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• New Wine in New Bottles

  - by Tony Davis

  How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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• Using ext4 in VMware machine

  First of all, using a journaling filesystems like NTFS, ext4, XFS, or JFS (not to name all of them) is a very good idea and nowadays unthinkable not to do. Linux offers a good variety of different option as journaling filesystem for your system. Since years I am using SGI's XFS and I am pretty confident with stability, performance and liability of the system. In earlier years I had to struggle with incompatibilities between XFS and the boot loader. Using an ext2 formatted /boot solved this issue. But, wow, that is ages ago! Lately, I had to setup a fresh Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) system for a change of our internal groupware / messaging system. Therefore, I fired up a new virtual machine with almost standard configuration in VMware Server and run through our network-based PXE boot and installation procedure. At a certain step in this process, Ubuntu asks you about the partitioning of your hard drive(s). Honestly, I have to say that only out of curiousity I sticked to the "default" suggestion and gave my faith and trust into the Ubuntu installation routine... Resulting to have an ext4 based root mount point ( / ). The rest of the installation went on without further concerns or worries. Note:I really can't remember why I chose to go away from my favourite... Well, it should turn out to be the wrong decision after all. Ok, let's continue the story about ext4 in a VMware based virtual machine. After some hours installing additional packages and configuring the new system using LDAP for general authentication and login, I had an "out-of-the-box" usable enterprise messaging system based on Zarafa 6.40 Community Edition inclusive proper SSL-based Webaccess interface and Z-Push extension for ActiveSync with my Nokia mobile. Straightforward and pretty nice for the time spent on the setup. Having priority on other tasks I let the system just running and didn't pay any further attention at all. Until I run into an upgrade of "Mail for Exchange" on Symbian OS. My mobile did not bother me at all with the upgrade and everything went smooth, but trying to re-establish the ActiveSync connection to the Zarafa messaging system resulted in a frustating situation. So, I shifted my focus back to the Linux system and I was amazed to figure out that the root had been remounted readonly due to hard drive failures or at least ext4 reported errors. Firing up Google only confirmed my concerns and it seems that using ext4 for VMware based virtual machines does not look like a stable and reliable candidate to me. You might consider reading those external resources: ext4 fs corruption under VMWare Server 2.01Bug #389555 - ext4 filesystem corruption Well, I learned my lesson and ext{2|3|4} based filesystems are not going to be used on any of my Linux systems or customer installations in the future. Addendum: I did not try this setup in other virtualization environments like VirtualBox, qemu, kvm, Xen, etc.

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• Use a Fake Http Channel to Unit Test with HttpClient

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Applications get data from lots of different sources. The most common is to get data from a database or a web service. Typically, we encapsulate calls to a database in a Repository object and we create some sort of IRepository interface as an abstraction to decouple between layers and enable easier unit testing by leveraging faking and mocking. This works great for database interaction. However, when consuming a RESTful web service, this is is not always the best approach. The WCF Web APIs that are available on CodePlex (current drop is Preview 3) provide a variety of features to make building HTTP REST services more robust. When you download the latest bits, you’ll also find a new HttpClient which has been updated for .NET 4.0 as compared to the one that shipped for 3.5 in the original REST Starter Kit. The HttpClient currently provides the best API for consuming REST services on the .NET platform and the WCF Web APIs provide a number of extension methods which extend HttpClient and make it even easier to use. Let’s say you have a client application that is consuming an HTTP service – this could be Silverlight, WPF, or any UI technology but for my example I’ll use an MVC application: 1: using System; 2: using System.Net.Http; 3: using System.Web.Mvc; 4: using FakeChannelExample.Models; 5: using Microsoft.Runtime.Serialization; 6:   7: namespace FakeChannelExample.Controllers 8: { 9: public class HomeController : Controller 10: { 11: private readonly HttpClient httpClient; 12:   13: public HomeController(HttpClient httpClient) 14: { 15: this.httpClient = httpClient; 16: } 17:   18: public ActionResult Index() 19: { 20: var response = httpClient.Get("Person(1)"); 21: var person = response.Content.ReadAsDataContract<Person>(); 22:   23: this.ViewBag.Message = person.FirstName + " " + person.LastName; 24: 25: return View(); 26: } 27: } 28: } On line #20 of the code above you can see I’m performing an HTTP GET request to a Person resource exposed by an HTTP service. On line #21, I use the ReadAsDataContract() extension method provided by the WCF Web APIs to serialize to a Person object. In this example, the HttpClient is being passed into the constructor by MVC’s dependency resolver – in this case, I’m using StructureMap as an IoC and my StructureMap initialization code looks like this: 1: using StructureMap; 2: using System.Net.Http; 3:   4: namespace FakeChannelExample 5: { 6: public static class IoC 7: { 8: public static IContainer Initialize() 9: { 10: ObjectFactory.Initialize(x => 11: { 12: x.For<HttpClient>().Use(() => new HttpClient("http://localhost:31614/")); 13: }); 14: return ObjectFactory.Container; 15: } 16: } 17: } My controller code currently depends on a concrete instance of the HttpClient. Now I *could* create some sort of interface and wrap the HttpClient in this interface and use that object inside my controller instead – however, there are a few why reasons that is not desirable: For one thing, the API provided by the HttpClient provides nice features for dealing with HTTP services. I don’t really *want* these to look like C# RPC method calls – when HTTP services have REST features, I may want to inspect HTTP response headers and hypermedia contained within the message so that I can make intelligent decisions as to what to do next in my workflow (although I don’t happen to be doing these things in my example above) – this type of workflow is common in hypermedia REST scenarios. If I just encapsulate HttpClient behind some IRepository interface and make it look like a C# RPC method call, it will become difficult to take advantage of these types of things. Second, it could get pretty mind-numbing to have to create interfaces all over the place just to wrap the HttpClient. Then you’re probably going to have to hard-code HTTP knowledge into your code to formulate requests rather than just “following the links” that the hypermedia in a message might provide. Third, at first glance it might appear that we need to create an interface to facilitate unit testing, but actually it’s unnecessary. Even though the code above is dependent on a concrete type, it’s actually very easy to fake the data in a unit test. The HttpClient provides a Channel property (of type HttpMessageChannel) which allows you to create a fake message channel which can be leveraged in unit testing. In this case, what I want is to be able to write a unit test that just returns fake data. I also want this to be as re-usable as possible for my unit testing. I want to be able to write a unit test that looks like this: 1: [TestClass] 2: public class HomeControllerTest 3: { 4: [TestMethod] 5: public void Index() 6: { 7: // Arrange 8: var httpClient = new HttpClient("http://foo.com"); 9: httpClient.Channel = new FakeHttpChannel<Person>(new Person { FirstName = "Joe", LastName = "Blow" }); 10:   11: HomeController controller = new HomeController(httpClient); 12:   13: // Act 14: ViewResult result = controller.Index() as ViewResult; 15:   16: // Assert 17: Assert.AreEqual("Joe Blow", result.ViewBag.Message); 18: } 19: } Notice on line #9, I’m setting the Channel property of the HttpClient to be a fake channel. I’m also specifying the fake object that I want to be in the response on my “fake” Http request. I don’t need to rely on any mocking frameworks to do this. All I need is my FakeHttpChannel. The code to do this is not complex: 1: using System; 2: using System.IO; 3: using System.Net.Http; 4: using System.Runtime.Serialization; 5: using System.Threading; 6: using FakeChannelExample.Models; 7:   8: namespace FakeChannelExample.Tests 9: { 10: public class FakeHttpChannel<T> : HttpClientChannel 11: { 12: private T responseObject; 13:   14: public FakeHttpChannel(T responseObject) 15: { 16: this.responseObject = responseObject; 17: } 18:   19: protected override HttpResponseMessage Send(HttpRequestMessage request, CancellationToken cancellationToken) 20: { 21: return new HttpResponseMessage() 22: { 23: RequestMessage = request, 24: Content = new StreamContent(this.GetContentStream()) 25: }; 26: } 27:   28: private Stream GetContentStream() 29: { 30: var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T)); 31: Stream stream = new MemoryStream(); 32: serializer.WriteObject(stream, this.responseObject); 33: stream.Position = 0; 34: return stream; 35: } 36: } 37: } The HttpClientChannel provides a Send() method which you can override to return any HttpResponseMessage that you want. You can see I’m using the DataContractSerializer to serialize the object and write it to a stream. That’s all you need to do. In the example above, the only thing I’ve chosen to do is to provide a way to return different response objects. But there are many more features you could add to your own re-usable FakeHttpChannel. For example, you might want to provide the ability to add HTTP headers to the message. You might want to use a different serializer other than the DataContractSerializer. You might want to provide custom hypermedia in the response as well as just an object or set HTTP response codes. This list goes on. This is the just one example of the really cool features being added to the next version of WCF to enable various HTTP scenarios. The code sample for this post can be downloaded here.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Comparer&lt;T&gt;.Default

  - by James Michael Hare

  I’ve been working with a wonderful team on a major release where I work, which has had the side-effect of occupying most of my spare time preparing, testing, and monitoring.  However, I do have this Little Wonder tidbit to offer today. Introduction The IComparable<T> interface is great for implementing a natural order for a data type.  It’s a very simple interface with a single method: 1: public interface IComparer<in T> 2: { 3: // Compare two instances of same type. 4: int Compare(T x, T y); 5: }  So what do we expect for the integer return value?  It’s a pseudo-relative measure of the ordering of x and y, which returns an integer value in much the same way C++ returns an integer result from the strcmp() c-style string comparison function: If x == y, returns 0. If x > y, returns > 0 (often +1, but not guaranteed) If x < y, returns < 0 (often –1, but not guaranteed) Notice that the comparison operator used to evaluate against zero should be the same comparison operator you’d use as the comparison operator between x and y.  That is, if you want to see if x > y you’d see if the result > 0. The Problem: Comparing With null Can Be Messy This gets tricky though when you have null arguments.  According to the MSDN, a null value should be considered equal to a null value, and a null value should be less than a non-null value.  So taking this into account we’d expect this instead: If x == y (or both null), return 0. If x > y (or y only is null), return > 0. If x < y (or x only is null), return < 0. But here’s the problem – if x is null, what happens when we attempt to call CompareTo() off of x? 1: // what happens if x is null? 2: x.CompareTo(y); It’s pretty obvious we’ll get a NullReferenceException here.  Now, we could guard against this before calling CompareTo(): 1: int result; 2:  3: // first check to see if lhs is null. 4: if (x == null) 5: { 6: // if lhs null, check rhs to decide on return value. 7: if (y == null) 8: { 9: result = 0; 10: } 11: else 12: { 13: result = -1; 14: } 15: } 16: else 17: { 18: // CompareTo() should handle a null y correctly and return > 0 if so. 19: result = x.CompareTo(y); 20: } Of course, we could shorten this with the ternary operator (?:), but even then it’s ugly repetitive code: 1: int result = (x == null) 2: ? ((y == null) ? 0 : -1) 3: : x.CompareTo(y); Fortunately, the null issues can be cleaned up by drafting in an external Comparer.  The Soltuion: Comparer<T>.Default You can always develop your own instance of IComparer<T> for the job of comparing two items of the same type.  The nice thing about a IComparer is its is independent of the things you are comparing, so this makes it great for comparing in an alternative order to the natural order of items, or when one or both of the items may be null. 1: public class NullableIntComparer : IComparer<int?> 2: { 3: public int Compare(int? x, int? y) 4: { 5: return (x == null) 6: ? ((y == null) ? 0 : -1) 7: : x.Value.CompareTo(y); 8: } 9: }  Now, if you want a custom sort -- especially on large-grained objects with different possible sort fields -- this is the best option you have.  But if you just want to take advantage of the natural ordering of the type, there is an easier way.  If the type you want to compare already implements IComparable<T> or if the type is System.Nullable<T> where T implements IComparable, there is a class in the System.Collections.Generic namespace called Comparer<T> which exposes a property called Default that will create a singleton that represents the default comparer for items of that type.  For example: 1: // compares integers 2: var intComparer = Comparer<int>.Default; 3:  4: // compares DateTime values 5: var dateTimeComparer = Comparer<DateTime>.Default; 6:  7: // compares nullable doubles using the null rules! 8: var nullableDoubleComparer = Comparer<double?>.Default;  This helps you avoid having to remember the messy null logic and makes it to compare objects where you don’t know if one or more of the values is null. This works especially well when creating say an IComparer<T> implementation for a large-grained class that may or may not contain a field.  For example, let’s say you want to create a sorting comparer for a stock open price, but if the market the stock is trading in hasn’t opened yet, the open price will be null.  We could handle this (assuming a reasonable Quote definition) like: 1: public class Quote 2: { 3: // the opening price of the symbol quoted 4: public double? Open { get; set; } 5:  6: // ticker symbol 7: public string Symbol { get; set; } 8:  9: // etc. 10: } 11:  12: public class OpenPriceQuoteComparer : IComparer<Quote> 13: { 14: // Compares two quotes by opening price 15: public int Compare(Quote x, Quote y) 16: { 17: return Comparer<double?>.Default.Compare(x.Open, y.Open); 18: } 19: } Summary Defining a custom comparer is often needed for non-natural ordering or defining alternative orderings, but when you just want to compare two items that are IComparable<T> and account for null behavior, you can use the Comparer<T>.Default comparer generator and you’ll never have to worry about correct null value sorting again.     Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,IComparable,Comparer

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• The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

  - by Phil Factor

  The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, August 11, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, August 11, 2014Popular ReleasesSpace Engineers Server Manager: SESM V1.15: V1.15 - Updated Quartz library - Correct a bug in the new mod managment - Added a warning if you have backup enabled on a server but no static map configuredAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI SS - v 1.2: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI SS SDK in comparison with Aspose.Cells What's New ? Following Examples: Create Pivot Charts Detect Merged Cells Sort Data Printing Workbooks Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are available at Aspose Docs. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.AngularGo (SPA Project Template): AngularGo.VS2013.vsix: First ReleaseTouchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesPublic Key Infrastructure PowerShell module: PowerShell PKI Module v3.0: Important: I would like to hear more about what you are thinking about the project? I appreciate that you like it (2000 downloads over past 6 months), but may be you have to say something? What do you dislike in the module? Maybe you would love to see some new functionality? Tell, what you think! Installation guide:Use default installation path to install this module for current user only. To install this module for all users — enable "Install for all users" check-box in installation UI ...Modern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.019 Release 1: Added RadioAntenna broadcast name to ship name detail. Added two additional columns for Asteroid material generation for Asteroid Fields. Added Mass and Block number columns to main display. Added Ellipsis to some columns on main display to reduce name confusion. Added correct SE version number in file when saving. Re-added in reattaching Motor when drag/dropping or importing ships (KeenSH have added RotorEntityId back in after removing it months ago). Added option to export and r...jQuery List DragSort: jQuery List DragSort 0.5.2: Fixed scrollContainer removing deprecated use of $.browser so should now work with latest version of jQuery. Added the ability to return false in dragEnd to revert sort order Project changes Added nuget package for dragsort https://www.nuget.org/packages/dragsort Converted repository from SVN to MercurialBraintree Client Library: Braintree 2.32.0: Allow credit card verification options to be passed outside of the nonce for PaymentMethod.create Allow billingaddress parameters and billingaddress_id to be passed outside of the nonce for PaymentMethod.create Add Subscriptions to paypal accounts Add PaymentMethod.update Add failonduplicatepaymentmethod option to PaymentMethod.create Add support for dispute webhooksThe Mario Kart 8 App: V1.0.2.1: First Codeplex release. WINDOWS INSTALLER ONLYAspose Java for Docx4j: Aspose.Words vs Docx4j - v 1.0: Release contain the Code Comparison for Features in Docx4j SDK and Aspose.Words What's New ?Following Examples: Accessing Document Properties Add Bookmarks Convert to Formats Delete Bookmarks Working with Comments Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are available at Aspose Docs. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.File System Security PowerShell Module: NTFSSecurity 2.4.1: Add-Access and Remove-Access now take multiple accoutsYourSqlDba: YourSqlDba 5.2.1.: This version improves alert message that comes a while after you install the script. First it says to get it from YourSqlDba.CodePlex.com If you don't want to update now, just-rerun the script from your installed version. To get actual version running just execute install.PrintVersionInfo. . You can go to source code / history and click on change set 72957 to see changes in the script.Manipulator: Manipulator: manipulatorXNB filetype plugin for Paint.NET: Paint.NET XNB plugin v0.4.0.0: CHANGELOG Reverted old incomplete changes. Updated library for compatibility with Paint .NET 4. Updated project to NET 4.5. Updated version to 0.4.0.0. INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS Extract the ZIP file to your Paint.NET\FileTypes folder.EdiFabric: Release 4.1: Changed MessageContextWix# (WixSharp) - managed interface for WiX: Release 1.0.0.0: Release 1.0.0.0 Custom UI Custom MSI Dialog Custom CLR Dialog External UIMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v3.2.0: Linear Algebra: Vector.Map2 (map2 in F#), storage-optimized Linear Algebra: fix RemoveColumn/Row early index bound check (was not strict enough) Statistics: Entropy ~Jeff Mastry Interpolation: use Array.BinarySearch instead of local implementation ~Candy Chiu Resources: fix a corrupted exception message string Portable Build: support .Net 4.0 as well by using profile 328 instead of 344. .Net 3.5: F# extensions now support .Net 3.5 as well .Net 3.5: NuGet package now contains pro...babelua: 1.6.5.1: V1.6.5.1 - 2014.8.7New feature: Formatting code; Stability improvement: fix a bug that pop up error "System.Net.WebResponse EndGetResponse";New ProjectsDouDou: a little project.Dynamic MVC: Dynamically generate views from your model objects for a data centric MVC application.EasyDb - Simple Data Access: EasyDb is a simple library for data access that allows you to write less code.ExpressToAbroad: just go!!!!!Full Silverlight Web Video/Voice Conferencing: The Goal of this project is to provide complete Open Source (Voice/Video Chatting Client/Server) Modules Using SilverlightGaia: Gaia is an app for Windows plataform, Gaia is like Siri and Google Now or Betty but Gaia use only text commands.pxctest: pxctestSTACS: Career Management System for MIT by Team "STACS"StrongWorld: StrongWorld.WebSuiteXevas Tools: Xevas is a professional coders group of 'Nimbuzz'. We make all tools for worldwide users of nimbuzz at free of cost.????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ????????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ?????????

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• What is the correct way to use g_signal_connect() in C++ for dynamic unity quicklists?

  - by hakermania

  I want to make my application use dynamic unity quicklists. For building my application I am using C++ and the QtCreator IDE. When a menu action is triggered I want to be able to have access to a non-static function of my MainWindow class so as to be able to update the Graphical User Interface which can be accessed from inside 'normal' MainWindow's functions. So, I am building up my quicklist like this (mainwindow.cpp): void MainWindow::enable_unity_quicklist(){ Unity_Menu = dbusmenu_menuitem_new(); dbusmenu_menuitem_property_set_bool (Unity_Menu, DBUSMENU_MENUITEM_PROP_VISIBLE, FALSE); Unity_Stop = dbusmenu_menuitem_new(); dbusmenu_menuitem_property_set(Unity_Stop, DBUSMENU_MENUITEM_PROP_LABEL, "Stop"); dbusmenu_menuitem_child_append (Unity_Menu, Unity_Stop); g_signal_connect (Unity_Stop, DBUSMENU_MENUITEM_SIGNAL_ITEM_ACTIVATED, G_CALLBACK(&fake_callback), (gpointer)this); if(!unity_entry) unity_entry = unity_launcher_entry_get_for_desktop_id("myapp.desktop"); unity_launcher_entry_set_quicklist(unity_entry, Unity_Menu); dbusmenu_menuitem_property_set_bool(Unity_Menu, DBUSMENU_MENUITEM_PROP_VISIBLE, true); dbusmenu_menuitem_property_set_bool(Unity_Stop, DBUSMENU_MENUITEM_PROP_VISIBLE, true); } void MainWindow::fake_callback(gpointer data){ MainWindow* m = (MainWindow*)data; m->on_stopButton_clicked(); } void MainWindow::on_stopButton_clicked(){ //stopping the process... } mainwindow.h: private slots: void enable_unity_quicklist(); void on_stopButton_clicked(); public slots: static void fake_callback(gpointer data); This suggestion was taken from http://old.nabble.com/Using-g_signal_connect-in-class-td18461823.html The program crashes immediately after I choose the 'Stop' action from the Unity Quicklist. Debugging the program shows that I am not able to access anything MainWindow related inside the on_stopButton_clicked() without crashing. For example, it crashes when doing this check (which is the first 2 lines of code inside this function): if (!ui->stopButton->isEnabled()) return; I have also tested lots of other things that I found at the internet, but nothing of them worked. One interesting solution would be to use gtkmm (http://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/stable/sec-connecting-signal-handlers.html.en) but I am not used at all working on GTK applications (I work solely in Qt) and I don't know if this even suits to my occasion. A compilable example indicating what the problem is can be found at: http://ubuntuone.com/7iKA3wnPmWVp8YNNDLlVQI (3.2Kb) If you are not familiar with the QtCreator IDE, you can compile with the following commands, as long as you have all the needed libraries: cd dynamic_unity_quicklists_test; qmake -project; qmake; make

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• Career Change Need Advice: Professional Web Developer

  - by bikedorkseattle

  I'm hoping to get some advice here on the steps I should take to make a career change into professional web development. I've been working in cancer research the last 14 years and I need a change. The job market is terrible, the pay is worse, and despite what one would think the atmosphere is generally un-collegial, even in your own group. Venture funding never returned after the dot com burst and with 3 to 5 wars our country is now in, NIH funding is only going to get worse. I know things are not going to get better for my field, sadly, and I know I need to move on. For probably just as long I have fiddled around with web development, I even run a fairly popular site with close to 1 million/month pageviews that pulls a decent income, but not stable enough to live off of right now. My skills are ok for being self taught. I enjoy the fast paced nature of the web and the tools the community creates and how eager people are to help and share knowledge; it's what science should be. I have been trying to find an entry level developer job doing standard HTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL/JS/jQuery type work. A good 50%+ of the jobs want someone with a CS degree, and most want 5 years experience. Having no professional experience and no formal education, I know I'm at a huge disadvantage. I am now considering my options on how to move forward professionally. The way I see it I have basically 3 options. Build up my portfolio of work as much as I can and continue to learn as much as I can on my own. Try to contribute on some open source project when time allows. Network like crazy and go to meetups. Be confident and pray a lot in private. OR While doing above, do some certification programs in PHP and Java, possibly others. Get a Zend Certification. OR Spend a few years getting a CS degree while doing 1. I've already done the work fulltime go to school thing and it doesn't excite me one bit. I didn't have the greatest college experience and am not too eager to return, but I have a family to feed. Is the degree really necessary or is it more of a right of passage type thing in most instances? I appreciate everyones input. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  ORCLville: OOW 2012 - Crystal BallOracle ACE Director Floyd Teter cooks up some tongue-in-cheek predictions for news and announcements that might come out of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. What's your prediction? Oracle Optimized Solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 | Oracle Hardware Hardware matters, too! The people behind the Oracle Hardware blog have put together a list of Oracle Openworld 2012 sessions focused Oracle Optimized Solutions, "designed, pre-tested, tuned and fully documented architectures for optimal performance and availability." Just plug the session ID numbers into Schedule Builder and you're good to go. AIX Checklist for stable OBIEE deployment | Dick Dunbar "OBIEE is a complicated system with many moving parts and connection points," according to Oracle Business Inteligence escalation engineer Dick Dunbar. "The purpose of this article is to provide a checklist to discuss OBIEE deployment with your systems administrators." Demo for OPN: Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c Oracle Partner Network members can check out a new Coherence Management demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of Management Pack for Oracle Coherence and JVM Diagnostics. "The demo flow showcases the key enhancements made in Enterprise Manager 12c release which includes new customizable performance summary, cache data management and configuration management," according to the WebLogic Partner Community EMEA blog. The Pragmatic Architect: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before | Frank Buschmann "Many architects have technical knowledge that's both impressive and sound, which is indeed an inevitable basis for design success," says Frank Buschmann. "Yet, a lot of software projects fail or suffer due to severe challenges in their architecture. The key to mastery is how architects approach design, what they value, and where they focus their attention and work." As retail dies, whom will be the winners? | Peter Evans-Greenwood "The problem for many retailers is that how consumers shop has changed but the the retailers haven't adapted, " says Peter Evans-Greenwood. "Their sole virtue was to be the last step in a supply chain delivering somebody else's products to the consumer. However, being the last step in the supply chain is no longer a virtue when consumers skip across channels and can reach around the globe, no longer dependant on or limited to what they can find locally." Thought for the Day "Brains require stimulation. If you're locked into a pattern of work, work, and more work, your brain soon habituates - the same way that it lets you stop hearing a clock ticking. So, if you want to be more effective at work, you must, paradoxically, be less single-minded in your devotion to work. Anything you do—anything—that stimulates new segments of your brain will make you a more effective programmer or analyst. I promise, with a money-back guarantee." — Gerald M. Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Secure Your Wireless Router: 8 Things You Can Do Right Now

  - by Chris Hoffman

  A security researcher recently discovered a backdoor in many D-Link routers, allowing anyone to access the router without knowing the username or password. This isn’t the first router security issue and won’t be the last. To protect yourself, you should ensure that your router is configured securely. This is about more than just enabling Wi-Fi encryption and not hosting an open Wi-Fi network. Disable Remote Access Routers offer a web interface, allowing you to configure them through a browser. The router runs a web server and makes this web page available when you’re on the router’s local network. However, most routers offer a “remote access” feature that allows you to access this web interface from anywhere in the world. Even if you set a username and password, if you have a D-Link router affected by this vulnerability, anyone would be able to log in without any credentials. If you have remote access disabled, you’d be safe from people remotely accessing your router and tampering with it. To do this, open your router’s web interface and look for the “Remote Access,” “Remote Administration,” or “Remote Management” feature. Ensure it’s disabled — it should be disabled by default on most routers, but it’s good to check. Update the Firmware Like our operating systems, web browsers, and every other piece of software we use, router software isn’t perfect. The router’s firmware — essentially the software running on the router — may have security flaws. Router manufacturers may release firmware updates that fix such security holes, although they quickly discontinue support for most routers and move on to the next models. Unfortunately, most routers don’t have an auto-update feature like Windows and our web browsers do — you have to check your router manufacturer’s website for a firmware update and install it manually via the router’s web interface. Check to be sure your router has the latest available firmware installed. Change Default Login Credentials Many routers have default login credentials that are fairly obvious, such as the password “admin”. If someone gained access to your router’s web interface through some sort of vulnerability or just by logging onto your Wi-Fi network, it would be easy to log in and tamper with the router’s settings. To avoid this, change the router’s password to a non-default password that an attacker couldn’t easily guess. Some routers even allow you to change the username you use to log into your router. Lock Down Wi-Fi Access If someone gains access to your Wi-Fi network, they could attempt to tamper with your router — or just do other bad things like snoop on your local file shares or use your connection to downloaded copyrighted content and get you in trouble. Running an open Wi-Fi network can be dangerous. To prevent this, ensure your router’s Wi-Fi is secure. This is pretty simple: Set it to use WPA2 encryption and use a reasonably secure passphrase. Don’t use the weaker WEP encryption or set an obvious passphrase like “password”. Disable UPnP A variety of UPnP flaws have been found in consumer routers. Tens of millions of consumer routers respond to UPnP requests from the Internet, allowing attackers on the Internet to remotely configure your router. Flash applets in your browser could use UPnP to open ports, making your computer more vulnerable. UPnP is fairly insecure for a variety of reasons. To avoid UPnP-based problems, disable UPnP on your router via its web interface. If you use software that needs ports forwarded — such as a BitTorrent client, game server, or communications program — you’ll have to forward ports on your router without relying on UPnP. Log Out of the Router’s Web Interface When You’re Done Configuring It Cross site scripting (XSS) flaws have been found in some routers. A router with such an XSS flaw could be controlled by a malicious web page, allowing the web page to configure settings while you’re logged in. If your router is using its default username and password, it would be easy for the malicious web page to gain access. Even if you changed your router’s password, it would be theoretically possible for a website to use your logged-in session to access your router and modify its settings. To prevent this, just log out of your router when you’re done configuring it — if you can’t do that, you may want to clear your browser cookies. This isn’t something to be too paranoid about, but logging out of your router when you’re done using it is a quick and easy thing to do. Change the Router’s Local IP Address If you’re really paranoid, you may be able to change your router’s local IP address. For example, if its default address is 192.168.0.1, you could change it to 192.168.0.150. If the router itself were vulnerable and some sort of malicious script in your web browser attempted to exploit a cross site scripting vulnerability, accessing known-vulnerable routers at their local IP address and tampering with them, the attack would fail. This step isn’t completely necessary, especially since it wouldn’t protect against local attackers — if someone were on your network or software was running on your PC, they’d be able to determine your router’s IP address and connect to it. Install Third-Party Firmwares If you’re really worried about security, you could also install a third-party firmware such as DD-WRT or OpenWRT. You won’t find obscure back doors added by the router’s manufacturer in these alternative firmwares. Consumer routers are shaping up to be a perfect storm of security problems — they’re not automatically updated with new security patches, they’re connected directly to the Internet, manufacturers quickly stop supporting them, and many consumer routers seem to be full of bad code that leads to UPnP exploits and easy-to-exploit backdoors. It’s smart to take some basic precautions. Image Credit: Nuscreen on Flickr     

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• Ubuntu 12.04.3 Graphics Issues: Broken Pipes, Reinstalled Xorg and Bumblebee

  - by user190488

  It seems I have a problem, and am only making it worse by following what I find online. I have a new Asus N550JV-D71 (not sure about the part after the dash, though I definitely know it includes 71). I decided to downgrade Windows 8 to 7, then dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 with it (there were issues with Windows 8, and I had a Windows 7 disk handy). It did work and, after installing Bumblebee in tty (because it wouldn't boot when it was first installed), it worked marvelously for a little less than a week. However, I restarted it last night and got the Could not write bytes: Broken pipes error. (I see it's a very common error, but I've looked at the majority of the suggested Similar Questions already.) I followed what I could find online, followed those instructions (making sure to not install any sort of graphics drivers other than what Bumblebee provides), and it just seems to go further and further downhill. I'm afraid I didn't write the exact steps to get to this point (it was late by the time I gave up the night before), but it involved reinstalling lightdm, xorg (and xserver?), and Bumblebee. I then changed the Bumblebee.conf file so that Device=nvidia. I'm pretty new to Linux in general (I've used it since 10.04, but I hadn't had issues up until this computer, so it let me stay a newbie), so I'm not exactly sure what log files to look at to find the errors to look up. However, I did look at lshw and noticed that displays was marked as unassigned. Also, if I try to start lightdm using the command line, it always stops at Stopping Mount network filesystems. I should note that there isn't an xorg.conf file, and no .Xauthority. I would really, really prefer not to reinstall 12.04 if possible. I managed to get grub to display only a short time ago, and I can't boot to the dvd drive unless I go into the BIOS settings and manually change the boot order (that was an issue from the beginning, before the Ubuntu install), and getting into those settings often means rebooting several times due to the fact that the window to get to it is extremely small. I have most of what I need backed up, however, in case it does get to that point. If I really have to, I can just use the latest Ubuntu version instead of the LTS, but the reason I chose 12.04 in the first place is because I need something stable-ish, and Windows isn't suitable to what I need to do. I should note that the reason I restarted last night in the first place was that it wasn't charging the battery, and the wifi kept on going out. Hardware: Nvidia GeForce GT 750M Intel HD graphics 4600

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• C-states and P-states : confounding factors for benchmarking

  - by Dave

  I was recently looking into a performance issue in the java.util.concurrent (JUC) fork-join pool framework related to particularly long latencies when trying to wake (unpark) threads in the pool. Eventually I tracked the issue down to the power & scaling governor and idle-state policies on x86. Briefly, P-states refer to the set of clock rates (speeds) at which a processor can run. C-states reflect the possible idle states. The deeper the C-state (higher numerical values) the less power the processor will draw, but the longer it takes the processor to respond and exit that sleep state on the next idle to non-idle transition. In some cases the latency can be worse than 100 microseconds. C0 is normal execution state, and P0 is "full speed" with higher Pn values reflecting reduced clock rates. C-states are P-states are orthogonal, although P-states only have meaning at C0. You could also think of the states as occupying a spectrum as follows : P0, P1, P2, Pn, C1, C2, ... Cn, where all the P-states are at C0. Our fork-join framework was calling unpark() to wake a thread from the pool, and that thread was being dispatched onto a processor at deep C-state, so we were observing rather impressive latencies between the time of the unpark and the time the thread actually resumed and was able to accept work. (I originally thought we were seeing situations where the wakee was preempting the waker, but that wasn't the case. I'll save that topic for a future blog entry). It's also worth pointing out that higher P-state values draw less power and there's usually some latency in ramping up the clock (P-states) in response to offered load. The issue of C-states and P-states isn't new and has been described at length elsewhere, but it may be new to Java programmers, adding a new confounding factor to benchmarking methodologies and procedures. To get stable results I'd recommend running at C0 and P0, particularly for server-side applications. As appropriate, disabling "turbo" mode may also be prudent. But it also makes sense to run with the system defaults to understand if your application exhibits any performance sensitivity to power management policies. The operating system power management sub-system typically control the P-state and C-states based on current and recent load. The scaling governor manages P-states. Operating systems often use adaptive policies that try to avoid deep C-states for some period if recent deep idle episodes proved to be very short and futile. This helps make the system more responsive under bursty or otherwise irregular load. But it also means the system is stateful and exhibits a memory effect, which can further complicate benchmarking. Forcing C0 + P0 should avoid this issue.

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• 4.8M wasn't enough so we went for 5.055M tpmc with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel r2 :-)

  - by wcoekaer

  We released a new set of benchmarks today. One is an updated tpc-c from a few months ago where we had just over 4.8M tpmc at $0.98 and we just updated it to go to 5.05M and $0.89. The other one is related to Java Middleware performance. You can find the press release here. Now, I don't want to talk about the actual relevance of the benchmark numbers, as I am not in the benchmark team. I want to talk about why these numbers and these efforts, unrelated to what they mean to your workload, matter to customers. The actual benchmark effort is a very big, long, expensive undertaking where many groups work together as a big virtual team. Having the virtual team be within a single company of course helps tremendously... We already start with a very big server setup with tons of storage, many disks, lots of ram, lots of cpu's, cores, threads, large database setups. Getting the whole setup going to start tuning, by itself, is no easy task, but then the real fun starts with tuning the system for optimal performance -and- stability. A benchmark is not just revving an engine at high rpm, it's actually hitting the circuit. The tests require long runs, require surviving availability tests, such as surviving crashes -and- recovery under load. In the TPC-C example, the x4800 system had 4TB ram, 160 threads (8 sockets, hyperthreaded, 10 cores/socket), tons of storage attached, tons of luns visible to the OS. flash storage, non flash storage... many things at high scale that all have to be perfectly synchronized. During this process, we find bugs, we fix bugs, we find performance issues, we fix performance issues, we find interesting potential features to investigate for the future, we start new development projects for future releases and all this goes back into the products. As more and more customers, for Oracle Linux, are running larger and larger, faster and faster, more mission critical, higher available databases..., these things are just absolutely critical. Unrelated to what anyone's specific opinion is about tpc-c or tpc-h or specjenterprise etc, there is a ton of effort that the customer benefits from. All this work makes Oracle Linux and/or Oracle Solaris better platforms. Whether it's faster, more stable, more scalable, more resilient. It helps. Another point that I always like to re-iterate around UEK and UEK2 : we have our kernel source git repository online. Complete changelog of the mainline kernel, and our changes, easy to pull, easy to dissect, easy to know what went in when, why and where. No need to go log into a website and manually click through pages to hopefully discover changes or patches. No need to untar 2 tar balls and run a diff.

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• Online ALTER TABLE in MySQL 5.6

  - by Marko Mäkelä

  This is the low-level view of data dictionary language (DDL) operations in the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL 5.6. John Russell gave a more high-level view in his blog post April 2012 Labs Release – Online DDL Improvements. MySQL before the InnoDB Plugin Traditionally, the MySQL storage engine interface has taken a minimalistic approach to data definition language. The only natively supported operations were CREATE TABLE, DROP TABLE and RENAME TABLE. Consider the following example: CREATE TABLE t(a INT); INSERT INTO t VALUES (1),(2),(3); CREATE INDEX a ON t(a); DROP TABLE t; The CREATE INDEX statement would be executed roughly as follows: CREATE TABLE temp(a INT, INDEX(a)); INSERT INTO temp SELECT * FROM t; RENAME TABLE t TO temp2; RENAME TABLE temp TO t; DROP TABLE temp2; You could imagine that the database could crash when copying all rows from the original table to the new one. For example, it could run out of file space. Then, on restart, InnoDB would roll back the huge INSERT transaction. To fix things a little, a hack was added to ha_innobase::write_row for committing the transaction every 10,000 rows. Still, it was frustrating that even a simple DROP INDEX would make the table unavailable for modifications for a long time. Fast Index Creation in the InnoDB Plugin of MySQL 5.1 MySQL 5.1 introduced a new interface for CREATE INDEX and DROP INDEX. The old table-copying approach can still be forced by SET old_alter_table=0. This interface is used in MySQL 5.5 and in the InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1. Apart from the ability to do a quick DROP INDEX, the main advantage is that InnoDB will execute a merge-sort algorithm before inserting the index records into each index that is being created. This should speed up the insert into the secondary index B-trees and potentially result in a better B-tree fill factor. The 5.1 ALTER TABLE interface was not perfect. For example, DROP FOREIGN KEY still invoked the table copy. Renaming columns could conflict with InnoDB foreign key constraints. Combining ADD KEY and DROP KEY in ALTER TABLE was problematic and not atomic inside the storage engine. The ALTER TABLE interface in MySQL 5.6 The ALTER TABLE storage engine interface was completely rewritten in MySQL 5.6. Instead of introducing a method call for every conceivable operation, MySQL 5.6 introduced a handful of methods, and data structures that keep track of the requested changes. In MySQL 5.6, online ALTER TABLE operation can be requested by specifying LOCK=NONE. Also LOCK=SHARED and LOCK=EXCLUSIVE are available. The old-style table copying can be requested by ALGORITHM=COPY. That one will require at least LOCK=SHARED. From the InnoDB point of view, anything that is possible with LOCK=EXCLUSIVE is also possible with LOCK=SHARED. Most ALGORITHM=INPLACE operations inside InnoDB can be executed online (LOCK=NONE). InnoDB will always require an exclusive table lock in two phases of the operation. The execution phases are tied to a number of methods: handler::check_if_supported_inplace_alter Checks if the storage engine can perform all requested operations, and if so, what kind of locking is needed. handler::prepare_inplace_alter_table InnoDB uses this method to set up the data dictionary cache for upcoming CREATE INDEX operation. We need stubs for the new indexes, so that we can keep track of changes to the table during online index creation. Also, crash recovery would drop any indexes that were incomplete at the time of the crash. handler::inplace_alter_table In InnoDB, this method is used for creating secondary indexes or for rebuilding the table. This is the ‘main’ phase that can be executed online (with concurrent writes to the table). handler::commit_inplace_alter_table This is where the operation is committed or rolled back. Here, InnoDB would drop any indexes, rename any columns, drop or add foreign keys, and finalize a table rebuild or index creation. It would also discard any logs that were set up for online index creation or table rebuild. The prepare and commit phases require an exclusive lock, blocking all access to the table. If MySQL times out while upgrading the table meta-data lock for the commit phase, it will roll back the ALTER TABLE operation. In MySQL 5.6, data definition language operations are still not fully atomic, because the data dictionary is split. Part of it is inside InnoDB data dictionary tables. Part of the information is only available in the *.frm file, which is not covered by any crash recovery log. But, there is a single commit phase inside the storage engine. Online Secondary Index Creation It may occur that an index needs to be created on a new column to speed up queries. But, it may be unacceptable to block modifications on the table while creating the index. It turns out that it is conceptually not so hard to support online index creation. All we need is some more execution phases: Set up a stub for the index, for logging changes. Scan the table for index records. Sort the index records. Bulk load the index records. Apply the logged changes. Replace the stub with the actual index. Threads that modify the table will log the operations to the logs of each index that is being created. Errors, such as log overflow or uniqueness violations, will only be flagged by the ALTER TABLE thread. The log is conceptually similar to the InnoDB change buffer. The bulk load of index records will bypass record locking. We still generate redo log for writing the index pages. It would suffice to log page allocations only, and to flush the index pages from the buffer pool to the file system upon completion. Native ALTER TABLE Starting with MySQL 5.6, InnoDB supports most ALTER TABLE operations natively. The notable exceptions are changes to the column type, ADD FOREIGN KEY except when foreign_key_checks=0, and changes to tables that contain FULLTEXT indexes. The keyword ALGORITHM=INPLACE is somewhat misleading, because certain operations cannot be performed in-place. For example, changing the ROW_FORMAT of a table requires a rebuild. Online operation (LOCK=NONE) is not allowed in the following cases: when adding an AUTO_INCREMENT column, when the table contains FULLTEXT indexes or a hidden FTS_DOC_ID column, or when there are FOREIGN KEY constraints referring to the table, with ON…CASCADE or ON…SET NULL option. The FOREIGN KEY limitations are needed, because MySQL does not acquire meta-data locks on the child or parent tables when executing SQL statements. Theoretically, InnoDB could support operations like ADD COLUMN and DROP COLUMN in-place, by lazily converting the table to a newer format. This would require that the data dictionary keep multiple versions of the table definition. For simplicity, we will copy the entire table, even for DROP COLUMN. The bulk copying of the table will bypass record locking and undo logging. For facilitating online operation, a temporary log will be associated with the clustered index of table. Threads that modify the table will also write the changes to the log. When altering the table, we skip all records that have been marked for deletion. In this way, we can simply discard any undo log records that were not yet purged from the original table. Off-page columns, or BLOBs, are an important consideration. We suspend the purge of delete-marked records if it would free any off-page columns from the old table. This is because the BLOBs can be needed when applying changes from the log. We have special logging for handling the ROLLBACK of an INSERT that inserted new off-page columns. This is because the columns will be freed at rollback.

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• Where I missed boot.properties.?

  - by Dyade, Shailesh M

  Today one of my customer was trying to start the WebLogic Server ( Production Instance) , though he was trying to start the server in a standard way, but it was failing due to below error :   ####<Oct 22, 2012 12:14:43 PM BST> <Warning> <Security> <BanifB1> <> <main> <> <> <> <1350904483998> <BEA-090066> <Problem handling boot identity. The following exception was generated: weblogic.security.internal.encryption.EncryptionServiceException: weblogic.security.internal.encryption.EncryptionServiceException: [Security:090219]Error decrypting Secret Key java.security.ProviderException: setSeed() failed> And it started failing into below causes. ####<Oct 22, 2012 12:16:45 PM BST> <Critical> <WebLogicServer> <BanifB1> <AdminServer> <main> <<WLS Kernel>> <> <> <1350904605837> <BEA-000386> <Server subsystem failed. Reason: java.lang.AssertionError: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException java.lang.AssertionError: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException weblogic.security.internal.encryption.EncryptionServiceException: weblogic.security.internal.encryption.EncryptionServiceException: [Security:090219]Error decrypting Secret Key java.security.ProviderException: setSeed() failed weblogic.security.internal.encryption.EncryptionServiceException: [Security:090219]Error decrypting Secret Key java.security.ProviderException: setSeed() failed at weblogic.security.internal.encryption.JSafeSecretKeyEncryptor.decryptSecretKey(JSafeSecretKeyEncryptor.java:121) Customer was facing this issue without any changes in the system, it was stable suddenly started seeing this issue last night. When we checked, customer was manually entering the username and password, config.xml had the entries encrypted However when verified, customer had the boot.properties at the Servers/AdminServer/security folder and DomainName/security didn't have this file. Adding boot.properies fixed the issue. Regards Shailesh Dyade 

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• Critical Patch Updates During EBS 11i Exception to Sustaining Support Period

  - by Elke Phelps (Oracle Development)

  As previously blogged in the EBS 11i and 12.1 Support Timeline Changes entry, two important changes to the Oracle Lifetime Support policies were announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - San Francisco.  These changes affect E-Business Suite Releases 11i and 12.1. Critical Patch Updates for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support Period You may be wondering about the availability of Critical Patch Updates (CPU) for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support period.  The following details the E-Business Suite Critical Patch Update support policy for EBS 11i during the Exception to Sustaining Support period: Oracle will continue to provide CPUs containing critical security fixes for E-Business Suite 11i.  CPUs will be packaged and released as as cumulative patches for both ATG RUP 6 and ATG RUP 7. As always, we try to minimize the number of patches and dependencies required for uptake of a CPU; however, there have been quite a few changes to the 11i baseline since its release.  For dependency reasons the 11i CPUs may require a higher number of files in order to bring them up to a consistent, stable, and well tested level. EBS 11i customer will continue to receive CPUs up to and including the October 2014 CPU. Where can I learn more? There are two interlocking policies that affect the E-Business Suite:  Oracle's Lifetime Support policies for each EBS release (timelines which were updated by this announcement), and the Error Correction Support policies (which state the minimum baselines for new patches). For more information about how these policies interact, see: Understanding Support Windows for E-Business Suite Releases What about E-Business Suite technology stack components? Things get more complicated when one considers individual techstack components such as Oracle Forms or the Oracle Database.  To learn more about the interlocking EBS+techstack component support windows, see these two articles: On Apps Tier Patching and Support: A Primer for E-Business Suite Users On Database Patching and Support: A Primer for E-Business Suite Users Where can I learn more about Critical Patch Updates?The Critical Patch Update Advisory is the starting point for relevant information. It includes a list of products affected, pointers to obtain the patches, a summary of the security vulnerabilities, and links to other important documents.  Related Articles EBS 11i and 12.1 Support Timeline Changes Frequently Asked Questions about Latest EBS Support Changes Extended Support Fees Waived for E-Business Suite 11i and 12.0

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• Why do old programming languages continue to be revised?

  - by SunAvatar

  This question is not, "Why do people still use old programming languages?" I understand that quite well. In fact the two programming languages I know best are C and Scheme, both of which date back to the 70s. Recently I was reading about the changes in C99 and C11 versus C89 (which seems to still be the most-used version of C in practice and the version I learned from K&R). Looking around, it seems like every programming language in heavy use gets a new specification at least once per decade or so. Even Fortran is still getting new revisions, despite the fact that most people using it are still using FORTRAN 77. Contrast this with the approach of, say, the typesetting system TeX. In 1989, with the release of TeX 3.0, Donald Knuth declared that TeX was feature-complete and future releases would contain only bug fixes. Even beyond this, he has stated that upon his death, "all remaining bugs will become features" and absolutely no further updates will be made. Others are free to fork TeX and have done so, but the resulting systems are renamed to indicate that they are different from the official TeX. This is not because Knuth thinks TeX is perfect, but because he understands the value of a stable, predictable system that will do the same thing in fifty years that it does now. Why do most programming language designers not follow the same principle? Of course, when a language is relatively new, it makes sense that it will go through a period of rapid change before settling down. And no one can really object to minor changes that don't do much more than codify existing pseudo-standards or correct unintended readings. But when a language still seems to need improvement after ten or twenty years, why not just fork it or start over, rather than try to change what is already in use? If some people really want to do object-oriented programming in Fortran, why not create "Objective Fortran" for that purpose, and leave Fortran itself alone? I suppose one could say that, regardless of future revisions, C89 is already a standard and nothing stops people from continuing to use it. This is sort of true, but connotations do have consequences. GCC will, in pedantic mode, warn about syntax that is either deprecated or has a subtly different meaning in C99, which means C89 programmers can't just totally ignore the new standard. So there must be some benefit in C99 that is sufficient to impose this overhead on everyone who uses the language. This is a real question, not an invitation to argue. Obviously I do have an opinion on this, but at the moment I'm just trying to understand why this isn't just how things are done already. I suppose the question is: What are the (real or perceived) advantages of updating a language standard, as opposed to creating a new language based on the old?

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• Professional immigration

  - by etranger

  Hello all, Does anyone here have a practical advice on professional relocation from Russia to Europe? The reasons behind making such a decision are far beyond the subject, perhaps, so I'll stick to the practical part. Having done some of the "common stuff" for finding a job, I am now facing two serious problems: I am a "dual-class" person, with university degree in marketing, and multiple years of self-studied computer competence (hence my writing here). Have professional experience in both areas. I don't currently hold a European work permit. From what I can see, this results in normal HR person throwing out my CV as either being "overqualified" or "too much trouble with making the permit". I do have the skills and character to start my own business, but it requires start-up capital that I don't have, over the last years I had to pay high bills for medical treatment of my family member, who had deceased. Now, I'm almost out of debts. As you can probably guess, English is not a problem, and I'm open to new languages, but first steps of entering the market, or the society, is the problematic part. I live close to Norway, and am trying to get some professional contacts there, but it hasn't got me any practical perspective so far. Any advice is greatly appreciated. EDIT: I am currently making my living off web site development, and occasional consulting services both in IT and marketing. For purely geographic reasons I'm dealing with clients that reside in the same city where I live, pop. 350 000. Being quite local, market requirements for web sites are simple and stable — clients need to control navigation, write articles in a word-like editor, upload illustrations and place ad banners, all with no additional programming. As many web developers do, I'm using my own content management system that fits these expectations. I have also started developing a newer version of this system that has better support for international environments, but I'm too distant from the real market demand in Europe to speak of the right track here. Technically it's based on php/mysql and uses xslt for templating. It allows for quick website deployment, and has architectural neatness, lack of which made me abandon similar opensource solutions (Joomla and the like). Deploying time from rasterized design proofs is normally under 6-8 working hours, don't know how that compares to the world practice. EDIT 2: Can anyone share what Norwegian (Scandinavian) web solutions market currently demands?

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• SharePoint logging to a list

  - by Norgean

  I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName);             if (list == null)             {                 var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList);                 list = web.Lists[listGuid];                 list.Title = LogListTitle;                 list.Update();                 list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false);                 var stringColl = new StringCollection();                 stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose});                 list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl);                 ModifyDefaultView(list);             }         }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect:         public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);             if (list != null)             {                 list.Delete();             }         } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts)         {             if (web != null)             {                 var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);                 if (list != null)                 {                     var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay?                     var text = string.Format(textformat, texts);                     if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh.                         text = text.Substring(0, 254);                     item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text;                     item[Degree] = severity;                     item[Category] = category;                     item.Update();                 }             } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log.         } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier.         private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list)         {             // Add fields to default view             var defaultView = list.DefaultView;             var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0);               if (!exists)             {                 var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 defaultView.Update();                   var sortDoc = new XmlDocument();                 sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query));                 var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy");                 if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null)                     sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy);                 orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy");                 sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy);                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified];                 var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                   fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID];                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                 defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml;                 //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>";                 defaultView.Update();             }         } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

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• MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.4 RC1 has been released

  - by fernando

  MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver  for MySQL has been released.  This is the Release Candidate intended to introduce users to the new features in the release.  This release is feature complete it should be stable enough for users to understand the new features and how we expect them to work.  As is the case with all non-GA releases, it should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6 It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.6 version of MySQL Connector/Net brings the following new features:   * Stored routine debugging   * Entity Framework 4.3 Code First support   * Pluggable authentication (now third parties can plug new authentications mechanisms into the driver).   * Full Visual Studio 2012 support: everything from Server Explorer to Intellisense&  the Stored Routine debugger. The following specific fixes are addressed in this version: - Fixed Entity Framework + mysql connector/net in partial trust throws exceptions (MySql bug #65036, Oracle bug #14668820). - Added support in Parser for Datetime and Time types with precision when using Server 5.6 (No bug Number). - Fix for bug TIMESTAMP values are mistakenly represented as DateTime with Kind = Local (Mysql bug #66964, Oracle bug #14740705). The release is available to download athttp://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.6.html Documentation ------------------------------------- You can view current Connector/Net documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net.html For specific topics: Stored Routine Debugger:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net-visual-studio-debugger.html Authentication plugin:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net-programming-authentication-user-plugin.html You can find our team blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our forums at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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• Can Anything be Done to Make Improv (a 1993 Win 3.1 App) handle larger Files?

  - by user75185

  My very favorite spradsheet is Improv, a 1993 Windows 3.1 application. It still puts Excel to shame for building spreadsheets and writing formulas. The only problem is because Improv was written when 1 Meg of RAM was state of the art, it becomes unstable when working with larger spreadsheets and often crashes and/or corrupts the data file. I am working on a project that greatly exceeds Improv's limits. Although it will ultimately require more robust databasing capability, I could save a lot of critical time if I could delay that headache and continue working in Improv for now. To that end, I moved to the only product I could find that comes close, Quantrix, which is nothing more than Improv updated to handle large spreadsheets and utilize today's technologies. The problems with Quantrix are its speed (significantly slower than Improv) and its $1000 price (which I cannot afford). I have already had 3 15 day extensions after the initial 30 day trial, so my time to use Quantrix as a bridge is at its end. Searches for Improv over the years have gotten me nowhere and, not surprisingly after reading some posts on this site, I got nothing for the money and time invested to find a programmer to write code to "fix" this problem. Improv is freely available as "abandonware" at http://vetusware.com/download/LotusImprov2.1/?id=5797 , and the best background info can be found on Wikipedia and at "Moose's Greatest Software Products of All Time - Lotus Improv" http://moosevalley.fhost.com.au/mooses_review_page_lotus_improv.html It is critically urgent for me to focus on analyzing the data asap. Working in a stable Improv would, without question, be the fastest route. To that end, I am looking for answers to the following questions and anything else that might be helpful: 1) Is it lawful to hire someone to fix Improv for my own use? If so, 2) About how much should it cost? 3) About how long should it take? 4) What skills should I be looking for &/or how should a post be worded? 5) Is there a niche site where it should it be posted? 6) What questions can I ask to quickly screen candidates? Since I am not a programmer, I need questions the answers to which leave no room to confuse me, whether intentional or not. For example, what tools or players should someone with an acceptable competency level have knowledge of?

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• Physics Engine [Collision Response, 2-dimensional] experts, help!! My stack is unstable!

  - by Register Sole

  Previously, I struggle with the sequential impulse-based method I developed. Thanks to jedediah referring me to this paper, I managed to rebuild the codes and implement the simultaneous impulse based method with Projected-Gauss-Seidel (PGS) iterative solver as described by Erin Catto (mentioned in the reference of the paper as [Catt05]). So here's how it currently is: The simulation handles 2-dimensional rotating convex polygons. Detection is using separating-axis test, with a SKIN, meaning closest points between two polygons is detected and determined if their distance is less than SKIN. To resolve collision, simultaneous impulse-based method is used. It is solved using iterative solver (PGS-solver) as in Erin Catto's paper. Error-correction is implemented using Baumgarte's stabilization (you can refer to either paper for this) using J V = beta/dt*overlap, J is the Jacobian for the constraints, V the matrix containing the velocities of the bodies, beta an error-correction parameter that is better be < 1, dt the time-step taken by the engine, and overlap, the overlap between the bodies (true overlap, so SKIN is ignored). However, it is still less stable than I expected :s I tried to stack hexagons (or squares, doesn't really matter), and even with only 4 to 5 of them, they hardly stand still! Also note that I am not looking for a sleeping scheme. But I would settle if you have any explicit scheme to handle resting contacts. That said, I would be more than happy if you have a way of treating it generally (as continuous collision, instead of explicitly as a special state). Ideas I have: I would try adding a damping term (proportional to velocity) to the Baumgarte. Is this a good idea in general? If not I would not want to waste my time trying to tune the parameter hoping it magically works. Ideas I have tried: Using simultaneous position based error correction as described in the paper in section 5.3.2, turned out to be worse than the current scheme. If you want to know the parameters I used: Hexagons, side 50 (pixels) gravity 2400 (pixels/sec^2) time-step 1/60 (sec) beta 0.1 restitution 0 to 0.2 coeff. of friction 0.2 PGS iteration 10 initial separation 10 (pixels) mass 1 (unit is irrelevant for now, i modified velocity directly<-impulse method) inertia 1/1000 Thanks in advance! I really appreciate any help from you guys!! :)

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