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• server 2008 r2 - wbadmin systemstatebackup - system writer not found in the backup

  - by TWood

  I am trying to manually run a systemstatebackup command on my server 2008 r2 box and I am getting an error code '2155347997' when I view the backup event log details. The command line tells me that I have log files written to the c:\windows\logs\windowsserverbackup\ path but I have no files of the .log type there. My command window tells me "System Writer is not found in the backup". However when I run vssadmin list writers I find System Writer in the list and it shows normal status with no last errors stored. I am running this from an elevated command prompt as well as from a logged on administrator account. My backup target path has permission for network service to have full control and it has plenty of free space. Looking in eventlog I have two VSS error 8194 that happen immediately before the Backup error 517 which has the errorcode 2155347997 listed. All three of these errors are a result of trying to run the command for the systemstatebackup. It's my belief that some VSS related permission is failing and exiting the backup process before it ever gets started. Because of this the initial code that creates the log files must not be running and this is why I have no files. When running the systemstatebackup command from the command prompt and watching the windowsserverbackup directory I do see that I have a Wbadmin.0.etl file which gets created but it is deleted when the backup errors out and stops. I have looked online and there are numerous opinions as to the cause of this error. These are the things I have corrected to try and fix this issue before posting here: Machine runs a HP 1410i smart array controller but at one time also used a LSI scsi card. Used networkadminkb.com's kb# a467 to find one LSI_SCSI entry in HKLMSysCurrentControlSetServices which start was set to 0x0 and I modified to 0x3. No changes. In HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesVSSDiag I gave network service full control where it previously only had "Special Permission". No changes. I followed KB2009272 to manually try to fix system writer. These are all of the things I have tried. What else should I look at to resolve this issue? It may be important to note that I run Mozy Pro on this server and that was known in the past to use VSS for copying operations and it occasionally threw an error. However since an update last year those error event log entries have stopped.

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• Intel RST accidentally selected wrong drive as system drive -- how to fix?

  - by Sean Killeen

  Question / TL;DR If Intel RST has marked a drive other than my RAID set as the system drive, how can I get it so that the RAID set is now seen as the system drive, and catch it up to my drive now? What Happened NOTE: Some perhaps unwise decisions are ahead. This is as best as I can recall the order of things. I had a 2x1TB RAID1 config. I bought the drives around the same time, and they started to die around the same time. I replaced 1st drive with a 2 TB drive before the other one's SMART errors got more serious. I waited for the RAID to replicate, then replaced the 2nd drive with a manufacturer's replacement. I got a second manufacturer's drive replacement and used it as a spare. so I now I had a 1TB/2TB drive in a RAID1 and another 1TB as a spare. The 1TB drive in the replacement set was bad from the manufacturer. Rather than mess with their refurbished stuff, I bought another 2 TB drive an upped the config to a 2x2TB RAID1 with the other, functioning manufacturer's drive as a spare. I made the mistake of trying to bring the other drive online to clean it out and the signatue clash killed my machine. When the machine rebooted, that drive was marked as the system drive. So, I have a 2x2TB RAID1 that is apparently offline, and 1 spare 1 TB refurbished drive that everything is being run from. Not a great idea. Options I'm considering Bring the 2x2TB drive back online, and then unplug the spare until I can format it in another system. This would involve some data loss, but the more I think about it, I actually think I haven't modified any data that isn't backed up or synced somewhere (go me!) Anything that isn't is likely trivial, enough that I'm willing to take the risk. One downside here is that if the 2 TB doesn't have data on it for some reason, I could be screwed trying to put the other drive back in, no? Try to somehow get the RAID1 updated with the data from the current system drive. Option 3?

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• filtering itunes library items by file location

  - by Cawas

  3 answers and unfortunately no solution yet. The Problem I've got way more than 1000 duplicated items in my iTunes Library pointing to a non-existant place (the "where" under "get info" window), along with other duplicated items and other MIAs (Missing In Action). Is there any simple way to just delete all of them and only them? From the library, of course. By that I mean some MIAs are pointing to /Volumes while some are pointing to .../music/Music/... or just .../music/.... I want to delete all pointing to /Volumes as to later I'll recover the rest. Check the image below. Some Background I tried searching for a specific key word on the path and creating smart play list, but with no result. Being able to just sort all library by path would be a perfect solution! I believe old iTunes could do that. PowerTunes can do it (sort by path) but I can't do anything with its list. I would also welcome any program able to handle this, then import and properly export back the iTunes library. Since this seems to just not be clear enough... AppleScript doesn't work That's because AppleScript just can't gather the missing info anywhere in iTunes Library. Maybe we could use AppleScript by opening the XML file, but that's a whole nother issue. Here's a quote from my conversation with Doug the man himself Adams last december: I don't think you do understand. There is no way to get the path to the file of a dead track because iTunes has "forgotten" it. That is, by definition, what a dead track is. Doug On Dec 21, 2010, at 7:08 AM, Caue Rego wrote: yes I understand that and have seem the script. but I'm not looking for the file. just the old broken path reference to it. Sent from my iPhone On 21/12/2010, at 10:00, Doug Adams wrote: You cannot locate missing files of dead tracks because, by definition, a dead track is one that doesn't have any file information. If you look at "Super Remove Dead Tracks", you will notice it looks for tracks that have "missing value" for the location property.

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• Are random packets normal?

  - by TheLQ

  About a month ago on one of my servers I started receiving random packets from IPs all over the world. So I did the smart thing and stopped putting off installing an IDS. This IDS is a ClearOS Gateway which comes with Snort and SnortSam. I enabled it, checked There is a total of 4 ports open, two of which forward to the server I'm talking about. These ports are 3724 and 8085, so they aren't going to be easily detected in a port scan. However checking some logs of this server I found that the attack is resuming. I found this ... Accepting connection from '75.166.155.122' [Auth] got unknown packet from '75.166.155.122' Accepting connection from '98.164.154.93' [Auth] got unknown packet from '98.164.154.93' Ping MySQL to keep connection alive Accepting connection from '70.241.195.129' [Auth] got unknown packet from '70.241.195.129' Accepting connection from '67.182.229.169' [Auth] got unknown packet from '67.182.229.169' Accepting connection from '69.137.140.38' [Auth] got unknown packet from '69.137.140.38' Accepting connection from '76.31.72.55' [Auth] got unknown packet from '76.31.72.55' Accepting connection from '97.88.139.39' [Auth] got unknown packet from '97.88.139.39' Accepting connection from '173.35.62.112' [Auth] got unknown packet from '173.35.62.112' Accepting connection from '187.15.10.73' [Auth] got unknown packet from '187.15.10.73' Accepting connection from '66.66.94.124' [Auth] got unknown packet from '66.66.94.124' Accepting connection from '75.159.219.124' [Auth] got unknown packet from '75.159.219.124' Accepting connection from '99.102.100.82' [Auth] got unknown packet from '99.102.100.82' Accepting connection from '24.128.240.45' [Auth] got unknown packet from '24.128.240.45' Accepting connection from '99.231.7.39' [Auth] got unknown packet from '99.231.7.39' Accepting connection from '206.255.79.56' [Auth] got unknown packet from '206.255.79.56' Accepting connection from '68.97.106.235' [Auth] got unknown packet from '68.97.106.235' Accepting connection from '69.134.67.251' [Auth] got unknown packet from '69.134.67.251' Accepting connection from '63.228.138.186' [Auth] got unknown packet from '63.228.138.186' Accepting connection from '184.39.146.193' [Auth] got unknown packet from '184.39.146.193' Accepting connection from '69.171.161.102' [Auth] got unknown packet from '69.171.161.102' Accepting connection from '76.0.47.228' [Auth] got unknown packet from '76.0.47.228' Ping MySQL to keep connection alive Accepting connection from '126.112.201.14' [Auth] got unknown packet from '126.112.201.14' Ping MySQL to keep connection alive Now that scares me. Why isn't Snort detecting this? How were they able to find this specific port? More importantly, what normally would these packets contain? Is this something I should be worried about? How can I stop this?

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• apache sendmail: trying to change user "from" address from apache to domain account

  - by Wes

  I apologize if I am asking a question already answered, but my problem isn't really that I haven't found an answer. I have, in fact, found a half-dozen different "solutions" to my problem, tried them all, in various combinations, and have been consistently unsuccessful. The goal All I want to do is change the envelope "from" address for all email sent from [email protected] to [email protected], always. What I've already done I am running Apache, PHP, and sendmail on CentOS 5.5, [email protected]. We have an SMTP server at 192.168.0.4. The domain's email accounts are all at @domain.org. I have successfully set up "smart host" using this line in the sendmail.mc file: define(`SMART_HOST', `192.168.0.4')dnl Then I set up masquerading, and was hopeful this would solve it. I have this in the .mc file: FEATURE(`masquerade_entire_domain')dnl FEATURE(`masquerade_envelope')dnl FEATURE(`allmasquerade')dnl MASQUERADE_AS(`domain.org')dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(`domain.org.')dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain.')dnl This rewrites "to" addresses, but not "from" addresses. Testing from the command line: sendmail -v [email protected] Always is shown from the local user (in this case root, or my local user account). I had read that "sendmail" command sometimes bypasses masquerading. Nevertheless, using the "mail" command has the same result. After that, I have explored several "solutions", including: mailertable virtusertable FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl LOCAL_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain')dnl FEATURE(`genericstable')dnl /etc/mail/access file /etc/mail/local-host-names file /etc/mail/trusted-users file All to no affect. The last thing I've tried So, I decided to go in a different direction, and try to set the envelope "from" address via PHP, using either the configuration in /etc/php.ini, or adding the -f parameter to the mail() function or to sendmail command. If I run this command: sendmail -v -f [email protected] [email protected] I get this error in /var/log/maillog: Mar 30 08:56:16 localhost sendmail[24022]: p2UCuE8w024022: [email protected], size=5, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, relay=user@localhost Mar 30 08:56:19 localhost sendmail[24022]: p2UCuE8w024022: [email protected], [email protected] (500/502), delay=00:00:05, xdelay=00:00:03, mailer=relay, pri=30005, relay=[192.168.0.4] [192.168.0.4], dsn=5.1.1, stat=User unknown Mar 30 08:56:19 localhost sendmail[24022]: p2UCuE8w024022: p2UCuE8x024022: DSN: User unknown Mar 30 08:56:23 localhost sendmail[24022]: p2UCuE8x024022: [email protected], delay=00:00:04, xdelay=00:00:04, mailer=relay, pri=31029, relay=[192.168.0.4] [192.168.0.4], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (Ok: queued as B5E2E40E0A2) Which is basically a "User unknown" 550 error. Help Please help. What do I need to change? Should I just start over in the sendmail.mc file? It has a ton of config options stuffed in it, over days of trying things. Why is changing the envelope "from" address via the command line generating a "User unknown" error?

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• file corruption on read/write 2.6.32-22-server (happens across many kernels)

  - by Jonathan

  Hi Guys, I'm having an issue where after the server has been up for a period of time (~week/few days) the server will start reading corrupt data. For instance when I run a sha1sum of a file after a fresh boot it remains the same. However after a while I will start to get segfaults and from then on whenever I read this file I get a different sha1sum. I've checked S.M.A.R.T with long tests and I've run an extended memtest86+(12 passes) My lspci is as follows: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 Host Bridge 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (int gfx) 00:06.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 2) 00:07.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 3) 00:11.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 SATA Controller [AHCI mode] 00:12.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller 00:12.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller 00:12.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller 00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller 00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller 00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller 00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 3c) 00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 IDE Controller 00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 LPC host controller 00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge 00:14.5 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI2 Controller 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K10 [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] HyperTransport Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K10 [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K10 [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K10 [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] Miscellaneous Control 00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K10 [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] Link Control 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 3300 Graphics 01:05.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RS780 Azalia controller 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller (rev b0) 03:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. Device 3403 I could really use some help on this, do you have any idea what could cause this? It's really frustrating me as it seems to trigger entirely randomly and will not go away until I reboot. I'm also use KVM for virtualization as well as MD for software RAID on this server and the processor is a Phenom II X4 965. I don't believe it's the software raid however as this affects files also hosted on non-raid partitions so I don't know.

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• Windows 7 Home hangs at "Welcome" screen

  - by White Phoenix

  I'm asking on behalf of a friend who's currently having problems with his machine. Windows 7 Home 32-bit. He's too far away for me to help by going over to his house - I'm helping him over the Internet. This is his current machine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227134 The only two changes he made to that machine is to swap out the gfx card for a EVGA GTX 460 and the PSU for a Corsair TX650. Here's what happened: He was playing a computer game (fairly CPU/GPU intensive) and had some music going in the background in foobar while playing. Suddenly, he notices the music stopped playing, so he switches to foobar to try to close it, but it freezes up (window won't respond). So he figures it's just foobar having a bad day and force quits that program. Suddenly, his game won't respond, so he force quits that, then the entire computer just went to crap at that point, so he hits the restart button on his machine. Computer POSTS fine, but now he gets stuck at the Windows "welcome" screen (his account is set to auto-login). HD activity light is solid yellow but he doesn't hear HDD activity. He tried booting into Safe Mode - gets stuck at the "welcome screen". Tried a STartup Repair within Windows 7, it found a few problems, but still gets stuck at welcome. I advised him to boot off the DVD - sfc /scannow found nothing (couldn't use the regular /scannow option; says there's a repair pending, had to use use offbootdir/offwindir command switches). Ran startup repair 3 times - found nothing. My friend runs virus/malware scans on a regular basis, so he's fairly sure it's not that either. Right now I'm having my friend run chkdsk /R on the computer while in this Startup Recovery mode - so far it's caught a few bad sectors. However at this point I'm kinda wondering which way to go if chkdsk doesn't fix it. Quick Google search said someone had success by booting Windows with bootlogging on - some others have success with running the aforemented chkdsk, etc. The fact that Windows cannot even boot into Safe Mode concerns me. While we're waiting for chkdsk /R to finish, are there any other options I can give my friend short of reinstalling Windows 7? He has his data on a separate partition so that's not a major problem (though it'll be an annoyance for him). I suspect his hard drive may be having some issues, but my main concern is getting him back up and running before we start diagnosing the hard drive (I may have him run some sort of SMART test utility later).

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• SSL support with Apache and Proxytunnel

  - by whuppy

  I'm inside a strict corporate environment. https traffic goes out via an internal proxy (for this example it's 10.10.04.33:8443) that's smart enough to block ssh'ing directly to ssh.glakspod.org:443. I can get out via proxytunnel. I set up an apache2 VirtualHost at ssh.glakspod.org:443 thus: ServerAdmin [email protected] ServerName ssh.glakspod.org <!-- Proxy Section --> <!-- Used in conjunction with ProxyTunnel --> <!-- proxytunnel -q -p 10.10.04.33:8443 -r ssh.glakspod.org:443 -d %host:%port --> ProxyRequests on ProxyVia on AllowCONNECT 22 <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 74.101 </Proxy> So far so good: I hit the Apache proxy with a CONNECT and then PuTTY and my ssh server shake hands and I'm off to the races. There are, however, two problems with this setup: The internal proxy server can sniff my CONNECT request and also see that an SSH handshake is taking place. I want the entire connection between my desktop and ssh.glakspod.org:443 to look like HTTPS traffic no matter how closely the internal proxy inspects it. I can't get the VirtualHost to be a regular https site while proxying. I'd like the proxy to coexist with something like this: SSLEngine on SSLProxyEngine on SSLCertificateFile /path/to/ca/samapache.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/ca/samapache.key SSLCACertificateFile /path/to/ca/ca.crt DocumentRoot /mnt/wallabee/www/html <Directory /mnt/wallabee/www/html/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> <!-- Need a valid client cert to get into the sanctum --> <Directory /mnt/wallabee/www/html/sanctum> SSLVerifyClient require SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +ExportCertData SSLVerifyDepth 1 </Directory> So my question is: How to I enable SSL support on the ssh.glakspod.org:443 VirtualHost that will work with ProxyTunnel? I've tried various combinations of proxytunnel's -e, -E, and -X flags without any luck. The only lead I've found is Apache Bug No. 29744, but I haven't been able to find a patch that will install cleanly on Ubuntu Jaunty's Apache version 2.2.11-2ubuntu2.6. Thanks in advance.

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• Windows Server 2008 Software Raid 5 - Data integrity issues

  - by Fopedush

  I've got a server running Windows Server 2008 R2, with a (windows native) software raid-5 array. The array consists of 7x 1TB Western Digital RE3 and RE4 drives. I have offline backups of this array. The problem is this: I noticed a few days ago after copying a large file to the disk that there was an integrity issue with that file - it was a ~12GB file that I had downloaded via uTorrent. After moving it to the raid array, I used uTorrent to relocate the download location, and performed a re-check so I could seed it from that location. The recheck found that only 6308/6310 chunks of the copied file were intact. My next step was to write a quick powershell script that would copy files to the array, while performing a SHA1 hash of the original and resultant files and comparing them. Smaller files (100-1000MB) copied over just fine. When I started copying larger data (~15GB), I found that the hash check failed about 2/3rds of the time. The corrupt files had very, very small inconsistencies - less than .01%. I further eliminated the possibility of networking or client issues by placing this large file on the C:\ of the server, and copying it repeatedly from there to the array, seeing similar results. Copying the data via explorer, powershell, or the standard windows command prompt yield the same results. None of the copies fail or report any problems. The raid array itself is listed as healthy in disk management. After a few experiments, I shut down the server and ran memtest overnight. No errors were detected. A basic run of chkdsk found no problems, but I did not use the /R flag, as I was unsure how that might affect a software raid-5 volume. I next ran Crystal Disk Info to check the smart data on the drives - but found that CDI only detected 5 out of 7 of the disks in the array. I have no idea why. Nevertheless, CDI shows the following "caution" flags on a single one of the drives: 05 199 199 140 000000000001 Reallocated Sectors Count C5 200 200 __0 000000000001 Current Pending Sector Count Which is a little bit alarming, but I don't really know what to do with the information. I hardly feel like one reallocated sector could be causing this. At this point, I'm looking for some guidance on what to do next. I need to determine the cause of this issue, but I'm hesitant to run chkdsk /R or any bootable disk health checkers because I'm afraid they might break the array. I've considered triggering a re-sync of the array, but I'm not actually sure how to do that without doing something silly like manually dropping a disk and then restoring it. Any advice that could help me ferret out the precise cause of this issue would be greatly appreciated.

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• How to enjoy DVD on Apple iPad

  - by user44251

  I believe many people spent a sleepless night yesterday waiting for the new Apple Tablet to come, just a few days ago or perhaps longer I noticed fierce debate about it, its name, size, capacity, processor, main features, price etc. And now, they can take a long breath with the new Apple Tablet named iPad officially released on 28, January, 2010 (Beijing Time). But I know a new battle just begins. iPad, sounds somewhat like iPod and it really shares some similarities in terms of shape like smart, light and portable. It has a 9.7-inch, LED-backlit, IPS display with a remarkable precise Multi-Touch screen. And yet, at just 1.5 lbs and 0.5 inches thin, it's easy to carry and use everywhere. It can greatly facilitates your experience with the web, emails, photos and videos. Right now, it can run almost 140.000 of the apps on the Apple store. It can even run the apps you have downloaded for your iPhone or iPod touch. But so far, I haven't seen any possibility that it can work with DVD, probability there is no built-in DVD-ROM or DVD player which can play DVD directly. As Apple iPad states, the video formats supported are MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), H.264, MOV etc and audio formats accepted are AAC, Proteceted AAC, MP3, AIFF and WAV etc, those are formats that are commonly used with iMac. This could really a hard nut to crack if you want to watch your favourite DVD on this magic Apple iPad. But don't worry, there is still way out, you just need a few steps for ripping and importing DVD movies to Apple iPad with a simple application DVD to iPad converter What's on DVD to iPad Converter for Mac DVD to iPad converter for Mac is a powerful and professional application designed for the newly released Apple iPad which can rip, convert your DVD contents to Apple iPad compatible MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), H.264, MOV etc, and other popular file formats like AVI, WMV, MPG, MKV, VOB, 3GP, FLV etc can also be converted so that you can put on your portable devices like iPod, iPhone, iRiver, BlackBerry etc. Besides, it can also extract audio from DVD videos and save as MP3, AIFF, AAC, WAV etc. Mac DVD to iPad converter has also been enhanced that can run both on PowerPC and Intel (Snow Leopard included). It can offer versatile editing features which allows you to make your own DVD videos. For example, you can cut your DVD to whatever length you like by Trim, crop off unwanted parts from DVD clips by Crop, add special effect like Gray, Emboss and Old film to make your videos more artistic. Besides, its built-in merging feature and batch mode allows you to join several DVD clips into a single one and do batch conversion. And more features can be expected if you afford a few minutes to try.

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• Is there a Distributed SAN/Storage System out there?

  - by Joel Coel

  Like many other places, we ask our users not to save files to their local machines. Instead, we encourage that they be put on a file server so that others (with appropriate permissions) can use them and that the files are backed up properly. The result of this is that most users have large hard drives that are sitting mainly empty. It's 2010 now. Surely there is a system out there that lets you turn that empty space into a virtual SAN or document library? What I envision is a client program that is pushed out to users' PCs that coordinates with a central server. The server looks to users just like a normal file server, but instead of keeping entire file contents it merely keeps a record of where those files can be found among various user PCs. It then coordinates with the right clients to serve up file requests. The client software would be able to respond to such requests directly, as well as be smart enough to cache recent files locally. For redundancy the server could make sure files are copied to multiple PCs, perhaps allowing you to define groups in different locations so that an instance of the entire repository lives in each group to protect against a disaster in one building taking down everything else. Obviously you wouldn't point your database server here, but for simpler things I see several advantages: Files can often be transferred from a nearer machine. Disk space grows automatically as your company does. Should ultimately be cheaper, as you don't need to keep a separate set of disks I can see a few downsides as well: Occasional degradation of user pc performance, if the machine has to serve or accept a large file transfer during a busy period. Writes have to be propogated around the network several times (though I suspect this isn't really much of a problem, as reading happens in most places more than writing) Still need a way to send a complete copy of the data offsite occasionally, and this would make it very hard to do differentials Think of this like a cloud storage system that lives entirely within your corporate LAN and makes use of your existing user equipment. Our old main file server is due for retirement in about 2 years, and I'm looking into replacing it with a small SAN. I'm thinking something like this would be a better fit. As a school, we have a couple computer labs I can leave running that would be perfect for adding a little extra redundancy to the system. Unfortunately, the closest thing I can find is Dienst, and it's just a paper that dates back to 1994. Am I just using the wrong buzzwords in my searches, or does this really not exist? If not, is there a big downside that I'm missing?

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• New harddrives failing within weeks.

  - by Jason Kealey

  I've experienced 8 hard disk failures in 3 months and have tried many things to solve the issue permanently but I have failed. I would like to know if you have any advice for me. System was running Win XP on an Asus P5W-DH Deluxe. I have setup a RAID-1 array. I started out with 2 x 500 GB 7200RPM Western Digital drives. One died. I took it out to RMA it. On the same day, the router was fried. Assumed a power surge occurred; connected an older UPS to protect the system. Once I got my hands on an identical disk, I installed it. The RAID array was rebuilt. A few days later, the other one died. Assumed the rebuild caused it to fail. Took it out for RMA. Before the other one arrived, the remaining one died. I then discovered I could re-enable them using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I re-enabled both and the system seemed fine for a week, until both died again. I got two new 1.5 TB 7200RPM Seagate drives and re-installed Windows 7. Also replaced the UPS and power supply. They both died again. The voltage on the plug is stable between 120 and 122V as per the UPS. None of the other devices have had any problems (monitors, etc.). At this point, I see two options: a) electrical issue in the house that was, for some reason, not blocked by the UPS. b) something else inside the system causing surges? motherboard? onboard raid controller? Failures happen fairly quickly, between 2 and 14 days after I fix the previous issue. I just gotten a new computer (Core i7) to replace it. If it is stable, I can determine that b) was the problem. If it fries its hard drive again, I can determine that it is an electrical issue in the house. Do you have any other thoughts? Any tools I can run on the drives that failed to get more information about the original SMART event history?

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• HP Proliant G7 hardware RAID configuration automation with ribcl

  - by karthik

  I have been trying to automate hardware RAID configuration of HP proliant machines before OS installation (So I can not use hpacucli) ssh into iLO3 doesn't have option for RAID configuration I use ribcl but there is no command for RAID config, however I see this under the command GET_EMBEDDED_HEALTH. <STORAGE> <CONTROLLER> <LABEL VALUE="Controller on System Board"/> <STATUS VALUE="OK"/> <CONTROLLER_STATUS VALUE="OK"/> <SERIAL_NUMBER VALUE="50014380215F0070"/> <MODEL VALUE="HP Smart Array P420i Controller"/> <FW_VERSION VALUE="3.41"/> <DRIVE_ENCLOSURE> <LABEL VALUE="Port 1I Box 1"/> <STATUS VALUE="OK"/> <DRIVE_BAY VALUE="04"/> </DRIVE_ENCLOSURE> <DRIVE_ENCLOSURE> <LABEL VALUE="Port 2I Box 0"/> <STATUS VALUE="OK"/> <DRIVE_BAY VALUE="01"/> </DRIVE_ENCLOSURE> <LOGICAL_DRIVE> <LABEL VALUE="01"/> <STATUS VALUE="OK"/> <CAPACITY VALUE="68 GB"/> <FAULT_TOLERANCE VALUE="RAID 0"/> <PHYSICAL_DRIVE> <LABEL VALUE="Port 1I Box 1 Bay 3"/> <STATUS VALUE="OK"/> <SERIAL_NUMBER VALUE="6TA0N3SZ0000B231CYDT"/> <MODEL VALUE="EH0072FAWJA"/> <CAPACITY VALUE="68 GB"/> <LOCATION VALUE="Port 1I Box 1 Bay 3"/> <FW_VERSION VALUE="HPDH"/> <DRIVE_CONFIGURATION VALUE="Configured"/> </PHYSICAL_DRIVE> </LOGICAL_DRIVE> </CONTROLLER> </STORAGE> My question is, is there a way I modify/create this xml piece (say I have 2 Logical drive with one spare) and reboot the server it takes effect ? If this approach is not correct are there any other ways to automate hardware raid config ?

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• Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider

  - by Gopinath

  If you going to buy iPhone 4S on a two year contract in USA, Europe or Australia you may not find it expensive. But if you are planning to buy it in any other parts of the world, you will definitely feel the heat of ridiculous iPhone 4S price. In India iPhone 4S costs approximately costs $1000 which is 30% more than the price tag of an unlocked iPhone sold in USA. Personally I love iPhones as there is no match for the user experience provided by Apple as well as the wide range of really meaning applications available for iPhone. But it breaks heart to spend $1000 for a phone and I’m forced to look at alternates available in the market. Here are the four iPhone 4S alternates available in almost all the countries where we can buy iPhone 4S Google Galaxy Nexus The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s own Android smartphone manufactured by Samsung and sold under the brand name of Google Nexus. Galaxy Nexus is the pure Android phone available in the market without any bloat software or custom user interfaces like other Androids available in the market. Galaxy Nexus is also the first Android phone to be shipped with the latest version of Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. This phone is the benchmark for the rest of Android phones that are going to enter the market soon. In the words of Google this smartphone is called as “Galaxy Nexus: Simple. Beautiful. Beyond Smart.”.  BGR review summarizes the phone as This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favourite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry. Samsung Galaxy S II The one single company that is able to sell more smartphones than Apple is Samsung. Samsung recently displaced Apple from the top smartphone seller spot and occupied it with loads of pride. Samsung’s Galaxy S II fits as one the best alternatives to Apple’s iPhone 4S with it’s beautiful design and remarkable performance. Engadget summarizes Samsung Galaxy S2 review as It’s the best Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it might well be the best smartphone, period. Of course, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, no matter how stupendously thin the device that carries it may be, and we also can’t say for sure that the Galaxy S II would justify a long-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to another. Nonetheless, if you’re asking us what smartphone to buy today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II would be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Nokia Lumia 800 Here comes unexpected Windows Phone in to the boxing ring. May be they are not as great as Androids available in the market today, but they are picking up very quickly. Especially the Nokia Lumia 800 seems to be first ever Windows Phone 7 aimed at competing serious with Androids and iPhones available in the market. There are reports that Nokia Lumia 800 is outselling all Androids in UK and few high profile tech blogs are calling it as the king of Windows Phone. Considering this phone while evaluating the alternative of iPhone 4S will not disappoint you. We assure. Droid RAZR Remember the Motorola Driod that swept entire Android market share couple of years ago? The first two version of Motorola Droids were the best in the market and they out performed almost every other Android phone those days. The invasion of Samsung Androids, Motorola lost it charm. With the recent release of Droid RAZR, Motorola seems to be in the right direction to reclaiming the prestige. Droid RAZR is the thinnest smartphone available in the market and it’s beauty is not just skin deep. Here is a review of the phone from Engadget blog the RAZR’s beauty is not only skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make sure this sleek number is ready to run with the big boys. It kept pace with, and in some cases clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies in the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a perfectly viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey Rezound and Galaxy Nexus Further Reading So we have seen the four alternates of iPhone 4S available in the market and I personally love to buy a Samsung smartphone if I’m don’t have money to afford an iPhone 4S. If you are interested in deep diving into the alternates, here few links that help you do more research Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs. Motorola Droid RAZR: How Their Specs Compare by Huffington Post Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Nexus Galaxy: Spec Smackdown by PC World Browser Speed Test: Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II – by Gizmodo iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S II by pocket lint Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II by techie buzz This article titled,Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• LWJGL - Eclipse error [on hold]

  - by Zarkopafilis

  When I try to run my lwjgl project, an error pops . Here is the log file: # A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment: # EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x6d8fcc0a, pid=5612, tid=900 # JRE version: 6.0_16-b01 Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (14.2-b01 mixed mode windows-x86 ) Problematic frame: V [jvm.dll+0xfcc0a] # If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit: http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp # --------------- T H R E A D --------------- Current thread (0x016b9000): JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_vm, id=900, stack(0x00160000,0x001b0000)] siginfo: ExceptionCode=0xc0000005, reading address 0x00000000 Registers: EAX=0x00000000, EBX=0x00000000, ECX=0x00000006, EDX=0x00000000 ESP=0x001af4d4, EBP=0x001af524, ESI=0x016b9000, EDI=0x016b9110 EIP=0x6d8fcc0a, EFLAGS=0x00010246 Top of Stack: (sp=0x001af4d4) 0x001af4d4: 6da44bd8 016b9110 00000000 001af668 0x001af4e4: ffffffff 22200000 001af620 76ec39c2 0x001af4f4: 001af524 6d801086 0000000b 001afd34 0x001af504: 016b9000 016dd990 016b9000 00000000 0x001af514: 001af5f4 6d9ee000 6d9ef2f0 ffffffff 0x001af524: 001af58c 10008c85 016b9110 00000000 0x001af534: 00000000 000a0554 00000000 00000024 0x001af544: 00000000 00000000 001af6ac 00000000 Instructions: (pc=0x6d8fcc0a) 0x6d8fcbfa: e8 e8 d0 1d 08 00 8b 45 10 c7 45 d8 0b 00 00 00 0x6d8fcc0a: 8b 00 8b 48 08 0f b7 51 26 8b 40 0c 8b 4c 90 20 Stack: [0x00160000,0x001b0000], sp=0x001af4d4, free space=317k Native frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code, C=native code) V [jvm.dll+0xfcc0a] C [lwjgl.dll+0x8c85] C [USER32.dll+0x18876] C [USER32.dll+0x170f4] C [USER32.dll+0x1119e] C [ntdll.dll+0x460ce] C [USER32.dll+0x10e29] C [USER32.dll+0x10e84] C [lwjgl.dll+0x1cf0] j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.createWindow(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DrawableLWJGL;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DisplayMode;Ljava/awt/Canvas;II)V+102 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.createWindow()V+71 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/Drawable;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/ContextAttribs;)V+72 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;)V+12 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create()V+7 j zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V+16 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub V [jvm.dll+0xecf9c] V [jvm.dll+0x1741e1] V [jvm.dll+0xed01d] V [jvm.dll+0xf5be5] V [jvm.dll+0xfd83d] C [javaw.exe+0x2155] C [javaw.exe+0x833e] C [kernel32.dll+0x51154] C [ntdll.dll+0x5b2b9] C [ntdll.dll+0x5b28c] Java frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code) j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.nCreateWindow(IIIIZZJ)J+0 j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.createWindow(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DrawableLWJGL;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DisplayMode;Ljava/awt/Canvas;II)V+102 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.createWindow()V+71 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/Drawable;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/ContextAttribs;)V+72 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;)V+12 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create()V+7 j zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V+16 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub --------------- P R O C E S S --------------- Java Threads: ( = current thread ) 0x0179a400 JavaThread "Low Memory Detector" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=4460, stack(0x0b900000,0x0b950000)] 0x01795400 JavaThread "CompilerThread0" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=5264, stack(0x0b8b0000,0x0b900000)] 0x01790c00 JavaThread "Attach Listener" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=6080, stack(0x0b860000,0x0b8b0000)] 0x01786400 JavaThread "Signal Dispatcher" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=1204, stack(0x0b810000,0x0b860000)] 0x01759c00 JavaThread "Finalizer" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=5772, stack(0x0b7c0000,0x0b810000)] 0x01755000 JavaThread "Reference Handler" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=4696, stack(0x01640000,0x01690000)] =0x016b9000 JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_vm, id=900, stack(0x00160000,0x001b0000)] Other Threads: 0x01751c00 VMThread [stack: 0x015f0000,0x01640000] [id=4052] 0x0179c800 WatcherThread [stack: 0x0b950000,0x0b9a0000] [id=3340] VM state:not at safepoint (normal execution) VM Mutex/Monitor currently owned by a thread: None Heap def new generation total 960K, used 816K [0x037c0000, 0x038c0000, 0x03ca0000) eden space 896K, 91% used [0x037c0000, 0x0388c2c0, 0x038a0000) from space 64K, 0% used [0x038a0000, 0x038a0000, 0x038b0000) to space 64K, 0% used [0x038b0000, 0x038b0000, 0x038c0000) tenured generation total 4096K, used 0K [0x03ca0000, 0x040a0000, 0x077c0000) the space 4096K, 0% used [0x03ca0000, 0x03ca0000, 0x03ca0200, 0x040a0000) compacting perm gen total 12288K, used 2143K [0x077c0000, 0x083c0000, 0x0b7c0000) the space 12288K, 17% used [0x077c0000, 0x079d7e38, 0x079d8000, 0x083c0000) No shared spaces configured. Dynamic libraries: 0x00400000 - 0x00424000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe 0x77550000 - 0x7768e000 C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll 0x75a80000 - 0x75b54000 C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll 0x758d0000 - 0x7591b000 C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll 0x759e0000 - 0x75a80000 C:\Windows\system32\ADVAPI32.dll 0x76070000 - 0x7611c000 C:\Windows\system32\msvcrt.dll 0x77250000 - 0x77269000 C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\sechost.dll 0x771a0000 - 0x77241000 C:\Windows\system32\RPCRT4.dll 0x76eb0000 - 0x76f79000 C:\Windows\system32\USER32.dll 0x76e60000 - 0x76eae000 C:\Windows\system32\GDI32.dll 0x77770000 - 0x7777a000 C:\Windows\system32\LPK.dll 0x75fd0000 - 0x7606e000 C:\Windows\system32\USP10.dll 0x770b0000 - 0x770cf000 C:\Windows\system32\IMM32.DLL 0x770d0000 - 0x7719c000 C:\Windows\system32\MSCTF.dll 0x7c340000 - 0x7c396000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\msvcr71.dll 0x6d800000 - 0x6da8b000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\client\jvm.dll 0x73a00000 - 0x73a32000 C:\Windows\system32\WINMM.dll 0x75610000 - 0x7565b000 C:\Windows\system32\apphelp.dll 0x6d7b0000 - 0x6d7bc000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\verify.dll 0x6d330000 - 0x6d34f000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.dll 0x6d290000 - 0x6d298000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\hpi.dll 0x776e0000 - 0x776e5000 C:\Windows\system32\PSAPI.DLL 0x6d7f0000 - 0x6d7ff000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\zip.dll 0x10000000 - 0x1004c000 C:\Users\theo\Desktop\workspace\JavaFX1\lib\natives\windows\lwjgl.dll 0x5d170000 - 0x5d238000 C:\Windows\system32\OPENGL32.dll 0x6e7b0000 - 0x6e7d2000 C:\Windows\system32\GLU32.dll 0x70620000 - 0x70707000 C:\Windows\system32\DDRAW.dll 0x70610000 - 0x70616000 C:\Windows\system32\DCIMAN32.dll 0x75b60000 - 0x75cfd000 C:\Windows\system32\SETUPAPI.dll 0x759b0000 - 0x759d7000 C:\Windows\system32\CFGMGR32.dll 0x76d70000 - 0x76dff000 C:\Windows\system32\OLEAUT32.dll 0x75db0000 - 0x75f0c000 C:\Windows\system32\ole32.dll 0x758b0000 - 0x758c2000 C:\Windows\system32\DEVOBJ.dll 0x74060000 - 0x74073000 C:\Windows\system32\dwmapi.dll 0x74b60000 - 0x74b69000 C:\Windows\system32\VERSION.dll 0x745f0000 - 0x7478e000 C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.windows.common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.7600.16661_none_420fe3fa2b8113bd\COMCTL32.dll 0x75d50000 - 0x75da7000 C:\Windows\system32\SHLWAPI.dll 0x74370000 - 0x743b0000 C:\Windows\system32\uxtheme.dll 0x22200000 - 0x22206000 C:\Program Files\ESET\ESET Smart Security\eplgHooks.dll VM Arguments: jvm_args: -Djava.library.path=C:\Users\theo\Desktop\workspace\JavaFX1\lib\natives\windows -Dfile.encoding=Cp1253 java_command: zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main Launcher Type: SUN_STANDARD Environment Variables: PATH=C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin/client;C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin;C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/lib/i386;C:\Perl\site\bin;C:\Perl\bin;C:\Ruby200\bin;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Shared;C:\Users\theo\Desktop\eclipse; USERNAME=theo OS=Windows_NT PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5, GenuineIntel --------------- S Y S T E M --------------- OS: Windows 7 Build 7600 CPU:total 4 (8 cores per cpu, 2 threads per core) family 6 model 37 stepping 5, cmov, cx8, fxsr, mmx, sse, sse2, sse3, ssse3, sse4.1, sse4.2, ht Memory: 4k page, physical 2097151k(1257972k free), swap 4194303k(4194303k free) vm_info: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (14.2-b01) for windows-x86 JRE (1.6.0_16-b01), built on Jul 31 2009 11:26:58 by "java_re" with MS VC++ 7.1 time: Wed Oct 23 22:00:12 2013 elapsed time: 0 seconds Code: Display.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(800,600)); Display.create();//Error here I am using JDK 6

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• Developer’s Life – Summary of Superhero Articles

  - by Pinal Dave

  Earlier this year, I wrote an article series where I talked about developer’s life and compared it with Superhero. I have got amazing response to this series and I have been receiving quite a lots of email suggesting that I should write more blog post about them. Currently I am not planning to write more blog post but I will soon continue another series. In this blog post, I have summarized the entire series. Let me know if you want me to write about any superhero. I will see what I can do about that hero. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Captain America Captain America was first created as a comic book character in the 1940’s as a way to boost morale during World War II.  Aimed at a children’s audience, his legacy faded away when the war ended.  However, he has recently has a major reboot to become a popular movie character that deals with modern issues. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is the Incredible Hulk The Incredible Hulk is possibly one of the scariest superheroes out there.  All superheroes are meant to be “out of this world” and awe-inspiring, but I think most people will agree with I say The Hulk takes this to the next level.  He is the result of an industrial accident, which is scary enough in it’s own right.  Plus, when mild-mannered Bruce Banner is angered, he goes completely out-of-control and transforms into a destructive monster that he cannot control and has no memories of. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Wonder Woman We have focused a lot lately on this “superhero series.”  I love fantasy books and movies, and I feel like there is a lot to be learned from them.  As I am writing this series, though, I have noticed that every super hero I write about is a man.  So today, I would like to talk about the major female super hero – Wonder Woman. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Harry Potter Harry Potter might not be a superhero in the traditional sense, but I believe he still has a lot to teach us and show us about life as a developer.  If you have been living under a rock for the last 17 years, you might not know that Harry Potter is the main character in an extremely popular series of books and movies documenting the education and tribulation of a young wizard (and his friends). Developer’s Life – Every Developer is Like Transformers Transformers may not be superheroes – they don’t wear capes, they don’t have amazing powers outside of their size and folding ability, they’re not even human (technically).  Part of their enduring popularity is that while we are enjoying over-the-top movies, we are learning about good leadership and strong personal skills. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Iron Man Iron Man is another superhero who is not naturally “super,” but relies on his brain (and money) to turn him into a fighting machine.  While traditional superheroes are still popular, a three-movie franchise and incorporation into the new Avengers series shows that Iron Man is popular enough on his own. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Sherlock Holmes I have been thinking a lot about how developers are like super heroes, and I have written two blog posts now comparing them to Spiderman and Superman.  I have a lot of love and respect for developers, and I hope that they are enjoying these articles, and others are learning a little bit about the profession.  There is another fictional character who, while not technically asuper hero, is very powerful, and I also think stands as a good example of a developer. That character is Sherlock Holmes.  Sherlock Holmes is a British detective, first made popular at the turn of the 19thcentury by author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  The original Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective who could solve the most mind-boggling crime through simple observations and deduction. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Chhota Bheem Chhota Bheem is a cartoon character that is extremely popular where I live.  He is my daughter’s favorite characters.  I like to say that children love Chhota Bheem more than their parents – it is lucky for us he is not real!  Children love Chhota Bheem because he is the absolute “good guy.”  He is smart, loyal, and strong.  He and his friends live in Dholakpur and fight off their many enemies – and always win – in every episode.  In each episode, they learn something about friendship, bravery, and being kind to others.  Chhota Bheem is a good role model for children, and I think that he is a good role model for developers are well. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Batman Batman is one of the darkest superheroes in the fantasy canon.  He does not come to his powers through any sort of magical coincidence or radioactive insect, but through a lot of psychological scarring caused by witnessing the death of his parents.  Despite his dark back story, he possesses a lot of admirable abilities that I feel bear comparison to developers. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Superman I enjoyed comparing developers to Spiderman so much, that I have decided to continue the trend and encourage some of my favorite people (developers) with another favorite superhero – Superman.  Superman is probably the most famous superhero – and one of the most inspiring. Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Spiderman I have to admit, Spiderman is my favorite superhero.  The most recent movie recently was released in theaters, so it has been at the front of my mind for some time. Spiderman was my favorite superhero even before the latest movie came out, but of course I took my whole family to see the movie as soon as I could!  Every one of us loved it, including my daughter.  We all left the movie thinking how great it would be to be Spiderman.  So, with that in mind, I started thinking about how we are like Spiderman in our everyday lives, especially developers. I would like to know which Superhero is your favorite hero! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Developer, Superhero

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• Adobe Photoshop Vs Lightroom Vs Aperture

  - by Aditi

  Adobe Photoshop is the standard choice for photographers, graphic artists and Web designers. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom  & Apple’s Aperture are also in the same league but the usage is vastly different. Although Photoshop is most popular & widely used by photographers, but in many ways it’s less relevant to photographers than ever before. As Lightroom & Aperture is aimed squarely at photographers for photo-processing. With this write up we are going to help you choose what is right for you and why. Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is the most liked tool for the detailed photo editing & designing work. Photoshop provides great features for rollover and Image slicing. Adobe Photoshop includes comprehensive optimization features for producing the highest quality Web graphics with the smallest possible file sizes. You can also create startling animations with it. Designers & Editors know how important precise masking is, PhotoShop lets you do that with various detailing tools. Art history brush, contact sheets, and history palette are some of the smart features, which add to its viability. Download Whether you’re producing printed pages or moving images, you can work more efficiently and produce better results because of its smooth integration across other adobe applications. Buy supporting layer effects, it allows you to quickly add drop shadows, inner and outer glows, bevels, and embossing to layers. It also provides Seamless Web Graphics Workflow. Photoshop is hands-down the BEST for editing. Photoshop Cons: • Slower, less precise editing features in Bridge • Processing lots of images requires actions and can be slower than exporting images from Lightroom • Much slower with editing and processing a large number of images Aperture Apple Aperture is aimed at the professional photographer who shoots predominantly raw files. It helps them to manage their workflow and perform their initial Raw conversion in a better way. Aperture provides adjustment tools such as Histogram to modify color and white balance, but most of the editing of photos is left for Photoshop. It gives users the option of seeing their photographs laid out like slides or negatives on a light table. It boasts of – stars, color-coding and easy techniques for filtering and picking images. Aperture has moved forward few steps than Photoshop, but most of the editing work has been left for Photoshop as it features seamless Photoshop integration. Aperture Pros: Aperture is a step up from the iPhoto software that comes with every Mac, and fairly easy to learn. Adjustments are made in a logical order from top to bottom of the menu. You can store the images in a library or any folder you choose. Aperture also works really well with direct Canon files. It is just $79 if you buy it through Apple’s App Store Moving forward, it will run on the iPad, and possibly the iPhone – Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop may never offer these options It is much nicer and simpler user interface. Lightroom Lightroom does a smashing job of basic fixing and editing. It is more advanced tool for photographers. They can use it to have a startling photography effect. Light room has many advanced features, which makes it one of the best tools for photographers and far ahead of the other two. They are Nondestructive editing. Nothing is actually changed in an image until the photo is exported. Better controls over organizing your photos. Lightroom helps to gather a group of photos to use in a slideshow. Lightroom has larger Compare and Survey views of images. Quickly customizable interface. Simple keystrokes allow you to perform different All Lightroom controls are kept available in panels right next to the photos. Always-available History palette, it doesn’t go when you close lightroom. You gain more colors to work with compared to Photoshop and with more precise control. Local control, or adjusting small parts of a photo without affecting anything else, has long been an important part of photography. In Lightroom 2, you can darken, lighten, and affect color and change sharpness and other aspects of specific areas in the photo simply by brushing your cursor across the areas. Photoshop has far more power in its Cloning and Healing Brush tools than Lightroom, but Lightroom offers simple cloning and healing that’s nondestructive. Lightroom supports the RAW formats of more cameras than Aperture. Lightroom provides the option of storing images outside the application in the file system. It costs less than photoshop. Download Why PhotoShop is advanced than Lightroom? There are countless image processing plug-ins on the market for doing specialized processing in Photoshop. For example, if your image needs sophisticated noise reduction, you can use the Noiseware plug-in with Photoshop to do a much better job or noise removal than Lightroom can do. Lightroom’s advantages over Aperture 3 Will always have better integration with Photoshop. Lightroom is backed by bigger and more active user community (So abundant availability for tutorials, etc.) Better noise reduction tool. Especially for photographers the Lens-distortion correction tool  is perfect Lightroom Cons: • Have to Import images to work on them • Slows down with over 10,000 images in the catalog • For processing just one or two images this is a slower workflow Photoshop Pros: • ACR has the same RAW processing controls as Lightroom • ACR Histogram is specialized to the chosen color space (Lightroom is locked into ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve) • Don’t have to Import images to open in Bridge or ACR • Ability to customize processing of RAW images with Photoshop Actions Pricing and Availability Get LightRoomGet PhotoShop Latest version Of Photoshop can be purchased from Adobe store and Adobe authorized reseller and it costs US$999. Latest version of Aperture can be bought for US$199 from Apple Online store or Mac App Store. You can buy latest version of LightRoom from Adobe Store or Adobe Authorized reseller for US$299. Related posts:Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended Web based Alternatives to Photoshop 10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software

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• New MySQL Cluster 7.3 Previews: Foreign Keys, NoSQL Node.js API and Auto-Tuned Clusters

  - by Mat Keep

  At this weeks MySQL Connect conference, Oracle previewed an exciting new wave of developments for MySQL Cluster, further extending its simplicity and flexibility by expanding the range of use-cases, adding new NoSQL options, and automating configuration. What’s new: Development Release 1: MySQL Cluster 7.3 with Foreign Keys Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer In this blog, I'll introduce you to the features being previewed. Review the blogs listed below for more detail on each of the specific features discussed. Save the date!: A live webinar is scheduled for Thursday 25th October at 0900 Pacific Time / 1600UTC where we will discuss each of these enhancements in more detail. Registration will be open soon and published to the MySQL webinars page MySQL Cluster 7.3: Development Release 1 The first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Milestone Release (DMR) previews Foreign Keys, bringing powerful new functionality to MySQL Cluster while eliminating development complexity. Foreign Key support has been one of the most requested enhancements to MySQL Cluster – enabling users to simplify their data models and application logic – while extending the range of use-cases for both custom projects requiring referential integrity and packaged applications, such as eCommerce, CRM, CMS, etc. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within the MySQL Cluster data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether they are SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA, HTTP/REST or the new Node.js API - discussed later.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation.  This represents a further enhancement to MySQL Cluster's support for on0line schema changes, ie adding and dropping indexes, adding columns, etc.  Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  Getting Started with MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR1: Users can download either the source or binary and evaluate the MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR with Foreign Keys now! (Select the Development Release tab). MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Node.js is hot! In a little over 3 years, it has become one of the most popular environments for developing next generation web, cloud, mobile and social applications. Bringing JavaScript from the browser to the server, the design goal of Node.js is to build new real-time applications supporting millions of client connections, serviced by a single CPU core. Making it simple to further extend the flexibility and power of Node.js to the database layer, we are previewing the Node.js Javascript API for MySQL Cluster as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/. Select the following build: MySQL-Cluster-NoSQL-Connector-for-Node-js Alternatively, you can clone the project at the MySQL GitHub page.  Implemented as a module for the V8 engine, the new API provides Node.js with a native, asynchronous JavaScript interface that can be used to both query and receive results sets directly from MySQL Cluster, without transformations to SQL. Figure 1: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js enables end-to-end JavaScript development Rather than just presenting a simple interface to the database, the Node.js module integrates the MySQL Cluster native API library directly within the web application itself, enabling developers to seamlessly couple their high performance, distributed applications with a high performance, distributed, persistence layer delivering 99.999% availability. The new Node.js API joins a rich array of NoSQL interfaces available for MySQL Cluster. Whichever API is chosen for an application, SQL and NoSQL can be used concurrently across the same data set, providing the ultimate in developer flexibility.  Get started with MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js tutorial MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer Compatible with both MySQL Cluster 7.2 and 7.3, the Auto-Installer makes it simple for DevOps teams to quickly configure and provision highly optimized MySQL Cluster deployments – whether on-premise or in the cloud. Implemented with a standard HTML GUI and Python-based web server back-end, the Auto-Installer intelligently configures MySQL Cluster based on application requirements and auto-discovered hardware resources Figure 2: Automated Tuning and Configuration of MySQL Cluster Developed by the same engineering team responsible for the MySQL Cluster database, the installer provides standardized configurations that make it simple, quick and easy to build stable and high performance clustered environments. The auto-installer is previewed as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/, by selecting the MySQL-Cluster-Auto-Installer build. You can read more about getting started with the MySQL Cluster auto-installer here. Watch the YouTube video for a demonstration of using the MySQL Cluster auto-installer Getting Started with MySQL Cluster If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3 and the Early Access previews). Or use the new MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer! Download the Guide to Scaling Web Databases with MySQL Cluster (to learn more about its architecture, design and ideal use-cases). Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team and the MySQL Cluster community will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section here or in the blogs referenced in this article. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. The first Development Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 and the Early Access previews give you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases, by using the comments of this blog.

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• Professional WordPress Business Themes

  - by Matt

  Every now and then JustSkins.com receives quote requests for WordPress design for business websites. Most companies now keep up to date with a blog on their corporate website, that showcases their day to day activities & progresses.  Getting such professional wordpress driven website designed from the scratch costs you a lot. If you have decided to make WordPress the CMS for your business website, there are some Professional WordPress themes you can take a look at. We have created this list to help you save some time to do all the trying and the testing. Optimize by WooThemes Last year one of the most popular Business theme by WooThemes was the Coffee Break theme, Optimize is further adaptation of the same. It is simple, sleek design with great functionality. The customizable front page lets you showcase your work or product etc. Demo | Price: $70, Developer Price: $150 | DOWNLOAD WooThemes is also offering their whole Business theme pack for a very very reasonable fee, If you like multiple designs from them you can get this big deal for only $125 Onyx , Impacto by Simple Themes Simple Themes has been making very crisp & beautiful WordPress Themes & are also very reasonably priced. If their themes solve your purpose $39 membership for 3 months is a good deal.  If you are looking to create quick website, landing page or micro site their templates are best. Demo | Price: $39 for 3 Months Membership Rejuvenate by Templatic One of the most beautiful Premium WordPress Theme, Available in 4 elegant color schemes. This theme can be used for your Beauty, Spa and Studio Business. Demo | Price: $65  | DOWNLOAD Templatic has created great professional business templates, such as Gourmet, Real Estate, Job Board, Automobile & lots More. You can also get a Best Value Offer in $299 for all of Templatic Themes. TheProfessional by ElegantThemes Elegant Themes is known to provide very beautiful & straightforward designs. The professional wordpress theme is a simple, crisp & concise Theme you can use to create a business website. The 3 short blurbs on the homepage are simple, which can be used to point them to your major offerings and the prominent slider indicates a clear call to action. There are 52 themes to choose from & Elegant Themes is giving a great offer at such a small yearly fee. Demo | Price: $39 Yearly Membership  | DOWNLOAD Elegant Themes has a cluster of 52 magnificent themes, and all you have to do is pay $39 to win access to all of them. Join today! Some of the Professional designs that I like for a business website are SimplePress and Corporation. Extatic by Chimera Themes The theme includes plenty of great features including custom feature tour pages, portfolio sections, static feature areas, pricing table page, 20+ shortcodes, multiple page/post options, unlimited custom sidebars which can be assigned to posts/pages, advanced theme style editor and options page and much more. Its a must buy Demo | Price: $37 | DOWNLOAD Corporate by Clover Themes Simple Theme for a small business. Corporate is an clean, powerful and feature-rich corporate theme with dynamic and energy design. Demo | Price: $69.95 | DOWNLOAD Bizco by Themify Bizco is a very professional template for wordpress targeted at corporate and product based businesses. This theme is simple yet highly functional and is suitable for showcasing features of your service or product. With the custom page template you can change the display of your pages and posts easily with our visual custom panel. Demo | Price: $70  |DOWNLOAD Devision by Themetrust Devision is a small business wordpress theme that can be used to make a business website within a few minutes. It makes it very easy to showcase and highlight your services or product on the homepage. Demo | Price: Euro 39 | DOWNLOAD BizPress by WPZoom A professional business WordPress theme from WPZoom suitable for companies, organizations, product showcases or other business websites. The theme comes with 4 colour options, featured products / services slider on the homepage, drop down menus, theme options page etc. Demo | Price: $ 69 | DOWNLOAD Clean Classy Corporate by ThemeFuse A very impressive WordPress business theme, that can be used in multiple ways. It is suitable for many kinds, like web products, services, hosting etc etc. Clean Classy Corporate WordPress Theme has a clean crisp look and is professional in appeal. Demo | Price: $49  | DOWNLOAD Insdustry by ThemeJam A powerful Business WordPress Template along with lots of options, colors, and customizable features. This is one for almost any kind of blogger, corporate, or organization. Lots of features, gives it the kind of scalability you might need to create any kind of website. Demo | Price: $ 59 | DOWNLOAD AppPress by ChimeraThemes This professional business WordPress theme includes 5 different colour schemes, advanced theme options page, multiple homepage sliders, custom widgets and page templates. The theme also includes a range of other unique features such as custom title, live style editor to modify colours, font styles, sizes etc, and 20+ shortcodes for creating pricing tables, content columns, boxes, buttons and others. Demo | Price: $ 37 | DOWNLOAD Why WordPress Professional Template? You can modify them, these usually come with a lot of fancy features that enable you to create the website as per your usability & choice. In some cases the  Premium WordPress business themes can be accessed through a subscription service. Premium Vs Free WordPress Themes There are very good Free WordPress themes out there that you can use to modify and code further or create what you want, but this possible when you are technically able. On the contrary Premium WordPress business themes offers great features & can save you a lot of time and money. It varies from business to business, some like to keep their website simple while most want to keep cool nifty features and abilities to scale it differently for various sections, products or categories. All this & more is possible with a Professional Business theme that is suitable/close to your needs.

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• MySQL 5.5 brings in new ways to authenticate users

  - by Georgi Kodinov

  Ever wanted to use your server's OS for authenticating MySQL users ? Or the corporate LDAP repository ? Unfortunately options like the above are plentiful nowadays. And providing hard-coded support for protocol X or service Y is not the best possible idea. MySQL 5.5 has taken the step into the right direction by providing an infrastructure allowing one to make the server understand different authentication protocols by creating a set of simple plugins (one for the client and one for the server). So now you can easily extend MySQL to search for and authenticate users in your favorite user directory. In fact the API supplied is so versatile that we took the possibility to re-design the current "native" authentication mechanism into a built-in always-on plugin ! OK, let me give you an example: Imagine we have a bunch of users defined in your OS, e.g. we have a user joro with his respective password. And we have a MySQL instance running on the same computer. It would not be unexpected to need to let joro access and/or modify MySQL data. The first step is to define him as a MySQL user. And there's a problem right there : MySQL's CREATE USER joro@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'joros_password' statement needs a password. And this is a password in no way related to the password that joro have set up in the OS. What's worse : if joro changes his OS password this will in no way be reflected in MySQL. So he'll need to change his MySQL password in a separate step. Not very convenient, specially when you have a lot of users. This is a laborious setup for joro's DBA as well : he'll have to disable his access in both MySQL and the OS should he decides that joro's out of the "nice" list. Now mysql 5.5 to the rescue: Imagine that the smart DBA has created a MySQL server plugin that will check if the name of the user logging in is a valid and enabled OS name and if the password supplied to the mysql client matches the OS and has called this plugin 'auth_os'. Now all that's left to do is to define joro as a MySQL user that will be authenticated externally. This is done by the following command : CREATE USER 'joro'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH 'auth_os'; Now joro can login to MySQL using his current OS password. Note : joro is still a valid MySQL user, so you can grant privileges to him just like you would for all other users. What's better: you can have users that authenticate using different mechanisms in the same server. So you can e.g. safely experiment with external authentication for selected users while keeping your current user base operational. What happens under the hood when joro logs in ? The server will find out by the user definition that it needs to use a non-default authentication and will ask the client to "switch" to using the appropriate client-side plugin (if of course the client is not already using it). If the client can't do this (e.g. because it's an old client or doesn't have the necessary plugin available) the server will reject the login. Otherwise the server will let the server-side plugin decide (while possibly talking to the client side plugin and the OS user directory) if this is a valid login or not. If it is the login process will continue as usual, while if it's not the login will get rejected. There's a lot more that MySQL 5.5 can do for you than just the simple case above. Stay tuned for more advanced use cases like mapping groups of external users to a single MySQL user (so you won't have to have 1-to-1 mapping between your external user directory and your mysql user repository) or ways to control the process as a DBA. Or you can simply skip ahead and read the relevant topics from MySQL's excellent online documentation. Or take a look at the example plugins in plugin/auth. Or take a look at the test suite in mysql-test/t/plugin_auth.test. Changelog entry: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/news-5-5-7.html Primary new sections: Pluggable authentication Proxy users Client plugin C API functions Revised sections: New PROXY privilege New proxies_priv grant table Passwords might be external New external_user and proxy_user system variables New --default-auth and --plugin-dir mysql options New MYSQL_DEFAULT_AUTH and MYSQL_PLUGIN_DIR options for mysql_options() CREATE USER has IDENTIFIED WITH clause to specify auth plugin GRANT has PROXY privilege, IDENTIFIED WITH clause to specify auth plugin The data structure for writing client plugins

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• UCM 11g is 4 days old!

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  Ok...so I missed posting a blog entry when UCM 11g and the entire ECM suite released on Tuesday. Hopefully you've already seen the announcements on any number of the Oracle ECM blogs out there such as ECM Alerts, Fusion ECM, bex huff, or C4. So I won't bore you with the same talking points like 179 million check-ins per day or 124 web site page hits per second. Instead, I thought I'd show some screenshots of the new features in UCM and URM 11g. WebLogic Server and Enterprise Manager So probably the biggest change in 11g is UCM and URM now run on top of the WebLogic Server application server. This is a huge step as ECM is now on a standard platform with the rest of Oracle Fusion Middleware which makes installation, configuration, and integration consistent among all the products. From a feature perspective, it's also beneficial because it's now integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager provides a lot of provisioning control over servers as well as performance monitoring and access to logs and debugging information. Desktop Integration Suite Desktop Integration Suite got a complete overhaul for 11g. It exposes a lot more features within Windows Explorer such as saved searches, workflow queue, and checked-out items. It also now support metadata pop-up screens to let users fill in additional metadata when they drag-n-drop files in! And the integration within Office applications has changed significantly by introducing a dedicated UCM menu to do open, save, compare, etc. Site Studio for External Applications In UCM Site Studio 10gR4, a major architectural shift was introduced which brought several new objects such as elements, region definitions, region templates, and placeholder definitions. This truly separated the content from the display and from the definition. It also allowed separation of the content from needing to be rendered on a complete Site Studio page. Well, the new Site Studio for External Applications takes advantage of that architecture and introduces pre-built tags and plug-ins to JDeveloper to allow to go from simply adding a content area to your web application page to building an entire web site, just like you would have done in Site Studio Designer. In addition to these changes, enhancements to the core Site Studio have been added as well. One of the big ones is called Designer Mode which allows power-users to bypass the standard rules defined by the placeholder definition or template and perform any number of additional actions. This reduces the need to go back to Site Studio Designer or JDeveloper to make more advanced changes to the site. Dashboards As part of the updated records management functionality in both UCM and URM, users can now set a dashboard view on their home page to surface common functions in a single view. It has pre-built "portlets" users can choose from to display and organize they way they want. Behind the scenes, these dashboards are stored as Content Folios. So the dashboards themselves are content items that can be revisioned and shared between users. And new dashboard portlets can be easily added (like the User Profile one in the screenshots) by getting a copy of an existing one, modifying the display, and then checking it in as a new one to select from. URM Interface Enhancements URM includes several new UI and usability enhancements in 11g. There is a new view for physical records, a place to configure "favorite" items to quickly get to, and new placement of the records management menu. BI Publisher Reports Records management in UCM and URM now offer reports generated through embedded BI Publisher. Templates are controlled by rich text files checked directly into the repository, so they can be easily modified. Other Features A new Inbound Refinery conversion option is available that does native Microsoft Office HTML conversion. If your IBR is on Windows and you have the native applications loaded, the IBR can use them to produce HTML. A new GUI template editor for Dynamic Converter is available. It's written in Java so is available through all the supported browsers and platforms. The original ActiveX based editor is also still available. The Component Manager interface has changed to help provide an easier and more descriptive way to enable core components that are installed along with UCM. All of the supported components are immediately available to turn on and do not have to be installed separately as in previous versions. My Downloads is located in the My Content Server menu and provides for easy download of client installs including Desktop Integration Suite and Site Studio Designer. Well, hopefully that gives you a taste for some of the new things in 11g. We're all pretty excited here at Oracle about all the new changes and enhancements. Over the next few months I hope to highlight some of these features more in-depth, so keep your eye out for those posts.

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• Silverlight 5 Hosting :: Features in Silverlight 5 and Release Date

  - by mbridge

  Silverlight 5 is finally announced in the Silverlight FireStarter Event on the 2nd December, 2010. This new version of Silverlight which was earlier labeled as 'Future of Microsoft Silverlight' has now come much closer to go live as the first Silverlight 5 Beta version is expected to be shipped during the early months of 2011. However for the full fledged and the final release of Silverlight 5, we have to wait many more months as the same is likely to be made available within the Q3 2011. As would have been usually expected, this latest edition would feature many new capabilities thereby extending the developer productivity to a whole new dimension of premium media experience and feature-rich business applications. It comes along with many new feature updates as well as the inclusion of new technologies to improve the standard of the Silverlight applications which are now fine-tuned to produce next generation business and media solutions that is capable to meet the requirements of the advanced web-based app development. The Silverlight 5 is all set to replace the previous fourth version which now includes more than forty new features while also dropping various deprecated elements that was prevalent earlier. It has brought around some major performance enhancements and also included better support for various other tools and technologies. Following are some of the changes that are registered to be available under the Silverlight 5 Beta edition which is scheduled to be launched during the Q1 2011. Silverlight 5 : Premium Media Experiences The media features of Silverlight 5 has seen some major enhancements with a lot of optimizations being made to deliver richer solutions. It's capability has now been extended to make things easier, faster and capable of performing the desired tasks in the most efficient manner. The Silverlight media solutions has already been a part of many companies in the recent days where various on-demand Silverlight services were featured but with the arrival of the next generation premium media solution of Silverlight 5, it is expected to register new heights of success and global user acclamation for using it with many esteemed web-based projects and media solutions. - The most happening element in the new Silverlight 5 will be its support for utilizing the GPU based hardware acceleration which is intended to lower down the CPU load to a significant extent and thereby allowing faster rendering of media contents without consuming much resources. This feature is believed to be particularly helpful for low configured machines to run full HD media content without any lagging caused due to processor load. It will hence be one great feature to revolutionize the new generation high quality media contents to be available within the web in a more efficient manner with its hardware decoded video playback capabilities. - With the inclusion of hardware video decoding to minimize the processor load, the Silverlight 5 also comes with another optimization enhancement to also reduce the power consumption level by making new methods to deal with the power-saver settings. With this optimization in effect, the computer would be automatically allowed to switch to sleep mode while no video playback is in progress and also to prevent any screensavers to popup and cause annoyances during any video playback. There would also be other power saver options which will be made available to best suit the users requirements and purpose. - The Silverlight trickplay feature is another great way to tweak any silverlight powered media content as is used for many video tutorial sites or for dealing with any sort of presentations. This feature enables the user to modify the playback speed to either slowdown or speedup during the playback durations based on the requirements without compromising on the quality of output. Normally such manipulations always makes the content's audio to go off-pitch, but the same will not be the case with TrickPlay and the audio would seamlessly progress with the video without skipping any of its part. - In addition to all of the above, the new Silverlight 5 will be featuring wireless control of all the media contents by making use of remote controllers. With the use of such remote devices, it will be easier to handle the various media playback controls thereby providing more freedom while experiencing the premium media services. Silverlight 5 : Business Application Development The application development standard has been extended with more possibilities by bringing forth new and useful technologies and also reviving the existing methods to work better than what it was used to. From the UI improvements to advanced technical aspects, the Silverlight 5 scores high on all grounds to produce great next generation business delivered applications by putting in more creativity and resourceful touch to all the apps being produced with it. - The WPF feature of Silverlight is made more effective by introducing new standards of Databinding which is intended to improve the productivity standards of the Silverlight application developer. It brings in a lot of convenience in debugging the databinding components or expressions and hence making things work in a flawless manner. Some additional features related to databinding includes that of Ancestor RelativeSource, Implicit DataTemplates and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) support with DataContextChanged event and many other new features relating it. - It now comes with a refined text and printing service which facilitates better clarity of the text rendering and also many positive changes which are being applied to the layout pattern. New supports has been added to include OpenType font, multi-column text, linked-text containers and character leading support to name a few among the available features.This also includes some important printing aspects like that of Postscript Vector Printing API which allows to program our printing tasks in a user defined way and Pivot functionality for visualization concerns of informations. - The Graphics support is the key improvements being incorporated which now enables to utilize three dimensional graphics pattern using GPU acceleration. It can manage to provide some really cool visualizations being curved to provide media contents within the business apps with also the support for full HD contents at 1080p quality. - Silverlight 5 includes the support for 64-bit operating systems and relevant browsers and is also optimized to provide better performance. It can support the background thread for the networking which can reduce the latency of the network to a considerable extent. The Out-of-Browser functionality adds the support for utilizing various libraries and also the Win32 API. It also comes with testing support with VS 2010 which is mostly an automated procedure and has also enabled increased security aspects of all the Silverlight 5 developed applications by using the improved version of group policy support.

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• jQuery 1.4 Opacity and IE Filters

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into a small problem today with my client side jQuery library after switching to jQuery 1.4. I ran into a problem with a shadow plugin that I use to provide drop shadows for absolute elements – for Mozilla WebKit browsers the –moz-box-shadow and –webkit-box-shadow CSS attributes are used but for IE a manual element is created to provide the shadow that underlays the original element along with a blur filter to provide the fuzziness in the shadow. Some of the key pieces are: var vis = el.is(":visible"); if (!vis) el.show(); // must be visible to get .position var pos = el.position(); if (typeof shEl.style.filter == "string") sh.css("filter", 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Blur(makeShadow=true, pixelradius=3, shadowOpacity=' + opt.opacity.toString() + ')'); sh.show() .css({ position: "absolute", width: el.outerWidth(), height: el.outerHeight(), opacity: opt.opacity, background: opt.color, left: pos.left + opt.offset, top: pos.top + opt.offset }); This has always worked in previous versions of jQuery, but with 1.4 the original filter no longer works. It appears that applying the opacity after the original filter wipes out the original filter. IOW, the opacity filter is not applied incrementally, but absolutely which is a real bummer. Luckily the workaround is relatively easy by just switching the order in which the opacity and filter are applied. If I apply the blur after the opacity I get my correct behavior back with both opacity: sh.show() .css({ position: "absolute", width: el.outerWidth(), height: el.outerHeight(), opacity: opt.opacity, background: opt.color, left: pos.left + opt.offset, top: pos.top + opt.offset }); if (typeof shEl.style.filter == "string") sh.css("filter", 'progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Blur(makeShadow=true, pixelradius=3, shadowOpacity=' + opt.opacity.toString() + ')'); While this works this still causes problems in other areas where opacity is implicitly set in code such as for fade operations or in the case of my shadow component the style/property watcher that keeps the shadow and main object linked. Both of these may set the opacity explicitly and that is still broken as it will effectively kill the blur filter. This seems like a really strange design decision by the jQuery team, since clearly the jquery css function does the right thing for setting filters. Internally however, the opacity setting doesn’t use .css instead hardcoding the filter which given jQuery’s usual flexibility and smart code seems really inappropriate. The following is from jQuery.js 1.4: var style = elem.style || elem, set = value !== undefined; // IE uses filters for opacity if ( !jQuery.support.opacity && name === "opacity" ) { if ( set ) { // IE has trouble with opacity if it does not have layout // Force it by setting the zoom level style.zoom = 1; // Set the alpha filter to set the opacity var opacity = parseInt( value, 10 ) + "" === "NaN" ? "" : "alpha(opacity=" + value * 100 + ")"; var filter = style.filter || jQuery.curCSS( elem, "filter" ) || ""; style.filter = ralpha.test(filter) ? filter.replace(ralpha, opacity) : opacity; } return style.filter && style.filter.indexOf("opacity=") >= 0 ? (parseFloat( ropacity.exec(style.filter)[1] ) / 100) + "": ""; } You can see here that the style is explicitly set in code rather than relying on $.css() to assign the value resulting in the old filter getting wiped out. jQuery 1.32 looks a little different: // IE uses filters for opacity if ( !jQuery.support.opacity && name == "opacity" ) { if ( set ) { // IE has trouble with opacity if it does not have layout // Force it by setting the zoom level elem.zoom = 1; // Set the alpha filter to set the opacity elem.filter = (elem.filter || "").replace( /alpha\([^)]*\)/, "" ) + (parseInt( value ) + '' == "NaN" ? "" : "alpha(opacity=" + value * 100 + ")"); } return elem.filter && elem.filter.indexOf("opacity=") >= 0 ? (parseFloat( elem.filter.match(/opacity=([^)]*)/)[1] ) / 100) + '': ""; } Offhand I’m not sure why the latter works better since it too is assigning the filter. However, when checking with the IE script debugger I can see that there are actually a couple of filter tags assigned when using jQuery 1.32 but only one when I use jQuery 1.4. Note also that the jQuery 1.3 compatibility plugin for jQUery 1.4 doesn’t address this issue either. Resources ww.jquery.js (shadow plug-in $.fn.shadow) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  

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• Surface development: it&rsquo;s just like software development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Surface is magic. Everyone using it seems to think that way. And I have to be honest, after working for almost 2 years with the platform I still get that special feeling the moment I turn on the unit to do some more work. The whole user experience, the rich environment of the SDK, the touch, even the look and feel of the Surface environment is so much different from the stuff I’ve been working on all my career that I am still bewildered by it. But… and this is a big but.. in the end we’re still talking about a computer and that needs software to become useful. Deep down the magic of the Surface unit there is a PC somewhere, running Windows Vista and the .net framework 3.5. When you write that magic software that makes the platform come alive you’re still working with .net, WPF/XNA, C#, VB.Net and all those other tools and technologies you know so well. Sure, the whole user experience is different from what you’ve known. And the way of thinking about users, their interaction and the positioning of screen elements requires a whole new paradigm. And that takes time. It took me about half a year before I had the feeling I got it nailed down. But when that moment came (about 18 months ago…) I realized that everything I had learned so far on software development still is true when it comes to Surface. The last 6 months I have been working with some people with a different background to start a new company. The idea was that the new company would be focussing on Surface and Surface only. These people come from a marketing background and had some good ideas for some applications. And I have to admit: their ideas were good. Very good. Where it all fell down of course is that these ideas need to be implemented in a piece of software. And creating great software takes skilled developers and a lot of time and money. That’s where things went wrong: the marketing guys didn’t realize and didn’t want to realize that software development is a job that takes skill. You can’t just hire a bunch of developers and expect them to deliver the best sort of software, especially not when it comes to Surface. I tried to explain that yes, their User Interface in Photoshop looked great, but no: I couldn’t develop an application like that in a weeks time. Even worse: the while backend of the software (WCF for communications, SQL Server for the database, etc) would take a lot more time than the frontend. They didn’t understand. It took them a couple of days to drawn the UI in Photoshop so in Blend I should be able to build the software in about the same amount of time. Well, you and I know that it doesn’t work that way. Software is hard to write, and even harder to write well, and it takes skill and dedication. It’s not something you can do as fast as you can draw a mock up for a Surface application in Photohop. The same holds true for web applications of course. A lot of designers there fail to appreciate the hard work that goes into writing the plumbing for a good web app that can handle thousands of users. Although the UI is very important, it’s not all there is to it. And in Surface development this is the same. The UI should create the feeling of magic, but the software behind it is what makes it come alive. And that takes time. A lot of time. So brush of you skills and don’t throw them away if you start developing for Surface. Because projects (and colaborations) can fail there as hard as they can in any other area of software development. On a side note: we decided to stop the colaboration (something the other parties involved didn’t appreciate and were very angry about) and decided to hire a designer for the Surface projects. The focus is back where it belongs: on the software development we know so well and have been doing very well for 13 years. UI is just a part of the whole project and not the end product. So my company Detrio is still going strong when it comes to develivering Surface solutions but once again from a technological background, not a marketing background.

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• Social Network Updates: While You Were Busy Marketing 2

  - by Mike Stiles

  Since social moves at the speed of data, it’s already time for another update, as we did back in April, on the changes the various social networks have made or gone through while you were busy marketing. Facebook There’s a lot of talk Facebook’s developing a mobile product to act like Flipboard and surface news, from both users and media outlets. The biggest news was Facebook/Instagram’s introduction of 15-second videos, enhanced with with filters, to take some of Vine’s candy. You can also delete parts of videos and rerecord them, and there’s image stabilization. Facebook’s ad revenue is coming along just fine, thank you very much. 35% quarter-to-quarter growth in Q2. And it looks like new formats like Mobile App Install Ads and Unpublished Page Posts are adding to the mix. If you don’t already, you’ll soon see a little camera in comment boxes letting you insert photos right into the comments you make. The drive toward “more visual” continues. The other big news is Facebook’s adoption of our Twitter friend, the hashtag. Adding # sets apart the post topic so it can be easily found or discovered. It’s also being added to Google Plus, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Twitter Want to send someone a promoted tweet when they’re in range of your store? That could be happening by the end of this year. Some users have been seeing automatic in-stream previews of images on Twitter.com. Right now it’s images in your own tweets, but we can assume all tweets are next. Get your followers organized! Twitter raised the limit on the number of lists you can create from 20 to 1,000. They also raised the number of accounts you can have in a list from 500 to 5,000. Twitter started notifying you when someone favorites a tweet you’re mentioned in or re-tweets a tweet you re-tweeted. Anyway, it’s the first time Twitter’s notified you about indirect interactions like that. Who’s afraid of Instagram? A study shows 6-second Vine videos are being posted to Twitter at the rate of 9/second, up from 5/second 2 months ago. Vine has over 13 million users and branded Vines are 4x more likely to be shared than video ads. Google Plus Now featuring a 3-column redesigned stream, and images that take up a whole column. And photo filters Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome work to turn your photos into a real show. Google Hangouts is the workhorse for all Google messaging now, it’s not just an online chat with 9 people anymore. Google Plus Dashboard improves the connection between your company’s Google Plus business page and your Google Plus Local. Updates go out across all Google properties and you can do your managing from the dashboard. With Google Plus’ authorship system, you can build “Author Rank” based on what you write and put on the web. If your stuff is +1’ed and shared a lot, you’re the real deal and there are search result benefits. LinkedIn "Who's Viewed Your Updates" shows you what you’ve shared recently, who saw it and what they did about it in real-time. “Influencers” is, well, influential. Traffic to all LI news products has gone up 8x since it was introduced. LinkedIn is quickly figuring out how to get users to stick around awhile. You and your brand can post images and documents in status updates now. In fact, that whole “document posting” thing is making some analysts wonder if LinkedIn will drift on over to the Dropboxes and YouSendIts of the world. C’mon, admit it. Your favorite part of LinkedIn is being able to see who’s viewed your profile. Now you’ve got even more info and can see what/who you have in common. Premium users get even deeper insights about how people are finding them. If you’re a big fan of security, you’ll love that LinkedIn started offering two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s optional, but step 2 is a one-time code texted to your registered mobile. Pinterest A study showed pins have a looong shelf life compared to other social net posts. “Clicks kept coming for 30 days and beyond.” Most pins are timeless, and the infinite scroll causes people to see older pins. Is it a keeper? Pinterest jumped 82% to 54 million users in the past year. It’s valued at $2.5 billion and is one of the biggest sources of referral traffic there is. That said, CEO Ben Silbermann adds, "Right now, we don't make money." A new search feature stops you from having to endlessly scroll through your own pins looking for that waterfall picture you posted. Simply select “just my pins” in the search bar. New "Rich Pins" lets brands add info like price and availability to pins that can be updated daily via a data feed from your merchant site. Not so fast, you have to apply to Pinterest for it first. Like other social nets, Pinterest does not allow sexual content, nudity, or even partial nudity. However…some art contains nudity, and Pinterest wants to allow art. What constitutes “art” will be judged by…what we have to assume are Pinterest employees who love their job. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng, Tim Marmon

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