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• Creative, busy Devoxx week

  - by JavaCecilia

  I got back from my first visit to the developer conference Devoxx in Antwerp. I can't describe the vibes of the conference, it was a developer amusement park, hackergartens, fact sessions, comic relief provided by Java Posse, James Bond and endless hallway discussions.All and all - I had a lot of fun, my main mission was to talk about Oracle's main focus for OpenJDK which besides development and bug fixing is making sure the infrastructure is working out for the full community. My focus was not to hang out at night club the Noxx, but that was came included in the package :)The London Java community leaders Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg are leading discussions in the community to lay out the necessary requirements for the infrastructure for build and test in the open. They called a first meeting at JavaOne gathering 25 people, including people from RedHat, IBM and Oracle. The second meeting at Devoxx included 14 participants and had representatives from Oracle and IBM. I hope we really can find a way to collaborate on this, making sure we deliver an efficient infrastructure for all engineers to contribute to OpenJDK with.My home in all of this was the BOF rooms and the sessions there meeting the JUG leaders, talking about OpenJDK infrastructure and celebrating the Duchess Duke Award together with the others. The restaurants in the area was slower than I've ever seen, so I missed out on Trisha Gee's brilliant replay of the workshop "The Problem with Women in IT - an Agile Approach" where she masterly leads the audience (a packed room, 50-50 gender distribution) to solve the problem of including more diversity in the developer community. A tough and sometimes sensitive topic where she manages to keep the discussion objective with a focus of improving the matter from a business perspective. Mattias Karlsson is organizing the Java developer conference Jfokus in Stockholm and was there talking to Andres Almires planning a Hackergarten with a possible inclusion of an OpenJDK bugathon. That would be really cool, especially as the Oracle Stockholm Java development office is just across the water from the Jfokus venue, some of the local JVM engineers will likely attend and assist, even though the bug smashing theme will likely be more starter level build warnings in Swing or langtools than fixing JVM bugs.I was really happy that I managed to catch a seat for the Java Posse live podcast "the Third Presidential Debate" a lot of nerd humor, a lot of beer, a lot of fun :) The new member Chet had a perfect dead pan delivery and now I just have to listen more to the podcasts! Can't get the most perfect joke out of my head, talking about beer "As my father always said: Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" - hilarious :)I attended the sessions delivered by my Stockholm office colleagues Marcus Lagergren (on dynamic languages on the jvm, JavaScript in particular) and Joel Borggrén-Franck (Annotations) and was happy to see the packed room and all the questions raised at the end.There's loads of stuff to write about the event, but just have to pace myself for now. It was a fantastic event, captain Stephan Janssen with crew should be really proud to provide this forum to the developer community!

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• Databases and Beer

  - by Johnm

  It is a bit of a no-brainer: Include the word "beer" in a subject line of an e-mail or blog post title and you can be certain that it will be read. While there are times this practice might be a ploy to increase readership, it is not the case for this blog post. There is inspiration that can be drawn from other industries to which we, as database professionals, can apply in our industry. In this post I will highlight one of my favorite participants of the brewing industry. The Boston Beer Company started in the 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts. Others may be more familiar with this company through their Samuel Adams Boston Lager and other various seasonal beers. I am continually inspired by their commitment to mastery of the brewing process to which they evangelize frequently in their commercials. They also are continually in pursuit of pushing the boundaries of beer as we know it while working within traditional constraints. A recent example of this is their collaboration with Weihenstephan Brewery of Munich, Germany to produce the soon to be released Infinium beer. This beer, while brewed as an ale, is touted as something closer to something like Champaign - all while complying with the Reinheitsgebot. The Reinheitsgebot is also known as the "German Beer Purity Law" which was originated in 1516. This law states that beer is to consist of water, barley, hops and yeast. That's it. Quite a limiting constraint indeed. and yet, The Boston Beer Company pushed forward. Much like the process of brewing, the discipline of database design and architecture is one that is continually in process and driven by the pursuit of mastery. While we do not have purity laws to constrain us, we have many other types: best practices, company policies, government regulations, security and budgets. Through our fellow comrades, we discuss the challenges and constraints in which we operate. We boil down the principles and theories that define our profession. We reassemble these into something that is complementary to the business needs that we must fulfill. As a result, it is not uncommon to see something amazingly innovative in a small business who is pushing the boundaries of their database well beyond its intended state. It is equally common to see innovation in the use of features available in the more advanced features of databases that are found in large businesses. The tag line for The Boston Beer Company is: "Take Pride In Your Beer.", I would like to offer an alternative and say "Take Pride In Your Database." So, As you pour your next Boston Lager into a frosted glass, consider those who spend their lives mastering the craft of brewing and strive to interject their spirit into everything that you do as a database professional. Cheers!

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• Creating a Strong Bridge to the Post PC World

  - by Webgui

  Moving from location to location requires strong roads.  When crossing a barrier though, like a body of water or valley, we are required to build a strong bridge to get us from point A to point B in a way that is fast, safe, and easy.Yet we are not talking here about driving a car or riding a bus.  As we in the computing world are evidencing the move to the post-PC era, modernizing and migrating legacy applications to harness the power of HTML5 web, cloud and mobile is one of the most difficult challenges enterprises have faced.  Constant technological changes have weakened the business value of legacy systems, which have been developed over the years through huge investments.  There are several risks of course in this move.  Do you choose to simply rewrite code of legacy apps and transform them to HTML5 one by one?  This is quite expensive (according to research firm Gartner, the cost is $6 - $26 per line of code).  Of course, the pace of the rewriting process is very slow – around 170 lines per day for each developer – which slows down business productivity in a world in which no organization can afford to fall behind.  Other questions include whether the new cloud-based apps will have the same functionality as the trusted applications that worked for you for years.  How will the user experience be affected?  And of course, what about data security?  So we are faced with the challenge of building a sturdy bridge to stabilize our move in order to allow us to confidently and easily move our legacy applications into the post-PC era.   We at Gizmox are excited to release the first downloadable Community Technology Preview (CTP) of our Instant CloudMove Transposition Studio.Developers: To download the tool, and try it out for yourself, please visit http://www.visualwebgui.com/download.aspx.The CTP is the first and only tool-based solution allowing any Microsoft Visual Studio developer to extend VB6 and .NET enterprise client/server applications into HTML5 web, cloud and mobile applications, including the ability to upgrade their code and UI while doing so.   It is the only solution to fully replicate enterprise desktop applications behavior in the post-PC era.  With Instant CloudMove, the transposed application is available on any mobile or tablet device, browser and across any client operating system. Moreover, the extended application logic and data remains on the server behind the fire-wall and therefore the application’s front end is secured-by-design.   We would love for you to try out the tool for yourselves and let us know what you think.  How are you finding the move?

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• Oracle CRM For Public Sector, Commercial Business, Education

  - by michael.seback

  Chongqing Transport Commission Improves Management of Transport Projects The Chongqing Transport Commission is responsible for public passenger, road, and waterway transport in urban and rural areas of Chongqing. The commission administers the region's road and water industry; oversees the construction of transport infrastructure; and manages civil aviation, railroads, roads, waterways, ports, and wharves. "After studying the IT initiatives of other provincial transport commissions, we decided to use Siebel Public Sector to build our integrated transport service system. The Siebel software offers powerful functions that allow us to integrate information and improve the management of our road, rail, and waterway infrastructure projects." - Chen Xiaoming, Vice Director, Information Center, Chongqing Transport Commission. Read more here. Siemens Information Services Increases Productivity by 20% Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. provides back-office account processing services to Siemens' vendors. The company works with Siemens' healthcare, energy, and industry divisions in Europe, the United States, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. It approves financial services such as processing payroll, accounts data, purchase orders, invoices, and payments, and also creates service catalogs for customers and internal teams. "Oracle CRM ON Demand provides us with a complete view of each customer's data from the moment they log a request to the time we close it. This has eliminated manual requests, and improved the service we offer to our clients across the Asia-Pacific region." -Sunil Zutshi, General Manager, IT, Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. Read more here. China Distance Education Holdings Improves Call Center Productivity by 24% China Distance Education Holdings Limited is a leading provider of online education. The organization offers 174 courses through 16 Web sites, including accounting, healthcare, law, and engineering. In 2010, 215,000 students were enrolled. "Online education is a fast growing sector in China. To maintain our competitiveness, we implemented Oracle Contact Center Anywhere to make it easier and faster for our call center staff to respond to student enquiries. As a result, their productivity increased by 24%." - Qin Songjiang, Chief Technology Officer, China Distance Education Holdings Limited. Read more here.

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• More Efficient Data Structure for Large Layered Tile Map

  - by Stupac

  It seems like the popular method is to break the map up into regions and load them as needed, my problem is that in my game there are many AI entities other than the player out performing actions in virtually all the regions of the map. Let's just say I have a 5000x5000 map, when I use a 2D array of byte's to render it my game uses around 17 MB of memory, as soon as I change that data structure to a my own defined MapCell class (which only contains a single field: byte terrain) my game's memory consumption rockets up to 400+ MB. I plan on adding layering, so an array of byte's won't cut it and I figure I'd need to add a List of some sort to the MapCell class to provide objects in the layers. I'm only rendering tiles that are on screen, but I need the rest of the map to be represented in memory since it is constantly used in Update. So my question is, how can I reduce the memory consumption of my map while still maintaining the above requirements? Thank you for your time! Here's a few snippets my C# code in XNA4: public static void LoadMapData() { // Test map generations int xSize = 5000; int ySize = 5000; MapCell[,] map = new MapCell[xSize,ySize]; //byte[,] map = new byte[xSize, ySize]; Terrain[] terrains = new Terrain[4]; terrains[0] = grass; terrains[1] = dirt; terrains[2] = rock; terrains[3] = water; Random random = new Random(); for(int x = 0; x < xSize; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < ySize; y++) { //map[x,y] = new MapCell(terrains[random.Next(4)]); map[x,y] = new MapCell((byte)random.Next(4)); //map[x, y] = (byte)random.Next(4); } } testMap = new TileMap(map, xSize, ySize); // End test map setup currentMap = testMap; } public class MapCell { //public TerrainType terrain; public byte terrain; public MapCell(byte itsTerrain) { terrain = itsTerrain; } // the type of terrain this cell is treated as /*public Terrain terrain { get; set; } public MapCell(Terrain itsTerrain) { terrain = itsTerrain; }*/ }

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• Retail in New York - a walk down 5th Avenue

  - by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

  It's the week of the NRF Big Show and all eyes in the retail industry are on New York. The Big Apple is famous for Big Retail -with a proliferation of incredibly iconic stores. The environment is exciting and familiar even to people visiting this small island for the first time. Most of us have travelled down Fifth Avenue watching movies and TV even if we have never set foot on American soil. I find it one of the most exciting retail cities in the world and I am thrilled this year to be here with so many of Oracle's International retail customers who are joining us for the Retail Exchange. The Oracle program brings retailers from all over the planet together to share ideas and be inspired by New York retail and the NRF event. The show celebrates its 100th year in 2011 and New York itself has been recognized globally as the capital of innovative retail for just as long.  Fifth Avenue is where many global brands have placed their flagship stores, and businesses are in constant competition to set themselves apart from their competitors - both in the store and from the street.  These flag ship retail destinations present what today's customers are finding most exciting and delightful about retail. For the tourist market, they may only visit these stores once, but the impression that a trip to a flagship store leaves with a customer can last a lifetime.  One of the stores that is currently turning heads on Fifth Avenue is Hollister, sister brand to Abercrombie and Fitch, which has filled its shop front with a massive live video (and audio) feed of surfers on the beach in California.  To complete the effect, they also have troughs of water in front of the video screens to bring the sea to the street.  And this isn't the only kind of surfing that retailers are considering today and multi-channel retail is a hot topic that all of the retailers joining the Retail Exchange are considering.   The rest of the world looks to the brands along Fifth Avenue for inspiration - how they take advantage of new opportunities, how they set themselves apart from their competitors and how they keep their products fresh and desirable. With these inspiring pioneers in New York, it's little wonder that NRF's Big Show is so popular, and that New York is viewed as one of the retail capitals of the world. It is a pleasure to be here with so many of the world's greatest international retailers.

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• A "First" at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Adam May, Director, Fusion CRM, Oracle Applications Development There are always firsts at OpenWorld. These firsts keep the conference fresh and are the reason people come back year after year. An important first this year is our Fusion CRM customers who are using the product and deriving real benefit from Fusion CRM. Everyone can learn from and interact with them -- including us!  We love talking to customers, especially those who are using our solutions in unexpected ways because they challenge us! At previous OpenWorlds, we presented our overall Fusion vision and our plans for Fusion CRM. Those presentations helped customers plan their strategies and map out their new release uptakes. Fast forward to March of this year when the first Fusion CRM customer went live. Since then we've watched the pace of go-lives accelerate every single month. Now we're at the threshold of another OpenWorld -- with over 45,000 attendees, 2,500 sessions and LOTS of other activities. To avoid having our customers curl into a ball with sensory overload, we designed a Focus On Document to outline the most important Fusion CRM activities. Here are some of the highlights: Anthony Lye's "Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap" on Monday at 3:15 p.m. The CRM Pavilion, open in Moscone West from Monday through Wednesday; features our strategic Fusion CRM partners and provides live demonstrations of their capabilities General Session: "Oracle Fusion CRM--Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use" on Tuesday at 11:45 a.m.; features Anthony Lye and Deloitte "Meet the Fusion CRM Experts" on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.; this session gives customers the opportunity to interact one-on-one with Fusion experts divided into eight categories of expertise CRM Social Reception on Tuesday from 6-8 p.m.; there's no better way to spend the early evening than discussing Fusion CRM with Oracle experts and strategic partners over appetizers and drinks Wednesday night is Oracle's Customer Appreciation event; enjoy Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, etc. beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Treasure Island Be sure to drink plenty of water before sleeping Wednesday night and don't stay out too late because we have lots of great content on Thursday; at the top of the list is "Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement" at 11:15 a.m. We hope you have a fantastic experience at OpenWorld 2012! And here's a little video treat to whet your appetite: http://www.youtube.com/user/FusionAppsAtOracle

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Use Expressions with LINQ to Entities

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Recently I've been putting together a generic approach for paging the response from a WCF service. Paging changes the service signature, so it's not as simple as adding a behavior to an existing service in config, but the complexity of the paging is isolated in a generic base class. We're using the Entity Framework talking to SQL Server, so when we ask for a page using LINQ's .Take() method we get a nice efficient SQL query for just the rows we want, with minimal impact on SQL Server and network traffic. We use the maximum ID of the record returned as a high-water mark (rather than using .Skip() to go to the next record), so the approach caters for records being deleted between page requests. In the paged response we include a HasMorePages indicator, computed by comparing the max ID in the page of results to the max ID for the whole resultset - if the latter is bigger, then there are more pages. In some quick performance testing, the paged version of the service performed much more slowly than the unpaged version, which was unexpected. We narrowed it down to the code which gets the max ID for the full resultset - instead of building an efficient MAX() SQL query, EF was returning the whole resultset and then computing the max ID in the service layer. It's easy to reproduce - take this AdventureWorks query:             var context = new AdventureWorksEntities();             var query = from od in context.SalesOrderDetail                         where od.ModifiedDate >= modified                          && od.SalesOrderDetailID.CompareTo(id) > 0                         orderby od.SalesOrderDetailID                         select od;   We can find the maximum SalesOrderDetailID like this:             var maxIdEfficiently = query.Max(od => od.SalesOrderDetailID);   which produces our efficient MAX() SQL query. If we're doing this generically and we already have the ID function in a Func:             Func<SalesOrderDetail, int> idFunc = od => od.SalesOrderDetailID;             var maxIdInefficiently = query.Max(idFunc);   This fetches all the results from the query and then runs the Max() function in code. If you look at the difference in Reflector, the first call passes an Expression to the Max(), while the second call passes a Func. So it's an easy fix - wrap the Func in an Expression:             Expression<Func<SalesOrderDetail, int>> idExpression = od => od.SalesOrderDetailID;             var maxIdEfficientlyAgain = query.Max(idExpression);   - and we're back to running an efficient MAX() statement. Evidently the EF provider can dissect an Expression and build its equivalent in SQL, but it can't do that with Funcs.

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• My First 5K, the recap.

  - by Chris Williams

  It was a nice day to be outside (and trust me, those aren't words you'll hear from me often.) I got to the site around 7:45, hit the pre-reg table and got my number along with a goody bag full of coupons for racing gear, a water bottle and a tshirt. Oh and a map. Stashed all that stuff in the jeep, emptied my pockets of everything but my iPhone and my jeep key, and proceeded to walk around for a bit as people started showing up and signing in. It was fairly breezy, and there was definitely a storm coming... but it was anyone's guess on when it would actually arrive. It was interesting to see everyone who was participating. If I had to guess, I would say the event was 60-70% women, with a pretty broad distribution of age... as young as 13 to well over 60 (in both genders.) I don't know exactly how many folks were there, but it was well over 300. Eventually it was time to kick things off, and everyone made their way to the start line. All of the 5k and 10k runners were mixed together, starting at the same time. All the walkers and the people with strollers or dogs were in the back. It was pretty chaotic at first, once things started, but it thinned out fairly quickly. The 10k people and the hardcore runners sped ahead of everyone else and the walkers gradually lagged behind. The 5K course was pretty nice, winding around a lake down in Eden Prairie. The 10K course overlapped most of ours, but branched off a couple times too. I didn't run the whole time, but I started the race running and I ended it running, and did a mix of walking and running along the way. I met my goals, which were a) don't ever stop and b) don't be last. The weather managed to hold out for the entire race. It never got too hot, there was a nice breeze and it was mostly overcast. Pretty much perfect in my book. About 20-30 minutes after I left, the rain came down pretty hard. I had a good time, and will most likely do more of them. We'll see.

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• Is OOP hard because it is not natural?

  - by zvrba

  One can often hear that OOP naturally corresponds to the way people think about the world. But I would strongly disagree with this statement: We (or at least I) conceptualize the world in terms of relationships between things we encounter, but the focus of OOP is designing individual classes and their hierarchies. Note that, in everyday life, relationships and actions exist mostly between objects that would have been instances of unrelated classes in OOP. Examples of such relationships are: "my screen is on top of the table"; "I (a human being) am sitting on a chair"; "a car is on the road"; "I am typing on the keyboard"; "the coffee machine boils water", "the text is shown in the terminal window." We think in terms of bivalent (sometimes trivalent, as, for example in, "I gave you flowers") verbs where the verb is the action (relation) that operates on two objects to produce some result/action. The focus is on action, and the two (or three) [grammatical] objects have equal importance. Contrast that with OOP where you first have to find one object (noun) and tell it to perform some action on another object. The way of thinking is shifted from actions/verbs operating on nouns to nouns operating on nouns -- it is as if everything is being said in passive or reflexive voice, e.g., "the text is being shown by the terminal window". Or maybe "the text draws itself on the terminal window". Not only is the focus shifted to nouns, but one of the nouns (let's call it grammatical subject) is given higher "importance" than the other (grammatical object). Thus one must decide whether one will say terminalWindow.show(someText) or someText.show(terminalWindow). But why burden people with such trivial decisions with no operational consequences when one really means show(terminalWindow, someText)? [Consequences are operationally insignificant -- in both cases the text is shown on the terminal window -- but can be very serious in the design of class hierarchies and a "wrong" choice can lead to convoluted and hard to maintain code.] I would therefore argue that the mainstream way of doing OOP (class-based, single-dispatch) is hard because it IS UNNATURAL and does not correspond to how humans think about the world. Generic methods from CLOS are closer to my way of thinking, but, alas, this is not widespread approach. Given these problems, how/why did it happen that the currently mainstream way of doing OOP became so popular? And what, if anything, can be done to dethrone it?

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• Are there software options (preferabbly .NET) for doing distance and speed analysis of footballers moving on video?

  - by Anonymous Type

  Editing Question for Clarity Thanks for feedback so far, very insightful. I'm not sure how far along this part of the software community is, and what if any libraries exist for me to leverage from. Heres what I'm trying to do. Problem: Take an existing video of a game of rugby league. The Rugby League field is 100 metres long, 70 metres wide, and has white line markings every 10 metres running along the width of the field, as well as along the sidelines. Each side has 13 players on the field. Players on each team have identical jerseys that normally constrast strongly against background colours (green/brown field colour) and the referee's colour (usually yellow) and the designated water runner (orange). All players have a unique number in thick white lettering on their backs for identification. Video is taken with a high definition camera. Currently only one camera is used (2D) and existing video does not contain a foreground object of fixed spatial dimensions (as suggested in one answer for comparision measurements, however I could add this to future filming sessions if it is worthwhile). The player's do not run in a straight line 50% of the time but will go sideways on on a diagonal to the play the ball. The distance measured always starts from the spot of the previous "tackle", which ends where the player stops forward movement. It is not always possible to determine the players number from the video (facing other direction, sunlight, others standing in the way of the camera). But this isn't important as the software could allow for manual inputting of unknown "runs" at a later point after analysis. Determine the distance between two points (i.e. where the player started his "run" and where he finished it). I'm guessing that this would be quite doable if I manually marked the start and end point in the video. But how would I use landmarks in the background to determine the distance (assuming the person taking the video has kept it from jerking around). Question: Do software packages or libraries exist that are specialised enough to assist with writing analysis software to determine a sports persons distance travelled based on video taken of the performance?

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• Can VMWare Server 2.0 be useful in Production for easing backups?

  - by Keith Sirmons

  Howdy, Let's run this idea by the group here. I am thinking about using VMWare Server in production to host a 2008 Domain Controller with DHCP and DNS, a 2008 member server with WSUS, some virus software, and other "management" utilities a second 2008 member server with SQL, IIS, and File Shares for a medium business of 50-100 desktops. The reason I am leaning toward Server vs ESXi is for backup purposes. Using ESXi, if I want to backup the VM's, I would need a second server in the office with enough storage availability to hold a copy of the vmdks. I am wondering if putting this virtual environment on top of a basic 2008 server install will allow for easier backups to both tape and/or to offsite storage using JungleDisk. Can a snapshot be triggered easily via a scheduled job? I know this doesn't necessarily handle file level restores, but I want to make sure in a DR situation, we can restore production servers quickly. Does this concept hold water? Would a very minimum install of the 2008 Host remove too many resources from the actual production machines? This would be a new Dell 410 server with 12 GB ram and (6) 600 GB 15K in a RAID 6, Dual Intel Xeon 2.26GHz procs.

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• laptop motherboard "shorts" when connected to adapter

  - by Bash

  Disclaimer: I'm sort of a noob, and this is a long post. Thank you all in advance! summary: completely dead laptop with no signs of life whatsoever (suddenly, for no apparent reason) Here's the deal: Lenovo Y470 (only a few months old with no water or shock damage). It stopped working suddenly (no lights, no sound, even when connecting adapter with or without battery). I tried a different adapter (same electrical rating), but no luck. I disassembled the thing completely, and tried plugging in the adapter and looking for signs of life with all different combinations of components installed (tried all combinations of RAM, CPU, USB power cords, screen, etc plugged in). no luck. Then, I noticed (as I was plugging in the adapter to try for the millionth time) that there was a "spark" for an instant when I first connect the adapter to the power jack. The adapter's LED would then flash (indicating it isn't working or charging). So, I thought the power jack has a short of some sort (due to bad soldering or something). Scanned virtually every single component on the motherboard, and tested the power jack connections with a multimeter. No shorts or damage to anything on the entire motherboard. Now I'm thinking I need to replace the motherboard. But, my actual question: What does this "shorting" when connecting the adapter signify? (btw, the voltage across the power connections and current through it drop to virtually zero when the adapter is connected and "sparks", and they stay that way). The bewildering thing is that there are no damaged components, and the voltage across adapter terminals returns to normal after I disconnect it (so it's not damaged). Please take a look at the pictures (of the motherboard's power connection and nearby components) and see if I'm missing something completely obvious... Links to pictures and laptop and motherboard model: pictures on DropBox Motherboard model: LA-6881P Laptop model: Lenovo IdeaPad Y470

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• Keyboards for kiosk/outdoor/abusive environments?

  - by Justin Scott

  We have a bunch of kiosks deployed into let's just say... abusive environments. The enclosures we had built are touch as nails, and the HP thin client computers are working great. The keyboards that were purchased for the project have been nothing but problems. They're a generic brand direct from a Chinese manufacturer. They're stainless steel with keys mounted from the inside and a trackball, but they've been deployed for only a month and nearly 20% of them are already out of service due to keys sticking, keys not working, trackball problems, water damage, and a variety of other issues. Are there any kiosk keyboards that can take a beating without breaking so easily? Ideally they should be tamper-proof (keys can't be removed), waterproof, lettering should be engraved into the keys, trackball, option for a single mouse button would be nice, and some protection to keep debris out of the keys so they don't stick (sticky cleaners, food debris, etc.). Does such a beast exist? Everything we've looked at is susceptible to easy damage. We need the M1 Abrams Tank of keyboards. Any suggestions?

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• Portable, battery-powered, wireless access point, ethernet adapter

  - by Jed

  I am in need of an adapter that will convert an ethernet port into a wireless access point. I have found a handful of devices, but I'm unable to find a device that is battery powered. Does a self-powered wireless access point even exist? The particular scenario that I will be using the device for is not your typical computer/PC scenario. For the curious, here's a bit of background on the problem I'm trying to solve: I make devices (controllers) that monitor water systems. Our controllers have a Webserver that serves out web pages so that users can configure the controller's settings. Typically, the user will use a cross-over cable to connect directly to the controller's ethernet port with their laptop to gain access to the controller's web pages. Now that tablets (devices that don't have an ethernet port - iPad, for example) are becoming more common, I need to find a device that will convert the controller's ethernet port into a wireless access point so that the user can connect to the controller's web pages via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It's worth noting that this wireless device that I'm looking for will NOT be permanently installed on the controller. It will be a portable device that the user will use on any of his controllers when he needs to make a connection to the controller. If you know of a device that will solve the scenario that I mention above, please share your info.

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• IE9 apprears to be ignoring RewriteRule in htaccess file

  - by mouli

  I have a site that uses SEF URLs and htaccess RewriteRules to serve up the pages. This has worked fine for several years until the arrival of IE9. Now it appears that the links are not being rewritten and the site is dead in the water. I have tried different compatabilty modes, to no avail, and I've played with the Rewrite Rules over and over, tried different doctypes and a few other browser settings. I agree that it cannot in theory be a browser specific problem if the problem is with the htaccess file but this site works in IE8, firefox and chrome. I have run the rewriterule through a validator and it looks fine. Any ideas would be appreciated as I am running out of ideas. The site is www.marlboroughsounds.co.nz a sample link is http://www.marlboroughsounds.co.nz/walking/freedom-walk-queen-charlotte-track/4dfw and the rewrite rule thats not working looks like this: RewriteRule ^walking/.*/([a-z0-9_]*)/?$ /walking.php?act_code=$1 [L] The link fails and it serves up a browser 404 page, not even the custom 404 I have for the site. Any ideas would be much appreciated as I am stumped.

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• Disaster recovery backup of files/photos for personal use

  - by Renesis

  I'm looking for the best method to store a backup of important files and 5+ years of digital photos that is safe from some type of fire/flood disaster in my home. I'm looking for: Affordable: Less than $100/yr or first-time cost. Reliable: At least a smaller chance of failing than there is of fire or flood Easy for initial backup and to add to, and at least semi-easy to recover. I recently purchased a small home safe for physical vitals. It was inexpensive, solid, and is fire/water safe. If I had a physical copy of the digital files, the safe would work fine for this, but I don't know what to store in it that adequately meets the requirements above. Hard drive - I read that the danger of it not spinning up makes a hard drive a bad choice for this type of storage, although it was my first thought and would definitely be the simplest choice - very easy to take out once a month and add files to. DVDs - Way too much of a hassle for both backup and restore. Tape - No idea on the affordability of this option Online - Given that I have at least 300GB already and ever-increasing megapixels means ever-bigger files, and my ISP upload is about 2Mb at the best, this just doesn't sound like a good option for me, but I could be convinced. Other - Have I missed something? Also, I'm already covered both for sync between computers (Dropbox) and a nightly backup of these files (External HDD). The problem with the nightly backup is obviously that it's always with the computer and in a disaster would be destroyed along with it. Is anyone else doing something similar? Is the HDD as poor of a choice as I read, or is it a feasible option? Maybe two to reduce the likelihood of failure?

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• Intermittent Trouble Entering Hibernate on WinXP

  - by kquinn

  My personal desktop, running 32-bit Windows XP SP2 (with 4GB RAM, 2.75GB addressable, swap disabled, hiberfil.sys existing and contiguous on C:\; SP3 is not installed because SP2 has been working fine and I do not want to re-qualify with SP3 just for sheer perversity) typically gets hibernated at night. For a long time this worked great, but recently the machine has had trouble entering hibernation. Sometimes when I press my power button (configured to hibernate), the box will start the procedure for hibernating (i.e., go to the blue "Windows XP" background logo and display a message about entering hibernation), but before displaying the usual blue-on-black hibernation progress bar it will drop back to the desktop. No error messages appear, on screen or in the system log. The only record of unsuccessful hibernation attempts in the system log, which proudly proclaims that "The Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service entered the running state." once per failed hibernation attempt. The problem is almost certainly resource related: if I then close one or more applications which are running, and repeat the exact same process, the machine will hibernate perfectly. There does not appear to be a reliable high-water mark for virtual or physical memory use, below which the machine is guaranteed to hibernate; it's different every time (though typically, below about 1.1–1.4 GB memory usage seems to be where hibernate succeeds most often). Memory may not even be the relevant resource; as far as I know, it could also be handles or sockets. This behavior is relatively recent: it has only started in the last few months; before then, I could hibernate reliably no matter what the current resource use of the system. This machine claims to have hotfix Q909095 installed, but since the symptoms of my problem match KB909095 rather well, I'm suspicious if this fix is actually working as intended. Any ideas on how to fix this or where to start debugging?

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• How to setup a virtual machine in Ubuntu desktop to run Debian Server

  - by stickman

  I want to run a virtual machine in my Ubuntu desktop that runs a Debian server. The purpose of this is to generate Debian packages. I have some C++ applications that were originally developed on my Ubuntu machine, and I need to (re)compile them on a Debian server in order to: build Deb packages for deployment on a Debian server make sure that the applications will definitely work on a debian server The idea is so that I can do 90% of my development on Ubuntu (where I am more comfortable), and deploy a binary package that definitely works on Debian. BTW, I am developing on Karmic Kola (Ubuntu 9.10). [Edit] Following the advice I got so far, I have installed debootstrap and Debian 'Lenny' on /srv/chroot/debian_lenny on my machine. I am not sure this is the server version, but in any case I dont think that matters for my purposes (though it would be useful to know how to specifically install the server version). At the moment though, I am like a fish out of water, since there is no GUI, and it is only a console that I have in the chroot jail. I had a look in the home folder (I cheated, by using the KNavigator in Ubuntu), and there are no folders there - which presumably mean that no users have been set up as yet in the Debian "system". I would like to know how to do the following: Download and install the dev tools needed for (re)compiling my C++ apps Copy my projects from the Ubuntu "system" to the Debian "system" After building the binaries, I would like to create a debian binary package containing all of my binaries, so that I can install the package on a Debian server (my remote server)

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• Performance data collection for short-running, ephemeral servers

  - by ErikA

  We're building a medical image processing software stack, currently hosted on various AWS resources. As part of this application, we have a handful of long-running servers (database, load balancers, web application, etc.). Collecting performance data on those servers is quite simple - my go-to- recipe of Nagios (for monitoring/notifications) and Munin (for collection of performance data and displaying trends) will work just fine. However - as part of this application, we are constantly starting up and terminating compute instances on EC2. In typical usage, these compute instances start up, configure themselves, receive a job from a message queue, and then get to work processing that job, which takes anywhere from 15 minutes to over 8 hours. After job completion, these instances get terminated, never to be heard from again. What is a decent strategy for collecting performance data on these short-lived instances? I don't necessarily need monitoring on them - if they fail for whatever reason, our application will detect this and handle re-starting the job on another instance or raising the flag so an administrator can take a look at things. However, it still would be useful to collect information like CPU (user, idle, iowait, etc.), memory usage, network traffic, disk read/write data, etc. In our internal database, we track the instance ID of the machine that runs each job, and it would be quite helpful to be able to look up performance data for a specific instance ID for troubleshooting and profiling. Munin doesn't seem like a great candidate, as it requires maintaining a list of munin nodes in a text file - far from ideal for an environment with a high amount of churn, and for the short amount of time each node will be running, I'd rather keep the full-resolution data indefinitely than have RRD water down the data over time. In the end, my guess is that this will require a monitoring engine that: uses a database (MySQL, SQLite, etc.) for configuration and data storage exposes an API for adding/removing hosts and services Are there other things I should be thinking about when evaluating options? Perhaps I'm over-thinking this, though, and just ought to run sar at 1-minute intervals on these short-lived instances and collect the sar db files prior to termination.

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• Links break in IE9 when using Wordpress plugins in non Wordpress Page

  - by mouli

  I have a site that uses SEF URLs and htaccess RewriteRules to serve up the pages. This has worked fine for several years until the arrival of IE9. Now it appears that the links are not being rewritten and the site is dead in the water. I have tried different compatabilty modes, to no avail, and I've played with the Rewrite Rules over and over, tried different doctypes and a few other browser settings. I agree that it cannot in theory be a browser specific problem if the problem is with the htaccess file but this site works in IE8, firefox and chrome. I have run the rewriterule through a validator and it looks fine. Any ideas would be appreciated as I am running out of ideas. The site is www.marlboroughsounds.co.nz a sample link is http://www.marlboroughsounds.co.nz/walking/freedom-walk-queen-charlotte-track/4dfw and the rewrite rule thats not working looks like this: RewriteRule ^walking/.*/([a-z0-9_]*)/?$ /walking.php?act_code=$1 [L] The link fails and it serves up a browser 404 page, not even the custom 404 I have for the site. Any ideas would be much appreciated as I am stumped.

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• Computer does not boot, often

  - by tam

  I've ran into a issue with my computer that it does no longer reach POST, but simply powers on for a fraction of a second and powers off. But this is not always, some times it boots just normally and it works as it should, no issues with not enough power or anything. But as soon as I turn it of, I can not turn it back on, but then again at some random point it just powers up again, and resumes normal operation. If I disconnect the 8pin ATX connector from the motherboard, it powers up, fans and disks spinning normally until I power it off again. So this problem only happens when ATX is connected, which seems odd, I normally always saw this kind of an error if ATX was not connected, but here it's the exact opposite. It also does not emit any sound on the buzzer, except the normal beep, when it powers up normally. I have already tried: Remove graphics card Remove one and/or all RAM sticks Disconnect everything non-essential, even hard drives Clear CMOS I have not yet tried to remove all components and tried to boot everything outside of the case, because I did not have the time to disassemble and bleed the water loop. However, I can confirm that nothing is stuck underneath the motherboard, not is any of those brass raisers touching the board where it should not. Specs: Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 AMD FX6300 ATI HD7850 I think this should be enough for this issue.

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• Troubleshooting an overheating CPU

  - by Jeff Fry

  I & my father just recently put together a new PC. Specs below. From the very beginning, on boot it will often complain that the CPU is too hot. If I sit in BIOS and watch the CPU, it'll drop back down from red to blue (<72C), at which point I've tended to just boot into Windows...and haven't had any problems. In fact, I've played a couple hours straight of Skyrim at max settings, and not had any visible issues. That said, I've occasionally walked away & come back to find that it's crashed. Yesterday, it crashed (while idle) twice in 12 hours, which shifted the balance from busy-with-life to nervous-I'm-about-to-melt-something. I just installed Core Temp which is showing my 4 cores fluxuating between 70-98C. I'm guessing at this point that the CPU fan may be incorrectly installed or defective. My first thought is to either (a) add water cooling (which the case supports) and / or (b) replace the CPU fan with an after-market one. That said, I'm very open to suggestions. A note, while I certainly don't want to burn money here, I have a baby coming any day now and am still unpacking from a recent move so if I have a choice between an option that costs money and another that takes a while...I'll happily spend a bit extra. Side question: Should I be nervous to even have this on at this point? Let me know if there's something useful I could add to my report. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to your suggestions! Thanks. CPU Intel i7-2600 CPU w/ stock fan Other HW ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard 64G SSD boot drive 4 older SATA HDs GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD6950 1 GB DDR5 8G Kingston T1 Series RAM Corsair 650W Gold Certified power supply Antec P280 case

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• iCloud backup merges or overwrites?

  - by Joe McMahon

  The following happened today (it was six AM my time, so yeah, I was dumb and dropped stitches in this process): A friend had a problem with her iPhone and needed to reset it. Unfortunately she did the reset while connected to iTunes and the restore process kicked in. In my sleepy state, I told her to go ahead. She did, and restored the most recent local (iTunes) backup (from July last year - she doesn't back up often, as she has an Air which is pretty full). During setup on the phone, she was prompted to merge data with the iCloud copy, and did so. There was no "restore from iCloud" prompt. Obviously I should have made sure she was disconnected from iTunes before she did the reset, or had her set it up as a new device and then restored from iCloud, but water under the bridge now. (Side question: could I have had her disconnect and then restart the phone again and avoid this whole process?) The question is: was the "merge" that happened in this process a true merge, or a replace? Her passwords for Mail were wrong, since they were the old ones from the old backup. If she does the wipe data and restore from iCloud, will she get her old SMSes and calendar entries back? Or did the merge decide that the phone, despite it being "old" was right and therefore the SMSes, calendar entries, etc. were discarded? As a recovery option, I have a 4-day-old iTunes backup here from ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup, but she and the phone are 3000 miles away, and it's 8GB, so I can't easily restore it for her. I do have the option of encrypting it and mailing it on a data stick if the iCloud backup is now toast. Should she try the wipe and restore from the cloud (after backing up locally), or should I just get the more-recent backup in the mail? My goal is to get everything (especially the SMSes) back to the most recent version possible.

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