 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> NetworkManager (version 0.9.4.0) is starting... Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> Read config file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> VPN: loaded org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> DNS: loaded plugin dnsmasq Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu Sorry it's so huge; the restart happens at 23:28:12 I believe and all I see is that chromium segfaulted a few times. I wouldn't think a segfault from an individual program on the computer would crash it, but could that be the issue?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010New ProjectsaMaze Mapa Generator: Parte do Projeto aMazeASP.Net RIA Controls: Simple ASP.Net server controls to integrate Flash and Silverlight controls into your web applications. Included controls don't use any JavaScript,...BMap.NET: BMaps.NET is a .NET application written in C#, for access Bing Maps from your computer without web browsers. With it you can access to Bing Maps an...DaliNet: A .NET API for the Tridonic.Atco DALI USB device.Fabrica7: This is the main project of Fabrica 7 Corp.Image Ripper: A Winform application parse & fetch various HD pictures in specific photo galleries.IoCWrap: Provides interfaces which wrap various IoC container implementations so that it is possible to switch to a different provider without changing any ...NetSockets: NetSockets is a .NET class library that provides easy-to-use, multi-threaded, event-based, client and server network communication.Network Backup: Network Backup is a home and small company backup solution for workstations and a backup server. It incorporates a backup service, scheduler, data ...NUnit.Specs: Specification extensions for NUnit.Nutrivida: Sistema para avaliação de especialização.OHTB Snake: OHTB Snake is a multiplayer game. In this incarnation, snakes may eat 3 types of powerups: standard berries, causing them to grow; sawberries, caus...Playground TDrouen: Tjerk's PlaygroundPower Plan Chooser: This is my first endeavor into a C# Windows application with XAML. The program sits in the notification area (task bar) and lets you quickly activa...Search IMDB in C#: In lack of an IMDB API most of us resort to screen scraping utilities to query the Internet Movie Database. This one is written in C# (.NET 2.0 sta...SIGPRO Desktop: FUNCERNSql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: Pequena aplicação para Corrigir o seguinte erro de Instalação do...TwiztedTracker: TwiztedTracker designed to make your bug tracking easy.UmbracoXsltLogHelper: I needed a way to easily add log rows from my xslt macros, and added a single-line-extension for that reason. Then I played around with the umbraco...VisualStock: VisualStock is stock data visualization, analysis application build on the Micorsoft Composite Application Library.WHS File Mover: A Windows Home Server Plugin to move files from a local directory ("drop" or "staging" directory to a folder share)XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: XML based Content Deployment in Sharepoint helps you to easy deploy content into SharePoint, including webs, lists, items, files and folder. You wi...New ReleasesASP.Net RIA Controls: Version 1.0 Beta: The first functionnal version.BMap.NET: BMap.NET 1: This is the 1st version of BMap.NETDigital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor 1.0: All features implemented. Added: clipping imageFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.1.0: Version 1.3.1.0 Added a cancel button to marriage and children IGI Searches Opening Results window now automatically shows first record Updated IGI...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.5 Released: Hi, This release contains fix for the following bug: * Chart threw exception if ZoomingEnabled property was set to True at real-time. You ca...Homework Helper: Homework Helper v.1.1: Sorry but the latest release didn't seem to be the latest. This should be the right one!Image Ripper: Image Ripper: Image Ripper based on HtmlAgilityPack and GData library.ManPowerEngine: 0.1: UpdatesSound System added. Bitmap Collider in Physics System works now. Improved the performance of HTTP download in images Physics Framework...NIPO Data Processing Component Framework: NIPO 1.0: The first release of NIPO. Includes the NIPO binary dll and documentation. This release does not include a starter application since it is still in...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop7: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...Photosynth Point Cloud Exporter: Photosynth Point Cloud Exporter 1.0.2: Photosynth webservice reference updated to work with the new site OBJ file format support added (Note: this format doesn't support vertex colors)Power Plan Chooser: Power Plan Chooser 1.0.0: Power Plan Chooser is a small utility that sits in the notification area (task bar) in Windows 7 and allows the user to quickly activate one of the...Restart Explorer: RestartExplorer Release 1.00.0001: Initial release: Start, stop and restart Windows Explorer with this utility.Search IMDB in C#: Search IMDB 1.0: Source code included with compiled example.SIMD Detector: 3rd Release: Added Intel AES instruction check Added a CSharp Winform NetSIMDDetector application. Changes the red ball and green ball images to red cross a...Sql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Sql2008FIx_PerfMonCounter.zip: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956 Rule Name PerfMonCounter...UmbracoXsltLogHelper: 0.9 Working Beta: First version. XsltLogHelper09 is the installable package.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30319.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF RIA Services Contrib: RIA Services Contrib RC Release: This version is recompiled against the RC release of WCF RIA Services.XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: SPContentDeployment 1.0.0.0: The first link contains the resources and a sample project. The second link contains everything included in the first package and an additional fo...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS Alfa.2: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows Mobile Speed Guage, Sat Count number, KML for google map file formatZGuideTV.NET: ZGuideTV.NET 0.92: Vendredi 19 mars 2010 (ZGuideTV.NET bêta 9 build 0.92) - English below Corrections : - Gestion de certains contrôles dans l'écran principal. - Div...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Database continuous integration step by step

  - by David Atkinson

  This post will describe how to set up basic database continuous integration using TeamCity to initiate the build process, SQL Source Control to put your database under source control, and the SQL Compare command line to keep a test database up to date. In my example I will be using Subversion as my source control repository. If you wish to follow my steps verbatim, please make sure you have TortoiseSVN, SQL Compare and SQL Source Control installed. Downloading and Installing TeamCity TeamCity (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/index.html) is free for up to three agents, so it a great no-risk tool you can use to experiment with. 1. Download the latest version from the JetBrains website. For some reason the TeamCity executable didn't download properly for me, stalling frustratingly at 99%, so I tried again with the zip file download option (see screenshot below), which worked flawlessly. 2. Run the installer using the defaults. This results in a set-up with the server component and agent installed on the same machine, which is ideal for getting started with ease. 3. Check that the build agent is pointing to the server correctly. This has caught me out a few times before. This setting is in C:\TeamCity\buildAgent\conf\buildAgent.properties and for my installation is serverUrl=http\://localhost\:80 . If you need to change this value, if for example you've had to install the Server console to a different port number, the TeamCity Build Agent Service will need to be restarted for the change to take effect. 4. Open the TeamCity admin console on http://localhost , and specify your own designated username and password at first startup. Putting your database in source control using SQL Source Control 5. Assuming you've got SQL Source Control installed, select a development database in the SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer and select Link Database to Source Control. 6. For the Link step you can either create your own empty folder in source control, or you can select Just Evaluating, which just creates a local subversion repository for you behind the scenes. 7. Once linked, note that your database turns green in the Object Explorer. Visit the Commit tab to do an initial commit of your database objects by typing in an appropriate comment and clicking Commit. 8. There is a hidden feature in SQL Source Control that opens up TortoiseSVN (provided it is installed) pointing to the linked repository. Keep Shift depressed and right click on the text to the right of 'Linked to', in the example below, it's the red Evaluation Repository text. Select Open TortoiseSVN Repo Browser. This screen should give you an idea of how SQL Source Control manages the object files behind the scenes. Back in the TeamCity admin console, we'll now create a new project to monitor the above repository location and to trigger a 'build' each time the repository changes. 9. In TeamCity Adminstration, select Create Project and give it a name, such as "My first database CI", and click Create. 10. Click on Create Build Configuration, and name it something like "Integration build". 11. Click VCS settings and then Create And Attach new VCS root. This is where you will tell TeamCity about the repository it should monitor. 12. In my case since I'm using the Just Evaluating option in SQL Source Control, I should select Subversion. 13. In the URL field paste your repository location. In my case this is file:///C:/Users/David.Atkinson/AppData/Local/Red Gate/SQL Source Control 3/EvaluationRepositories/WidgetDevelopment/WidgetDevelopment 14. Click on Test Connection to ensure that you can communicate with your source control system. Click Save. 15. Click Add Build Step, and Runner Type: Command Line. Should you be familiar with the other runner types, such as NAnt, MSBuild or Powershell, you can opt for these, but for the same of keeping it simple I will pick the simplest option. 16. If you have installed SQL Compare in the default location, set the Command Executable field to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Compare 10\sqlcompare.exe 17. Flip back to SSMS briefly and add a new database to your server. This will be the database used for continuous integration testing. 18. Set the command parameters according to your server and the name of the database you have created. In my case I created database RedGateCI on server .\sql2008r2 /scripts1:. /server2:.\sql2008r2 /db2:RedGateCI /sync /verbose Note that if you pick a server instance that isn't on your local machine, you'll need the TCP/IP protocol enabled in SQL Server Configuration Manager otherwise the SQL Compare command line will not be able to connect. 19. Save and select Build Triggering / Add New Trigger / VCS Trigger. This is where you tell TeamCity when it should initiate a build. Click Save. 20. Now return to SQL Server Management Studio and make a schema change (eg add a new object) to your linked development database. A blue indicator will appear in the Object Explorer. Commit this change, typing in an appropriate check-in comment. All being good, within 60 seconds (a TeamCity default that can be changed) a build will be triggered. 21. Click on Projects in TeamCity to get back to the overview screen: The build log will show you the console output, which is useful for troubleshooting any issues: That's it! You now have continuous integration on your database. In future posts I'll cover how you can generate and test the database creation script, the database upgrade script, and run database unit tests as part of your continuous integration script. If you have any trouble getting this up and running please let me know, either by commenting on this post, or email me directly using the email address below. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• Using Lightbox with _Screen

  Although, I have to admit that I discovered Bernard Bout's ideas and concepts about implementing a lightbox in Visual FoxPro quite a while ago, there was no "spare" time in active projects that allowed me to have a closer look into his solution(s). Luckily, these days I received a demand to focus a little bit more on this. This article describes the steps about how to integrate and make use of Bernard's lightbox class in combination with _Screen in Visual FoxPro. The requirement in this project was to be able to visually lock the whole application (_Screen area) and guide the user to an information that should not be ignored easily. Depending on the importance any current user activity should be interrupted and focus put onto the notification. Getting the "meat", eh, source code Please check out Bernard's blog on Foxite directly in order to get the latest and greatest version. As time of writing this article I use version 6.0 as described in this blog entry: The Fastest Lightbox Ever The Lightbox class is sub-classed from the imgCanvas class from the GdiPlusX project on VFPx and therefore you need to have the source code of GdiPlusX as well, and integrate it into your development environment. The version I use is available here: Release GDIPlusX 1.20 As soon as you open the bbGdiLightbox class the first it, VFP might ask you to update the reference to the gdiplusx.vcx. As we have the sources, no problem and you have access to Bernard's code. The class itself is pretty easy to understand, some properties that you do not need to change and three methods: Setup(), ShowLightbox() and BeforeDraw() The challenge - _Screen or not? Reading Bernard's article about the fastest lightbox ever, he states the following: "The class will only work on a form. It will not support any other containers" Really? And what about _Screen? Isn't that a form class, too? Yes, of course it is but nonetheless trying to use _Screen directly will fail. Well, let's have look at the code to see why: WITH This .Left = 0 .Top = 0 .Height = ThisForm.Height .Width = ThisForm.Width .ZOrder(0) .Visible = .F.ENDWITH During the setup of the lightbox as well as while capturing the image as replacement for your forms and controls, the object reference Thisform is used. Which is a little bit restrictive to my opinion but let's continue. The second issue lies in the method ShowLightbox() and introduced by the call of .Bitmap.FromScreen(): Lparameters tlVisiblilty* tlVisiblilty - show or hide (T/F)* grab a screen dump with controlsIF tlVisiblilty Local loCaptureBmp As xfcBitmap Local lnTitleHeight, lnLeftBorder, lnTopBorder, lcImage, loImage lnTitleHeight = IIF(ThisForm.TitleBar = 1,Sysmetric(9),0) lnLeftBorder = IIF(ThisForm.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(3)) lnTopBorder = IIF(ThisForm.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(4)) With _Screen.System.Drawing loCaptureBmp = .Bitmap.FromScreen(ThisForm.HWnd,; lnLeftBorder,; lnTopBorder+lnTitleHeight,; ThisForm.Width ,; ThisForm.Height) ENDWITH * save it to a property This.capturebmp = loCaptureBmp ThisForm.SetAll("Visible",.F.) This.DraW() This.Visible = .T.ELSE ThisForm.SetAll("Visible",.T.) This.Visible = .F.ENDIF My first trials in using the class ended in an exception - GdiPlusError:OutOfMemory - thrown by the Bitmap object. Frankly speaking, this happened mainly because of my lack of knowledge about GdiPlusX. After reading some documentation, especially about the FromScreen() method I experimented a little bit. Capturing the visible area of _Screen actually was not the real problem but the dimensions I specified for the bitmap. The modifications - step by step First of all, it is to get rid of restrictive object references on Thisform and to change them into either This.Parent or more generic into This.oForm (even better: This.oControl). The Lightbox.Setup() method now sets the necessary object reference like so: *====================================================================* Initial setup* Default value: This.oControl = "This.Parent"* Alternative: This.oControl = "_Screen"*====================================================================With This .oControl = Evaluate(.oControl) If Vartype(.oControl) == T_OBJECT .Anchor = 0 .Left = 0 .Top = 0 .Width = .oControl.Width .Height = .oControl.Height .Anchor = 15 .ZOrder(0) .Visible = .F. EndIfEndwith Also, based on other developers' comments in Bernard articles on his lightbox concept and evolution I found the source code to handle the differences between a form and _Screen and goes into Lightbox.ShowLightbox() like this: *====================================================================* tlVisibility - show or hide (T/F)* grab a screen dump with controls*====================================================================Lparameters tlVisibility Local loControl m.loControl = This.oControl If m.tlVisibility Local loCaptureBmp As xfcBitmap Local lnTitleHeight, lnLeftBorder, lnTopBorder, lcImage, loImage lnTitleHeight = Iif(m.loControl.TitleBar = 1,Sysmetric(9),0) lnLeftBorder = Iif(m.loControl.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(3)) lnTopBorder = Iif(m.loControl.BorderStyle < 2,0,Sysmetric(4)) With _Screen.System.Drawing If Upper(m.loControl.Name) == Upper("Screen") loCaptureBmp = .Bitmap.FromScreen(m.loControl.HWnd) Else loCaptureBmp = .Bitmap.FromScreen(m.loControl.HWnd,; lnLeftBorder,; lnTopBorder+lnTitleHeight,; m.loControl.Width ,; m.loControl.Height) EndIf Endwith * save it to a property This.CaptureBmp = loCaptureBmp m.loControl.SetAll("Visible",.F.) This.Draw() This.Visible = .T. Else This.CaptureBmp = .Null. m.loControl.SetAll("Visible",.T.) This.Visible = .F. Endif {loadposition content_adsense} Are we done? Almost... Although, Bernard says it clearly in his article: "Just drop the class on a form and call it as shown." It did not come clear to my mind in the first place with _Screen, but, yeah, he is right. Dropping the class on a form provides a permanent link between those two classes, it creates a valid This.Parent object reference. Bearing in mind that the lightbox class can not be "dropped" on the _Screen, we have to create the same type of binding during runtime execution like so: *====================================================================* Create global lightbox component*==================================================================== Local llOk, loException As Exception m.llOk = .F. m.loException = .Null. If Not Vartype(_Screen.Lightbox) == "O" Try _Screen.AddObject("Lightbox", "bbGdiLightbox") Catch To m.loException Assert .F. Message m.loException.Message EndTry EndIf m.llOk = (Vartype(_Screen.Lightbox) == "O")Return m.llOk Through runtime instantiation we create a valid binding to This.Parent in the lightbox object and the code works as expected with _Screen. Ease your life: Use properties instead of constants Having a closer look at the BeforeDraw() method might wet your appetite to simplify the code a little bit. Looking at the sample screenshots in Bernard's article you see several forms in different colors. This got me to modify the code like so: *====================================================================* Apply the actual lightbox effect on the captured bitmap.*====================================================================If Vartype(This.CaptureBmp) == T_OBJECT Local loGfx As xfcGraphics loGfx = This.oGfx With _Screen.System.Drawing loGfx.DrawImage(This.CaptureBmp,This.Rectangle,This.Rectangle,.GraphicsUnit.Pixel) * change the colours as needed here * possible colours are (220,128,0,0),(220,0,0,128) etc. loBrush = .SolidBrush.New(.Color.FromArgb( ; This.Opacity, .Color.FromRGB(This.BorderColor))) loGfx.FillRectangle(loBrush,This.Rectangle) EndwithEndif Create an additional property Opacity to specify the grade of translucency you would like to have without the need to change the code in each instance of the class. This way you only need to change the values of Opacity and BorderColor to tweak the appearance of your lightbox. This could be quite helpful to signalize different levels of importance (ie. green, yellow, orange, red, etc...) of notifications to the users of the application. Final thoughts Using the lightbox concept in combination with _Screen instead of forms is possible. Already Jim Wiggins comments in Bernard's article to loop through the _Screen.Forms collection in order to cascade the lightbox visibility to all active forms. Good idea. But honestly, I believe that instead of looping all forms one could use _Screen.SetAll("ShowLightbox", .T./.F., "Form") with Form.ShowLightbox_Access method to gain more speed. The modifications described above might provide even more features to your applications while consuming less resources and performance. Additionally, the restrictions to capture only forms does not exist anymore. Using _Screen you are able to capture and cover anything. The captured area of _Screen does not include any toolbars, docked windows, or menus. Therefore, it is advised to take this concept on a higher level and to combine it with additional classes that handle the state of toolbars, docked windows and menus. Which I did for the customer's project.

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• jBullet Collision/Physics not working correctly

  - by Kenneth Bray

  Below is the code for one of my objects in the game I am creating (yes although this is a cube, I am not making anything remotely like MineCraft), and my issue is I while the cube will display and is does follow the physics if the cube falls, it does not interact with any other objects in the game. If I was to have multiple cubes in screen at once they all just sit there, or shoot off in all directions never stopping. Anyway, I am new to jBullet, and any help would be appreciated. package Object; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.GL_QUADS; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glBegin; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glColor3f; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glEnd; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glPopMatrix; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glPushMatrix; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glVertex3f; import javax.vecmath.Matrix4f; import javax.vecmath.Quat4f; import javax.vecmath.Vector3f; import com.bulletphysics.collision.shapes.BoxShape; import com.bulletphysics.collision.shapes.CollisionShape; import com.bulletphysics.dynamics.RigidBody; import com.bulletphysics.dynamics.RigidBodyConstructionInfo; import com.bulletphysics.linearmath.DefaultMotionState; import com.bulletphysics.linearmath.Transform; public class Cube { // Cube size/shape variables private float size; boolean cubeCollidable; boolean cubeDestroyable; // Position variables - currently this defines the center of the cube private float posX; private float posY; private float posZ; // Rotation variables - should be between 0 and 359, might consider letting rotation go higher though I can't think of a purpose currently private float rotX; private float rotY; private float rotZ; //collision shape is a box shape CollisionShape fallShape; // setup the motion state for the ball DefaultMotionState fallMotionState; Vector3f fallInertia = new Vector3f(0, 1, 0); RigidBodyConstructionInfo fallRigidBodyCI; public RigidBody fallRigidBody; int mass = 1; // Constructor public Cube(float pX, float pY, float pZ, float pSize) { posX = pX; posY = pY; posZ = pZ; size = pSize; rotX = 0; rotY = 0; rotZ = 0; // define the physics based on the values passed in fallShape = new BoxShape(new Vector3f(size, size, size)); fallMotionState = new DefaultMotionState(new Transform(new Matrix4f(new Quat4f(0, 0, 0, 1), new Vector3f(0, 50, 0), 1f))); fallRigidBodyCI = new RigidBodyConstructionInfo(mass, fallMotionState, fallShape, fallInertia); fallRigidBody = new RigidBody(fallRigidBodyCI); } public void Update() { Transform trans = new Transform(); fallRigidBody.getMotionState().getWorldTransform(trans); posY = trans.origin.x; posX = trans.origin.y; posZ = trans.origin.z; } public void Draw() { fallShape.calculateLocalInertia(mass, fallInertia); // center point posX, posY, posZ float radius = size / 2; //top glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // red glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //bottom glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(1.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // ?? color glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //right side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // ?? color glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //left side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,1.0f); // ?? color glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //front side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); //blue glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //back side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // green glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); } }

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• Move penetrating OBB out of another OBB to resolve collision

  - by Milo

  I'm working on collision resolution for my game. I just need a good way to get an object out of another object if it gets stuck. In this case a car. Here is a typical scenario. The red car is in the green object. How do I correctly get it out so the car can slide along the edge of the object as it should. I tried: if(buildings.size() > 0) { Entity e = buildings.get(0); Vector2D vel = new Vector2D(); vel.x = vehicle.getVelocity().x; vel.y = vehicle.getVelocity().y; vel.normalize(); while(vehicle.getRect().overlaps(e.getRect())) { vehicle.setCenter(vehicle.getCenterX() - vel.x * 0.1f, vehicle.getCenterY() - vel.y * 0.1f); } colided = true; } But that does not work too well. Is there some sort of vector I could calculate to use as the vector to move the car away from the object? Thanks Here is my OBB2D class: public class OBB2D { // Corners of the box, where 0 is the lower left. private Vector2D corner[] = new Vector2D[4]; private Vector2D center = new Vector2D(); private Vector2D extents = new Vector2D(); private RectF boundingRect = new RectF(); private float angle; //Two edges of the box extended away from corner[0]. private Vector2D axis[] = new Vector2D[2]; private double origin[] = new double[2]; public OBB2D(Vector2D center, float w, float h, float angle) { set(center,w,h,angle); } public OBB2D(float left, float top, float width, float height) { set(new Vector2D(left + (width / 2), top + (height / 2)),width,height,0.0f); } public void set(Vector2D center,float w, float h,float angle) { Vector2D X = new Vector2D( (float)Math.cos(angle), (float)Math.sin(angle)); Vector2D Y = new Vector2D((float)-Math.sin(angle), (float)Math.cos(angle)); X = X.multiply( w / 2); Y = Y.multiply( h / 2); corner[0] = center.subtract(X).subtract(Y); corner[1] = center.add(X).subtract(Y); corner[2] = center.add(X).add(Y); corner[3] = center.subtract(X).add(Y); computeAxes(); extents.x = w / 2; extents.y = h / 2; computeDimensions(center,angle); } private void computeDimensions(Vector2D center,float angle) { this.center.x = center.x; this.center.y = center.y; this.angle = angle; boundingRect.left = Math.min(Math.min(corner[0].x, corner[3].x), Math.min(corner[1].x, corner[2].x)); boundingRect.top = Math.min(Math.min(corner[0].y, corner[1].y),Math.min(corner[2].y, corner[3].y)); boundingRect.right = Math.max(Math.max(corner[1].x, corner[2].x), Math.max(corner[0].x, corner[3].x)); boundingRect.bottom = Math.max(Math.max(corner[2].y, corner[3].y),Math.max(corner[0].y, corner[1].y)); } public void set(RectF rect) { set(new Vector2D(rect.centerX(),rect.centerY()),rect.width(),rect.height(),0.0f); } // Returns true if other overlaps one dimension of this. private boolean overlaps1Way(OBB2D other) { for (int a = 0; a < axis.length; ++a) { double t = other.corner[0].dot(axis[a]); // Find the extent of box 2 on axis a double tMin = t; double tMax = t; for (int c = 1; c < corner.length; ++c) { t = other.corner[c].dot(axis[a]); if (t < tMin) { tMin = t; } else if (t > tMax) { tMax = t; } } // We have to subtract off the origin // See if [tMin, tMax] intersects [0, 1] if ((tMin > 1 + origin[a]) || (tMax < origin[a])) { // There was no intersection along this dimension; // the boxes cannot possibly overlap. return false; } } // There was no dimension along which there is no intersection. // Therefore the boxes overlap. return true; } //Updates the axes after the corners move. Assumes the //corners actually form a rectangle. private void computeAxes() { axis[0] = corner[1].subtract(corner[0]); axis[1] = corner[3].subtract(corner[0]); // Make the length of each axis 1/edge length so we know any // dot product must be less than 1 to fall within the edge. for (int a = 0; a < axis.length; ++a) { axis[a] = axis[a].divide((axis[a].length() * axis[a].length())); origin[a] = corner[0].dot(axis[a]); } } public void moveTo(Vector2D center) { Vector2D centroid = (corner[0].add(corner[1]).add(corner[2]).add(corner[3])).divide(4.0f); Vector2D translation = center.subtract(centroid); for (int c = 0; c < 4; ++c) { corner[c] = corner[c].add(translation); } computeAxes(); computeDimensions(center,angle); } // Returns true if the intersection of the boxes is non-empty. public boolean overlaps(OBB2D other) { if(right() < other.left()) { return false; } if(bottom() < other.top()) { return false; } if(left() > other.right()) { return false; } if(top() > other.bottom()) { return false; } if(other.getAngle() == 0.0f && getAngle() == 0.0f) { return true; } return overlaps1Way(other) && other.overlaps1Way(this); } public Vector2D getCenter() { return center; } public float getWidth() { return extents.x * 2; } public float getHeight() { return extents.y * 2; } public void setAngle(float angle) { set(center,getWidth(),getHeight(),angle); } public float getAngle() { return angle; } public void setSize(float w,float h) { set(center,w,h,angle); } public float left() { return boundingRect.left; } public float right() { return boundingRect.right; } public float bottom() { return boundingRect.bottom; } public float top() { return boundingRect.top; } public RectF getBoundingRect() { return boundingRect; } public boolean overlaps(float left, float top, float right, float bottom) { if(right() < left) { return false; } if(bottom() < top) { return false; } if(left() > right) { return false; } if(top() > bottom) { return false; } return true; } };

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• Static background noise while using new headset Ubuntu 13.04

  - by ThundLayr

  Today I bought a new gaming headset (Gx-Gaming Lychas), and when I tried to record some gameplay-comentary I noticed that there always is a static background noise, I just recorded an example so you guys can listen it (no downloaded needed): http://www47.zippyshare.com/v/65167832/file.html I'm using Kubuntu 13.04 and Kernel version is 3.8.0-19, my laptop is an Acer Travelmate 5760Z, I tried tons of configurations on Alsamixer and none of them made result, I really need to get this working so any kind of help will be very aprecciated. cat /proc/asound/cards: 0 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH HDA Intel PCH at 0xc6400000 irq 44 cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 Codec: Conexant CX20588 Address: 0 AFG Function Id: 0x1 (unsol 1) Vendor Id: 0x14f1506c Subsystem Id: 0x10250574 Revision Id: 0x100003 No Modem Function Group found Default PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Default Amp-In caps: N/A Default Amp-Out caps: N/A State of AFG node 0x01: Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold CLKSTOP EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 GPIO: io=4, o=0, i=0, unsolicited=1, wake=0 IO[0]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 IO[1]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 IO[2]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 IO[3]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 Node 0x10 [Audio Output] wcaps 0xc1d: Stereo Amp-Out R/L Control: name="Headphone Playback Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Headphone Playback Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Device: name="CX20588 Analog", type="Audio", device=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x4a, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-Out vals: [0x4a 0x4a] Converter: stream=8, channel=0 PCM: rates [0x560]: 44100 48000 96000 192000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x11 [Audio Output] wcaps 0xc1d: Stereo Amp-Out R/L Control: name="Speaker Playback Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Speaker Playback Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x4a, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-Out vals: [0x80 0x80] Converter: stream=8, channel=0 PCM: rates [0x560]: 44100 48000 96000 192000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x12 [Audio Output] wcaps 0x611: Stereo Digital Converter: stream=0, channel=0 Digital: Digital category: 0x0 IEC Coding Type: 0x0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x5]: PCM AC3 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x13 [Beep Generator Widget] wcaps 0x70000c: Mono Amp-Out Control: name="Beep Playback Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=1, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Beep Playback Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=1, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x07, nsteps=0x07, stepsize=0x0f, mute=0 Amp-Out vals: [0x00] Node 0x14 [Audio Input] wcaps 0x100d1b: Stereo Amp-In R/L Control: name="Capture Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=In, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Capture Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=In, idx=0, ofs=0 Device: name="CX20588 Analog", type="Audio", device=0 Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x50, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x50 0x50] [0x80 0x80] [0x80 0x80] [0x80 0x80] Converter: stream=4, channel=0 SDI-Select: 0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x17* 0x18 0x23 0x24 Node 0x15 [Audio Input] wcaps 0x100d1b: Stereo Amp-In R/L Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x50, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] Converter: stream=0, channel=0 SDI-Select: 0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x17* 0x18 0x23 0x24 Node 0x16 [Audio Input] wcaps 0x100d1b: Stereo Amp-In R/L Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x50, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] Converter: stream=0, channel=0 SDI-Select: 0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x17* 0x18 0x23 0x24 Node 0x17 [Audio Selector] wcaps 0x30050d: Stereo Amp-Out Control: name="Mic Boost Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x00, nsteps=0x04, stepsize=0x27, mute=0 Amp-Out vals: [0x04 0x04] Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x1a 0x1b* 0x1d 0x1e Node 0x18 [Audio Selector] wcaps 0x30050d: Stereo Amp-Out Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x00, nsteps=0x04, stepsize=0x27, mute=0 Amp-Out vals: [0x00 0x00] Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x1a* 0x1b 0x1d 0x1e Node 0x19 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Control: name="Headphone Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x0000001c: OUT HP Detect Pin Default 0x04214040: [Jack] HP Out at Ext Right Conn = 1/8, Color = Green DefAssociation = 0x4, Sequence = 0x0 Pin-ctls: 0xc0: OUT HP Unsolicited: tag=01, enabled=1 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1a [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400481: Stereo Control: name="Internal Mic Phantom Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x00001324: IN Detect Vref caps: HIZ 50 80 Pin Default 0x90a70130: [Fixed] Mic at Int N/A Conn = Analog, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0x3, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x24: IN VREF_80 Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x1b [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Control: name="Mic Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x00011334: IN OUT EAPD Detect Vref caps: HIZ 50 80 EAPD 0x0: Pin Default 0x04a19020: [Jack] Mic at Ext Right Conn = 1/8, Color = Pink DefAssociation = 0x2, Sequence = 0x0 Pin-ctls: 0x24: IN VREF_80 Unsolicited: tag=02, enabled=1 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1c [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Pincap 0x00000014: OUT Detect Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1d [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Pincap 0x00010034: IN OUT EAPD Detect EAPD 0x0: Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1e [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400481: Stereo Pincap 0x00000024: IN Detect Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x1f [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400501: Stereo Control: name="Speaker Phantom Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x92170110: [Fixed] Speaker at Int Front Conn = Analog, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0x1, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10 0x11* Node 0x20 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400781: Stereo Digital Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 1 0x12 Node 0x21 [Audio Output] wcaps 0x611: Stereo Digital Converter: stream=0, channel=0 Digital: Digital category: 0x0 IEC Coding Type: 0x0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x5]: PCM AC3 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x22 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400781: Stereo Digital Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 1 0x21 Node 0x23 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x40040b: Stereo Amp-In Amp-In caps: ofs=0x00, nsteps=0x04, stepsize=0x2f, mute=0 Amp-In vals: [0x00 0x00] Pincap 0x00000020: IN Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x24 [Audio Mixer] wcaps 0x20050b: Stereo Amp-In Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x4a, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x00 0x00] [0x00 0x00] Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10 0x11 Node 0x25 [Vendor Defined Widget] wcaps 0xf00000: Mono

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• Building KPIs to monitor your business Its not really about the Technology

  When I have discussions with people about Business Intelligence, one of the questions the inevitably come up is about building KPIs and how to accomplish that. From a technical level the concept of a KPI is very simple, almost too simple in that it is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. The key to that iceberg is not really the tip, but the mass of the iceberg that is hidden beneath the surface upon which the tip sits. The analogy of the iceberg is not meant to indicate that the foundation of the KPI is overly difficult or complex. The disparity in size in meant to indicate that the larger thing that needs to be defined is not the technical tip, but the underlying business definition of what the KPI means. From a technical perspective the KPI consists of primarily the following items: Actual Value This is the actual value data point that is being measured. An example would be something like the amount of sales. Target Value This is the target goal for the KPI. This is a number that can be measured against Actual Value. An example would be $10,000 in monthly sales. Target Indicator Range This is the definition of ranges that define what type of indicator the user will see comparing the Actual Value to the Target Value. Most often this is defined by stoplight, but can be any indicator that is going to show a status in a quick fashion to the user. Typically this would be something like: Red Light = Actual Value more than 5% below target; Yellow Light = Within 5% of target either direction; Green Light = More than 5% higher than Target Value Status\Trend Indicator This is an optional attribute of a KPI that is typically used to show some kind of trend. The vast majority of these indicators are used to show some type of progress against a previous period. As an example, the status indicator might be used to show how the monthly sales compare to last month. With this type of indicator there needs to be not only a definition of what the ranges are for your status indictor, but then also what value the number needs to be compared against. So now we have an idea of what data points a KPI consists of from a technical perspective lets talk a bit about tools. As you can see technically there is not a whole lot to them and the choice of technology is not as important as the definition of the KPIs, which we will get to in a minute. There are many different types of tools in the Microsoft BI stack that you can use to expose your KPI to the business. These include Performance Point, SharePoint, Excel, and SQL Reporting Services. There are pluses and minuses to each technology and the right technology is based a lot on your goals and how you want to deliver the information to the users. Additionally, there are other non-Microsoft tools that can be used to expose KPI indicators to your business users. Regardless of the technology used as your front end, the heavy lifting of KPI is in the business definition of the values and benchmarks for that KPI. The discussion about KPIs is very dependent on the history of an organization and how much they are exposed to the attributes of a KPI. Often times when discussing KPIs with a business contact who has not been exposed to KPIs the discussion tends to also be a session educating the business user about what a KPI is and what goes into the definition of a KPI. The majority of times the business user has an idea of what their actual values are and they have been tracking those numbers for some time, generally in Excel and all manually. So they will know the amount of sales last month along with sales two years ago in the same month. Where the conversation tends to get stuck is when you start discussing what the target value should be. The actual value is answering the What and How much questions. When you are talking about the Target values you are asking the question Is this number good or bad. Typically, the user will know whether or not the value is good or bad, but most of the time they are not able to quantify what is good or bad. Their response is usually something like I just know. Because they have been watching the sales quantity for years now, they can tell you that a 5% decrease in sales this month might actually be a good thing, maybe because the salespeople are all waiting until next month when the new versions come out. It can sometimes be very hard to break the business people of this habit. One of the fears generally is that the status indicator is not subjective. Thus, in the scenario above, the business user is going to be fearful that their boss, just looking at a negative red indicator, is going to haul them out to the woodshed for a bad month. But, on the flip side, if all you are displaying is the amount of sales, only a person with knowledge of last month sales and the target amount for this month would have any idea if $10,000 in sales is good or not. Here is where a key point about KPIs needs to be communicated to both the business user and any user who might be viewing the results of that KPI. The KPI is just one tool that is used to report on business performance. The KPI is meant as a quick indicator of one business statistic. It is not meant to tell the entire story. It does not answer the question Why. Its primary purpose is to objectively and quickly expose an area of the business that might warrant more review. There is always going to be the need to do further analysis on any potential negative or neutral KPI. So, hopefully, once you have convinced your business user to come up with some target numbers and ranges for status indicators, you then need to take the next step and help them answer the Why question. The main question here to ask is, Okay, you see the indicator and you need to discover why the number is what is, where do you go?. The answer is usually a combination of sources. A sales manager might have some of the following items at their disposal (Marketing report showing a decrease in the promotional discounts for the month, Pricing Report showing the reduction of prices of older models, an Inventory Report showing the discontinuation of a particular product line, or a memo showing the ending of a large affiliate partnership. The answers to the question Why are never as simple as a single indicator value. Bring able to quickly get to this information is all about designing how a user accesses the KPIs and then also how easily they can get to the additional information they need. This is where a Dashboard mentality can come in handy. For example, the business user can have a dashboard that shows their KPIs, but also has links to some of the common reports that they run regarding Sales Data. The users boss may have the same KPIs on their dashboard, but instead of links to individual reports they are going to have a link to a status report that was created by the user that pulls together all the data about the KPI in a summary format the users boss can review. So some of the key things to think about when building or evaluating KPIs for your organization: Technology should not be the driving factor KPIs are of little value without some indicator for whether a value is good, bad or neutral. KPIs only give an answer to the Is this number good\bad? question Make sure the ability to drill into the Why of a KPI is close at hand and relevant to the user who is viewing the KPI. The KPI is a key business tool when defined properly to help monitor business performance across the enterprise in an objective and consistent manner. At times it might feel like the process of defining the business aspects of a KPI can sometimes be arduous, the payoff in the end can far outweigh the costs. Some of the benefits of going through this process are a better understanding of the key metrics for an organization and the measure of those metrics and a consistent snapshot of business performance that can be utilized across the organization. And I think that these are benefits to any organization regardless of the technology or the implementation.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM by Brian Mozinski (Accenture)

  - by Greg Jensen

  Today, technical requirements for IAM are evolving rapidly, and the bar is continuously raised for high performance IAM solutions as organizations look to roll out high volume use cases on the back of legacy systems.  Existing solutions were often designed and architected to support offline transactions and manual processes, and the business owners today demand globally scalable infrastructure to support the growth their business cases are expected to deliver. To help IAM practitioners address these challenges and make their organizations and themselves more successful, this series we will outline the: • Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM The explosive growth in expectations for IAM infrastructure, and the business cases they support to gain investment in new security programs. • "Necessity is the mother of invention": Technical solutions developed in the field Well proven tricks of the trade, used by IAM guru’s to maximize your solution while addressing the requirements of global organizations. • The Art & Science of Performance Tuning of Oracle IAM 11gR2 Real world examples of performance tuning with Oracle IAM • No Where to go but up: Extending the benefits of accelerated IAM Anything is possible, compelling new solutions organizations are unlocking with accelerated Oracle IAM Let’s get started … by talking about the changing dynamics driving these discussions. Big Companies are getting bigger everyday, and increasingly organizations operate across state lines, multiple times zones, and in many countries or continents at the same time.  No longer is midnight to 6am a safe time to take down the system for upgrades, to run recon’s and import or update user accounts and attributes.  Further IT organizations are operating as shared services with SLA’s similar to telephone carrier levels expected by their “clients”.  Workers are moved in and out of roles on a weekly, daily, or even hourly rate and IAM is expected to support those rapid changes.  End users registering for services during business hours in Singapore are expected their access to be green-lighted in custom apps hosted in Portugal within the hour.  Many of the expectations of asynchronous systems and batched updates are not adequate and the number and types of users is growing. When organizations acted more like independent teams at functional or geographic levels it was manageable to have processes that relied on a handful of people who knew how to make things work …. Knew how to get you access to the key systems to get your job done.  Today everyone is expected to do more with less, the finance administrator previously supporting their local Atlanta sales office might now be asked to help close the books for the Johannesburg team, and access certification process once completed monthly by Joan on the 3rd floor is now done by a shared pool of resources in Sao Paulo.   Fragmented processes that rely on institutional knowledge to get access to systems and get work done quickly break down in these scenarios.  Highly robust processes that have automated workflows for connected or disconnected systems give organizations the dynamic flexibility to share work across these lines and cut costs or increase productivity. As the IT industry computing paradigms continue to change with the passing of time, and as mature or proven approaches become clear, it is normal for organizations to adjust accordingly. Businesses must manage identity in an increasingly hybrid world in which legacy on-premises IAM infrastructures are extended or replaced to support more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users. The old legacy IAM implementation models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply. End users expect to self-request access to services from their tablet, get supervisor approval over mobile devices and email, and launch the application even if is hosted on the cloud, or run by a partner, vendor, or service provider. While user expectations are higher, they are also simpler … logging into custom desktop apps to request approvals, or going through email or paper based processes for certification is unacceptable.  Users expect security to operate within the paradigm of the application … i.e. feel like the application they are using. Citizen and customer facing applications have evolved from every where, with custom applications, 3rd party tools, and merging in from acquired entities or 3rd party OEM’s resold to expand your portfolio of services.  These all have their own user stores, authentication models, user lifecycles, session management, etc.  Often the designers/developers are no longer accessible and the documentation is limited.  Bringing together underlying directories to scale for growth, and improve user experience is critical for revenue … but also for operations. Job functions are more dynamic.... take the Olympics for example.  Endless organizations from corporations broadcasting, endorsing, or marketing through the event … to non-profit athletic foundations and public/government entities for athletes and public safety, all operate simultaneously on the world stage.  Each organization needs to spin up short-term teams, often dealing with proprietary information from hot ads to racing strategies or security plans.  IAM is expected to enable team’s to spin up, enable new applications, protect privacy, and secure critical infrastructure.  Then it needs to be disabled just as quickly as users go back to their previous responsibilities. On a more technical level … Optimized system directory; tuning guidelines and parameters are needed by businesses today. Business’s need to be making the right choices (virtual directories) and considerations via choosing the correct architectural patterns (virtual, direct, replicated, and tuning), challenge is that business need to assess and chose the correct architectural patters (centralized, virtualized, and distributed) Today's Business organizations have very complex heterogeneous enterprises that contain diverse and multifaceted information. With today's ever changing global landscape, the strategic end goal in challenging times for business is business agility. The business of identity management requires enterprise's to be more agile and more responsive than ever before. The continued proliferation of networking devices (PC, tablet, PDA's, notebooks, etc.) has caused the number of devices and users to be granted access to these devices to grow exponentially. Business needs to deploy an IAM system that can account for the demands for authentication and authorizations to these devices. Increased innovation is forcing business and organizations to centralize their identity management services. Access management needs to handle traditional web based access as well as handle new innovations around mobile, as well as address insufficient governance processes which can lead to rouge identity accounts, which can then become a source of vulnerabilities within a business’s identity platform. Risk based decisions are providing challenges to business, for an adaptive risk model to make proper access decisions via standard Web single sign on for internal and external customers,. Organizations have to move beyond simple login and passwords to address trusted relationship questions such as: Is this a trusted customer, client, or citizen? Is this a trusted employee, vendor, or partner? Is this a trusted device? Without a solid technological foundation, organizational performance, collaboration, constituent services, or any other organizational processes will languish. A Single server location presents not only network concerns for distributed user base, but identity challenges. The network risks are centered on latency of the long trip that the traffic has to take. Other risks are a performance around availability and if the single identity server is lost, all access is lost. As you can see, there are many reasons why performance tuning IAM will have a substantial impact on the success of your organization.  In our next installment in the series we roll up our sleeves and get into detailed tuning techniques used everyday by thought leaders in the field implementing Oracle Identity & Access Management Solutions.

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• My Code Kata–A Solution Kata

  - by Glav

  There are many developers and coders out there who like to do code Kata’s to keep their coding ability up to scratch and to practice their skills. I think it is a good idea. While I like the concept, I find them dead boring and of minimal purpose. Yes, they serve to hone your skills but that’s about it. They are often quite abstract, in that they usually focus on a small problem set requiring specific solutions. It is fair enough as that is how they are designed but again, I find them quite boring. What I personally like to do is go for something a little larger and a little more fun. It takes a little more time and is not as easily executed as a kata though, but it services the same purposes from a practice perspective and allows me to continue to solve some problems that are not directly part of the initial goal. This means I can cover a broader learning range and have a bit more fun. If I am lucky, sometimes they even end up being useful tools. With that in mind, I thought I’d share my current ‘kata’. It is not really a code kata as it is too big. I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution kata’. The code is on bitbucket here. What I wanted to do was create a kind of simplistic virtual world where I can create a player, or a class, stuff it into the world, and see if it survives, and can navigate its way to the exit. Requirements were pretty simple: Must be able to define a map to describe the world using simple X,Y co-ordinates. Z co-ordinates as well if you feel like getting clever. Should have the concept of entrances, exists, solid blocks, and potentially other materials (again if you want to get clever). A coder should be able to easily write a class which will act as an inhabitant of the world. An inhabitant will receive stimulus from the world in the form of surrounding environment and be able to make a decision on action which it passes back to the ‘world’ for processing. At a minimum, an inhabitant will have sight and speed characteristics which determine how far they can ‘see’ in the world, and how fast they can move. Coders who write a really bad ‘inhabitant’ should not adversely affect the rest of world. Should allow multiple inhabitants in the world. So that was the solution I set out to act as a practice solution and a little bit of fun. It had some interesting problems to solve and I figured, if it turned out ok, I could potentially use this as a ‘developer test’ for interviews. Ask a potential coder to write a class for an inhabitant. Show the coder the map they will navigate, but also mention that we will use their code to navigate a map they have not yet seen and a little more complex. I have been playing with solution for a short time now and have it working in basic concepts. Below is a screen shot using a very basic console visualiser that shows the map, boundaries, blocks, entrance, exit and players/inhabitants. The yellow asterisks ‘*’ are the players, green ‘O’ the entrance, purple ‘^’ the exit, maroon/browny ‘#’ are solid blocks. The players can move around at different speeds, knock into each others, and make directional movement decisions based on what they see and who is around them. It has been quite fun to write and it is also quite fun to develop different players to inject into the world. The code below shows a really simple implementation of an inhabitant that can work out what to do based on stimulus from the world. It is pretty simple and just tries to move in some direction if there is nothing blocking the path. public class TestPlayer:LivingEntity { public TestPlayer() { Name = "Beta Boy"; LifeKey = Guid.NewGuid(); } public override ActionResult DecideActionToPerform(EcoDev.Core.Common.Actions.ActionContext actionContext) { try { var action = new MovementAction(); // move forward if we can if (actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Forward; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Left; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Back; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Right; return action; } } return action; } catch (Exception ex) { World.WriteDebugInformation("Player: "+ Name, string.Format("Player Generated exception: {0}",ex.Message)); throw ex; } } private bool CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(MapBlock block) { if (block == null || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowEntry || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowExit || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowPotentialEntry) { return true; } return false; } } It is simple and it seems to work well. The world implementation itself decides the stimulus context that is passed to he inhabitant to make an action decision. All movement is carried out on separate threads and timed appropriately to be as fair as possible and to cater for additional skills such as speed, and eventually maybe stamina, strength, with actions like fighting. It is pretty fun to make up random maps and see how your inhabitant does. You can download the code from here. Along the way I have played with parallel extensions to make the compute intensive stuff spread across all cores, had to heavily factor in visibility of methods and properties so design of classes was paramount, work out movement algorithms that play fairly in the world and properly favour the players with higher abilities, as well as a host of other issues. So that is my ‘solution kata’. If I keep going with it, I may develop a web interface for it where people can upload assemblies and watch their player within a web browser visualiser and maybe even a map designer. What do you do to keep the fires burning?

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• Underwriting in a New Frontier: Spurring Innovation

  - by [email protected]

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Susan Keuer, product strategy manager for Oracle Insurance, shares her experiences and insight from the 2010 Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) Annual Conference, April 11-14, in San Antonio, Texas    How can I be more innovative in underwriting?  It's a common question I hear from insurance carriers, producers and others, so it was no surprise that it was the key theme at the recent 2010 AHOU Annual Conference.  This year's event drew more than 900 insurance professionals involved in the underwriting process across life and annuities, property and casualty and reinsurance from around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Bahamas, and more, to San Antonio - a Texas city where innovation transformed a series of downtown drainage canals into its premiere River Walk tourist destination.   CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta kicked off the conference with a phenomenal opening session that drove home the theme of the conference, "Underwriting in a New Frontier:  Spurring Innovation."   Drawing from his own experience as a neurosurgeon treating critically injured medical patients in the field in Iraq, Gupta inspired audience members to think outside the box during the underwriting process. He shared a compelling story of operating on a soldier who had suffered a head-related trauma in a field hospital.  With minimal supplies available Gupta used a Black and Decker saw to operate on the soldier's head and reduce pressure on his swelling brain. Drawing from this example, Gupta encouraged underwriters to think creatively, be innovative, and consider new tools and sources of information, such as social networking sites, during the underwriting process. So as you are looking at risk take into consideration all resources you have available.    Gupta also stressed the concept of IKIGAI - noting that individuals who believe that their life is worth living are less likely to die than are their counterparts without this belief.  How does one quantify this approach to life or thought process when evaluating risk?  Could this be something to consider as a "category" in the near future? How can this same belief in your own work spur innovation?   The role of technology was a hot topic of discussion throughout the conference.  Sessions delved into the latest in underwriting software to the rise of social media and how it is being increasingly integrated into underwriting process and solutions.  In one session a trio of panelists representing the carrier, producer and vendor communities stressed the importance to underwriters of leveraging new technology and the plethora of online information sources, which all could be used to accurately, honestly and consistently evaluate the risk throughout the underwriting process.   Another focused on the explosion of social media noting:  1.    Social media is growing exponentially - About eight percent of Americans used social media five years ago. Today about 46 percent of Americans do so, with 85 percent of financial services professionals using social media in their work.  2.    It will impact your business - Underwriters reconfirmed over and over that they are increasingly using "free" tools that are available in cyberspace in lieu of more costly solutions, such as inspection reports conducted by individuals in the field.  3.    Information is instantly available on the Web, anytime, anywhere - LinkedIn was mentioned as a way to connect to peers in the underwriting community and producers alike.  Many carriers and agents also are using Facebook to promote their company to customers - and as a point-of-entry to allow them to perform some functionality - such as accessing product marketing information versus directing users to go to the carrier's own proprietary website.  Other carriers have released their tight brand marketing to allow their producers to drive more business to their personal Facebook site where they offer innovative tools such as Application Capture or asking medical information in a more relaxed fashion.     Other key topics at the conference included the economy, ongoing industry consolidation, real-estate valuations as an asset and input into the underwriting process, and producer trends.  All stressed a "back to basics" approach for low cost, term products.   Finally, Connie Merritt, RN, PHN, entertained the large group of atttendees with audience-engaging insight on how to "Tame the Lions in Your Life - Dealing with Complainers, Bullies, Grump and Curmudgeon." Merritt noted "we are too busy for our own good." She shared how her overachieving personality had impacted her life.  Audience members then were asked to pick red, yellow, blue, or green shapes, without knowing that each one represented a specific personality trait.  For example, those who picked blue were the peacemakers. Those who choose yellow were social - the hint was to "Be Quiet Longer."  She then offered these "lion taming" steps:   1.    Admit It 2.    Accept It 3.    Let Go 4.    Be Present (which paralleled Gupta's IKIGAI concept)   When thinking about underwriting I encourage you to be present in the moment and think creatively, but don't be afraid to look ahead to the future and be an innovator.  I hope to see you at next year's AHOU Annual Conference, May 1-4, 2011 at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nev.     Susan Keuer is the product strategy manager for new business underwriting.  She brings more than 20 years of insurance industry experience working with leading insurance carriers and technology companies to her role on the product strategy team for life/annuities solutions within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit  

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• Silverlight MEF – Download On Demand

  - by PeterTweed

  Take the Slalom Challenge at www.slalomchallenge.com! A common challenge with building complex applications in Silverlight is the initial download size of the xap file.  MEF enables us to build composable applications that allows us to build complex composite applications.  Wouldn’t it be great if we had a mechanism to spilt out components into different Silverlight applications in separate xap files and download the separate xap file only if needed?   MEF gives us the ability to do this.  This post will cover the basics needed to build such a composite application split between different silerlight applications and download the referenced silverlight application only when needed. Steps: 1.     Create a Silverlight 4 application 2.     Add references to the following assemblies: System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll 3.     Add a new Silverlight 4 application called ExternalSilverlightApplication to the solution that was created in step 1.  Ensure the new application is hosted in the web application for the solution and choose to not create a test page for the new application. 4.     Delete the App.xaml and MainPage.xaml files – they aren’t needed. 5.     Add references to the following assemblies in the ExternalSilverlightApplication project: System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll 6.     Ensure the two references above have their Copy Local values set to false.  As we will have these two assmblies in the original Silverlight application, we will have no need to include them in the built ExternalSilverlightApplication build. 7.     Add a new user control called LeftControl to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project. 8.     Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml:     <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Beige" Margin="40" >         <Button Content="Left Content" Margin="30"></Button>     </Grid> 9.     Add the following statement to the top of the LeftControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 10.   Add the following attribute to the LeftControl class     [Export(typeof(LeftControl))]   This attribute tells MEF that the type LeftControl will be exported – i.e. made available for other applications to import and compose into the application. 11.   Add a new user control called RightControl to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project. 12.   Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml:     <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Green" Margin="40"  >         <TextBlock Margin="40" Foreground="White" Text="Right Control" FontSize="16" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" ></TextBlock>     </Grid> 13.   Add the following statement to the top of the RightControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 14.   Add the following attribute to the RightControl class     [Export(typeof(RightControl))] 15.   In your original Silverlight project add a reference to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project. 16.   Change the reference to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project to have it’s Copy Local value = false.  This will ensure that the referenced ExternalSilverlightApplication Silverlight application is not included in the original Silverlight application package when it it built.  The ExternalSilverlightApplication Silverlight application therefore has to be downloaded on demand by the original Silverlight application for it’s controls to be used. 1.     In your original Silverlight project add the following xaml to the LayoutRoot Grid in MainPage.xaml:         <Grid.RowDefinitions>             <RowDefinition Height="65*" />             <RowDefinition Height="235*" />         </Grid.RowDefinitions>         <Button Name="LoaderButton" Content="Download External Controls" Click="Button_Click"></Button>         <StackPanel Grid.Row="1" Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center" >             <Border Name="LeftContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border>             <Border Name="RightContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border>         </StackPanel>       The borders will hold the controls that will be downlaoded, imported and composed via MEF when the button is clicked. 2.     Add the following statement to the top of the MainPage.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 3.     Add the following properties to the MainPage class:         [Import(typeof(LeftControl))]         public LeftControl LeftUserControl { get; set; }         [Import(typeof(RightControl))]         public RightControl RightUserControl { get; set; }   This defines properties accepting LeftControl and RightControl types.  The attrributes are used to tell MEF the discovered type that should be applied to the property when composition occurs. 17.   Add the following event handler for the button click to the MainPage.xaml.cs file:         private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)         {                   DeploymentCatalog deploymentCatalog =     new DeploymentCatalog("ExternalSilverlightApplication.xap");                   CompositionHost.Initialize(deploymentCatalog);                   deploymentCatalog.DownloadCompleted += (s, i) =>                 {                     if (i.Error == null)                     {                         CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this);                           LeftContent.Child = LeftUserControl;                         RightContent.Child = RightUserControl;                         LoaderButton.IsEnabled = false;                     }                 };                   deploymentCatalog.DownloadAsync();         } This is where the magic happens!  The deploymentCatalog object is pointed to the ExternalSilverlightApplication.xap file.  It is then associated with the CompositionHost initialization.  As the download will be asynchronous, an eventhandler is created for the DownloadCompleted event.  The deploymentCatalog object is then told to start the asynchronous download. The event handler that executes when the download is completed uses the CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports() function to tell MEF to satisfy the Imports for the current class.  It is at this point that the LeftUserControl and RightUserControl properties are initialized with composed objects from the downloaded ExternalSilverlightApplication.xap package. 18.   Run the application click the Download External Controls button and see the controls defined in the ExternalSilverlightApplication application loaded into the original Silverlight application. Congratulations!  You have implemented download on demand capabilities for composite applications using the MEF DeploymentCatalog class.  You are now able to segment your applications into separate xap file for deployment.

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• Beginner’s Guide to Flock, the Social Media Browser

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you wanting a browser that can work as a social hub from the first moment that you start it up? If you love the idea of a browser that is ready to go out of the box then join us as we look at Flock. During the Install Process When you are installing Flock there are two install windows that you should watch for. The first one lets you choose between the “Express Setup & Custom Setup”. We recommend the “Custom Setup”. Once you have selected the “Custom Setup” you can choose which of the following options will enabled. Notice the “anonymous usage statistics” option at the bottom…you can choose to leave this enabled or disable it based on your comfort level. The First Look When you start Flock up for the first time it will open with three tabs. All three are of interest…especially if this is your first time using Flock. With the first tab you can jump right into “logging in/activating” favorite social services within Flock. This page is set to display each time that you open Flock unless you deselect the option in the lower left corner. The second tab provides a very nice overview of Flock and its’ built-in social management power. The third and final page can be considered a “Personal Page”. You can make some changes to the content displayed for quick and easy access and/or monitoring “Twitter Search, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, Friend Activity, & Favorite Sites”. Use the “Widget Menu” in the upper left corner to select the “Personal Page Components” that you would like to use. In the upper right corner there is a built-in “Search Bar” and buttons for “Posting to Your Blog & Uploading Media”. To help personalize the “My World Page” just a bit more you can even change the text to your name or whatever best suits your needs. The Flock Toolbar The “Flock Toolbar” is full of social account management goodness. In order from left to right the buttons are: My World (Homepage), Open People Sidebar, Open Media Bar, Open Feeds Sidebar, Webmail, Open Favorites Sidebar, Open Accounts and Services Sidebar, Open Web Clipboard Sidebar, Open Blog Editor, & Open Photo Uploader. The buttons will be “highlighted” with a blue background to help indicate which area you are in. The first area will display a listing of people that you are watching/following at the services shown here. Clicking on the “Media Bar Button” will display the following “Media Slider Bar” above your “Tab Bar”. Notice that there is a built-in “Search Bar” on the right side. Any photos, etc. clicked on will be opened in the currently focused tab below the “Media Bar”. Here is a listing of the “Media Streams” available for viewing. By default Flock will come with a small selection of pre-subscribed RSS Feeds. You can easily unsubscribe, rearrange, add custom folders, or non-categorized feeds as desired. RSS Feeds subscribed to here can be viewed combined together as a single feed (clickable links) in the “My World Page”. or can be viewed individually in a new tab. Very nice! Next on the “Flock Toolbar is the “Webmail Button”. You can set up access to your favorite “Yahoo!, Gmail, & AOL Mail” accounts from here. The “Favorites Sidebar” combines your “Browser History & Bookmarks” into one convenient location. The “Accounts and Services Sidebar” gives you quick and easy access to get logged into your favorite social accounts. Clicking on any of the links will open that particular service’s login page in a new tab. Want to store items such as photos, links, and text to add into a blog post or tweet later on? Just drag and drop them into the “Web Clipboard Sidebar” for later access. Clicking on the “Blog Editor Button” will open up a separate blogging window to compose your posts in. If you have not logged into or set up an account yet in Flock you will see the following message window. The “Blogging Window”…nice, simple, and straightforward. If you are not already logged into your photo account(s) then you will see the following message window when you click on the “Photo Uploader Button”. Clicking “OK” will open the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” with compatible photo services highlighted in a light yellow color. Log in to your favorite service to start uploading all those great images. After Setting Up Here is what our browser looked like after setting up some of our favorite services. The Twitter feed is certainly looking nice and easy to read through… Some tweaking in the “RSS Feeds Sidebar” makes for a perfect reading experience. Keeping up with our e-mail is certainly easy to do too. A look back at the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” shows that all of our accounts are actively logged in (green dot on the right side). Going back to our “My World Page” you can see how nice everything looks for monitoring our “Friend Activity & Favorite Feeds”. Moving on to regular browsing everything is looking very good… Flock is a perfect choice for anyone wanting a browser and social hub all built into a single app. Conclusion Anyone who loves keeping up with their favorite social services while browsing will find using Flock to be a wonderful experience. You literally get the best of both worlds with this browser. Links Download Flock The Official Flock Extensions Homepage The Official Flock Toolbar Homepage Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow to use an ISO image on Ubuntu LinuxAdvertise on How-To GeekFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Converting projects to use Automatic NuGet restore

  - by terje

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/terje/archive/2014/06/11/converting-projects-to-use-automatic-nuget-restore.aspxDownload tool In version 2.7 of NuGet automatic nuget restore was introduced, meaning you no longer need to distort your msbuild project files with nuget target information.   Visual Studio and TFS 2013 build have this enabled by default.  However, if your project was created before this was introduced, and/or if you have used the “Enable NuGet Package Restore” afterwards, you now have a series of unwanted things in your projects, and a series of project files that have been modified – and – you no longer neither want nor need this !  You might also get into some unwanted issues due to these modifications.  This is a MSBuild modification that was needed only before NuGet 2.7 ! So: DON’T USE THIS FUNCTION !!! There is an issue https://nuget.codeplex.com/workitem/4019 on this on the NuGet project site to get this function removed, renamed or at least moved farther away from the top level (please help vote it up!).  The response seems to be that it WILL BE removed, around version 3.0. This function does nothing you need after the introduction of NuGet 2.7.  What is also unfortunate is the naming of it – it implies that it is needed, it is not, and what is worse, there is no corresponding function to remove what it does ! So to fix this use the tool named IFix, that will fix this issue for you   - all free of course, and the code is open source.  Also report issues there:  https://github.com/OsirisTerje/IFix    IFix information DOWNLOAD HERE This command line tool installs using an MSI, and add itself to the system path.  If you work in a team, you will probably need to use the  tool multiple times.  Anyone in the team may at any time use the “Enable NuGet Package Restore” function and mess up your project again.  The IFix program can be run either in a  check modus, where it does not write anything back – it only checks if you have any issues, or in a Fix mode, where it will also perform the necessary fixes for you. The IFix program is used like this: IFix <command> [-c/--check] [-f/--fix]  [-v/--verbose] The command in this case is “nugetrestore”.  It will do a check from the location where it is being called, and run through all subfolders from that location. So  “IFix nugetrestore  --check” , will do the check ,  and “IFix nugetrestore  --fix”  will perform the changes, for all files and folders below the current working directory. (Note that --check  can be replaced with only –c, and --fix with –f, and so on. ) BEWARE: When you run the fix option, all solutions to be affected must be closed in Visual Studio ! So, if you just want to DO it, then: IFix nugetrestore --check to see if you have issues then IFix nugetrestore  --fix to fix them. How does it work IFix nugetrestore  checks and optionally fixes four issues that the older enabling of nuget restore did.  The issues are related to the MSBuild projess, and are: Deleting the nuget.targets file. Deleting the nuget.exe that is located under the .nuget folder Removing all references to nuget.targets in the solution file Removing all properties and target imports of nuget.targets inside the csproj files. IFix fixes these issues in the same sequence. The first step, removing the nuget.targets file is the most critical one, and all instances of the nuget.targets file within the scope of a solution has to be removed, and in addition it has to be done with the solution closed in Visual Studio.  If Visual Studio finds a nuget.targets file, the csproj files will be automatically messed up again. This means the removal process above might need to be done multiple times, specially when you’re working with a team, and that solution context menu still has the “Enable NuGet Package Restore” function.  Someone on the team might inadvertently do this at any time. It can be a good idea to add this check to a checkin policy – if you run TFS standard version control, but that will have no effect if you use TFS Git version control of course. So, better be prepared to run the IFix check from time to time. Or, even better, install IFix on your build servers, and add a call to IFix nugetrestore --check in the TFS Build script.    How does it look As a first example I have run the IFix program from the top of a set of git repositories, so it spans multiple repositories with multiple solutions. The result from the check option is as follows: We see the four red lines, there is one for each of the four checks we talked about in the previous section. The fact that they are red, means we have that particular issue. The first section (above the first red text line) is the nuget targets section.  Notice  No.1, it says it has found no paths to copy.  What IFix does here is to check if there are any defined paths to other nuget galleries.  If there are, then those are copied over to the nuget.config file, where is where it should be in version 2.7 and above.   No.2 says it has found the particular nuget.targets file,  No.3  states it HAS found some other nuget galleries defines in the targets file, which then it would like to copy to the config.file. No.4 is the section for nuget.exe files, and list those it has found, and which it would like to delete. No 5 states it has found a reference to nuget.targets in the solution file.  This reference comes from the fact that the .nuget folder is a solution folder, and the items within are described in the solution file. It then checks the csproj files, and as can be seen from the last red line, it ha found issues in 96 out of 198 csproj files.  There are two possible issues in a csproj files.  No.6 is the first one, and the most common and most important one, an “Import project” section.  This is the section that calls the nuget.targets files.  No.7 is another issue, which seems to sometimes be there, sometimes not, it is a RestorePackages property, which also should go away. Now, if we run the IFix nugetrestore –fix command, and then the check again after that, the result is: All green !

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• The SSIS tuning tip that everyone misses

  - by Rob Farley

  I know that everyone misses this, because I’m yet to find someone who doesn’t have a bit of an epiphany when I describe this. When tuning Data Flows in SQL Server Integration Services, people see the Data Flow as moving from the Source to the Destination, passing through a number of transformations. What people don’t consider is the Source, getting the data out of a database. Remember, the source of data for your Data Flow is not your Source Component. It’s wherever the data is, within your database, probably on a disk somewhere. You need to tune your query to optimise it for SSIS, and this is what most people fail to do. I’m not suggesting that people don’t tune their queries – there’s plenty of information out there about making sure that your queries run as fast as possible. But for SSIS, it’s not about how fast your query runs. Let me say that again, but in bolder text: The speed of an SSIS Source is not about how fast your query runs. If your query is used in a Source component for SSIS, the thing that matters is how fast it starts returning data. In particular, those first 10,000 rows to populate that first buffer, ready to pass down the rest of the transformations on its way to the Destination. Let’s look at a very simple query as an example, using the AdventureWorks database: We’re picking the different Weight values out of the Product table, and it’s doing this by scanning the table and doing a Sort. It’s a Distinct Sort, which means that the duplicates are discarded. It'll be no surprise to see that the data produced is sorted. Obvious, I know, but I'm making a comparison to what I'll do later. Before I explain the problem here, let me jump back into the SSIS world... If you’ve investigated how to tune an SSIS flow, then you’ll know that some SSIS Data Flow Transformations are known to be Blocking, some are Partially Blocking, and some are simply Row transformations. Take the SSIS Sort transformation, for example. I’m using a larger data set for this, because my small list of Weights won’t demonstrate it well enough. Seven buffers of data came out of the source, but none of them could be pushed past the Sort operator, just in case the last buffer contained the data that would be sorted into the first buffer. This is a blocking operation. Back in the land of T-SQL, we consider our Distinct Sort operator. It’s also blocking. It won’t let data through until it’s seen all of it. If you weren’t okay with blocking operations in SSIS, why would you be happy with them in an execution plan? The source of your data is not your OLE DB Source. Remember this. The source of your data is the NCIX/CIX/Heap from which it’s being pulled. Picture it like this... the data flowing from the Clustered Index, through the Distinct Sort operator, into the SELECT operator, where a series of SSIS Buffers are populated, flowing (as they get full) down through the SSIS transformations. Alright, I know that I’m taking some liberties here, because the two queries aren’t the same, but consider the visual. The data is flowing from your disk and through your execution plan before it reaches SSIS, so you could easily find that a blocking operation in your plan is just as painful as a blocking operation in your SSIS Data Flow. Luckily, T-SQL gives us a brilliant query hint to help avoid this. OPTION (FAST 10000) This hint means that it will choose a query which will optimise for the first 10,000 rows – the default SSIS buffer size. And the effect can be quite significant. First let’s consider a simple example, then we’ll look at a larger one. Consider our weights. We don’t have 10,000, so I’m going to use OPTION (FAST 1) instead. You’ll notice that the query is more expensive, using a Flow Distinct operator instead of the Distinct Sort. This operator is consuming 84% of the query, instead of the 59% we saw from the Distinct Sort. But the first row could be returned quicker – a Flow Distinct operator is non-blocking. The data here isn’t sorted, of course. It’s in the same order that it came out of the index, just with duplicates removed. As soon as a Flow Distinct sees a value that it hasn’t come across before, it pushes it out to the operator on its left. It still has to maintain the list of what it’s seen so far, but by handling it one row at a time, it can push rows through quicker. Overall, it’s a lot more work than the Distinct Sort, but if the priority is the first few rows, then perhaps that’s exactly what we want. The Query Optimizer seems to do this by optimising the query as if there were only one row coming through: This 1 row estimation is caused by the Query Optimizer imagining the SELECT operation saying “Give me one row” first, and this message being passed all the way along. The request might not make it all the way back to the source, but in my simple example, it does. I hope this simple example has helped you understand the significance of the blocking operator. Now I’m going to show you an example on a much larger data set. This data was fetching about 780,000 rows, and these are the Estimated Plans. The data needed to be Sorted, to support further SSIS operations that needed that. First, without the hint. ...and now with OPTION (FAST 10000): A very different plan, I’m sure you’ll agree. In case you’re curious, those arrows in the top one are 780,000 rows in size. In the second, they’re estimated to be 10,000, although the Actual figures end up being 780,000. The top one definitely runs faster. It finished several times faster than the second one. With the amount of data being considered, these numbers were in minutes. Look at the second one – it’s doing Nested Loops, across 780,000 rows! That’s not generally recommended at all. That’s “Go and make yourself a coffee” time. In this case, it was about six or seven minutes. The faster one finished in about a minute. But in SSIS-land, things are different. The particular data flow that was consuming this data was significant. It was being pumped into a Script Component to process each row based on previous rows, creating about a dozen different flows. The data flow would take roughly ten minutes to run – ten minutes from when the data first appeared. The query that completes faster – chosen by the Query Optimizer with no hints, based on accurate statistics (rather than pretending the numbers are smaller) – would take a minute to start getting the data into SSIS, at which point the ten-minute flow would start, taking eleven minutes to complete. The query that took longer – chosen by the Query Optimizer pretending it only wanted the first 10,000 rows – would take only ten seconds to fill the first buffer. Despite the fact that it might have taken the database another six or seven minutes to get the data out, SSIS didn’t care. Every time it wanted the next buffer of data, it was already available, and the whole process finished in about ten minutes and ten seconds. When debugging SSIS, you run the package, and sit there waiting to see the Debug information start appearing. You look for the numbers on the data flow, and seeing operators going Yellow and Green. Without the hint, I’d sit there for a minute. With the hint, just ten seconds. You can imagine which one I preferred. By adding this hint, it felt like a magic wand had been waved across the query, to make it run several times faster. It wasn’t the case at all – but it felt like it to SSIS.

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• How-to delete a tree node using the context menu

  - by frank.nimphius

  Hierarchical trees in Oracle ADF make use of View Accessors, which means that only the top level node needs to be exposed as a View Object instance on the ADF Business Components Data Model. This also means that only the top level node has a representation in the PageDef file as a tree binding and iterator binding reference. Detail nodes are accessed through tree rule definitions that use the accessor mentioned above (or nested collections in the case of POJO or EJB business services). The tree component is configured for single node selection, which however can be declaratively changed for users to press the ctrl key and selecting multiple nodes. In the following, I explain how to create a context menu on the tree for users to delete the selected tree nodes. For this, the context menu item will access a managed bean, which then determines the selected node(s), the internal ADF node bindings and the rows they represent. As mentioned, the ADF Business Components Data Model only needs to expose the top level node data sources, which in this example is an instance of the Locations View Object. For the tree to work, you need to have associations defined between entities, which usually is done for you by Oracle JDeveloper if the database tables have foreign keys defined Note: As a general hint of best practices and to simplify your life: Make sure your database schema is well defined and designed before starting your development project. Don't treat the database as something organic that grows and changes with the requirements as you proceed in your project. Business service refactoring in response to database changes is possible, but should be treated as an exception, not the rule. Good database design is a necessity – even for application developers – and nothing evil. To create the tree component, expand the Data Controls panel and drag the View Object collection to the view. From the context menu, select the tree component entry and continue with defining the tree rules that make up the hierarchical structure. As you see, when pressing the green plus icon  in the Edit Tree Binding  dialog, the data structure, Locations -  Departments – Employees in my sample, shows without you having created a View Object instance for each of the nodes in the ADF Business Components Data Model. After you configured the tree structure in the Edit Tree Binding dialog, you press OK and the tree is created. Select the tree in the page editor and open the Structure Window (ctrl+shift+S). In the Structure window, expand the tree node to access the conextMenu facet. Use the right mouse button to insert a Popup  into the facet. Repeat the same steps to insert a Menu and a Menu Item into the Popup you created. The Menu item text should be changed to something meaningful like "Delete". Note that the custom menu item later is added to the context menu together with the default context menu options like expand and expand all. To define the action that is executed when the menu item is clicked on, you select the Action Listener property in the Property Inspector and click the arrow icon followed by the Edit menu option. Create or select a managed bean and define a method name for the action handler. Next, select the tree component and browse to its binding property in the Property Inspector. Again, use the arrow icon | Edit option to create a component binding in the same managed bean that has the action listener defined. The tree handle is used in the action listener code, which is shown below: public void onTreeNodeDelete(ActionEvent actionEvent) {   //access the tree from the JSF component reference created   //using the af:tree "binding" property. The "binding" property   //creates a pair of set/get methods to access the RichTree instance   RichTree tree = this.getTreeHandler();   //get the list of selected row keys   RowKeySet rks = tree.getSelectedRowKeys();   //access the iterator to loop over selected nodes   Iterator rksIterator = rks.iterator();          //The CollectionModel represents the tree model and is   //accessed from the tree "value" property   CollectionModel model = (CollectionModel) tree.getValue();   //The CollectionModel is a wrapper for the ADF tree binding   //class, which is JUCtrlHierBinding   JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding =                  (JUCtrlHierBinding) model.getWrappedData();          //loop over the selected nodes and delete the rows they   //represent   while(rksIterator.hasNext()){     List nodeKey = (List) rksIterator.next();     //find the ADF node binding using the node key     JUCtrlHierNodeBinding node =                       treeBinding.findNodeByKeyPath(nodeKey);     //delete the row.     Row rw = node.getRow();       rw.remove();   }          //only refresh the tree if tree nodes have been selected   if(rks.size() > 0){     AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext =                          AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance();     adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(tree);   } } Note: To enable multi node selection for a tree, select the tree and change the row selection setting from "single" to "multiple". Note: a fully pictured version of this post will become available at the end of the month in a PDF summary on ADF Code Corner : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/index-101235.html 

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• Open GL stars are not rendering

  - by Darestium

  I doing Nehe's Open GL Lesson 9. I'm using SFML for windowing, the strange thing is no stars are rendering. #include <SFML/System.hpp> #include <SFML/Window.hpp> #include <SFML/Graphics.hpp> #include <iostream> void processEvents(sf::Window *app); void processInput(sf::Window *app); void renderGlScene(sf::Window *app); void init(); int loadResources(); const int NUM_OF_STARS = 50; float triRot = 0.0f; float quadRot = 0.0f; bool twinkle = false; bool tKey = false; float zoom = 15.0f; float tilt = 90.0f; float spin = 0.0f; unsigned int loop; unsigned int texture_handle[1]; typedef struct { int r, g, b; float distance; float angle; } stars; stars star[NUM_OF_STARS]; int main() { sf::Window app(sf::VideoMode(800, 600, 32), "Nehe Lesson 9"); app.UseVerticalSync(false); init(); if (loadResources() == -1) { return EXIT_FAILURE; } while (app.IsOpened()) { processEvents(&app); processInput(&app); renderGlScene(&app); app.Display(); } return EXIT_SUCCESS; } int loadResources() { sf::Image img_data; // Load Texture if (!img_data.LoadFromFile("data/images/star.bmp")) { std::cout << "Could not load data/images/star.bmp"; return -1; } // Generate 1 texture glGenTextures(1, &texture_handle[0]); // Linear filtering glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_handle[0]); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, img_data.GetWidth(), img_data.GetHeight(), 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, img_data.GetPixelsPtr()); return 0; } void processInput(sf::Window *app) { const sf::Input& input = app->GetInput(); if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::T) && !tKey) { tKey = true; twinkle = !twinkle; } if (!input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::T)) { tKey = false; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Up)) { tilt -= 0.05f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Down)) { tilt += 0.05f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::PageUp)) { zoom -= 0.02f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Up)) { zoom += 0.02f; } } void init() { glClearDepth(1.f); glClearColor(0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f); // Enable texturing glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); //glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); // Setup a perpective projection glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); gluPerspective(45.f, 1.f, 1.f, 500.f); glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE); glEnable(GL_BLEND); for (loop = 0; loop < NUM_OF_STARS; loop++) { star[loop].distance = (float)loop / NUM_OF_STARS * 5.0f; // Calculate distance from the centre // Give stars random rgb value star[loop].r = rand() % 256; star[loop].g = rand() % 256; star[loop].b = rand() % 256; } } void processEvents(sf::Window *app) { sf::Event event; while (app->GetEvent(event)) { if (event.Type == sf::Event::Closed) { app->Close(); } if (event.Type == sf::Event::KeyPressed && event.Key.Code == sf::Key::Escape) { app->Close(); } } } void renderGlScene(sf::Window *app) { app->SetActive(); // Clear color depth buffer glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // Apply some transformations glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // Select texture glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_handle[0]); for (loop = 0; loop < NUM_OF_STARS; loop++) { glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The View Before We Draw Each Star glTranslatef(0.0f, 0.0f, zoom); // Zoom Into The Screen (Using The Value In 'zoom') glRotatef(tilt, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Tilt The View (Using The Value In 'tilt') glRotatef(star[loop].angle, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Rotate To The Current Stars Angle glTranslatef(star[loop].distance, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Move Forward On The X Plane glRotatef(-star[loop].angle,0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Cancel The Current Stars Angle glRotatef(-tilt,1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Cancel The Screen Tilt if (twinkle) { glColor4ub(star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop) - 1].r, star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop)-1].g, star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop) - 1].b, 255); glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Begin Drawing The Textured Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glEnd(); // Done Drawing The Textured Quad } glRotatef(spin,0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Rotate The Star On The Z Axis // Assign A Color Using Bytes glColor4ub(star[loop].r, star[loop].g, star[loop].b, 255); glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Begin Drawing The Textured Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glEnd(); // Done Drawing The Textured Quad spin += 0.01f; // Used To Spin The Stars star[loop].angle += (float)loop / NUM_OF_STARS; // Changes The Angle Of A Star star[loop].distance -= 0.01f; // Changes The Distance Of A Star if (star[loop].distance < 0.0f) { star[loop].distance += 5.0f; // Move The Star 5 Units From The Center star[loop].r = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Red Value star[loop].g = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Green Value star[loop].b = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Blue Value } } } I've looked over the code atleast 10 times now and I can't figure out the problem. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• Refactoring Part 1 : Intuitive Investments

  - by Wes McClure

  Fear, it’s what turns maintaining applications into a nightmare.  Technology moves on, teams move on, someone is left to operate the application, what was green is now perceived brown.  Eventually the business will evolve and changes will need to be made.  The approach to those changes often dictates the long term viability of the application.  Fear of change, lack of passion and a lack of interest in understanding the domain often leads to a paranoia to do anything that doesn’t involve duct tape and bailing twine.  Don’t get me wrong, those have a place in the short term viability of a project but they don’t have a place in the long term.  Add to it “us versus them” in regards to the original team and those that maintain it, internal politics and other factors and you have a recipe for disaster.  This results in code that quickly becomes unmanageable.  Even the most clever of designs will eventually become sub optimal and debt will amount that exponentially makes changes difficult.  This is where refactoring comes in, and it’s something I’m very passionate about.  Refactoring is about improving the process whereby we make change, it’s an exponential investment in the process of change. Without it we will incur exponential complexity that halts productivity. Investments, especially in the long term, require intuition and reflection.  How can we tackle new development effectively via evolving the original design and paying off debt that has been incurred? The longer we wait to ask and answer this question, the more it will cost us.  Small requests don’t warrant big changes, but realizing when changes now will pay off in the long term, and especially in the short term, is valuable. I have done my fair share of maintaining applications and continuously refactoring as needed, but recently I’ve begun work on a project that hasn’t had much debt, if any, paid down in years.  This is the first in a series of blog posts to try to capture the process which is largely driven by intuition of smaller refactorings from other projects. Signs that refactoring could help: Testability How can decreasing test time not pay dividends? One of the first things I found was that a very important piece often takes 30+ minutes to test.  I can only imagine how much time this has cost historically, but more importantly the time it might cost in the coming weeks: I estimate at least 10-20 hours per person!  This is simply unacceptable for almost any situation.  As it turns out, about 6 hours of working with this part of the application and I was able to cut the time down to under 30 seconds!  In less than the lost time of one week, I was able to fix the problem for all future weeks! If we can’t test fast then we can’t change fast, nor with confidence. Code is used by end users and it’s also used by developers, consider your own needs in terms of the code base.  Adding logic to enable/disable features during testing can help decouple parts of an application and lead to massive improvements.  What exactly is so wrong about test code in real code?  Often, these become features for operators and sometimes end users.  If you cannot run an integration test within a test runner in your IDE, it’s time to refactor. Readability Are variables named meaningfully via a ubiquitous language? Is the code segmented functionally or behaviorally so as to minimize the complexity of any one area? Are aspects properly segmented to avoid confusion (security, logging, transactions, translations, dependency management etc) Is the code declarative (what) or imperative (how)?  What matters, not how.  LINQ is a great abstraction of the what, not how, of collection manipulation.  The Reactive framework is a great example of the what, not how, of managing streams of data. Are constants abstracted and named, or are they just inline? Do people constantly bitch about the code/design? If the code is hard to understand, it will be hard to change with confidence.  It’s a large undertaking if the original designers didn’t pay much attention to readability and as such will never be done to “completion.”  Make sure not to go over board, instead use this as you change an application, not in lieu of changes (like with testability). Complexity Simplicity will never be achieved, it’s highly subjective.  That said, a lot of code can be significantly simplified, tidy it up as you go.  Refactoring will often converge upon a simplification step after enough time, keep an eye out for this. Understandability In the process of changing code, one often gains a better understanding of it.  Refactoring code is a good way to learn how it works.  However, it’s usually best in combination with other reasons, in effect killing two birds with one stone.  Often this is done when readability is poor, in which case understandability is usually poor as well.  In the large undertaking we are making with this legacy application, we will be replacing it.  Therefore, understanding all of its features is important and this refactoring technique will come in very handy. Unused code How can deleting things not help? This is a freebie in refactoring, it’s very easy to detect with modern tools, especially in statically typed languages.  We have VCS for a reason, if in doubt, delete it out (ok that was cheesy)! If you don’t know where to start when refactoring, this is an excellent starting point! Duplication Do not pray and sacrifice to the anti-duplication gods, there are excellent examples where consolidated code is a horrible idea, usually with divergent domains.  That said, mediocre developers live by copy/paste.  Other times features converge and aren’t combined.  Tools for finding similar code are great in the example of copy/paste problems.  Knowledge of the domain helps identify convergent concepts that often lead to convergent solutions and will give intuition for where to look for conceptual repetition. 80/20 and the Boy Scouts It’s often said that 80% of the time 20% of the application is used most.  These tend to be the parts that are changed.  There are also parts of the code where 80% of the time is spent changing 20% (probably for all the refactoring smells above).  I focus on these areas any time I make a change and follow the philosophy of the Boy Scout in cleaning up more than I messed up.  If I spend 2 hours changing an application, in the 20%, I’ll always spend at least 15 minutes cleaning it or nearby areas. This gives a huge productivity edge on developers that don’t. Ironically after a short period of time the 20% shrinks enough that we don’t have to spend 80% of our time there and can move on to other areas.   Refactoring is highly subjective, never attempt to refactor to completion!  Learn to be comfortable with leaving one part of the application in a better state than others.  It’s an evolution, not a revolution.  These are some simple areas to look into when making changes and can help get one started in the process.  I’ve often found that refactoring is a convergent process towards simplicity that sometimes spans a few hours but often can lead to massive simplifications over the timespan of weeks and months of regular development.

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• GLSL: Strange light reflections [Solved]

  - by Tom

  According to this tutorial I'm trying to make a normal mapping using GLSL, but something is wrong and I can't find the solution. The output render is in this image: Image1 in this image is a plane with two triangles and each of it is different illuminated (that is bad). The plane has 6 vertices. In the upper left side of this plane are 2 identical vertices (same in the lower right). Here are some vectors same for each vertice: normal vector = 0, 1, 0 (red lines on image) tangent vector = 0, 0,-1 (green lines on image) bitangent vector = -1, 0, 0 (blue lines on image) here I have one question: The two identical vertices does need to have the same tangent and bitangent? I have tried to make other values to the tangents but the effect was still similar. Here are my shaders Vertex shader: #version 130 // Input vertex data, different for all executions of this shader. in vec3 vertexPosition_modelspace; in vec2 vertexUV; in vec3 vertexNormal_modelspace; in vec3 vertexTangent_modelspace; in vec3 vertexBitangent_modelspace; // Output data ; will be interpolated for each fragment. out vec2 UV; out vec3 Position_worldspace; out vec3 EyeDirection_cameraspace; out vec3 LightDirection_cameraspace; out vec3 LightDirection_tangentspace; out vec3 EyeDirection_tangentspace; // Values that stay constant for the whole mesh. uniform mat4 MVP; uniform mat4 V; uniform mat4 M; uniform mat3 MV3x3; uniform vec3 LightPosition_worldspace; void main(){ // Output position of the vertex, in clip space : MVP * position gl_Position = MVP * vec4(vertexPosition_modelspace,1); // Position of the vertex, in worldspace : M * position Position_worldspace = (M * vec4(vertexPosition_modelspace,1)).xyz; // Vector that goes from the vertex to the camera, in camera space. // In camera space, the camera is at the origin (0,0,0). vec3 vertexPosition_cameraspace = ( V * M * vec4(vertexPosition_modelspace,1)).xyz; EyeDirection_cameraspace = vec3(0,0,0) - vertexPosition_cameraspace; // Vector that goes from the vertex to the light, in camera space. M is ommited because it's identity. vec3 LightPosition_cameraspace = ( V * vec4(LightPosition_worldspace,1)).xyz; LightDirection_cameraspace = LightPosition_cameraspace + EyeDirection_cameraspace; // UV of the vertex. No special space for this one. UV = vertexUV; // model to camera = ModelView vec3 vertexTangent_cameraspace = MV3x3 * vertexTangent_modelspace; vec3 vertexBitangent_cameraspace = MV3x3 * vertexBitangent_modelspace; vec3 vertexNormal_cameraspace = MV3x3 * vertexNormal_modelspace; mat3 TBN = transpose(mat3( vertexTangent_cameraspace, vertexBitangent_cameraspace, vertexNormal_cameraspace )); // You can use dot products instead of building this matrix and transposing it. See References for details. LightDirection_tangentspace = TBN * LightDirection_cameraspace; EyeDirection_tangentspace = TBN * EyeDirection_cameraspace; } Fragment shader: #version 130 // Interpolated values from the vertex shaders in vec2 UV; in vec3 Position_worldspace; in vec3 EyeDirection_cameraspace; in vec3 LightDirection_cameraspace; in vec3 LightDirection_tangentspace; in vec3 EyeDirection_tangentspace; // Ouput data out vec3 color; // Values that stay constant for the whole mesh. uniform sampler2D DiffuseTextureSampler; uniform sampler2D NormalTextureSampler; uniform sampler2D SpecularTextureSampler; uniform mat4 V; uniform mat4 M; uniform mat3 MV3x3; uniform vec3 LightPosition_worldspace; void main(){ // Light emission properties // You probably want to put them as uniforms vec3 LightColor = vec3(1,1,1); float LightPower = 40.0; // Material properties vec3 MaterialDiffuseColor = texture2D( DiffuseTextureSampler, vec2(UV.x,-UV.y) ).rgb; vec3 MaterialAmbientColor = vec3(0.1,0.1,0.1) * MaterialDiffuseColor; //vec3 MaterialSpecularColor = texture2D( SpecularTextureSampler, UV ).rgb * 0.3; vec3 MaterialSpecularColor = vec3(0.5,0.5,0.5); // Local normal, in tangent space. V tex coordinate is inverted because normal map is in TGA (not in DDS) for better quality vec3 TextureNormal_tangentspace = normalize(texture2D( NormalTextureSampler, vec2(UV.x,-UV.y) ).rgb*2.0 - 1.0); // Distance to the light float distance = length( LightPosition_worldspace - Position_worldspace ); // Normal of the computed fragment, in camera space vec3 n = TextureNormal_tangentspace; // Direction of the light (from the fragment to the light) vec3 l = normalize(LightDirection_tangentspace); // Cosine of the angle between the normal and the light direction, // clamped above 0 // - light is at the vertical of the triangle -> 1 // - light is perpendicular to the triangle -> 0 // - light is behind the triangle -> 0 float cosTheta = clamp( dot( n,l ), 0,1 ); // Eye vector (towards the camera) vec3 E = normalize(EyeDirection_tangentspace); // Direction in which the triangle reflects the light vec3 R = reflect(-l,n); // Cosine of the angle between the Eye vector and the Reflect vector, // clamped to 0 // - Looking into the reflection -> 1 // - Looking elsewhere -> < 1 float cosAlpha = clamp( dot( E,R ), 0,1 ); color = // Ambient : simulates indirect lighting MaterialAmbientColor + // Diffuse : "color" of the object MaterialDiffuseColor * LightColor * LightPower * cosTheta / (distance*distance) + // Specular : reflective highlight, like a mirror MaterialSpecularColor * LightColor * LightPower * pow(cosAlpha,5) / (distance*distance); //color.xyz = E; //color.xyz = LightDirection_tangentspace; //color.xyz = EyeDirection_tangentspace; } I have replaced the original color value by EyeDirection_tangentspace vector and then I got other strange effect but I can not link the image (not eunogh reputation) Is it possible that with this shaders is something wrong, or maybe in other place in my code e.g with my matrices?

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• Agilist, Heal Thyself!

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 28, 2012Popular ReleasesWPUtils: WPUtils 1.2: Just fixed an issue related to isolated storage path for ChoosePhotoBehavior. Specifically CreateDirectory method only accepts relative path, but was given a "/photos/" path which would result in exception. Please make sure you have this fix if you are using ChoosePhotoBehavior! NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.TFS Timesheets: TFS Timesheets 2.0: New features: Visual Studio 2012 support Bug fixes: Scaling mode inherited rather than font scalingCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogFree Aspx Image Gallery: Free Aspx Image Gallery Release V1: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): ExcelDocConverter 0.1 Beta: Initial Release Microsoft Excel Documents Converter. Microsoft Excel 1997-2003 (XLS) Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) Portable Document Format (PDF) Microsoft XPS Document (XPS) Difference between NET2.0 and NET3.5 This program uses .NET Framework runtime library to run. Basically, they are no differences. Only the runtime library version is different. For older computers, i.e. Windows XP, might not have .NET Framework 3.5 installed, then use NET2.0 in stead. But, some Windows XP SP2 mig...Office File Properties: Office File Properties 3.3.1: Bug fix. Convert file extension to lowercase before checking.LoBDb.NET: LoBDb.NET 1.0.9: Centido.Core library: 1) SQL Server script bug fix: an error when changing the MaxLength property of an indexed string column or when changing the Precision-Scale properties of a decimal column. LobDb.NET Manager: 1) Changing the Precision, Scale, Default Value, Minimum and Maximum properties of a decimal column now enables the Save button. 2) The MaxLength property of a string column and the Precision+Scale values of a decimal column are now displayed in the column list. 3) Changing the Min...Chaos games: Chaos games: Small app for generating fractals using chaos gamesVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource: Version 1.1 Alpha 2: The component uses now the Google API V2.4 including the management API.MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.0: VS2012 support is alphaBlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...New ProjectsChaos games: Small app to generating fractals using chaos gamesDocument Digitalization System: This system will allow the users with on one or more PCs to digitalize pdf files and store it or export it to other file formats.ExternalTokenAnalysisOffline: SPUser?UserToken????????????????。FinalProjectSeniorProject: ***Unfinished*** Senior project build GL Ponpes Selamat Kendal: Aplikasi Akuntansi Sekolah Pondok Pesantren Modern Selamat KendalHealth Care Manager: One of keynote planned for the Brazzaville Microsoft event coming soon.Orchard Commerce History with PayPal: Project expands on Nwazet.Commerce module (and is required for this module to work). Adds a purchase history, product role associations, and PayPal.PDF.NET: PWMIS ?????? Ver 4.5 ???? SMS Egypt: This project is intended to make it easy for people to send SMS to their customers using SMS gateways inside and outside Egypt. Strong Caml: Use the familiar CAML syntax, but now do it in strongly-typed, dynamic code. Just follow Visual Studio's IntelliSense, and your CAML query can't go wrong!TrainingFrameWork: TrainingFrameWork

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• SOA Suite Integration: Part 3: Loading files

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the most common scenarios in SOA Integration is the loading of a file into the product from an external source. In Oracle SOA Suite there is a File Adapter that can process many file types into your BPEL process. For this example I will use the File Adapter to load a file of user and emails to update the user object within the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. Remember you can repeat this process with other objects and other file types. Again I am illustrating the ease of integration. The first thing is to create an empty BPEL process that will hold our flow. In Oracle JDeveloper this can be achieved by specifying the Define Service Later template (as other templates have predefined inputs and outputs and in this case we want to specify those). So I will create simpleFileLoad process to house our process. You will start with an empty canvas so you need to first specify the load part of the process using the File Adapter. Select the File Adapter from the Component Palette under BPEL Services and drag and drop it to the left side Partner Links (left is input). You name the Service. In this case I chose LoadFile. Press Next. We will define the interface as part of the wizard so select Define from operation and schema (specified later). Press Next. We are going to choose Read File to denote that we will read the file and specify the default Operation Name as Read. Press Next. The next step is to tell the Adapter the location of the files, how to process them and what to do with them after they have been processed. I am using hardcoded locations in this example but you can have logical locations as well. Press Next. I am now going to tell the adapter how to recognize the files I want to load. In my case I am using CSV files and more importantly I am tell the adapter to run the process for each record in the file it encounters. Press Next. Now, I tell the adapter how often I want to poll for the files. I have taken the defaults. Press Next. At this stage I have no explanation of the format of the input. So I am going to invoke the Native Format Wizard which will guide me through the process of creating the file input format. Clicking the purple cog icon will start the wizard. After an introduction screen (not shown), you specify the format of the input file. The File Adapter supports multiple format types. For this example, I will use Delimited as I am going to load a CSV file. Press Next. The best way for the wizard to work is with a sample. I have a sample file and the wizard will ask how much of the file to use as a template. I will use the defaults. Note: If you are using a language that has other languages other than US-ASCII, it is at this point you specify the character set to use.  Press Next. The sample contains multiple instances of a single record type. The wizard supports complex types as well. We will use the appropriate setting for our file. Press Next. You have to specify the file element and the record element. This will be used by the input wizard to translate the CSV data into an XML structure (this will make sense later). I am using LoadUsers as my file delimiter (root element) and User Record as my record root element. Press Next. As the file is CSV the delimiter is "," so I will also specify that the End Of Line (EOL) indicator indicates the end of a record. Press Next. Up until this point your have not given the columns their names. In my case my sample includes the column names in the first record. This is not always the case but you can specify the names and formats of columns in this dialog (not shown). Press Next. The wizard now generates the schema for the input file. You can specify a name for the schema. I have used userupdate.xsd. We want to verify the schema so press Test. You can test the schema by specifying an input sample. and pressing the green play button. You will see the delimiters you specified earlier for the file and the records. Press Ok to continue. A confirmation screen will be displayed showing you the location of the schema in your project. Press Finish to return to the File Adapter configuration. You will now see the schema and elements prepopulated from the wizard. Press Next. The File Adapter configuration is now complete. Press Finish. Now you need to receive the input from the LoadFile component so we need to place a Receive node in the BPEL process by drag and dropping the Receive component from the Component Palette under BPEL Constructs onto the BPEL process. We link the receive process with the LoadFile component by dragging the left most connect node of the Receive node to the LoadFile component. Once the link is established you need to name the Receive node appropriately and as in the post of the last part of this series you need to generate input variables for the BPEL process to hold the input records in. You need to now add the product Web Service. The process is the same as described in the post of the last part of this series. You drop the Web Service BPEL Service onto the right side of the process and fill in the details of the WSDL URL . You also have to add an Invoke node to call the service and generate the input and outputs variables for the call in the Invoke node. Now, to get the inputs from File to the service. You have to use a Transform (you can use an Assign action but a Transform action is more flexible). You drag and drop the Transform component from the Component Palette under Oracle Extensions and place it between the Receive and Invoke nodes. We name the Transform Node, Mapper File and associate the source of the mapping the schema from the Receive node and the output will be the input variable from the Invoke node. We now build the transform. We first map the user and email attributes by drag and drop the elements from the left to the right. The reason we needed to use the transform is that we will be telling the AS-User service that we want to issue an update action. Remember when we registered the service we actually used Read as the default. If we do not otherwise inform the service to use the Update action it will use the Read action instead (which is not desired). To specify the update action you need to click on the transactionType node on the right and select Set Text to set the action. You need to specify the transactionType of UPD (for update). The mapping is now complete. The final BPEL process is ready for deployment. You then deploy the BPEL process to the server and to test the service by simply dropping a file, in the same pattern/name as you specified, in the directory you specified in the File Adapter. You will see each record as a separate instance entry in the Fusion Middleware Control console. You can now load files into the product. You can repeat this process for each type of file to process. While this was a simple example it illustrates the method of loading data can be achieved using SOA Suite in conjunction with our products.

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• How to Control Screen Layouts in LightSwitch

  - by ChrisD

  Visual Studio LightSwitch has a bunch of screen templates that you can use to quickly generate screens. They give you good starting points that you can customize further. When you add a new screen to your project you see a set of screen templates that you can choose from. These templates lay out all the related data you choose to put on a screen automatically for you. And don’t under estimate them; they do a great job of laying out controls in a smart way. For instance, a tab control will be used when you select more than one related set of data to display on a screen. However, you’re not limited to taking the layout as is. In fact, the screen designer is pretty flexible and allows you to create stacks of controls in a variety of configurations. You just need to visualize your screen as a series of containers that you can lay out in rows and columns. You then place controls or stacks of controls into these areas to align the screen exactly how you want. If you’re new in Visual Studio LightSwitch, you can see this tutorial. OK, Let’s start with a simple example. I have already designed my data entities for a simple order tracking system similar to the Northwind database. I also have added a Search Data  Screen to search my Products already. Now I will add a new Details Screen for my Products and make it the default screen via the “Add New Screen” dialog: The screen designer picks a simple layout for me based on the single entity I chose, in this case Product. Hit F5 to run the application, select a Product on the search screen to open the Product Details Screen. Notice that it’s pretty simple because my entity is simple. Click the “Customize” button in the top right of the screen so we can start tweaking it. The left side of the screen shows the containership of controls and data bindings (called the content tree) and the right side shows the live preview with data. Notice that we have a simple layout of two rows but only one row is populated (with a vertical stack of controls in this case). The bottom row is empty. You can envision the screen like this: Each container will display a group of data that you select. For instance in the above screen, the top row is set to a vertical stack control and the group of data to display is coming from Product. So when laying out screens you need to think in terms of containers of controls bound to groups of data. To change the data to which a container is bound, select the data item next to the container: You can select the “New Group” item in order to create more containers (or controls) within the current container. For instance to totally control the layout, select the Product in the top row and hit the delete key. This will delete the vertical stack and therefore all the controls on the screen. The content tree will still have two rows, but the rows are now both empty. If you want a layout of four containers (two rows and two columns) then select “New Group” for the data item and then change the vertical stack control to “Two Columns” for both of the rows as shown here: You can keep going on and on by selecting new groups and choosing between rows or columns. Here’s a layout with 8 containers, 4 rows and 2 columns: And here is a layout with 7 content areas; one row across the top of the screen and three rows with two columns below that: When you select Choose Content and select a data item like Product it will populate all the controls within the container (row or column in a vertical stack) however you have complete control on what to display within each group. You can delete fields you don’t want to display and/or change their controls. You can also change the size of controls and how they display by changing the settings in the properties window. If you are in the Screen Designer (and not the customization mode like we are here) you can also drag-drop data items from the left-hand side of the screen to the content tree. Note, however, that not all areas of the tree will allow you to drop a data item if there is a binding already set to a different set of data. For instance you can’t drop a Customer ID into the same group as a Product if they originate from different entities. To get around this, all you need to do is create a new group and content area as shown above. Let’s take a more complex example that deals with more than just product. I want to design a complex screen that displays Products and their Category, as well as all the OrderDetails for which that product is selected. This time I will create a new screen and select List and Details, select the Products screen data, and include the related OrderDetails. However I’m going to totally change the layout so that a Product grid is at the top left and below that is the selected Product detail. Below that will be the Category text fields and image in two columns below. On the right side I want the OrderDetails grid to take up the whole right side of the screen. All this can be done in customization mode while you’re debugging the application. To do this, I first deleted all the content items in the tree and then re-created the content tree as shown in the image below. I also set the image to be larger and the description textbox to be 5 rows using the property window below the live preview. I added the green lines to indicate the containers and show how it maps to the content tree (click to enlarge): I hope this demystifies the screen designer a little bit. Remember that screen templates are excellent starting points – you can take them as-is or customize them further. It takes a little fooling around with customizing screens to get them to do exactly what you want but there are a ton of possibilities once you get the hang of it. Stay tuned for more information on how to create your own screen templates that show up in the “Add New Screen” dialog. Enjoy! The tutorial that might be interested: Adding Custom Control In LightSwitch

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• Notifications for Expiring DBSNMP Passwords

  - by Courtney Llamas

  Most user accounts these days have a password profile on them that automatically expires the password after a set number of days.   Depending on your company’s security requirements, this may be as little as 30 days or as long as 365 days, although typically it falls between 60-90 days. For a normal user, this can cause a small interruption in your day as you have to go get your password reset by an admin. When this happens to privileged accounts, such as the DBSNMP account that is responsible for monitoring database availability, it can cause bigger problems. In Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c you may notice the error message “ORA-28002: the password will expire within 5 days” when you connect to a target, or worse you may get “ORA-28001: the password has expired". If you wait too long, your monitoring will fail because the password is locked out. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get an alert 10 days before our DBSNMP password expired? Thanks to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Metric Extensions (ME), you can! See the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator’s Guide for more information on Metric Extensions. To create a metric extension, select Enterprise / Monitoring / Metric Extensions, and then click on Create. On the General Properties screen select either Cluster Database or Database Instance, depending on which target you need to monitor.  If you have both RAC and Single instance you may need to create one for each. In this example we will create a Cluster Database metric.  Enter a Name for the ME and a Display Name. Then select SQL for the Adapter.  Adjust the Collection Schedule as desired, for this example we will collect this metric every 1 day. Notice for metric collected every day, we can determine the exact time we want to collect. On the Adapter page, enter the query that you wish to execute.  In this example we will use the query below that specifically checks for the DBSNMP user that is expiring within 10 days. Of course, you can adjust this query to alert for any user that can cause an outage such as an application account or service account such as RMAN. select username, account_status, trunc(expiry_date-sysdate) days_to_expirefrom dba_userswhere username = 'DBSNMP'and expiry_date is not null; The next step is to create the columns to store the data returned from the query.  Click Add and add a column for each of the fields in the same order that data is returned.  The table below will help you complete the column additions. Name Display Name Column Type Value Type Metric Category Unit Username User Name Key String Security AccountStatus Account Status Data String Security DaysToExpire Days Until Expiration Data Number Security Days When creating the DaysToExpire column, you can add a default threshold here for Warning and Critical (say < 10 and 5).  When all columns have been added, click Next. On the Credentials page, you can choose to use the default monitoring credentials or specify new credentials.  We will use the default credentials established for our target (dbsnmp). The next step is to test your Metric Extension.  Click on Add to select a target for testing, then click Select. Now click the button Run Test to execute the test against the selected target(s). We can see in the example below that the Metric Extension has executed and returned a value of 68 days to expire. Click Next to proceed. Review the metric extension in the final screen and click Finish. The metric will be created in Editable status.  Select the metric, click Actions and select Deployable Draft. You can do this once more to move to Published. Finally, we want to apply this metric to a target. When managing many targets, it’s best to add your metric to a template, for details on adding a Metric Extension to a template see the Administrator’s Guide. For this example, we will deploy this to a target directly. Select Actions / Deploy to Targets. Click Add and select the target you wish to deploy to and click Submit.  Once deployment is complete, we can go to the target and view the Metric & Collection Settings to see the new metric and its thresholds.   After some time, you will find the metric has collected and the days to expiration for DBSNMP user can be seen in the All Metrics view.   For metrics collected once per day, you may have to wait up to 24 hours to see the metric and current severity. In the example below, the current severity is Clear (green check) as it is not scheduled to expire within 10 days. To test the notification, we can edit the thresholds for the new metric so they trigger an alert.  Our password expires in 139 days, so we’ll change our Warning to 140 and leave Critical at 5, in our example we also changed the collection time to every 5 minutes.  At the next collection, you’ll find that the current severity changes to a Warning and any related Incident Rules would be triggered to create an Incident or Notification as desired. Now that you get a notification that your DBSNMP passwords is about to expire, you can use OEM Command Line Interface (EM CLI) verb update_db_password to change it at both the database target and the OEM target in one step.  The caveat is you must know the existing password to use the update_db_password command.  To learn more about EM CLI, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface Guide.  Below is an example of changing the password with the update_db_password verb.  $ ./emcli update_db_password -target_name=emrep -target_type=oracle_database -user_name=dbsnmp -change_at_target=yes -change_all_references=yes Enter value for old_password :Enter value for new_password :Enter value for retype_new_password :Successfully submitted a job to change the password in Enterprise Manager and on the target database: "emrep"Execute "emcli get_jobs -job_id=FA66C1C4D663297FE0437656F20ACC84" to check the status of the job.Search for job name "CHANGE_PWD_JOB_FA66C1C4D662297FE0437656F20ACC84" on the Jobs home page to check job execution details. The subsequent job created will typically run quickly enough that a blackout is not needed, however if you submit a script with many targets to change, your job may run slower so adding a blackout to the script is recommended. $ ./emcli get_jobs -job_id=FA66C1C4D663297FE0437656F20ACC84 Name Type Job ID Execution ID Scheduled Completed TZ Offset Status Status ID Owner Target Type Target Name CHANGE_PWD_JOB_FA66C1C4D662297FE0437656F20ACC84 ChangePassword FA66C1C4D663297FE0437656F20ACC84 FA66C1C4D665297FE0437656F20ACC84 2014-05-28 09:39:12 2014-05-28 09:39:18 GMT-07:00 Succeeded 5 SYSMAN oracle_database emrep After implementing the above Metric Extension and using the EM CLI update_db_password verb, you will be able to stay on top of your DBSNMP password changes without experiencing an unplanned monitoring outage.  

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