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  • Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

    - by Randy Walker
    I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

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  • CPU Wars Is a Trump-Style Card Game Driven by Chip Stats

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    If you’re looking for the geekiest card game around, you’d be hard pressed to beat CPU Wars–a top-trumps card game built around CPU specs. From the game’s designers: CPU Wars is a trump card game built by geeks for geeks. For Volume 1.0 we chose 30 CPUs that we believe had the greatest impact on the desktop history. The game is ideally played by 2 or 3 people. The deck is split between the players and then each player takes a turn and picks a category that they think has the best value. We have chosen the most important specs that could be numerically represented, such as maximum speed achieved and maximum number of transistors. It’s lots of fun, it has a bit of strategy and can be played during a break or over a coffee. If you’re interested, you can pick up a copy for £7.99 (roughly $12.50 USD). Hit up the link below for more information. How To Customize Your Wallpaper with Google Image Searches, RSS Feeds, and More 47 Keyboard Shortcuts That Work in All Web Browsers How To Hide Passwords in an Encrypted Drive Even the FBI Can’t Get Into

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  • Oracle Social @ OpenWorld

    - by me
     Hi there -  Wanna know what going on at Oracle Open World and Social?  Here are the hot tips!  Do you want to see  the Oracle Social Engagement Center in action ? You can explore the power of social publishing (Vitrue)  and the live social  monitoring (Collective Intellect) of  the Social Buzz around OpenWorld.Let's see if you appear in the Tweeter stream . Visit us  at Moscone South main entrance (foursquare place)  and meet  the Oracle Social Geeks  @Radu43, @peterreiser, @dankmbp and team. Are you a  social developer  and want to discover Oracle Social Network (OSN) ? cool - you can still  join the OSN Developers Challenge , take the OSN technical preview tour and meet our WebCenter evangelists Jake (@theappslab) and @noelportugal. Do you want to meet the Oracle Social Geeks and have some fun?  Then join us at the Social Plaza @ Oracle OpenWorld event on Tuesday, October 2, Noon–8:00 p.m. at the  Mint Plaza, Fifth Street between Mission and Market. cu you all at #oow

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  • Oracle Social @ OpenWorld

    - by me
     Hi there -  Wanna know what going on at Oracle OpenWorld and Social?  Here are the hot tips!  Do you want to see  the Oracle Social Engagement Center in action ? You can explore the power of social publishing (Vitrue)  and the live social  monitoring (Collective Intellect) of  the Social Buzz around OpenWorld.Let's see if you appear in the Tweeter stream . Visit us  at Moscone South main entrance (foursquare place)  and meet  the Oracle Social Geeks  @Radu43, @peterreiser, @dankmbp and team. Are you a  social developer  and want to discover Oracle Social Network (OSN) ? cool - you can still  join the OSN Developers Challenge , take the OSN technical preview tour and meet our WebCenter evangelists Jake (@theappslab) and @noelportugal. Do you want to meet the Oracle Social Geeks and have some fun?  Then join us at the Social Plaza @ Oracle OpenWorld event on Tuesday, October 2, Noon–8:00 p.m. at the  Mint Plaza, Fifth Street between Mission and Market. cu you all at #oow

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  • Use Apache authentication + authorization to control access to Subversion subdirectories

    - by Stefan Lasiewski
    I have a single SVN repo at /var/svn/ with a few subdirectories. Staff must be able to access the top-level directory and all subdirectories within it, but I want to restrict access to subdirectories using alternate htpasswd files. This works for our Staff. <Location /> DAV svn SVNParentPath /var/svn AuthType Basic AuthBasicProvider ldap # mod_authnz_ldap AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off AuthLDAPURL "ldap.example.org:636/ou=people,ou=Unit,ou=Host,o=ldapsvc,dc=example,dc=org?uid?sub?(objectClass=PosixAccount)" AuthLDAPGroupAttribute memberUid AuthLDAPGroupAttributeIsDN off Require ldap-group cn=staff,ou=PosixGroup,ou=Unit,ou=Host,o=ldapsvc,dc=example,dc=org </Location> Now, I am trying to restrict access to a subdirectory with a separate htpasswd file, like this: <Location /customerA> DAV svn SVNParentPath /var/svn # mod_authn_file AuthType Basic AuthBasicProvider file AuthUserFile /usr/local/etc/apache22/htpasswd.customerA Require user customerA </Location> I can use Firefox and curl to browse to this folder fine: curl https://svn.example.org/customerA/ --user customerA:password But I cannot use check out this SVN repository: $ svn co https://svn.example.org/customerA/ svn: Repository moved permanently to 'https://svn.example.org/customerA/'; please relocate And on the server logs, I get this strange error: # httpd-access.log 192.168.19.13 - - [03/May/2010:16:40:00 -0700] "OPTIONS /customerA HTTP/1.1" 401 401 192.168.19.13 - customerA [03/May/2010:16:40:00 -0700] "OPTIONS /customerA HTTP/1.1" 301 244 # httpd-error.log [Mon May 03 16:40:00 2010] [error] [client 192.168.19.13] Could not fetch resource information. [301, #0] [Mon May 03 16:40:00 2010] [error] [client 192.168.19.13] Requests for a collection must have a trailing slash on the URI. [301, #0] My question: Can I restrict access to Subversion subdirectories using Apache access controls? DocumentRoot is commented out, so it's not clear that the FAQ at http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#http-301-error applies.

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  • Terminal Server in Windows Server 2003

    - by Hemal
    I have a confusion regarding what I am doing here. At present I have a Windows Server 2003 server with SP2. I have assigned RAS/VPN server role to it (through Manage my server wizard) and in my router, I setup the IP address of my RAS/VPN server as PPTP server. Staff leave their workstations ON all the time and access them from home through RDP. They first connect thorugh VPN & in the RDC they simply type their respective IP or computer name to access the office network from home. Everything works fine so far except: Staff have to leave compuers always ON in the office Speed is very slow depend how many staff members access the VPN network I was told to install and configure Terminal service to improve this situation. I already added TS Role in the server but I don't know how to clients can access the TS server from home or remote location. I really appreciate any good links or guidence from the experts in this group regarding this. Thank you in advance for any replies!

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  • MS Excel and Access - which is better for reports?

    - by Nat
    Where I work, staff have just started to use a basic table in excel (1 october) to record sales which has about 10 columns (name, client, renewed, discount, paid etc). I record the data (total sold etc) every hour and email it to the manager. Each staff has the their own file on the network which they use constantly for that day (eg. John 08-10.xlsx; John 09-10.xlsx etc) and have been told to save the file after they complete a row with client data. I can see the file (in read only mode) to update the report but I am sure there must be a way of doing an autoupdate of their worksheets in real time. I can link worksheets and workbooks to my main workbook but manually. Does anyone have suggestions on have to do this on Excel? Or would Access allow me to make a report which shows the sales total for that hour without the staff closing the file or constantly clicking save every few minutes? We use office 2010. thanks

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  • Best way to restrict access to a folder in Dropbox

    - by Joe S
    I currently run a business with around 10 staff members and we currently use Dropbox Pro 100GB to share all of our files. It works very well and is inexpensive, however, I am taking on a number of new staff and would like to move the more sensitive documents into their own, protected folder. Currently, we all share one Dropbox account, I am aware that Dropbox for teams supports this, but it is far too expensive for us as a small company. I have researched a number of solutions: 1) Set up a new standard Dropbox account just for use by management, which will contain all of the sensitive documents, and join the shared folder of the rest of my team to access the rest of the documents. As i understand it, this is not possible with a free account, as any dropbox shared folder added to your account will use up your quota 2) Set up some sort of TrueCrypt container, and install TrueCrypt on each trusted staff member's machine, and store the documents inside that. Would this be difficult to use? I'd imagine the sync-ing would not work so well as the disk would technically be mounted at the time of use and any changes would be a change to the actual container rather than individual files. I was just wondering if anyone knows a way to do this without the drawbacks outlined above? Thanks!

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  • How to use a specific Ip to access specific sites by?

    - by Dani AM
    My Company registered in certain services on the Web and are relying on the company's Ip to use these services, Director asked me to allow some staff to enter these sites from outside the company,after authorized staff enter to comany's site, How could they use the company's Ip to allow them to browse services sites ? Do I need to use a method such as proxy sites like youtube proxy? or there is another way?How do I do this in asp.net? thanks in advance.

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  • How to use a specific IP to access specific sites by?

    - by Dani AM
    My Company registered in certain services on the Web and are relying on the company's IP to use these services, Director asked me to allow some staff to enter these sites from outside the company, after authorized staff enter to comany's site. How could they use the company's IP to allow them to browse services sites? Do I need to use a method such as proxy sites like youtube proxy? or there is another way?How do I do this in asp.net? Thanks in advance.

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  • Allowing users to delete their own comments in Django

    - by RaDeuX
    I am using the delete() function from django.contrib.comments.views.moderation module. The staff-member is allowed to delete ANY comment posts, which is completely fine. However, I would also like to give registered non-staff members the privilege to delete their OWN comment posts, and their OWN only. How can I accomplish this?

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  • How to make an access database where both users with and without an ID number can make a transaction

    - by louise
    I am trying to create an access 2007 database that allows staff that already have ID numbers to make a transaction and also other guest users who do not have ID number make a transaction. What is the best way todo this in access? A transaction involves taking an item out of inventory. Therefore if one a user (staff or external) has an item out of inventory then no other users can get a hold of that item. Thanks, Any Ideas would be most appreciated!

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  • Strange Map Reduce Behavior in CouchDB. Rereduce?

    - by Tony
    I have a mapreduce issue with couchdb (both functions shown below): when I run it with grouplevel = 2 (exact) I get accurate output: {"rows":[ {"key":["2011-01-11","staff-1"],"value":{"total":895.72,"count":2,"services":6,"services_ignored":6,"services_liked":0,"services_disliked":0,"services_disliked_avg":0,"Revise":{"total":275.72,"count":1},"Review":{"total":620,"count":1}}}, {"key":["2011-01-11","staff-2"],"value":{"total":8461.689999999999,"count":2,"services":41,"services_ignored":37,"services_liked":4,"services_disliked":0,"services_disliked_avg":0,"Revise":{"total":4432.4,"count":1},"Review":{"total":4029.29,"count":1}}}, {"key":["2011-01-11","staff-3"],"value":{"total":2100.72,"count":1,"services":10,"services_ignored":4,"services_liked":3,"services_disliked":3,"services_disliked_avg":2.3333333333333335,"Revise":{"total":2100.72,"count":1}}}, However, changing to grouplevel=1 so the values for all the different staff keys should be all grouped by date no longer gives accurate output (notice the total is currect but all others are wrong): {"rows":[ {"key":["2011-01-11"],"value":{"total":11458.130000000001,"count":2,"services":0,"services_ignored":0,"services_liked":0,"services_disliked":0,"services_disliked_avg":0,"None":{"total":11458.130000000001,"count":2}}}, My only theory is this has something to do with rereduce, which I have not yet learned. Should I explore that option or am I missing something else here? This is the Map function: function(doc) { if(doc.doc_type == 'Feedback') { emit([doc.date.split('T')[0], doc.staff_id], doc); } } And this is the Reduce: function(keys, vals) { // sum all key points by status: total, count, services (liked, rejected, ignored) var ret = { 'total':0, 'count':0, 'services': 0, 'services_ignored': 0, 'services_liked': 0, 'services_disliked': 0, 'services_disliked_avg': 0, }; var total_disliked_score = 0; // handle status function handle_status(doc) { if(!doc.status || doc.status == '' || doc.status == undefined) { status = 'None'; } else if (doc.status == 'Declined') { status = 'Rejected'; } else { status = doc.status; } if(!ret[status]) ret[status] = {'total':0, 'count':0}; ret[status]['total'] += doc.total; ret[status]['count'] += 1; }; // handle likes / dislikes function handle_services(services) { ret.services += services.length; for(var a in services) { if (services[a].user_likes == 10) { ret.services_liked += 1; } else if (services[a].user_likes >= 1) { ret.services_disliked += 1; total_disliked_score += services[a].user_likes; if (total_disliked_score >= ret.services_disliked) { ret.services_disliked_avg = total_disliked_score / ret.services_disliked; } } else { ret.services_ignored += 1; } } } // loop thru docs for(var i in vals) { // increment the total $ ret.total += vals[i].total; ret.count += 1; // update totals and sums for the status of this route handle_status(vals[i]); // do the likes / dislikes stats if(vals[i].groups) { for(var ii in vals[i].groups) { if(vals[i].groups[ii].services) { handle_services(vals[i].groups[ii].services); } } } // handle deleted services if(vals[i].hidden_services) { if (vals[i].hidden_services) { handle_services(vals[i].hidden_services); } } } return ret; }

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  • Agile Development

    - by James Oloo Onyango
    Alot of literature has and is being written about agile developement and its surrounding philosophies. In my quest to find the best way to express the importance of agile methodologies, i have found Robert C. Martin's "A Satire Of Two Companies" to be both the most concise and thorough! Enjoy the read! Rufus Inc Project Kick Off Your name is Bob. The date is January 3, 2001, and your head still aches from the recent millennial revelry. You are sitting in a conference room with several managers and a group of your peers. You are a project team leader. Your boss is there, and he has brought along all of his team leaders. His boss called the meeting. "We have a new project to develop," says your boss's boss. Call him BB. The points in his hair are so long that they scrape the ceiling. Your boss's points are just starting to grow, but he eagerly awaits the day when he can leave Brylcream stains on the acoustic tiles. BB describes the essence of the new market they have identified and the product they want to develop to exploit this market. "We must have this new project up and working by fourth quarter October 1," BB demands. "Nothing is of higher priority, so we are cancelling your current project." The reaction in the room is stunned silence. Months of work are simply going to be thrown away. Slowly, a murmur of objection begins to circulate around the conference table.   His points give off an evil green glow as BB meets the eyes of everyone in the room. One by one, that insidious stare reduces each attendee to quivering lumps of protoplasm. It is clear that he will brook no discussion on this matter. Once silence has been restored, BB says, "We need to begin immediately. How long will it take you to do the analysis?" You raise your hand. Your boss tries to stop you, but his spitwad misses you and you are unaware of his efforts.   "Sir, we can't tell you how long the analysis will take until we have some requirements." "The requirements document won't be ready for 3 or 4 weeks," BB says, his points vibrating with frustration. "So, pretend that you have the requirements in front of you now. How long will you require for analysis?" No one breathes. Everyone looks around to see whether anyone has some idea. "If analysis goes beyond April 1, we have a problem. Can you finish the analysis by then?" Your boss visibly gathers his courage: "We'll find a way, sir!" His points grow 3 mm, and your headache increases by two Tylenol. "Good." BB smiles. "Now, how long will it take to do the design?" "Sir," you say. Your boss visibly pales. He is clearly worried that his 3 mms are at risk. "Without an analysis, it will not be possible to tell you how long design will take." BB's expression shifts beyond austere.   "PRETEND you have the analysis already!" he says, while fixing you with his vacant, beady little eyes. "How long will it take you to do the design?" Two Tylenol are not going to cut it. Your boss, in a desperate attempt to save his new growth, babbles: "Well, sir, with only six months left to complete the project, design had better take no longer than 3 months."   "I'm glad you agree, Smithers!" BB says, beaming. Your boss relaxes. He knows his points are secure. After a while, he starts lightly humming the Brylcream jingle. BB continues, "So, analysis will be complete by April 1, design will be complete by July 1, and that gives you 3 months to implement the project. This meeting is an example of how well our new consensus and empowerment policies are working. Now, get out there and start working. I'll expect to see TQM plans and QIT assignments on my desk by next week. Oh, and don't forget that your crossfunctional team meetings and reports will be needed for next month's quality audit." "Forget the Tylenol," you think to yourself as you return to your cubicle. "I need bourbon."   Visibly excited, your boss comes over to you and says, "Gosh, what a great meeting. I think we're really going to do some world shaking with this project." You nod in agreement, too disgusted to do anything else. "Oh," your boss continues, "I almost forgot." He hands you a 30-page document. "Remember that the SEI is coming to do an evaluation next week. This is the evaluation guide. You need to read through it, memorize it, and then shred it. It tells you how to answer any questions that the SEI auditors ask you. It also tells you what parts of the building you are allowed to take them to and what parts to avoid. We are determined to be a CMM level 3 organization by June!"   You and your peers start working on the analysis of the new project. This is difficult because you have no requirements. But from the 10-minute introduction given by BB on that fateful morning, you have some idea of what the product is supposed to do.   Corporate process demands that you begin by creating a use case document. You and your team begin enumerating use cases and drawing oval and stick diagrams. Philosophical debates break out among the team members. There is disagreement as to whether certain use cases should be connected with <<extends>> or <<includes>> relationships. Competing models are created, but nobody knows how to evaluate them. The debate continues, effectively paralyzing progress.   After a week, somebody finds the iceberg.com Web site, which recommends disposing entirely of <<extends>> and <<includes>> and replacing them with <<precedes>> and <<uses>>. The documents on this Web site, authored by Don Sengroiux, describes a method known as stalwart-analysis, which claims to be a step-by-step method for translating use cases into design diagrams. More competing use case models are created using this new scheme, but again, people can't agree on how to evaluate them. The thrashing continues. More and more, the use case meetings are driven by emotion rather than by reason. If it weren't for the fact that you don't have requirements, you'd be pretty upset by the lack of progress you are making. The requirements document arrives on February 15. And then again on February 20, 25, and every week thereafter. Each new version contradicts the previous one. Clearly, the marketing folks who are writing the requirements, empowered though they might be, are not finding consensus.   At the same time, several new competing use case templates have been proposed by the various team members. Each template presents its own particularly creative way of delaying progress. The debates rage on. On March 1, Prudence Putrigence, the process proctor, succeeds in integrating all the competing use case forms and templates into a single, all-encompassing form. Just the blank form is 15 pages long. She has managed to include every field that appeared on all the competing templates. She also presents a 159- page document describing how to fill out the use case form. All current use cases must be rewritten according to the new standard.   You marvel to yourself that it now requires 15 pages of fill-in-the-blank and essay questions to answer the question: What should the system do when the user presses Return? The corporate process (authored by L. E. Ott, famed author of "Holistic Analysis: A Progressive Dialectic for Software Engineers") insists that you discover all primary use cases, 87 percent of all secondary use cases, and 36.274 percent of all tertiary use cases before you can complete analysis and enter the design phase. You have no idea what a tertiary use case is. So in an attempt to meet this requirement, you try to get your use case document reviewed by the marketing department, which you hope will know what a tertiary use case is.   Unfortunately, the marketing folks are too busy with sales support to talk to you. Indeed, since the project started, you have not been able to get a single meeting with marketing, which has provided a never-ending stream of changing and contradictory requirements documents.   While one team has been spinning endlessly on the use case document, another team has been working out the domain model. Endless variations of UML documents are pouring out of this team. Every week, the model is reworked.   The team members can't decide whether to use <<interfaces>> or <<types>> in the model. A huge disagreement has been raging on the proper syntax and application of OCL. Others on the team just got back from a 5-day class on catabolism, and have been producing incredibly detailed and arcane diagrams that nobody else can fathom.   On March 27, with one week to go before analysis is to be complete, you have produced a sea of documents and diagrams but are no closer to a cogent analysis of the problem than you were on January 3. **** And then, a miracle happens.   **** On Saturday, April 1, you check your e-mail from home. You see a memo from your boss to BB. It states unequivocally that you are done with the analysis! You phone your boss and complain. "How could you have told BB that we were done with the analysis?" "Have you looked at a calendar lately?" he responds. "It's April 1!" The irony of that date does not escape you. "But we have so much more to think about. So much more to analyze! We haven't even decided whether to use <<extends>> or <<precedes>>!" "Where is your evidence that you are not done?" inquires your boss, impatiently. "Whaaa . . . ." But he cuts you off. "Analysis can go on forever; it has to be stopped at some point. And since this is the date it was scheduled to stop, it has been stopped. Now, on Monday, I want you to gather up all existing analysis materials and put them into a public folder. Release that folder to Prudence so that she can log it in the CM system by Monday afternoon. Then get busy and start designing."   As you hang up the phone, you begin to consider the benefits of keeping a bottle of bourbon in your bottom desk drawer. They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the analysis phase. BB gave a colon-stirring speech on empowerment. And your boss, another 3 mm taller, congratulated his team on the incredible show of unity and teamwork. Finally, the CIO takes the stage to tell everyone that the SEI audit went very well and to thank everyone for studying and shredding the evaluation guides that were passed out. Level 3 now seems assured and will be awarded by June. (Scuttlebutt has it that managers at the level of BB and above are to receive significant bonuses once the SEI awards level 3.)   As the weeks flow by, you and your team work on the design of the system. Of course, you find that the analysis that the design is supposedly based on is flawedno, useless; no, worse than useless. But when you tell your boss that you need to go back and work some more on the analysis to shore up its weaker sections, he simply states, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   So, you and your team hack the design as best you can, unsure of whether the requirements have been properly analyzed. Of course, it really doesn't matter much, since the requirements document is still thrashing with weekly revisions, and the marketing department still refuses to meet with you.     The design is a nightmare. Your boss recently misread a book named The Finish Line in which the author, Mark DeThomaso, blithely suggested that design documents should be taken down to code-level detail. "If we are going to be working at that level of detail," you ask, "why don't we simply write the code instead?" "Because then you wouldn't be designing, of course. And the only allowable activity in the design phase is design!" "Besides," he continues, "we have just purchased a companywide license for Dandelion! This tool enables 'Round the Horn Engineering!' You are to transfer all design diagrams into this tool. It will automatically generate our code for us! It will also keep the design diagrams in sync with the code!" Your boss hands you a brightly colored shrinkwrapped box containing the Dandelion distribution. You accept it numbly and shuffle off to your cubicle. Twelve hours, eight crashes, one disk reformatting, and eight shots of 151 later, you finally have the tool installed on your server. You consider the week your team will lose while attending Dandelion training. Then you smile and think, "Any week I'm not here is a good week." Design diagram after design diagram is created by your team. Dandelion makes it very difficult to draw these diagrams. There are dozens and dozens of deeply nested dialog boxes with funny text fields and check boxes that must all be filled in correctly. And then there's the problem of moving classes between packages. At first, these diagram are driven from the use cases. But the requirements are changing so often that the use cases rapidly become meaningless. Debates rage about whether VISITOR or DECORATOR design patterns should be used. One developer refuses to use VISITOR in any form, claiming that it's not a properly object-oriented construct. Someone refuses to use multiple inheritance, since it is the spawn of the devil. Review meetings rapidly degenerate into debates about the meaning of object orientation, the definition of analysis versus design, or when to use aggregation versus association. Midway through the design cycle, the marketing folks announce that they have rethought the focus of the system. Their new requirements document is completely restructured. They have eliminated several major feature areas and replaced them with feature areas that they anticipate customer surveys will show to be more appropriate. You tell your boss that these changes mean that you need to reanalyze and redesign much of the system. But he says, "The analysis phase is system. But he says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   You suggest that it might be better to create a simple prototype to show to the marketing folks and even some potential customers. But your boss says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it." Hack, hack, hack, hack. You try to create some kind of a design document that might reflect the new requirements documents. However, the revolution of the requirements has not caused them to stop thrashing. Indeed, if anything, the wild oscillations of the requirements document have only increased in frequency and amplitude.   You slog your way through them.   On June 15, the Dandelion database gets corrupted. Apparently, the corruption has been progressive. Small errors in the DB accumulated over the months into bigger and bigger errors. Eventually, the CASE tool just stopped working. Of course, the slowly encroaching corruption is present on all the backups. Calls to the Dandelion technical support line go unanswered for several days. Finally, you receive a brief e-mail from Dandelion, informing you that this is a known problem and that the solution is to purchase the new version, which they promise will be ready some time next quarter, and then reenter all the diagrams by hand.   ****   Then, on July 1 another miracle happens! You are done with the design!   Rather than go to your boss and complain, you stock your middle desk drawer with some vodka.   **** They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the design phase and their graduation to CMM level 3. This time, you find BB's speech so stirring that you have to use the restroom before it begins. New banners and plaques are all over your workplace. They show pictures of eagles and mountain climbers, and they talk about teamwork and empowerment. They read better after a few scotches. That reminds you that you need to clear out your file cabinet to make room for the brandy. You and your team begin to code. But you rapidly discover that the design is lacking in some significant areas. Actually, it's lacking any significance at all. You convene a design session in one of the conference rooms to try to work through some of the nastier problems. But your boss catches you at it and disbands the meeting, saying, "The design phase is over. The only allowable activity is coding. Now get back to it."   ****   The code generated by Dandelion is really hideous. It turns out that you and your team were using association and aggregation the wrong way, after all. All the generated code has to be edited to correct these flaws. Editing this code is extremely difficult because it has been instrumented with ugly comment blocks that have special syntax that Dandelion needs in order to keep the diagrams in sync with the code. If you accidentally alter one of these comments, the diagrams will be regenerated incorrectly. It turns out that "Round the Horn Engineering" requires an awful lot of effort. The more you try to keep the code compatible with Dandelion, the more errors Dandelion generates. In the end, you give up and decide to keep the diagrams up to date manually. A second later, you decide that there's no point in keeping the diagrams up to date at all. Besides, who has time?   Your boss hires a consultant to build tools to count the number of lines of code that are being produced. He puts a big thermometer graph on the wall with the number 1,000,000 on the top. Every day, he extends the red line to show how many lines have been added. Three days after the thermometer appears on the wall, your boss stops you in the hall. "That graph isn't growing quickly enough. We need to have a million lines done by October 1." "We aren't even sh-sh-sure that the proshect will require a m-million linezh," you blather. "We have to have a million lines done by October 1," your boss reiterates. His points have grown again, and the Grecian formula he uses on them creates an aura of authority and competence. "Are you sure your comment blocks are big enough?" Then, in a flash of managerial insight, he says, "I have it! I want you to institute a new policy among the engineers. No line of code is to be longer than 20 characters. Any such line must be split into two or more preferably more. All existing code needs to be reworked to this standard. That'll get our line count up!"   You decide not to tell him that this will require two unscheduled work months. You decide not to tell him anything at all. You decide that intravenous injections of pure ethanol are the only solution. You make the appropriate arrangements. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. You and your team madly code away. By August 1, your boss, frowning at the thermometer on the wall, institutes a mandatory 50-hour workweek.   Hack, hack, hack, and hack. By September 1st, the thermometer is at 1.2 million lines and your boss asks you to write a report describing why you exceeded the coding budget by 20 percent. He institutes mandatory Saturdays and demands that the project be brought back down to a million lines. You start a campaign of remerging lines. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. Tempers are flaring; people are quitting; QA is raining trouble reports down on you. Customers are demanding installation and user manuals; salespeople are demanding advance demonstrations for special customers; the requirements document is still thrashing, the marketing folks are complaining that the product isn't anything like they specified, and the liquor store won't accept your credit card anymore. Something has to give.    On September 15, BB calls a meeting. As he enters the room, his points are emitting clouds of steam. When he speaks, the bass overtones of his carefully manicured voice cause the pit of your stomach to roll over. "The QA manager has told me that this project has less than 50 percent of the required features implemented. He has also informed me that the system crashes all the time, yields wrong results, and is hideously slow. He has also complained that he cannot keep up with the continuous train of daily releases, each more buggy than the last!" He stops for a few seconds, visibly trying to compose himself. "The QA manager estimates that, at this rate of development, we won't be able to ship the product until December!" Actually, you think it's more like March, but you don't say anything. "December!" BB roars with such derision that people duck their heads as though he were pointing an assault rifle at them. "December is absolutely out of the question. Team leaders, I want new estimates on my desk in the morning. I am hereby mandating 65-hour work weeks until this project is complete. And it better be complete by November 1."   As he leaves the conference room, he is heard to mutter: "Empowermentbah!" * * * Your boss is bald; his points are mounted on BB's wall. The fluorescent lights reflecting off his pate momentarily dazzle you. "Do you have anything to drink?" he asks. Having just finished your last bottle of Boone's Farm, you pull a bottle of Thunderbird from your bookshelf and pour it into his coffee mug. "What's it going to take to get this project done? " he asks. "We need to freeze the requirements, analyze them, design them, and then implement them," you say callously. "By November 1?" your boss exclaims incredulously. "No way! Just get back to coding the damned thing." He storms out, scratching his vacant head.   A few days later, you find that your boss has been transferred to the corporate research division. Turnover has skyrocketed. Customers, informed at the last minute that their orders cannot be fulfilled on time, have begun to cancel their orders. Marketing is re-evaluating whether this product aligns with the overall goals of the company. Memos fly, heads roll, policies change, and things are, overall, pretty grim. Finally, by March, after far too many sixty-five hour weeks, a very shaky version of the software is ready. In the field, bug-discovery rates are high, and the technical support staff are at their wits' end, trying to cope with the complaints and demands of the irate customers. Nobody is happy.   In April, BB decides to buy his way out of the problem by licensing a product produced by Rupert Industries and redistributing it. The customers are mollified, the marketing folks are smug, and you are laid off.     Rupert Industries: Project Alpha   Your name is Robert. The date is January 3, 2001. The quiet hours spent with your family this holiday have left you refreshed and ready for work. You are sitting in a conference room with your team of professionals. The manager of the division called the meeting. "We have some ideas for a new project," says the division manager. Call him Russ. He is a high-strung British chap with more energy than a fusion reactor. He is ambitious and driven but understands the value of a team. Russ describes the essence of the new market opportunity the company has identified and introduces you to Jane, the marketing manager, who is responsible for defining the products that will address it. Addressing you, Jane says, "We'd like to start defining our first product offering as soon as possible. When can you and your team meet with me?" You reply, "We'll be done with the current iteration of our project this Friday. We can spare a few hours for you between now and then. After that, we'll take a few people from the team and dedicate them to you. We'll begin hiring their replacements and the new people for your team immediately." "Great," says Russ, "but I want you to understand that it is critical that we have something to exhibit at the trade show coming up this July. If we can't be there with something significant, we'll lose the opportunity."   "I understand," you reply. "I don't yet know what it is that you have in mind, but I'm sure we can have something by July. I just can't tell you what that something will be right now. In any case, you and Jane are going to have complete control over what we developers do, so you can rest assured that by July, you'll have the most important things that can be accomplished in that time ready to exhibit."   Russ nods in satisfaction. He knows how this works. Your team has always kept him advised and allowed him to steer their development. He has the utmost confidence that your team will work on the most important things first and will produce a high-quality product.   * * *   "So, Robert," says Jane at their first meeting, "How does your team feel about being split up?" "We'll miss working with each other," you answer, "but some of us were getting pretty tired of that last project and are looking forward to a change. So, what are you people cooking up?" Jane beams. "You know how much trouble our customers currently have . . ." And she spends a half hour or so describing the problem and possible solution. "OK, wait a second" you respond. "I need to be clear about this." And so you and Jane talk about how this system might work. Some of her ideas aren't fully formed. You suggest possible solutions. She likes some of them. You continue discussing.   During the discussion, as each new topic is addressed, Jane writes user story cards. Each card represents something that the new system has to do. The cards accumulate on the table and are spread out in front of you. Both you and Jane point at them, pick them up, and make notes on them as you discuss the stories. The cards are powerful mnemonic devices that you can use to represent complex ideas that are barely formed.   At the end of the meeting, you say, "OK, I've got a general idea of what you want. I'm going to talk to the team about it. I imagine they'll want to run some experiments with various database structures and presentation formats. Next time we meet, it'll be as a group, and we'll start identifying the most important features of the system."   A week later, your nascent team meets with Jane. They spread the existing user story cards out on the table and begin to get into some of the details of the system. The meeting is very dynamic. Jane presents the stories in the order of their importance. There is much discussion about each one. The developers are concerned about keeping the stories small enough to estimate and test. So they continually ask Jane to split one story into several smaller stories. Jane is concerned that each story have a clear business value and priority, so as she splits them, she makes sure that this stays true.   The stories accumulate on the table. Jane writes them, but the developers make notes on them as needed. Nobody tries to capture everything that is said; the cards are not meant to capture everything but are simply reminders of the conversation.   As the developers become more comfortable with the stories, they begin writing estimates on them. These estimates are crude and budgetary, but they give Jane an idea of what the story will cost.   At the end of the meeting, it is clear that many more stories could be discussed. It is also clear that the most important stories have been addressed and that they represent several months worth of work. Jane closes the meeting by taking the cards with her and promising to have a proposal for the first release in the morning.   * * *   The next morning, you reconvene the meeting. Jane chooses five cards and places them on the table. "According to your estimates, these cards represent about one perfect team-week's worth of work. The last iteration of the previous project managed to get one perfect team-week done in 3 real weeks. If we can get these five stories done in 3 weeks, we'll be able to demonstrate them to Russ. That will make him feel very comfortable about our progress." Jane is pushing it. The sheepish look on her face lets you know that she knows it too. You reply, "Jane, this is a new team, working on a new project. It's a bit presumptuous to expect that our velocity will be the same as the previous team's. However, I met with the team yesterday afternoon, and we all agreed that our initial velocity should, in fact, be set to one perfectweek for every 3 real-weeks. So you've lucked out on this one." "Just remember," you continue, "that the story estimates and the story velocity are very tentative at this point. We'll learn more when we plan the iteration and even more when we implement it."   Jane looks over her glasses at you as if to say "Who's the boss around here, anyway?" and then smiles and says, "Yeah, don't worry. I know the drill by now."Jane then puts 15 more cards on the table. She says, "If we can get all these cards done by the end of March, we can turn the system over to our beta test customers. And we'll get good feedback from them."   You reply, "OK, so we've got our first iteration defined, and we have the stories for the next three iterations after that. These four iterations will make our first release."   "So," says Jane, can you really do these five stories in the next 3 weeks?" "I don't know for sure, Jane," you reply. "Let's break them down into tasks and see what we get."   So Jane, you, and your team spend the next several hours taking each of the five stories that Jane chose for the first iteration and breaking them down into small tasks. The developers quickly realize that some of the tasks can be shared between stories and that other tasks have commonalities that can probably be taken advantage of. It is clear that potential designs are popping into the developers' heads. From time to time, they form little discussion knots and scribble UML diagrams on some cards.   Soon, the whiteboard is filled with the tasks that, once completed, will implement the five stories for this iteration. You start the sign-up process by saying, "OK, let's sign up for these tasks." "I'll take the initial database generation." Says Pete. "That's what I did on the last project, and this doesn't look very different. I estimate it at two of my perfect workdays." "OK, well, then, I'll take the login screen," says Joe. "Aw, darn," says Elaine, the junior member of the team, "I've never done a GUI, and kinda wanted to try that one."   "Ah, the impatience of youth," Joe says sagely, with a wink in your direction. "You can assist me with it, young Jedi." To Jane: "I think it'll take me about three of my perfect workdays."   One by one, the developers sign up for tasks and estimate them in terms of their own perfect workdays. Both you and Jane know that it is best to let the developers volunteer for tasks than to assign the tasks to them. You also know full well that you daren't challenge any of the developers' estimates. You know these people, and you trust them. You know that they are going to do the very best they can.   The developers know that they can't sign up for more perfect workdays than they finished in the last iteration they worked on. Once each developer has filled his or her schedule for the iteration, they stop signing up for tasks.   Eventually, all the developers have stopped signing up for tasks. But, of course, tasks are still left on the board.   "I was worried that that might happen," you say, "OK, there's only one thing to do, Jane. We've got too much to do in this iteration. What stories or tasks can we remove?" Jane sighs. She knows that this is the only option. Working overtime at the beginning of a project is insane, and projects where she's tried it have not fared well.   So Jane starts to remove the least-important functionality. "Well, we really don't need the login screen just yet. We can simply start the system in the logged-in state." "Rats!" cries Elaine. "I really wanted to do that." "Patience, grasshopper." says Joe. "Those who wait for the bees to leave the hive will not have lips too swollen to relish the honey." Elaine looks confused. Everyone looks confused. "So . . .," Jane continues, "I think we can also do away with . . ." And so, bit by bit, the list of tasks shrinks. Developers who lose a task sign up for one of the remaining ones.   The negotiation is not painless. Several times, Jane exhibits obvious frustration and impatience. Once, when tensions are especially high, Elaine volunteers, "I'll work extra hard to make up some of the missing time." You are about to correct her when, fortunately, Joe looks her in the eye and says, "When once you proceed down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."   In the end, an iteration acceptable to Jane is reached. It's not what Jane wanted. Indeed, it is significantly less. But it's something the team feels that can be achieved in the next 3 weeks.   And, after all, it still addresses the most important things that Jane wanted in the iteration. "So, Jane," you say when things had quieted down a bit, "when can we expect acceptance tests from you?" Jane sighs. This is the other side of the coin. For every story the development team implements,   Jane must supply a suite of acceptance tests that prove that it works. And the team needs these long before the end of the iteration, since they will certainly point out differences in the way Jane and the developers imagine the system's behaviour.   "I'll get you some example test scripts today," Jane promises. "I'll add to them every day after that. You'll have the entire suite by the middle of the iteration."   * * *   The iteration begins on Monday morning with a flurry of Class, Responsibilities, Collaborators sessions. By midmorning, all the developers have assembled into pairs and are rapidly coding away. "And now, my young apprentice," Joe says to Elaine, "you shall learn the mysteries of test-first design!"   "Wow, that sounds pretty rad," Elaine replies. "How do you do it?" Joe beams. It's clear that he has been anticipating this moment. "OK, what does the code do right now?" "Huh?" replied Elaine, "It doesn't do anything at all; there is no code."   "So, consider our task; can you think of something the code should do?" "Sure," Elaine said with youthful assurance, "First, it should connect to the database." "And thereupon, what must needs be required to connecteth the database?" "You sure talk weird," laughed Elaine. "I think we'd have to get the database object from some registry and call the Connect() method. "Ah, astute young wizard. Thou perceives correctly that we requireth an object within which we can cacheth the database object." "Is 'cacheth' really a word?" "It is when I say it! So, what test can we write that we know the database registry should pass?" Elaine sighs. She knows she'll just have to play along. "We should be able to create a database object and pass it to the registry in a Store() method. And then we should be able to pull it out of the registry with a Get() method and make sure it's the same object." "Oh, well said, my prepubescent sprite!" "Hay!" "So, now, let's write a test function that proves your case." "But shouldn't we write the database object and registry object first?" "Ah, you've much to learn, my young impatient one. Just write the test first." "But it won't even compile!" "Are you sure? What if it did?" "Uh . . ." "Just write the test, Elaine. Trust me." And so Joe, Elaine, and all the other developers began to code their tasks, one test case at a time. The room in which they worked was abuzz with the conversations between the pairs. The murmur was punctuated by an occasional high five when a pair managed to finish a task or a difficult test case.   As development proceeded, the developers changed partners once or twice a day. Each developer got to see what all the others were doing, and so knowledge of the code spread generally throughout the team.   Whenever a pair finished something significant whether a whole task or simply an important part of a task they integrated what they had with the rest of the system. Thus, the code base grew daily, and integration difficulties were minimized.   The developers communicated with Jane on a daily basis. They'd go to her whenever they had a question about the functionality of the system or the interpretation of an acceptance test case.   Jane, good as her word, supplied the team with a steady stream of acceptance test scripts. The team read these carefully and thereby gained a much better understanding of what Jane expected the system to do. By the beginning of the second week, there was enough functionality to demonstrate to Jane. She watched eagerly as the demonstration passed test case after test case. "This is really cool," Jane said as the demonstration finally ended. "But this doesn't seem like one-third of the tasks. Is your velocity slower than anticipated?"   You grimace. You'd been waiting for a good time to mention this to Jane but now she was forcing the issue. "Yes, unfortunately, we are going more slowly than we had expected. The new application server we are using is turning out to be a pain to configure. Also, it takes forever to reboot, and we have to reboot it whenever we make even the slightest change to its configuration."   Jane eyes you with suspicion. The stress of last Monday's negotiations had still not entirely dissipated. She says, "And what does this mean to our schedule? We can't slip it again, we just can't. Russ will have a fit! He'll haul us all into the woodshed and ream us some new ones."   You look Jane right in the eyes. There's no pleasant way to give someone news like this. So you just blurt out, "Look, if things keep going like they're going, we're not going to be done with everything by next Friday. Now it's possible that we'll figure out a way to go faster. But, frankly, I wouldn't depend on that. You should start thinking about one or two tasks that could be removed from the iteration without ruining the demonstration for Russ. Come hell or high water, we are going to give that demonstration on Friday, and I don't think you want us to choose which tasks to omit."   "Aw forchrisakes!" Jane barely manages to stifle yelling that last word as she stalks away, shaking her head. Not for the first time, you say to yourself, "Nobody ever promised me project management would be easy." You are pretty sure it won't be the last time, either.   Actually, things went a bit better than you had hoped. The team did, in fact, have to drop one task from the iteration, but Jane had chosen wisely, and the demonstration for Russ went without a hitch. Russ was not impressed with the progress, but neither was he dismayed. He simply said, "This is pretty good. But remember, we have to be able to demonstrate this system at the trade show in July, and at this rate, it doesn't look like you'll have all that much to show." Jane, whose attitude had improved dramatically with the completion of the iteration, responded to Russ by saying, "Russ, this team is working hard, and well. When July comes around, I am confident that we'll have something significant to demonstrate. It won't be everything, and some of it may be smoke and mirrors, but we'll have something."   Painful though the last iteration was, it had calibrated your velocity numbers. The next iteration went much better. Not because your team got more done than in the last iteration but simply because the team didn't have to remove any tasks or stories in the middle of the iteration.   By the start of the fourth iteration, a natural rhythm has been established. Jane, you, and the team know exactly what to expect from one another. The team is running hard, but the pace is sustainable. You are confident that the team can keep up this pace for a year or more.   The number of surprises in the schedule diminishes to near zero; however, the number of surprises in the requirements does not. Jane and Russ frequently look over the growing system and make recommendations or changes to the existing functionality. But all parties realize that these changes take time and must be scheduled. So the changes do not cause anyone's expectations to be violated. In March, there is a major demonstration of the system to the board of directors. The system is very limited and is not yet in a form good enough to take to the trade show, but progress is steady, and the board is reasonably impressed.   The second release goes even more smoothly than the first. By now, the team has figured out a way to automate Jane's acceptance test scripts. The team has also refactored the design of the system to the point that it is really easy to add new features and change old ones. The second release was done by the end of June and was taken to the trade show. It had less in it than Jane and Russ would have liked, but it did demonstrate the most important features of the system. Although customers at the trade show noticed that certain features were missing, they were very impressed overall. You, Russ, and Jane all returned from the trade show with smiles on your faces. You all felt as though this project was a winner.   Indeed, many months later, you are contacted by Rufus Inc. That company had been working on a system like this for its internal operations. Rufus has canceled the development of that system after a death-march project and is negotiating to license your technology for its environment.   Indeed, things are looking up!

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  • Securing an ADF Application using OES11g: Part 2

    - by user12587121
    To validate the integration with OES we need a sample ADF Application that is rich enough to allow us to test securing the various ADF elements.  To achieve this we can add some items including bounded task flows to the application developed in this tutorial. A sample JDeveloper 11.1.1.6 project is available here. It depends on the Fusion Order Demo (FOD) database schema which is easily created using the FOD build scripts.In the deployment we have chosen to enable only ADF Authentication as we will delegate Authorization, mostly, to OES.The welcome page of the application with all the links exposed looks as follows: The Welcome, Browse Products, Browse Stock and System Administration links go to pages while the Supplier Registration and Update Stock are bounded task flows.  The Login link goes to a basic login page and once logged in a link is presented that goes to a logout page.  Only the Browse Products and Browse Stock pages are really connected to the database--the other pages and task flows do not really perform any operations on the database. Required Security Policies We make use of a set of test users and roles as decscribed on the welcome page of the application.  In order to exercise the different authorization possibilities we would like to enforce the following sample policies: Anonymous users can see the Login, Welcome and Supplier Registration links. They can also see the Welcome page, the Login page and follow the Supplier Registration task flow.  They can see the icon adjacent to the Login link indicating whether they have logged in or not. Authenticated users can see the Browse Product page. Only staff granted the right can see the Browse Product page cost price value returned from the database and then only if the value is below a configurable limit. Suppliers and staff can see the Browse Stock links and pages.  Customers cannot. Suppliers can see the Update Stock link but only those with the update permission are allowed to follow the task flow that it launches.  We could hide the link but leave it exposed here so we can easily demonstrate the method call activity protecting the task flow. Only staff granted the right can see the System Administration link and the System Administration page it accesses. Implementing the required policies In order to secure the application we will make use of the following techniques: EL Expressions and Java backing beans: JSF has the notion of EL expressions to reference data from backing Java classes.  We use these to control the presentation of links on the navigation page which respect the security contraints.  So a user will not see links that he is not allowed to click on into. These Java backing beans can call on to OES for an authorization decision.  Important Note: naturally we would configure the WLS domain where our ADF application is running as an OES WLS SM, which would allow us to efficiently query OES over the PEP API.  However versioning conflicts between OES 11.1.1.5 and ADF 11.1.1.6 mean that this is not possible.  Nevertheless, we can make use of the OES RESTful gateway technique from this posting in order to call into OES. You can easily create and manage backing beans in Jdeveloper as follows: Custom ADF Phase Listener: ADF extends the JSF page lifecycle flow and allows one to hook into the flow to intercept page rendering.  We use this to put a check prior to rendering any protected pages, again calling on to OES via the backing bean.  Phase listeners are configured in the adf-settings.xml file.  See the MyPageListener.java class in the project.  Here, for example,  is the code we use in the listener to check for allowed access to the sysadmin page, navigating back to the welcome page if authorization is not granted:                         if (page != null && (page.equals("/system.jspx") || page.equals("/system"))){                             System.out.println("MyPageListener: Checking Authorization for /system");                             if (getValue("#{oesBackingBean.UIAccessSysAdmin}").toString().equals("false") ){                                   System.out.println("MyPageListener: Forcing navigation away from system" +                                       "to welcome");                                 NavigationHandler nh = fc.getApplication().getNavigationHandler();                                   nh.handleNavigation(fc, null, "welcome");                               } else {                                 System.out.println("MyPageListener: access allowed");                              }                         } Method call activity: our app makes use of bounded task flows to implement the sequence of pages that update the stock or allow suppliers to self register.  ADF takes care of ensuring that a bounded task flow can be entered by only one page.  So a way to protect all those pages is to make a call to OES in the first activity and then either exit the task flow or continue depending on the authorization decision.  The method call returns a String which contains the name of the transition to effect. This is where we configure the method call activity in JDeveloper: We implement each of the policies using the above techniques as follows: Policies 1 and 2: as these policies concern the coarse grained notions of controlling access to anonymous and authenticated users we can make use of the container’s security constraints which can be defined in the web.xml file.  The allPages constraint is added automatically when we configure Authentication for the ADF application.  We have added the “anonymousss” constraint to allow access to the the required pages, task flows and icons: <security-constraint>    <web-resource-collection>      <web-resource-name>anonymousss</web-resource-name>      <url-pattern>/faces/welcome</url-pattern>      <url-pattern>/afr/*</url-pattern>      <url-pattern>/adf/*</url-pattern>      <url-pattern>/key.png</url-pattern>      <url-pattern>/faces/supplier-reg-btf/*</url-pattern>      <url-pattern>/faces/supplier_register_complete</url-pattern>    </web-resource-collection>  </security-constraint> Policy 3: we can place an EL expression on the element representing the cost price on the products.jspx page: #{oesBackingBean.dataAccessCostPrice}. This EL Expression references a method in a Java backing bean that will call on to OES for an authorization decision.  In OES we model the authorization requirement by requiring the view permission on the resource /MyADFApp/data/costprice and granting it only to the staff application role.  We recover any obligations to determine the limit.  Policy 4: is implemented by putting an EL expression on the Browse Stock link #{oesBackingBean.UIAccessBrowseStock} which checks for the view permission on the /MyADFApp/ui/stock resource. The stock.jspx page is protected by checking for the same permission in a custom phase listener—if the required permission is not satisfied then we force navigation back to the welcome page. Policy 5: the Update Stock link is protected with the same EL expression as the Browse Link: #{oesBackingBean.UIAccessBrowseStock}.  However the Update Stock link launches a bounded task flow and to protect it the first activity in the flow is a method call activity which will execute an EL expression #{oesBackingBean.isUIAccessSupplierUpdateTransition}  to check for the update permission on the /MyADFApp/ui/stock resource and either transition to the next step in the flow or terminate the flow with an authorization error. Policy 6: the System Administration link is protected with an EL Expression #{oesBackingBean.UIAccessSysAdmin} that checks for view access on the /MyADF/ui/sysadmin resource.  The system page is protected in the same way at the stock page—the custom phase listener checks for the same permission that protects the link and if not satisfied we navigate back to the welcome page. Testing the Application To test the application: deploy the OES11g Admin to a WLS domain deploy the OES gateway in a another domain configured to be a WLS SM. You must ensure that the jps-config.xml file therein is configured to allow access to the identity store, otherwise the gateway will not b eable to resolve the principals for the requested users.  To do this ensure that the following elements appear in the jps-config.xml file: <serviceProvider type="IDENTITY_STORE" name="idstore.ldap.provider" class="oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.ldap.LdapIdentityStoreProvider">             <description>LDAP-based IdentityStore Provider</description>  </serviceProvider> <serviceInstance name="idstore.ldap" provider="idstore.ldap.provider">             <property name="idstore.config.provider" value="oracle.security.jps.wls.internal.idstore.WlsLdapIdStoreConfigProvider"/>             <property name="CONNECTION_POOL_CLASS" value="oracle.security.idm.providers.stdldap.JNDIPool"/></serviceInstance> <serviceInstanceRef ref="idstore.ldap"/> download the sample application and change the URL to the gateway in the MyADFApp OESBackingBean code to point to the OES Gateway and deploy the application to an 11.1.1.6 WLS domain that has been extended with the ADF JRF files. You will need to configure the FOD database connection to point your database which contains the FOD schema. populate the OES Admin and OES Gateway WLS LDAP stores with the sample set of users and groups.  If  you have configured the WLS domains to point to the same LDAP then it would only have to be done once.  To help with this there is a directory called ldap_scripts in the sample project with ldif files for the test users and groups. start the OES Admin console and configure the required OES authorization policies for the MyADFApp application and push them to the WLS SM containing the OES Gateway. Login to the MyADFApp as each of the users described on the login page to test that the security policy is correct. You will see informative logging from the OES Gateway and the ADF application to their respective WLS consoles. Congratulations, you may now login to the OES Admin console and change policies that will control the behaviour of your ADF application--change the limit value in the obligation for the cost price for example, or define Role Mapping policies to determine staff access to the system administration page based on user profile attributes. ADF Development Notes Some notes on ADF development which are probably typical gotchas: May need this on WLS startup in order to allow us to overwrite credentials for the database, the signal here is that there is an error trying to access the data base: -Djps.app.credential.overwrite.allowed=true Best to call Bounded Task flows via a CommandLink (as opposed to a go link) as you cannot seem to start them again from a go link, even having completed the task flow correctly with a return activity. Once a bounded task flow (BTF) is initated it must complete correctly  via a return activity—attempting to click on any other link whilst in the context of a  BTF has no effect.  See here for example: When using the ADF Authentication only security approach it seems to be awkward to allow anonymous access to the welcome and registration pages.  We can achieve anonymous access using the web.xml security constraint shown above (where no auth-constraint is specified) however it is not clear what needs to be listed in there….for example the /afr/* and /adf/* are in there by trial and error as sometimes the welcome page will not render if we omit those items.  I was not able to use the default allPages constraint with for example the anonymous-role or the everyone WLS group in order to be able to allow anonymous access to pages. The ADF security best practice advises placing all pages under the public_html/WEB-INF folder as then ADF will not allow any direct access to the .jspx pages but will only allow acces via a link of the form /faces/welcome rather than /faces/welcome.jspx.  This seems like a very good practice to follow as having multiple entry points to data is a source of confusion in a web application (particulary from a security point of view). In Authentication+Authorization mode only pages with a Page definition file are protected.  In order to add an emty one right click on the page and choose Go to Page Definition.  This will create an empty page definition and now the page will require explicit permission to be seen. It is advisable to give a unique context root via the weblogic.xml for the application, as otherwise the application will clash with any other application with the same context root and it will not deploy

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  • The Next Wave of PeopleSoft Capabilities for the Staffing Industry Is Here

    - by Mark Rosenberg
    With the release of PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 in January this year, we introduced substantial new capabilities for our Staffing Industry customers. Through a co-development project with Infosys Limited, we have enriched Oracle's PeopleSoft Staffing Solution with new tools aimed at accelerating and improving the quality of job order fulfillment, increasing branch recruiter productivity, and driving profitable growth. Staffing industry firms succeed based on their ability to rapidly, cost-effectively, and continually fill their pipelines with new clients and job orders, recruit the best talent, and match orders with talent. Pressure to execute in each of these functional areas is even more acute on staffing firms as contingent labor becomes a more substantial and permanent part of the workforce mix. In an industry that creates value through speedy execution, there is little room for manual, inefficient processes and brittle, custom integrations, which throttle profitability and growth. The latest wave of investment in the PeopleSoft Staffing Solution focuses on generating efficiency and flexibility for our customers. Simplicity To operate profitably and continue growing, a Staffing enterprise needs its client management, recruiting, order fulfillment, and other processes to function in harmony. Most importantly, they need to be simple for recruiters, branch managers, and applicants to access and understand. The latest PeopleSoft Staffing Solution set of enhancements includes numerous automated defaulting mechanisms and information-rich dashboard pagelets that even a new employee can learn quickly. Pending Applicant, Agenda management, Search, and other pagelets are just a few of the newest, easy-to-use tools that not only aggregate and summarize information, but also provide instant access to applicants, tasks, and key reports for branch staff. Productivity The leading firms in the Staffing industry are those that can more efficiently orchestrate large numbers of candidates, clients, and orders than their competitors can. PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 delivers productivity boosters that Staffing firms can leverage to streamline tasks and processes for competitive advantage. For example, we enhanced the Recruiting Funnel, which manages the candidate on-boarding process, with a highly interactive user interface. It integrates disparate Staffing business processes and exploits new PeopleTools technologies to offer a superior on-boarding user experience. Automated creation of agenda items and assignment tasks for each candidate minimizes setup and organizes assignment steps for the on-boarding process. Mass updates of tasks and instant access to the candidate overview page (which we also expanded), candidate event status, event counts, and other key data enable recruiters to better serve clients and candidates. Lower TCO Constructing and maintaining an efficient yet flexible labor supply chain can be complicated, let alone expensive. Traditionally, Staffing firms have been challenged in controlling their technology cost of ownership because connecting candidate and client-facing tools involved building and integrating custom applications and technologies and managing staff turnover, placing heavy demands on IT and support staff. With PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2, there are two major enhancements that aggressively tackle these challenges. First, we added another integration framework to enable cost-effective linking of the Staffing firm’s PeopleSoft applications and its job board distributors. (The first PeopleSoft 9.1 Feature Pack released in March 2011 delivered an integration framework to connect to resume parsing providers.) Second, we introduced the teaming concept to enable work to be partitioned to groups, as well as individuals. These two capabilities, combined with a host of others, position Staffing firms to configure and grow their businesses without growing their IT and overhead expenditures. For our Staffing Industry customers, PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 is loaded with high-value tools aimed at enabling and sustaining a flexible labor supply chain. For more information, contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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  • Organizational characteristics that impact the selection of Development Methodology concepts applied to a project

    Based on my experience, no one really follows a specific methodology exactly as it is formally designed. In fact, the key concepts of a few methodologies are usually combined to form a hybrid methodology for each project based on the current organizational makeup and the project need/requirements to be accomplished. Organizational characteristics that impact the selection of methodology concepts applied to a project. Prior subject knowledge pertaining to a project can be critical when deciding on what methodology or combination of methodologies to apply to a project. For example, if a project is very straight forward, and the development staff has experience in developing  that are similar, then the waterfall method could possibly be the best choice because little to no research is needed  in order to complete the project tasks and there is very little need for changes to occur.  On the other hand, if the development staff has limited subject knowledge or the requirements/specification of the project could possibly change as the project progresses then the use of spiral, iterative, incremental, agile, or any combination would be preferred. The previous methodologies used by an organization typically do not change much from project to project unless the needs of a project dictate differently. For example, if the waterfall method is the preferred development methodology then most projects will be developed by the waterfall method. Depending on the time allotted to a project each day can impact the selection of a development methodology. In one example, if the staff can only devote a few hours a day to a project then the incremental methodology might be ideal because modules can be added to the final project as they are developed. On the other hand, if daily time allocation is not an issue, then a multitude of methodologies could work well for a project. Project characteristics that impact the selection of methodology concepts applied to a project. The type of project being developed can often dictate the type of methodology used for the project. Based on my experience, projects that tend to have a lot of user interaction, follow a more iterative, incremental, or agile approach typically using a prototype that develops into a final project. These methodologies desire back and forth communication between users, clients, and developers to allow for requirements to change and functionality to be enhanced. Conversely, limited interaction applications or automated services can still sometimes get away with using the waterfall or transactional approach. The timeline of a project can also force an organization to prefer a particular methodology over the rest. For instance, if the project must be completed within 24 hours, then there is very little time for discussions back and forth between clients, users and the development team. In this scenario, the waterfall method would be perfect because the only interaction with the client occurs prior to a development project to outline the system requirements, and the development team can quickly move through the software development stages in order to complete the project within the deadline. If the team had more time, then the other methodologies could also be considered because there is more time for client and users to review the project and make changes as they see fit, and/or allow for more time to review the project in order to enhance the business performance and functionality. Sometimes the client and or user involvement can dictate the selection of methodologies applied to a project. One example of this is if a client is highly motivated to get a project completed and desires to play an active part in the development process then the agile development approach would work perfectly with this client because it allows for frequent interaction between clients, users and the development team. The inverse of this situation is a client that just wants to provide the project requirements and only wants to get involved when the project is to be delivered. In this case the waterfall method would work well because there is no room for changes and no back and forth between the users, clients or the development team.

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  • IIS7 Mixed Mode Authentication

    - by drachenstern
    We're getting ready to start migrating some of our IIS6 sites to IIS7, and the application currently uses Forms Authentication. We have started getting some requests from various sites to use the Windows Authentication for the users. While this is easy enough to implement (and I've shown internally that there is no issue with the app, as expected) the question then is how to continue to keep Forms authentication for when Integrated Windows doesn't work. I've seen several walkthroughs on how to have it configured on IIS6, and I could do the same thing on IIS7, but then I have to turn on Classic Mode processing. Any solution should also be back portable to IIS6, if possible, to keep the build tree simple. So what are my options on this? Do I setup the app with Integrated Windows Authentication in IIS7, Forms Auth in the web.config, and redirect 401 errors to an "error page" allowing them to login using forms, then back to the regular app? The case when Forms is likely to be needed is going to be reserved for Contract workers, our support staff, and if someone needs to access it on their site from their Extranet. So primarily it's for our staff to login to check functionality and confirm bug reports. I suggested we just maintain that for our support staff to work, we need a Windows login that will always be live, and then we'll just enforce local responsibility on who can login to the site, but I'm told that we would do better to have Forms Authentication. Any thoughts? I can post some of the links of the articles I've already read through if that would help the forum better narrow my needs. Many thanks. tl;dr: How to do mixed mode authentication (forms, windows) in IIS7 without changing to classic pipeline and still be able to use the build in IIS6 if possible.

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  • Django: Using 2 different AdminSite instances with different models registered

    - by omat
    Apart from the usual admin, I want to create a limited admin for non-staff users. This admin site will have different registered ModelAdmins. I created a folder /useradmin/ in my project directory and similar to contrib/admin/_init_.py I added an autodiscover() which will register models defined in useradmin.py modules instead of admin.py: # useradmin/__init__.py def autodiscover(): # Same as admin.autodiscover() but registers useradmin.py modules ... for app in settings.INSTALLED_APPS: mod = import_module(app) try: before_import_registry = copy.copy(site._registry) import_module('%s.useradmin' % app) except: site._registry = before_import_registry if module_has_submodule(mod, 'useradmin'): raise I also cretated sites.py under useradmin/ to override AdminSite similar to contrib/admin/sites: # useradmin/sites.py class UserAdminSite(AdminSite): def has_permission(self, request): # Don't care if the user is staff return request.user.is_active def login(self, request): # Do the login stuff but don't care if the user is staff if request.user.is_authenticated(): ... else: ... site = UserAdminSite(name='useradmin') In the project's URLs: # urls.py from django.contrib import admin import useradmin admin.autodiscover() useradmin.autodiscover() urlpatterns = patterns('', (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)), (r'^useradmin/', include(useradmin.site.urls)), ) And I try to register different models in admin.py and useradmin.py modules under app directories: # products/useradmin.py import useradmin class ProductAdmin(useradmin.ModelAdmin): pass useradmin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin) But when registering models in useradmin.py like useradmin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin), I get 'module' object has no attribute 'ModelAdmin' exception. Though when I try this via shell; import useradmin from useradmin import ModelAdmin does not raise any exception. Any ideas what might be wrong? Edit: I tried going the @Luke way and arranged the code as follows as minimal as possible: (file paths are relative to the project root) # admin.py from django.contrib.admin import autodiscover from django.contrib.admin.sites import AdminSite user_site = AdminSite(name='useradmin') # urls.py (does not even have url patterns; just calls autodiscover()) import admin admin.autodiscover() # products/admin.py import admin from products.models import Product admin.user_site.register(Product) As a result I get an AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'user_site' when admin.user_site.register(Product) in products/admin.py is called. Any ideas? Solution: I don't know if there are better ways but, renaming the admin.py in the project root to useradmin.py and updating the imports accordingly resolved the last case, which was a naming and import conflict.

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  • Read Parent nodes only from XML using LINQToXML

    - by ItsMeSri
    I have XML string that has parent nodes "Committee" and inside that another child node "Committee" is there. When I am using "from committee in xDocument.DescendantsAndSelf("Committee")" it is reading childnode also, but I don't want to read child nodes, I just want to read Parent nodes only. <Committee> <Position>STAFF</Position> <Appointment>1/16/2006</Appointment> <Committee>PPMSSTAFF</Committee> <CommitteeName>PPMS Staff</CommitteeName> <Expiration>12/25/2099</Expiration> </Committee> <Committee> <Position>STAFF</Position> <Appointment>4/16/2004</Appointment> <Committee>PMOSSTAFF</Committee> <CommitteeName>PPMS </CommitteeName> <Expiration>12/25/2099</Expiration> </Committee> XElement xDocument= XElement.Parse(xml); var committeeXmls = from Committee in xDocument.Descendants("Committee") select new { CommitteeName = Committee.Element("CommitteeName"), Position = Committee.Element("Position"), Appointment = Committee.Element("Appointment"), Expiration = Committee.Element("Expiration") }; int i = 0; foreach (var committeeXml in committeeXmls) { if (committeeXml != null) { drCommittee = dtCommittee.NewRow(); drCommittee["ID"] = ++i; drCommittee["CommitteeName"] = committeeXml.CommitteeName.Value; drCommittee["Position"] = committeeXml.Position.Value; drCommittee["Appointment"] = committeeXml.Appointment.Value; drCommittee["Expiration"] = committeeXml.Expiration.Value; dtCommittee.Rows.Add(drCommittee); // educationXml.GraduationDate.Value, educationXml.Major.Value); } }

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  • Can Django admin handle a one-to-many relationship via related_name?

    - by Mat
    The Django admin happily supports many-to-one and many-to-many relationships through an HTML <SELECT> form field, allowing selection of one or many options respectively. There's even a nice Javascript filter_horizontal widget to help. I'm trying to do the same from the one-to-many side through related_name. I don't see how it's much different from many-to-many as far as displaying it in the form is concerned, I just need a multi-select SELECT list. But I cannot simply add the related_name value to my ModelAdmin-derived field list. Does Django support one-to-many fields in this way? My Django model something like this (contrived to simplify the example): class Person(models.Model): ... manager = models.ForeignKey('self', related_name='staff', null=True, blank=True, ) From the Person admin page, I can easily get a <SELECT> list showing all possible staff to choose this person's manager from. I also want to display a multiple-selection <SELECT> list of all the manager's staff. I don't want to use inlines, as I don't want to edit the subordinates details; I do want to be able to add/remove people from the list. (I'm trying to use django-ajax-selects to replace the SELECT widget, but that's by-the-by.)

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  • Invalid argument supplied for foreach() using adldap

    - by Brad
    I am using adldap http://adldap.sourceforge.net/ And I am passing the session from page to page, and checking to make sure the username within the session is a member of a certain member group, for this example, it is the STAFF group. <?php ini_set('display_errors',1); error_reporting(E_ALL); require_once('/web/ee_web/include/adLDAP.php'); $adldap = new adLDAP(); session_start(); $group = "STAFF"; //$authUser = $adldap->authenticate($username, $password); $result=$adldap->user_groups($_SESSION['user_session']); foreach($result as $key=>$value) { switch($value) { case $group: print '<h3>'.$group.'</h3>'; break; default: print '<h3>Did not find specific value: '.$value.'</h3>'; } if($value == $group) { print 'for loop broke'; break; } } ?> It gives me the error: Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() on line 15, which is this line of code: foreach($result as $key=$value) { When I uncomment the code $authUser = $adldap-authenticate($username, $password); and enter in the appropriate username and password, it works fine, but I shouldn't have to, since the session is valid, I just want to see if the username stored within the valid_session is apart of the STAFF group. Why would it be giving me that problem?

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  • How do I scrape information off ASP.NET websites when paging and JavaScript links are being used?

    - by Ian Roke
    I have been given a staff list which is supposed to be up to date but it doesn't match an intranet People Finder which is written in ASP.NET. As the information is sensitive I am not able to access the database the People Finder is using so the only way I can get at the information is by scraping the structure starting at the top brass at the top and then going through each tier in turn. Each person has a Staff number which then forms the URL http://intranet/peoplefinder/index.aspx?srn=ABC1234 and then all the people who report to them are listed underneth in the format <a id="gvEmployees_ctl03_lnkFullName" href="index.aspx?srn=ABC4321" target="_self"> where each URL indicates the Staff number and provides a link to their team. The trouble arises when the teams are big as paging is implemented in the GridView with an URL such as <a href="javascript:__doPostBack('gvEmployees','Page$2')">2</a>. How would I scrape this page, capture the SRN and other details along with the people who report to the person on all pages of the GridView then loop through each reportee and do the same process until the whole list is complete?

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  • Get tag name and value of a given node using XMLReader, DOM, Xpath

    - by rossjha
    I need to query an xml document and then display specific tag values, e.g. forename, surname, group(dept), job_title. I'm using XMLReader as i may need to work with large XML files. I using DomXPath to filter the data, but i don't know how to retrieve the nodeName and value for each element. The code below only returns 'member' as the node name? Any help would be appreciated. <?php $reader = new XMLReader(); $reader->open('include/staff.xml'); while ($reader->read()){ switch($reader->nodeType){ case(XMLREADER::ELEMENT): if($reader->localName === 'staff'){ $node = $reader->expand(); $dom = new DomDocument(); $dom->formatOutput = true; $n = $dom->importNode($node, true); $dom->appendChild($n); $xp = new DomXpath($dom); $res = $xp->query("/staff/member[groups='HR']"); } } } echo $res->item(0)->nodeName; echo $res->item(0)->nodeValue; ?>

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