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  • How to print a web page that contains flash

    - by Richard
    I am using the chromium browser to display the following web page: http://www.primaryworksheets.co.uk/multiws/multi23.html I want to print off this maths worksheet for my son, but all I ever get out of my printer is a blank page. The web page appears to be produced using flash. I have been to the software centre and re-installed the flash plugin, but that did not help. I don't seem to have problems printing anything else. Firefox isn't any better. Can anyone tell me what else I might try? I'm using '11.04'. Thanks, Richard

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  • Wecam not detected

    - by Richard
    after much research ang googling, my web cam is still not recognized. In the time of Ubuntu 11.04 it was working fine. I did a fresh install of 11.10 and not more web cam. All the cheese and camera monotor and V4L tests and all failes with "cannot connect to /dev/video0" or equivalent. The output of 'lsusb' shows the webcam Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05a9:2640 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. OV2640 Webcam What I noticed is that neither /dev/v4l nor /dev/video* exists. If I re-install the v4l package all the /dev/video* are created, but no /dev/v4l If I reboot the /dev/video* are NOT created. I think the trouble is that the device are not created at boot time. I have a DELL Inspiron 1525 and until this fresh install the web cam worked fine. Can somebody help ? Thanks a lot Richard

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  • Next Fusion CRM Webinar for Partners (Monday March 19th, 3pm GMT): Fusion CRM User Interface, Activity Streams and Opportunity management

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    The next session of our weekly Fusion CRM webinar for EMEA partners will take place Monday March the 19th at 3pm GMT / 4pm CET and will address the Fusion CRM User Interface, Activity Streams and Opportunity management In order to check the complete agenda and see login-details, please visit our dedicated microsite. How to join the dedicated microsite: Click on http://isdportal.oracle.com/isd_html/sf.htm Enter your Email Address in the corresponding field Enter fusion_crm in the “Access URL/Page Token” field Agenda: The list of sessions is published and will be regularly updated in the microsite. Duration: Each session lasts up to 60 minutes Webex: The respective webinar link and session ID are published in the microsite Audio:  The audio call details (telephone numbers by country, call number and password) is indicated in the microsite Slides: For your convenience, a pdf copy of each presentation will be stored in the microsite’s document section. We hope that this series of webcasts will be instrumental to your way of Fusion CRM business success!  For further information please contact me at richard[email protected]

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  • CRM on Demand Marketing (ODM) Training for Partners - Munich - Dec 14-16th, 2011

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    We are pleased to inform you that we will be conducting a CRM on Demand Marketing (ODM) training workshop for EMEA Partners on December 14th - 16th in Munich (Germany). This 2.5-day Instructor lead course will be focusing on preparing Oracle CRM on Demand Practitioners and Clients to implement and operationalize ODM. The course will be consisting of 2 main tracks: Marketing User Product Specialist The course will be limited to 50 participants (with a maximum of 3 attendees per Partner Company). For detailed information and registration link, please refer to the invitation which will be sent shortly to the EMEA CRM on Demand Partners community or contact richard[email protected]. To join the EMEA CRM on Demand Partners community, follow this link:www.oracle.com/partners/goto/crm-saas-emea

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  • How to reduce your CRM migration project's risks?

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    In this 1'38 video, discover how you can dramatically reduce your CRM migration project's risks, costs and budgets with the market leading CRM Data Migration tool that offers turnkey migration platform from Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle CRM OnDemand on to Oracle Sales Cloud. This solution is open to any Oracle CRM & CX implementation partner (e.g. System Integrators) as a mean to complement their own offer. For any additional details or for an introduction to the tool, please contact richard[email protected]  or visit www.conemis.com

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  • USB Bose speakers with ubuntu 12.04

    - by Richard
    On a fresh install of ubuntu 12.04 my Bose USB weren't working at all. I read through a large number of posts here and elsewehre on Bose or USB speakers. I tried many things (modifying a number of different files, etc.). This worked... sort of: USB Audio on 0 volume on startup The AlsaMixer works after I turn up the volume, but the sound crackles a lot. Also, having to use a term mixer to change sound isn't ideal. Any other ideas? Thank you, Richard

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  • New user to Linux Mint and Alinux

    - by Richard
    which is better for a new Linux user, Linux Mint or Alinux i had trouble getting Alinux to run after install Mint ran fine. We are also with the Tucson Refugee ministry and we have computers given to us all the time then we reload the OS clean it up then we give them to the refugee families. We need something that will run on older computers with 256 or 512m of ram, and i do not want to use Micro Soft Please help. PS is there any other Linux OS you would recommend?????? Thanks Richard Smith [email protected]

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  • How to use a local Leopard Server Mail server acting "like" an Exchange mail server

    - by Richard Chevre
    We have a local Exchange 2003 server (company .local) who is collecting POP3 mail accounts on a distant (company .com) mailserver. The mails are collected by the Exchange server every 5-10 minutes and stored locally (on company .local), so the users can read them without going on the "real" mail server (company.com) What was explaned to me is that the mail collection is made with POP Now we are migrating on Snow Leopard Server. We have chosen to use a new extension for our local domain: .leo So our mailserver's FQDN is mail.company.leo, and the users have a user [email protected] formated mail address. A) All works fine except that I can't find how to tell the mail.company.leo that he must retreive the mails from the "real" public server (mail.company.com) I'm hoping to use IMAP and not POP. I can send mail using SMTP relay from mail.company.leo but (I know it's trivial) answering is not possible, even if I specify the reply-to as [email protected] (this seems to be related to A) ) I don't know if it's very complicated (I suspect not, but...) to achieve what I want to do, and I'm not a genius. But as I'm a little bit lost, I hopesomebody can or will help me. Solving this will allow us to use iCal invitations too, so a lot of services depends of these mailserver settings Some of you discuss the fact thta we choose to use a "new" tld with the .leo extension. We have no problem for that, we could use .local. no problem ;) We used .leo instead of .local just to differentiate the two systems (Exchange and SnowLeopardServer). The question was not about that, it was just to know if we can set a SnowLeopard mail server to act like an Exchange Server. Again thank you for your advice and help Richard Thanks in advance Richard

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  • Twitter API Voting System

    - by Richard Jones
    So I blatantly got this idea from the MIX 10 event. At MIX they held a rockband talent competition type thing (I’m not quite sure of all the details).    But the interesting part for me is how they collected votes. They used Twitter (what else, when you have a few thousand geeks available to you). The basic idea was that you tweeted your vote with a # tag, i.e #ROCKBANDVOTE vote Richard How cool….    So the question is how do you write something to collate and count all the votes?   Time to press the magic Visual Studio new Project button… Twitter has a really nice API that can be invoked from .NET.   This is the snippet of code that will search for any given phrase i.e #ROCKBANDVOTE   public static XmlDocument GetSearchResults(string searchfor) { return GetSearchResults(searchfor, ""); }   public static XmlDocument GetSearchResults(string searchfor, string sinceid) { XmlDocument retdoc = new XmlDocument();   try { string url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?&q=" + searchfor; if (sinceid.Length > 0) url += "since_id=" + sinceid; HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; WebResponse res = request.GetResponse(); retdoc.Load(res.GetResponseStream()); res.Close();   } catch { } return retdoc; } } I’ve got two overloads, that optionally let you pass in the last ID to look for as well as what you want to search for. Note that Twitter rate limits the amount of requests you can send,  see http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting So realistically I wanted my app to run every hour or so and only pull out results that haven’t been received before (hence the overload to pass in the sinceid parameter). I’ll post the code when finished that parses the returned XML.

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  • New Fusion CRM Webinars for Partners dates and subjects announced

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    New Fusion CRM Weekly webinars dates and subjects have been announced! Visit our microsite to find out the sessions to come and mark them in your agenda. The next session will take place Monday April the 2nd at 3pm GMT / 4pm CET and will address the Fusion CRM Sales Planning  In order to check the complete agenda and see login-details, please visit our dedicated microsite. How to join the dedicated microsite: Click on http://isdportal.oracle.com/isd_html/sf.htm Enter your Email Address in the corresponding field Enter fusion_crm in the “Access URL/Page Token” field Agenda: The list of sessions is published and will be regularly updated in the microsite. Duration: Each session lasts up to 60 minutes Webex: The respective webinar link and session ID are published in the microsite Audio:  The audio call details (telephone numbers by country, call number and password) is indicated in the microsite Slides: For your convenience, a pdf copy of each presentation will be stored in the microsite’s document section. We hope that this series of webcasts will be instrumental to your way of Fusion CRM business success!  For further information please contact me at richard[email protected]

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  • Getting Started with Puppet on Oracle Solaris 11

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

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  • Big Success for the 2012 edition of the Oracle EMEA Cloud CRM Partner Community Forum!

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    The 2012 edition of the Oracle EMEA Cloud Partner Community Forum took place on march 28&29 in Madrid. 100 participants from all over Europe had a chance to interact with the Oracle Cloud CRM Product Management team about multiple subjects such as Oracle Cloud CRM and Social Network solutions strategy, RightNow acquisition, Fusion CRM Business opportunities for partners, etc. During his opening keynote, Anthony Lye (Oracle Senior Vice-President and head of Oracle CRM) presented the current Fusion CRM business status, disclosed the overall Oracle CRM product strategy and responded to many questions from the audience. Later on that day, 8 Oracle ISV's presented their Oracle Cloud CRM add-on's and highlighted the value that System Integrators can benefit from as part of a Cloud CRM project. After a very friendly networking diner in a Spanish restaurant, the second day was dedicated to Fusion CRM, with a deeper dive into its major components (Sales, Sales Planning, Marketing) including the Fusion Composers. Briefings on Oracle Consulting Services Fusion CRM dedicated offerings and Fusion CRM Partner Programs concluded the day and the event. All participants rated the event as "good" to "Excellent" and mentioned that it was meaningful for them to plan their Oracle Cloud CRM based business in the near future. We look forward to organise a similar event next year and to welcome even more partners! Richard Lefebvre

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  • Oracle Solaris at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Interactive manifest editing with the Automated Installer Manifest Wizard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Top 10 Oracle Solaris How To Articles

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

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  • Deliberate Practice

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

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  • Learn Many Languages

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

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

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

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  • svcbundle for easier SMF manifest creation

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

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