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  • Case Management In-Depth: Cases & Case Activities Part 1 – Activity Scope by Mark Foster

    - by JuergenKress
    In the previous blog entry we looked at stakeholders and permissions, i.e. how we control interaction with the case and its artefacts. In this entry we’ll look at case activities, specifically how we decide their scope, in the next part we’ll look at how these activities relate to the over-arching case and how we can effectively visualize the relationship between the case and its activities. Case Activities As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, case activities can be created from: BPM processes Human Tasks Custom (Java Code) It is pretty obvious that we would use custom case activities when either: we already have existing code that we would like to form part of a case we cannot provide the necessary functionality with a BPM process or simple Human Task However, how do we determine what our BPM process as a case activity contains? What level of granularity? Take the following simple BPM process Read the full article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: ACM,BPM,Mark Foster,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Case Management In-Depth: Stakeholders & Permissions by Mark Foster

    - by JuergenKress
    We’ve seen in the previous 3 posts in this series what Case Management is, how it can be configured in BPM Studio and its lifecycle. I now want to go into some more depth with specific areas such as:. Stakeholders & Permissions Case Activities Case Rules etc. In the process of designing a Case Management solution it is important to know what approach to take, what questions to ask and based on the answers to these questions, how to implement. I’ll start with Stakeholders & Permissions. Stakeholders The users that perform actions on case objects, defined at a business level, e.g. “Help Desk Agent”, “Help Desk Supervisor” etc. Read the full article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: ACM,BPM,Mark Foster,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • How can a large company foster excellence in its engineers?

    - by Joshiatto
    I am tasked with improving the skills (quality & speed) of engineers in my company. Here are some ideas: Pair Programming TDD Automated Check-in Policies Talks given by experts Awards for coding excellence Encourage competition among engineers to contribute to GitHub Publish standards and practices docs on the intranet site "Gamification" of engineering. Somehow make becoming badasses into a game they will enjoy playing Training Showcase github checkins on screens around the office Add an "engineer of the month" to the intranet home page How can I drive traffic to the intranet home page? What crazy futuristic idea would drive engineers to go to the page every day to see who of their peers are making more money than them (inferred via recognition) and then go off and improve their skills and productivity to see their standings improve on the home page??? Or any ideas just to foster collaboration and love for their jobs so they start taking more pride in their work?? Don't take my ideas as symptomatic of our org. I take full responsibility for not knowing the right way to do this.

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  • Oracle Solaris 11.1 Announced at Oracle OpenWorld

    - by glynn
    One of the highlights for me at Oracle OpenWorld was our announcement of the next update version to Oracle Solaris 11, named Oracle Solaris 11.1. Since November 2011, we've done a lot of work not only to polish existing features and fix literally hundreds of bugs, but also add many new features that give yet more reasons for using Oracle Solaris as the deployment platform for Oracle workloads - particularly the Oracle database. Over the last few years since the Sun Microsystems acquisition, we've had our developers sitting in Redwood Shores with the Oracle database team figuring out how to best optimize that combination and provide a level of integration that no other vendor (or solution) can match. Oracle Solaris 11.1 is often the first release many customers will adopt due to perceived instability of '.0' releases. In reality, however, we've seen incredible adoption already and all our existing customers are loving the new technologies like Image Packaging System (IPS), Automated Installer and ZFS Boot Environments, consolidated network management and network virtualization, and of course the existing features that are so critical to creating private, hybrid or public cloud environments like the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system and Oracle Solaris Zones server virtualization. If you haven't already gotten on board, there's plenty chance to catch up. More importantly, Oracle Solaris 11.1 really provides a platform that is significantly easier to manage than any previous Solaris releases - to the extent that it should be relatively straightforward for any experienced Linux administrator to get up to speed (if they're struggling, we have ways to help). So take a look at what's new in Oracle Solaris 11.1 and start planning your deployment now! If you missed the announcement, you can see the full video of John Fowler's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld here:

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  • Getting Started with Puppet on Oracle Solaris 11

    - by Glynn Foster
    One of the exciting enhancements with Oracle Solaris 11.2 has been the introduction of Puppet. While upstream Puppet did have some rudimentary support for Oracle Solaris 11, Drew Fisher and Ginnie Wray worked tirelessly to add enhance the Oracle Solaris Puppet offering. We've talked to customers over the past few years and asked them what their problems were and what technologies they were using, particularly for configuration management. Puppet came up time and time again, and it made a huge amount of sense bringing it as a 1st class citizen in the Oracle Solaris platform. So what is Puppet, and why is it useful? To quote from PuppetLabs, the guys who are responsible for creating Puppet: Puppet is a declarative, model-based approach to IT automation, helping you manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to orchestration and reporting. Using Puppet, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud. What's more, with Puppet support for Oracle Solaris, administrators can now manage a completely heterogeneous data center from a single or series of Puppet masters. Better still, it's an excellent tool when combined with our new compliance framework to ensure you're meeting your compliance regulations. We're not stopping there of course, and we'll enhance our offerings over time, and work with PuppetLabs to get some of this support upstream (or into the Puppet Forge). So if you've heard some of the buzz around Puppet and never quite got started, and have some Oracle Solaris real estate that you'd love to manage, check out the Getting Started with Puppet on Oracle Solaris 11 guide.

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  • Oracle Solaris at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta

    - by Glynn Foster
    I had the fortune of attending my 2nd OpenStack summit in Atlanta a few weeks ago and it turned out to be a really excellent event. Oracle had many folks there this time around across a variety of different engineering teams - Oracle Solaris, Oracle ZFSSA, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and more. Really great to see continuing momentum behind the project and we're very happy to be involved. Here's a list of the highlights that I had during the summit: The operators track was a really excellent addition, with a chance for users/administrators to voice their opinions based on experiences. Really good to hear how OpenStack is making businesses more agile, but also equally good to hear about some of the continuing frustrations they have (fortunately many of them are new and being addressed). Seeing this discussion morph into a "Win the enterprise" working group is also very pleasing. Enjoyed Troy Toman's keynote (Rackspace) about designing a planet scale cloud OS and the interoperability challenges ahead of us. I've been following some of the discussion around DefCore for a bit and while I have some concerns, I think it's mostly heading in the right direction. Certainly seems like there's a balance to strike to ensure that this effects the OpenStack vendors in such a way as to avoid negatively impacting our end users. Also enjoyed Toby Ford's keynote (AT&T) about his desire for a NVF (Network Function Virtualization) architecture. What really resonated was also his desire for OpenStack to start addressing the typical enterprise workload, being less like cattle and more like pets. The design summit was, as per usual, pretty intense for - definitely would get more value from these if I knew the code base a little better. Nevertheless, attended some really great sessions and got a better feeling of the roadmap for Juno. Markus Flierl gave a great presentation (see below) at the demo theatre for what we're doing with OpenStack on Oracle Solaris (and more widely at Oracle across different products). Based on the discussions that we had at the Oracle booth, there's a huge amount of interest there and we talked to some great customers during the week about their thoughts and directions in this respect. Undoubtedly Atlanta had some really good food. Highlights were the smoked ribs and brisket and the SweetWater brewing company. That said, I also loved the fried chicken, fried green tomatoes and collared greens, and wonderful hosting of "big momma" at Pitty Pat's Porch. Couldn't quite bring myself to eat biscuits and gravy in the morning though. Visiting the World of Coca-Cola just before flying out. A total brain washing exercise, but very enjoyable. And very much liked Beverly (contrary to many other opinions on the internet) - but then again, I'd happily drink tonic water every day of the year... Looking forward to Paris in November!

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  • Harry Foxwell talks about "Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration: The Complete Reference"

    - by Glynn Foster
    In a previous blog entry, New Oracle Solaris 11 Administration book, I blogged about the fact that a new book has been written to provide an excellent resource for administrators starting to learn some of the new features in Oracle Solaris 11. Despite an extensive set of online resources from the Oracle Technology Network, it's also useful to have something in the bookshelf that you can quickly refer to - and Harry Foxwell and his team of co-authors have done just that. Check out the video below where Harry goes into detail about why the book was written, details about the target audience, and what he's excited about in Oracle Solaris 11. Best of all though, is the fact that this is a brilliant book for any inspiring Linux administrator who wants to start getting to know the Oracle Solaris operating system a little better.

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  • Interactive manifest editing with the Automated Installer Manifest Wizard

    - by Glynn Foster
    Oracle Solaris 11.2 adds a new Automated Installer (AI) Manifest Wizard to allow administrators to more easily create AI manifests for use in provisioning new client systems in the data center. The AI Manifest Wizard is a web web based interface that steps administrators through the basics of the AI manifest - target disks and layout selection, additional ZFS pools and datasets, IPS publisher and package selection, and the creation of any Oracle Solaris Zone virtual environments. The end result is an AI manifest without having to directly edit XML, and this can then be associated with an appropriate AI service. To get started, check out How To Create an Automated Installer Manifest with an Interactive Wizard

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  • New Oracle Solaris 11 Administration book

    - by glynn
    During the development of Oracle Solaris 11, one of the main goals was to modernize the operating system and remove some of the existing frustrations that our administrative audience had in deploying and using the platform within data centers around the world. That meant a comprehensive clean out of some existing technologies to provision the operating system (replacing Jumpstart with Automated Installer) and manage system software (replacing SVR4 with IPS packaging), consolidate the vast spectrum of networking configuration, and enhance the user environment to provide familiarity for those who were used to administering Linux environments among many other things. While some considered the changes to Oracle Solaris 11 as a negative change, most will be impressed at how far we've come - the deeper integration of key technologies, presented in a consolidated and consistent form. It is easier to administer the Oracle Solaris platform that ever before, and I have no doubt that administrators coming from other platforms will be hugely impressed with what they see, especially if they're judging based on past experiences of Solaris 8 and Solaris 9. In fact I'd go further to say that Oracle Solaris 11 is a more powerful, integrated and usable platform that most Linux platforms I've seen. But as with anything, there's always an initial learning curve to get through. We've provided a significant selection of learning materials out on the Oracle Solaris 11 pages on Oracle Technology Network and some great training and certification options. One more option is now available in the form of a book, the Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration The Complete Reference. This provides an exceptional reference to help administrators learn about Oracle Solaris 11, especially those who have come from the Linux platform. As is quoted in the first chapter of the guide: Linux users and developers will find in Oracle Solaris 11 a familiar and quickly productive working environment; we point out similarities and differences between the Linux and Solaris kernels and system administration tools, and describe how typical open source Web development tasks are accomplished in this OS. So I would encourage you to take a read of it and start seriously considering Oracle Solaris 11 to be a platform choice for your data center. Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration The Complete Reference - yours for only $32.50 (if you successfully use the promotion code - otherwise worth shopping around to pick up a good deal).

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  • Top 10 Oracle Solaris How To Articles

    - by Glynn Foster
    While generating new technical content for Oracle Solaris 11 is one of our higher priorities here at Oracle, it's always fun to have a look at some web stats to see what existing published content is popular among our audience. So here's the top ten as voted by your browsers. Interestingly it's a great mix of technologies. What's your favourite? Let us know! RankHow To Articles 1.Taking your first steps with Oracle Solaris 11 2.How to get started creating Zones on Oracle Solaris 11 3.How to script Oracle Solaris 11 Zone creation for a network in a box configuration 4.How to configure Oracle Solaris 11 using the sysconfig command 5.How to update Oracle Solaris 11 systems using Support Repository Updates 6.How to perform system archival and recovery with Oracle Solaris 11 7.Introducing the basics of IPS on Oracle Solaris 11 8.How to update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 using IPS 9.How to set up Automated Installer services on Oracle Solaris 11 10.How to live install from Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11 11/11

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  • svcbundle for easier SMF manifest creation

    - by Glynn Foster
    One of the new features we've introduced in Oracle Solaris 11.1 is a new utility called svcbundle. This utility allows for the easy creation of Service Management Facility (SMF) manifests and profiles, allowing you to take advantage of the benefits of automatic application restart without requiring you to have full knowledge of the XML file format that is used when integrating with the SMF. Integrating into SMF is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to take advantage of some of the mission critical aspects of the operating system, but many customers were often finding the initial learning curve of creating an XML manifest to be too hard. With the release of Oracle Solaris 11 11/11, SMF had a more integral part to play as more and more system configuration was starting to use the SMF configuration repository for the backend storage. This provides a number of aspects, including the ability to carefully manage customized administrative configuration, site specific configuration, and vendor provided configuration at different layers, helping to preserve them during system update. I've written a new article, Using svcbundle to Create SMF Manifests and Profiles in Oracle Solaris 11, to give you a feel for the help we can provide in converting your applications over to SMF, or doing some site wide configuration using profiles. This is the first pass at creating such a tool, so we'd love to hear feedback of your experiences using it.

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  • Oracle Solaris 11.1 Available Now!

    - by Glynn Foster
    As you may have already noticed, Oracle Solaris 11.1 is now available from the download page. This release marks nearly a year of development with some really exciting new features, hundreds of bug fixes, and another step towards a product that enterprise customers should feel utterly confident in deploying. We've made some great strides in fixing the frustrations that our customers care about - it is now even easier to deploy, update and manage, and our feature set is more integrated than ever to give you a superior experience. Go download now! If you've got an existing Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 installation you won't need to re-install again. Simply use the packaging tools and follow this useful How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 using IPS guide. We're also hosting an online event on the 7th November where we'll talk about Oracle Solaris 11.1, some of the new features included in this release, and where we're going generally with the operating system. Come join us!

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  • A simple deployment example using Oracle Solaris 11

    - by Glynn Foster
    Last week I was over in Melbourne and Sydney to present at an Oracle Technology Network System Administration Day. During a set of morning sessions, I presented on some of the new things that we've done in Oracle Solaris 11 and our focus for the future. One of the sessions I presented was giving a quick technical overview of what a typical application deployment scenario would look like using technologies like the Image Packaging System (IPS), Service Management Facility (SMF), Oracle Solaris Zones, and network virtualization. While it's just a simple example, it provides the basic building blocks for a more advanced configuration that a data center would typically deploy. Given these would likely be of general interest, I thought I'd upload the slides for others to view - enjoy! You can download the original source PPTX without some of the formatting errors in the above.

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  • Oracle Solaris 11 How To Guides

    - by glynn
    Over the past year or so I've been writing a lot of How To Guides for different technologies. While we have really excellent product documentation (including the best set of manual pages available on any UNIX or Linux platform), the various How To Guides we have help to complement some of that learning, giving administrators a chance to learn the motivations for different technologies with a simple set of examples. Not only are they fun to research and write, they're also one of the more popular items on our Oracle Solaris 11 technology pages on OTN. So here's a link to bookmark and come back to on a regular basis: Oracle Solaris 11 How To Guides. We've got an excellent line up of articles there, and below is a list of the ones I've been involved in writing. Let us know if there are technologies that you think a How To Guide would help with and we'd be happy to get them onto our list! TitleLink Taking your First Steps with Oracle Solaris 11An introduction to installing Oracle Solaris 11, including the steps for installing new software and administering other system configuration. Introducing the basics of IPS on Oracle Solaris 11How to administer an Oracle Solaris 11 system using IPS, including how to deal with software package repositories, install and uninstall packages, and update systems. Advanced administration with IPS on Oracle Solaris 11Take a deeper look at advanced IPS to learn how to determine package dependencies, explore manifests, perform advanced searches, and analyze the state of your system. How to create and publish packages with IPS on Oracle Solaris 11How to create new software packages for Oracle Solaris 11 and publish them to a network package repository. How to update your Oracle Solaris 11 systems using Support Repository UpdatesThe steps for updating an Oracle Solaris 11 system with software packages provided by an active Oracle support agreement, plus how to ensure the update is successful and safe. Introducing the basics of SMF on Oracle Solaris 11Simple examples of administering services on Oracle Solaris 11 with the Service Management Facility. Advanced administration with SMF on Oracle Solaris 11Advanced administrative tasks with SMF, including an introduction to service manifests, understanding layering within the SMF configuration repository, and how best to apply configuration to a system.

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  • How to eliminate NULL fields in TSQL

    - by salvationishere
    I am developing a TSQL query in SSMS 2008 R2. I am trying to develop this query to identify one record / client. Because some of these values are NULL, I am currently doing LEFT JOINS on most of the tables. But the problem with the LEFT JOINs is that now I get 1 record for some clients. But if I change this to INNER JOINs then some clients are excluded entirely because they have NULL values for these columns. How do I limit the query result to just one record / client regardless of NULL values? And if there are non-NULL values then I want it to choose the record with non-NULL values. Here is some of my current output: group_profile_id profile_name license_number is_accepting is_accepting_placement managing_office region vendor_name vendor_id applicant_type Office Address status_description Cert Date2 race ethnicity_desc religion 9CD932F1-6BE1-4F80-AB81-0CE32C565BCF Atreides Foster Home 1 Atreides1 1 Yes Manchester, NH Gulf Atlantic Atreides1 00000007 Treatment Foster Home 4042 Arrakis Avenue, Springfield, VT 05156 Open/Re-opened 2011-06-01 00:00:00.000 NULL NULL NULL DCE354D5-A7CC-409F-B5A3-89BF664B7718 Averitte, Leon and Sandra 00000044 1 Yes Birmingham, AL Gulf Atlantic AL Averitte, Leon and Sandra 00000044 Treatment Foster Home 3816 5th Avenue, Bessemer, AL 35020, (205)482-4307 Open/Re-opened 2011-08-05 00:00:00.000 NULL NULL NULL DCE354D5-A7CC-409F-B5A3-89BF664B7718 Averitte, Leon and Sandra 00000044 1 Yes Birmingham, AL Gulf Atlantic AL Averitte, Leon and Sandra 00000044 Treatment Foster Home 3816 5th Avenue, Bessemer, AL 35020, (205)482-4307 Open/Re-opened 2011-08-05 00:00:00.000 Caucasian/White Non Hispanic NULL AD02A43C-6F38-4F35-8C9E-E12422690BFB Bass, Matthew and Sarah 00000076 1 Yes Jacks on, MS Central Gulf Coast MS Bass, Matthew and Sarah 00000076 Treatment Foster Home 506 Eagelwood Drive, Florence, MS 39073, (601)665-7169 Open/Re-opened 2011-04-01 00:00:00.000 NULL NULL NULL AD02A43C-6F38-4F35-8C9E-E12422690BFB Bass, Matthew and Sarah 00000076 1 Yes Jackson, MS Central Gulf Coast MS Bass, Matthew and Sarah 00000076 Treatment Foster Home 506 Eagelwood Drive, Florence, MS 39073, (601)665-7169 Open/Re-opened 2011-04-01 00:00:00.000 Caucasian/White NULL Baptist You can see that both Averitte and Bass profile names have one record with NULL race, ethnicity, religion. How do I eliminate these rows (rows 2 and 4)? Here is my query currently: select distinct gp.group_profile_id, gp.profile_name, gp.license_number, gp.is_accepting, case when gp.is_accepting = 1 then 'Yes' when gp.is_accepting = 0 then 'No ' end as is_accepting_placement, mo.profile_name as managing_office, regions.[region_description] as region, pv.vendor_name, pv.id as vendor_id, at.description as applicant_type, dbo.GetGroupAddress(gp.group_profile_id, null, 0) as [Office Address], gsv.status_description, ri.[description] as race, ethnicity.description as ethnicity_desc, religion.description as religion from group_profile gp With (NoLock) --Office Information inner join group_profile_type gpt With (NoLock) on gp.group_profile_type_id = gpt.group_profile_type_id and gpt.type_code = 'FOSTERHOME' and gp.agency_id = @agency_id and gp.is_deleted = 0 inner join group_profile mo With (NoLock) on gp.managing_office_id = mo.group_profile_id left outer join payor_vendor pv With (NoLock) on gp.payor_vendor_id = pv.payor_vendor_id left outer join applicant_type at With (NoLock) on gp.applicant_type_id = at.applicant_type_id and at.is_foster_home = 1 inner join group_status_view gsv With (NoLock) on gp.group_profile_id = gsv.group_profile_id and gsv.status_value = 'OPEN' and gsv.effective_date = (Select max(b.effective_date) from group_status_view b With (NoLock) where gp.group_profile_id = b.group_profile_id) left outer join regions With (NoLock) on isnull(mo.regions_id, gp.regions_id) = regions.regions_id left join enrollment en on en.group_profile_id = gp.group_profile_id join event_log el on el.event_log_id = en.event_log_id left join people client on client.people_id = el.people_id left join race With (NoLock) on el.people_id = race.people_id left join group_profile_race gpr with (nolock) on gpr.race_info_id = race.race_info_id left join race_info ri with (nolock) on ri.race_info_id = gpr.race_info_id left join ethnicity With(NoLock) On client.ethnicity = ethnicity.ethnicity_id left join religion on client.religion = religion.religion_id

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  • Great Blogs About Oracle Solaris 11

    - by Markus Weber
    Now that Oracle Solaris 11 has been released, why not blog about blogs. There is of course a tremendous amount of resource and information available, but valuable insights directly from people actually building the product is priceless. Here's a list of such great blogs. NOTE: If you think we missed some good ones, please let us know in the comments section !  Topic Title Author Top 11 Things My 11 favourite Solaris 11 features Darren Moffat Top 11 Things These are 11 of my favorite things! Mike Gerdts Top 11 Things 11 reason to love Solaris 11     Jim Laurent SysAdmin Resources Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators Rick Ramsey Overview Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS Larry Wake Overview What's a "Cloud Operating System"? Harry Foxwell Overview What's New in Oracle Solaris 11 Jeff Victor Try it ! Virtually the fastest way to try Solaris 11 (and Solaris 10 zones) Dave Miner Upgrade Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11 Alan Hargreaves IPS The IPS System Repository Tim Foster IPS Building a Solaris 11 repository without network connection Jim Laurent IPS IPS Self-assembly – Part 1: overlays Tim Foster IPS Self assembly – Part 2: multiple packages delivering configuration Tim Foster Security Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS Darren Moffat Security User home directory encryption with ZFS Darren Moffat Security Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo" Darren Moffat Security Completely disabling root logins on Solaris 11 Darren Moffat Security OpenSSL Version in Solaris Darren Moffat Security Exciting Crypto Advances with the T4 processor and Oracle Solaris 11 Valerie Fenwick Performance Critical Threads Optimization Rafael Vanoni Performance SPARC T4-2 Delivers World Record SPECjvm2008 Result with Oracle Solaris 11 BestPerf Blog Performance Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11 BestPerf Blog Predictive Self Healing Introducing SMF Layers Sean Wilcox Predictive Self Healing Oracle Solaris 11 - New Fault Management Features Gavin Maltby Desktop What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop? Calum Benson Desktop S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system Alan Coopersmith Desktop Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Peter Korn

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  • A view from the call center for the Nashville Flood telethon

    - by Rob Foster
    I want to break away from my usual topic of something technical and talk about what I experienced tonight while working in the call center for the Nashville Flood telethon, which was broadcast on WSMV, CNN, and The Weather Channel.  We started receiving calls about 7pm local time and to be honest, I had no idea what to expect when going into this.  I mean, I'm a pretty good talker, but this is different...We had a good script of what to say and how we were supposed to say it, as well as paper forms and pens that we used to collect information from people who wanted to donate their money to help.  I took my first few calls pretty easily and it went pretty quick and easy.  Everyone was upbeat and happy to be in the call center as well as people happy to be donating money. Pizza, snacks, and soft drinks were flowing well.  Everyone is smiling and happy.  :) About 3 or 4 calls into my night, I got a call from a lady that had lost 2 family members in West Nashville who drowned in the floods.  She was crying when she called and I of course tried to console her.  She told me how bad her situation was, losing family members and much of her neighborhood.  After all this, she still just wanted to help other people.  She was donating all the money that she could to the telethon and I want to share a direct quote from her: "I want to donate this instead of buying flowers for my family members' funeral because people out there need help.". Please let me pause while I get myself together <again>.  That caught me so off guard (and still does). I had kids calling wanting to donate their allowance, open their piggy banks, whatever they could do.  These are kids.  Kids not much older than my boys.  Kids who should be focused on buying the next cool video game or toy or whatever but wanted to do something.  Everyone just seemed to want to help. I took calls from as far away as British Columbia as well and pretty much coast to coast.  how cool is that? Yet another thing that caught me off guard.  This kind lady that called from British Columbia told me how much she loved visiting Nashville and just hated to see this happen.  I belive that she said that she will be attending the CMA Fest this year too.  I was sure to tell her not to cancel her plans!  :) It felt like every call I took (and I took A LOT, as did everyone else) was very personal and heartfelt.  I've never had the privelage to do anything like this and fell lucky to have been able to help out with answering phones and logging donations.  Nashville will bounce back very quickly, people are out there day and night helping each other, and the spirits are very high here.  I hope that one day, my kids read this blog and better understand who they are, where they come from, and what the human spirt is and can be.  I love this city, I love the people here, I love the culture and even more than ever am proud to say that this is me.  This is us.  We are Nashville!

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  • BPM 11g - Dynamic Task Assignment with Multi-level Organization Units

    - by Mark Foster
    I've seen several requirements to have a more granular level of task assignment in BPM 11g based on some value in the data passed to the process. Parametric Roles is normally the first port of call to try to satisfy this requirement, but in this blog we will show how a lot of use-cases can be satisfied by the easier to implement and flexible Organization Unit. The Use-Case Task assignment is to an approval group containing several users. At runtime, a location value in the input data determines which of the particular users the task is ultimately assigned to. In this case we use the Demo Community referenced in the SOA Admin Guide, and specifically the "LoanAnalyticGroup" which contains three users; "szweig", "mmitch" & "fkafka". In our scenario we would like to assign a task to "szweig" if the input data specifies that the location is "JapanCentral", to "fkafka" if the location is "JapanNorth" and to "mmitch" if "JapanSouth", and to all of them if the location is "Japan" i.e....   The Process Simple one human task process.... In the output data association of the "Start" activity we need to set the value of the "Organization Unit" predefined variable based on the input data (note that the  predefined variables can only be set on output data associations)....  ...and in the output data association of the human activity we will reset the "Organization Unit" to empty, always good practice to ensure that the Organization Unit will not be used for any subsequent human activities for which we do not require it.... Set Up the Organization Unit  Log in to the BPM Workspace with an administrator user (weblogic/welcome1 in our case) and choose the "Administration" option. Within "Roles" assign the "ProcessOwner" swim-lane for our process to "LoanAnalyticGroup".... Within "Organization Units" we can model our organization.... "Root Organization Unit" as "Japan" and "Child Organization Unit" as "Central", "South" & "North" as shown. As described previously, add user "szweig" to "Central", "mmitch" to "South" and "fkafka" to "North"....   Test the Process Invalid Data  First let us test with invalid data in the input to see what the consequences are, here we use "X" as input.... ...and looking at the instance we can see it has errored.... Organization Unit Root Level Assignment  Now let us see what happens if we have "Japan" in the input data.... ...looking in the "flow trace" we can see that the task has been assigned....  ... but who has the task been assigned to ? Let us look in the BPM Workspace for user "szweig"....  ...and for "mmitch"....  ... and for "fkafka"....  ...so we can see that with an Organization Unit at "Root" level we have successfully assigned the task to all users. Organization Unit Child Level Assignment  Now let us test with "Japan/North" in the input data.... ...and looking in "fkafka" workspace we see the task has been assigned, remember, he was associated with "JapanNorth"....   ... but what about the workspace of "szweig"....  ...no tasks assigned, neither has "mmitch", just as we expected. Summary  We have seen in this blog how to easily implement multi-level dynamic task routing using Organization Units, a common use-case and a simpler solution than Parametric Roles. 

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  • What kind of an IT or programming job can a college student get part time?

    - by Alex Foster
    I'm a college student with a full load of classes and i need some extra money to cover some of my expenses. I love anything and everything to do with computers. I don't know how to program but have build computers before and know how windows works. I would call myself a power user. My question is, what kind of a job can someone like me get with effort? If there are some more skills that i can pick up that would benefit in getting the foot in the door i would love to hear about them. The only limitation i have is that i can't work very late in the evening most days due to classes. But usually in the morning my time is available for work. I will appreciate all answers i receive. Thank you for your help.

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  • What do you need to know to get a job as a web developer

    - by Alex Foster
    What do you need to know to at the very least get your foot in the door? We're assuming for someone who doesn't have a college degree (yet) but will eventually get one. My guess is html, css, javascript, and php, and photoshop and dreamweaver, and sql. And being familiar with using a web host to have sites live, like knowing how to use cpanel. It's probably a very inaccurate and narrow guess but that's what i think right now. I don't know exactly.

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  • Trouble installing Pokerstars on a Live USB without Persistence through WINE

    - by Ricky Foster
    I need to install any form of Texas Hold Em' on a Lubuntu Live USB that doesn't have persistence. I was able to download PokerStars.net by emulating the .exe (a windows type file) using WINE for Linux (Lubuntu). But, when I try to install, I have no room. The only place on the Live USB is in the root folder which is set to read-only. Is there any way I can change the read only properties of the Live USB while it's in use? So, to recap. I am running Lubuntu 13.04 and can't start in Persistent mode. When I start normally everything worked fine. I proceeded to Chromium and successfully downloaded Wine and the Pokerstars.exe. I right clicked the downloaded fiel then clicked Wine, the installer loaded fine. There are about 8 different disk icons and only the one containing system files is active. Is there any way I can use the terminal to install it to Root. Thanks in advance for your answer/alternate method (without having to buy another USB to install it to).

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  • Deliberate Practice

    - by Jeff Foster
    It’s easy to assume, as software engineers, that there is little need to “practice” writing code. After all, we write code all day long! Just by writing a little each day, we’re constantly learning and getting better, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Of course, developers do improve with experience. Each time we encounter a problem we’re more likely to avoid it next time. If we’re in a team that deploys software early and often, we hone and improve the deployment process each time we practice it. However, not all practice makes perfect. To develop true expertise requires a particular type of practice, deliberate practice, the only goal of which is to make us better programmers. Everyday software development has other constraints and goals, not least the pressure to deliver. We rarely get the chance in the course of a “sprint” to experiment with potential solutions that are outside our current comfort zone. However, if we believe that software is a craft then it’s our duty to strive continuously to raise the standard of software development. This requires specific and sustained efforts to get better at something we currently can’t do well (from Harvard Business Review July/August 2007). One interesting way to introduce deliberate practice, in a sustainable way, is the code kata. The term kata derives from martial arts and refers to a set of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. One of the better-known examples is the Bowling Game kata by Bob Martin, the goal of which is simply to write some code to do the scoring for 10-pin bowling. It sounds too easy, right? What could we possibly learn from such a simple example? Trust me, though, that it’s not as simple as five minutes of typing and a solution. Of course, we can reach a solution in a short time, but the important thing about code katas is that we explore each technique fully and in a controlled way. We tackle the same problem multiple times, using different techniques and making different decisions, understanding the ramifications of each one, and exploring edge cases. The short feedback loop optimizes opportunities to learn. Another good example is Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simple problem to solve, but try solving it in a functional style. If you’re used to mutability, solving the problem without mutating state will push you outside of your comfort zone. Similarly, if you try to solve it with the focus of “tell-don’t-ask“, how will the responsibilities of each object change? As software engineers, we don’t get enough opportunities to explore new ideas. In the middle of a development cycle, we can’t suddenly start experimenting on the team’s code base. Code katas offer an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe environment. If you’re still skeptical, my challenge to you is simply to try it out. Convince a willing colleague to pair with you and work through a kata or two. It only takes an hour and I’m willing to bet you learn a few new things each time. The next step is to make it a sustainable team practice. Start with an hour every Friday afternoon (after all who wants to commit code to production just before they leave for the weekend?) for month and see how that works out. Finally, consider signing up for the Global Day of Code Retreat. It’s like a daylong code kata, it’s on December 8th and there’s probably an event in your area!

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  • Learn Many Languages

    - by Jeff Foster
    My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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  • What do you need to know to get a job as a web developer [closed]

    - by Alex Foster
    What do you need to know to at the very least get your foot in the door? We're assuming for someone who doesn't have a college degree (yet) but will eventually get one. My guess is html, css, javascript, and php, and photoshop and dreamweaver, and sql. And being familiar with using a web host to have sites live, like knowing how to use cpanel. It's probably a very inaccurate and narrow guess but that's what i think right now. I don't know exactly.

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  • Best choice for 3D Physics Engine for C#/XNA

    - by Nic Foster
    Since 2007 I've been working on the development of an open-source game engine, and have been using JigLibX for 3D Physics. However, the developers on the project have stopped contributing to it for over 2 years now, and it's lacking features I need, or have major bugs in certain features. What are some good choices for 3D physics engines that are written purely in C#? Are there any that are more complete than JigLibX? EDIT: I just stumbled upon an engine called BEPUphysics. It was supported up until May 2012, which is fairly recent. I may check it out, any information that you guys could give on how complete the engine is would be great.

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