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• On a BPM Mission with Process Accelerators. Part 1: BPM as an ATV

  - by Cesare Rotundo

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Part 1: BPM as an ATV It’s always exciting to talk to customers that are in the middle of a BPM transformational journey. Their thirst for new processes to improve with BPM makes them explorers in a landscape of opportunities. They have discovered that with BPM the can “go places” they couldn’t reach before. In a way, learning how to generate value with BPM is like adopting a new mean of transportation. Apps are like regular cars: very efficient, but to be used on paved roads: the road/process has been traced, and there are fixed paths to follow to get from “opportunity to quote” or from “quote to cash”. Getting off the road is risky, and laying down new asphalt is slow and expensive. Custom development is like running: you can go virtually anywhere, following any path you like, yet it’s slow, and a lot of sweat. BPM allows you to go “off the beaten path” laid out by packaged apps, yet make fast progress compared to custom development. BPM is therefore more like an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV): less efficient than a car, but much faster than running, with a powerful enough engine that can get you places. The similarities between BPM and ATVs don’t stop here: you must learn to ride it even if you already know how to drive a car; you can reach places but figuring out the path to your destination is harder. Ultimately, with BPM as with an ATV, you reach places that you thought you could never reach, and you discover new destinations that provide great benefit to you … and that you didn’t even know existed! That’s where the sense of accomplishment that we heard from our BPM customers comes from, as well as the desire to share their experience, or even, as in the case of a County, the willingness to contribute their BPM solutions to help other agencies that face the same challenges. The question we wanted to answer is how can we teach organizations to drive ATV/BPM, thus leading them to deeper success with BPM, while increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and finally equip them with the right tools. Like with ATVs, getting from point A to point B is more of a work of art than cruising on the highway by car. There is a lot we can do: after all many sought after destinations are common: someone else has been on the same path before. If only you could learn from their experience …

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• An observation on .NET loops – foreach, for, while, do-while

  It’s very common that .NET programmers use “foreach” loop for iterating through collections. Following is my observation whilst I was testing simple scenario on loops. “for” loop is 30% faster than “foreach” and “while” loop is 50% faster than “foreach”. “do-while” is bit faster than “while”. Someone may feel that how does it make difference if I’m iterating only 1000 times in a loop. This test case is only for simple iteration. According to the "Data structure" concepts, best and worst cases are completely based on the data we provide to the algorithm. so we can not conclude that a "foreach" algorithm is not good. All I want to tell that we need to be little cautious even choosing the loops. Example:- You might want to chose quick sort when you want to sort more numbers. At the same time bubble sort may be effective than quick sort when you want to sort less numbers. Take a simple scenario, a request of a simple web application fetches the data of 10000 (10K) rows and iterating them for some business logic. Think, this application is being accessed by 1000 (1K) people simultaneously. In this simple scenario you are ending up with 10000000 (10Million or 1 Crore) iterations. below is the test scenario with simple console application to test 100 Million records. using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Diagnostics;namespace ConsoleApplication1{ class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var sw = new Stopwatch(); var numbers = GetSomeNumbers(); sw.Start(); foreach (var item in numbers) { } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine( String.Format("\"foreach\" took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds)); sw.Reset(); sw.Start(); for (int i = 0; i < numbers.Count; i++) { } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine( String.Format("\"for\" loop took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds)); sw.Reset(); sw.Start(); var it = 0; while (it++ < numbers.Count) { } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine( String.Format("\"while\" loop took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds)); sw.Reset(); sw.Start(); var it2 = 0; do { } while (it2++ < numbers.Count); sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine( String.Format("\"do-while\" loop took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds)); } #region Get me 10Crore (100 Million) numbers private static List<int> GetSomeNumbers() { var lstNumbers = new List<int>(); var count = 100000000; for (var i = 1; i <= count; i++) { lstNumbers.Add(i); } return lstNumbers; } #endregion Get me some numbers }} In above example, I was just iterating through 100 Million numbers. You can see the time to execute various  loops provided in .NET Output "foreach" took 1108 milliseconds "for" loop took 727 milliseconds "while" loop took 596 milliseconds "do-while" loop took 594 milliseconds   Press any key to continue . . . So I feel we need to be careful while choosing the looping strategy. Please comment your thoughts. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Using WKA in Large Coherence Clusters (Disabling Multicast)

  - by jpurdy

  Disabling hardware multicast (by configuring well-known addresses aka WKA) will place significant stress on the network. For messages that must be sent to multiple servers, rather than having a server send a single packet to the switch and having the switch broadcast that packet to the rest of the cluster, the server must send a packet to each of the other servers. While hardware varies significantly, consider that a server with a single gigabit connection can send at most ~70,000 packets per second. To continue with some concrete numbers, in a cluster with 500 members, that means that each server can send at most 140 cluster-wide messages per second. And if there are 10 cluster members on each physical machine, that number shrinks to 14 cluster-wide messages per second (or with only mild hyperbole, roughly zero). It is also important to keep in mind that network I/O is not only expensive in terms of the network itself, but also the consumption of CPU required to send (or receive) a message (due to things like copying the packet bytes, processing a interrupt, etc). Fortunately, Coherence is designed to rely primarily on point-to-point messages, but there are some features that are inherently one-to-many: Announcing the arrival or departure of a member Updating partition assignment maps across the cluster Creating or destroying a NamedCache Invalidating a cache entry from a large number of client-side near caches Distributing a filter-based request across the full set of cache servers (e.g. queries, aggregators and entry processors) Invoking clear() on a NamedCache The first few of these are operations that are primarily routed through a single senior member, and also occur infrequently, so they usually are not a primary consideration. There are cases, however, where the load from introducing new members can be substantial (to the point of destabilizing the cluster). Consider the case where cluster in the first paragraph grows from 500 members to 1000 members (holding the number of physical machines constant). During this period, there will be 500 new member introductions, each of which may consist of several cluster-wide operations (for the cluster membership itself as well as the partitioned cache services, replicated cache services, invocation services, management services, etc). Note that all of these introductions will route through that one senior member, which is sharing its network bandwidth with several other members (which will be communicating to a lesser degree with other members throughout this process). While each service may have a distinct senior member, there's a good chance during initial startup that a single member will be the senior for all services (if those services start on the senior before the second member joins the cluster). It's obvious that this could cause CPU and/or network starvation. In the current release of Coherence (3.7.1.3 as of this writing), the pure unicast code path also has less sophisticated flow-control for cluster-wide messages (compared to the multicast-enabled code path), which may also result in significant heap consumption on the senior member's JVM (from the message backlog). This is almost never a problem in practice, but with sufficient CPU or network starvation, it could become critical. For the non-operational concerns (near caches, queries, etc), the application itself will determine how much load is placed on the cluster. Applications intended for deployment in a pure unicast environment should be careful to avoid excessive dependence on these features. Even in an environment with multicast support, these operations may scale poorly since even with a constant request rate, the underlying workload will increase at roughly the same rate as the underlying resources are added. Unless there is an infrastructural requirement to the contrary, multicast should be enabled. If it can't be enabled, care should be taken to ensure the added overhead doesn't lead to performance or stability issues. This is particularly crucial in large clusters.

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• Using HTML5 Today part 3&ndash; Using Polyfills

  - by Steve Albers

  Shims helps when adding semantic tags to older IE browsers, but there is a huge range of other new HTML5 features that having varying support on browsers.  Polyfills are JavaScript code and/or browser plug-ins that can provide older or less featured browsers with API support.  The best polyfills will detect the whether the current browser has native support, and only adds the functionality if necessary.  The Douglas Crockford JSON2.js library is an example of this approach: if the browser already supports the JSON object, nothing changes.  If JSON is not available, the library adds a JSON property in the global object. This approach provides some big benefits: It lets you add great new HTML5 features to your web sites sooner. It lets the developer focus on writing to the up-and-coming standard rather than proprietary APIs. Where most one-off legacy code fixes tends to break down over time, well done polyfills will stop executing over time (as customer browsers natively support the feature) meaning polyfill code may not need to be tested against new browsers since they will execute the native methods instead. Your should also remember that Polyfills represent an entirely separate code path (and sometimes plug-in) that requires testing for support.  Also Polyfills tend to run on older browsers, which often have slower JavaScript performance.  As a result you might find that performance on older browsers is not comparable. When looking for Polyfills you can start by checking the Modernizr GitHub wiki or the HTML5 Please site. For an example of a polyfill consider a page that writes a few geometric shapes on a <canvas> <script src="jquery-1.7.1.min.js"><script> <script> $(document).ready(function () { drawCanvas(); }); function drawCanvas() { var context = $("canvas")[0].getContext('2d'); //background context.fillStyle = "#8B0000"; context.fillRect(5, 5, 300, 100); // emptybox context.strokeStyle = "#B0C4DE"; context.lineWidth = 4; context.strokeRect(20, 15, 80, 80); // circle context.arc(160, 55, 40, 0, Math.PI * 2, false); context.fillStyle = "#4B0082"; context.fill(); </script>   The result is a simple static canvas with a box & a circle:   …to enable this functionality on a pre-canvas browser we can find a polyfill.  A check on html5please.com references  FlashCanvas.  Pull down the zip and extract the files (flashcanvas.js, flash10canvas.swf, etc) to a directory on your site.  Then based on the documentation you need to add a single line to your original HTML file: <!--[if lt IE 9]><script src="flashcanvas.js"></script><![endif]—> …and you have canvas functionality!  The IE conditional comments ensure that the library is only loaded in browsers where it is useful, improving page load & processing time. Like all Polyfills, you should test to verify the functionality matches your expectations across browsers you need to support.  For instance the Flash Canvas home page advertises 70% support of HTML5 Canvas spec tests.

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• Moving StarterSTS to the (Azure) Cloud

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Quite some people asked me about an Azure version of StarterSTS. While I kinda knew what I had to do to make the move, I couldn’t find the time. Until recently. This blog post briefly documents the necessary changes and design decisions for the next version of StarterSTS which will work both on-premise and on Azure. Provider Fortunately StarterSTS is already based on the idea of “providers”. Authentication, roles and claims generation is based on the standard ASP.NET provider infrastructure. This makes the migration to different data stores less painful. In my case I simply moved the ASP.NET provider database to SQL Azure and still use the standard SQL Server based membership, roles and profile provider. In addition StarterSTS has its own providers to abstract resource access for certificates, relying party registration, client certificate registration and delegation. So I only had to provide new implementations. Signing and SSL keys now go in the Azure certificate store and user mappings (client certificates and delegation settings) have been moved to Azure table storage. The one thing I didn’t anticipate when I originally wrote StarterSTS was the need to also encapsulate configuration. Currently configuration is “locked” to the standard .NET configuration system. The new version will have a pluggable SettingsProvider with versions for .NET configuration as well as Azure service configuration. If you want to externalize these settings into e.g. a database, it is now just a matter of supplying a corresponding provider. Moving between the on-premise and Azure version will be just a matter of using different providers. URL Handling Another thing that’s substantially different on Azure (and load balanced scenarios in general) is the handling of URLs. In farm scenarios, the standard APIs like ASP.NET’s Request.Url return the current (internal) machine name, but you typically need the address of the external facing load balancer. There’s a hotfix for WCF 3.5 (included in v4) that fixes this for WCF metadata. This was accomplished by using the HTTP Host header to generate URLs instead of the local machine name. I now use the same approach for generating WS-Federation metadata as well as information card files. New Features I introduced a cache provider. Since we now have slightly more expensive lookups (e.g. relying party data from table storage), it makes sense to cache certain data in the front end. The default implementation uses the ASP.NET web cache and can be easily extended to use products like memcached or AppFabric Caching. Starting with the relying party provider, I now also provide a read/write interface. This allows building management interfaces on top of this provider. I also include a (very) simple web page that allows working with the relying party provider data. I guess I will use the same approach for other providers in the future as well. I am also doing some work on the tracing and health monitoring area. Especially important for the Azure version. Stay tuned.

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• Is Your Company Social on the Inside?

  - by Mike Stiles

  As we talk about the extension of social from an outbound-facing marketing tool to a platform that will reach across the entire enterprise, servicing multiple functions of that enterprise, it might be time to take a look at how social can be effectively employed for internal communications. Remember the printed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Remember the emailed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Why not? Shouldn’t your employees care about the company more than anything else in life and be voraciously hungry for any information related to it? The more realistic prospect is that a company’s employees don’t behave much differently at work where information is concerned than they do in their personal lives. They “tune in” to information that’s immediately relevant to them, that peaks their interest, and/or that’s presented in a visually engaging way. That currently makes an internal social platform the most ideal way to communicate within the organization. It not only facilitates more immediate, more targeted (and thus more relevant) messaging from the company out to employees, it sets a stage for employees to communicate with each other and efficiently get answers to questions from peers. It’s a collaboration tool on steroids. If you build such an internal social portal and you do it right, will employees use it? Considering social media has officially been declared more addictive than cigarettes, booze and sex…probably. But what does it mean to do an internal social platform “right”? The bar has been set pretty high. Your employees are used to Twitter and Facebook, and would roll their eyes at anything less simple or harder to navigate than those. All the Facebook best practices would apply to your internal social as well, including the importance of managing posting frequency, using photos and video, moderation & response, etc. And don’t worry, you won’t be the first to jump in. WPP's global digital agency Possible has its own social network called Colab. Nestle has “The Nest.” Red Robin’s got one. I myself got an in-depth look at McGraw-Hill’s internal social platform at Blogwell NYC. Some of these companies are building their own platforms, others are buying them off the shelf or customizing readymade solutions. But you won’t be the last either. Prescient Digital Media and the IABC learned 39% of companies don’t offer employees any social tools. Not a social network, not discussion forums, not even IM. And a great many continue to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter on the premises. That’s pretty astonishing since social has become as essential a modern day communications tool as the telephone. But such holdouts will pay a big price for being mired in fear while competitors exploit social connections unchallenged. Fish where the fish are. If social has become the way people communicate and take in information, let that be the way communication is trafficked in the organization.

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• Experimenting with other search engines

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’ve been a Google user so long I can hardly remember what I used before it.  Alta Vista maybe?  Or Yahoo.  I’ve tried Bing off and on but it never really stuck.  I probably care more about search engines than your average user because of their impact on SQLTeam.com.  Lately I’ve been trying two other search engines and actually switched to one of them. I’ve played with Blekko a little in the past.  They have some interesting ways to “slice up” your results.  For example, searching on “SQL Server /blogs /date” should just search all the recently updated blogs.  Those two extra words on the search are slashtags.  The full list of slashtags runs from /forums to just see forums to /twitter to /nikon to /reviews and on and on and on.  I laughed when I saw they had slashtags for both liberal and conservative.  I’d hate to find any search results that don’t match my existing worldview :)  You can also create your own slashtags.  I created a mini-search engine for the SQL Server blogs that I read.  You can search it for “backup” at http://blekko.com/ws/backup+/billgraziano/sql-sites.  I uploaded my OPML and it limited the search to just those sites.  It seems like the site is focusing more on curating results and less on algorithms.  This is an interesting site for those power searchers.  There are some great ways to curate results using slashtags.  For 99% of my searches (type words, click on one of the first few links) slashtags are overkill.  They do have some good information on page and site ranking though so I’ll probably send some time looking through that. Blekko recently got my attention again when they said they were banning “content farms” - and that includes eHow and experts-exchange.  I always feel used when I click on a link to EE and find myself scrolling all the way to the bottom to see if I can find the answer.  Sometimes it’s there but sometimes it tells me I need to pay first.  I’ve longed for a way to always exclude certain sites.  Blekko might be taking a hammer to a problem that needs a scalpel but it’s an interesting choice.  (And some of the comments in the TechCrunch link are interesting if you’re a search nerd.) DuckDuckGo is an odd name for a search engine.  Their big hook is that they don’t have search history.  If you wade through your Google account you can probably find the page where it stores your search history.  It was pretty enlightening to find mine.  It was easy to disable but that got me started looking at other search engines.  DDG (or DukGo) just feels like Google used to in the old days.  The results are good enough and the site is fast. Searches will return a snippet from WikiPedia or other site (like StackOverflow) at the top.  I think the idea is to answer the question without needing to visit the site.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing for SQLTeam.com. The only thing I really miss is image search.  You can add a “!i” at the end of any search and it will search the images on Bing.  Bing doesn’t have a great image search but it works for most of what I need.  They call these exclamation marks “!bangs” and they are kinda, sorta like slashtags.  I’ve been using DuckDuckGo now for a few weeks and I’m pretty happy with it.  I use Chrome for my browser and it was an easy switch to make.  It’s still a little surprising seeing my search results come up in a different format.  I’m starting to get used to it though.

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• New PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition provides a complete set of IT services at a low, predictable monthly cost

  - by Robbin Velayedam

  At Oracle Open World last month, Oracle announced that we are extending our On Demand offerings with the general availability of PeopleSoft On Demand Standard Edition. Standard Edition represents Oracle’s commitment to providing customers a choice of solutions, technology, and deployment options commensurate with their business needs and future growth. The Standard Edition offering complements the traditional On Demand offerings (Enterprise and Professional Editions) by focusing on a low, predictable monthly cost model that scales with the size of your business.   As part of Oracle's open cloud strategy, customers can freely move PeopleSoft licensed applications between on premise and the various  on demand options as business needs arise.    In today’s business climate, aggressive and creative business objectives demand more of IT organizations. They are expected to provide technology-based solutions to streamline business processes, enable online collaboration and multi-tasking, facilitate data mining and storage, and enhance worker productivity. As IT budgets remain tight in a recovering economy, the challenge becomes how to meet these demands with limited time and resources. One way is to eliminate the variable costs of projects so that your team can focus on the high priority functions and better predict funding and resource needs two to three years out. Variable costs and changing priorities can derail the best laid project and capacity plans. The prime culprits of variable costs in any IT organization include disaster recovery, security breaches, technical support, and changes in business growth and priorities. Customers have an immediate need for solutions that are cheaper, predictable in cost, and flexible enough for long-term growth or capacity changes. The Standard Edition deployment option fulfills that need by allowing customers to take full advantage of the rich business functionality that is inherent to PeopleSoft HCM, while delegating all application management responsibility – such as future upgrades and product updates – to Oracle technology experts, at an affordable and expected price. Standard Edition provides the advantages of the secure Oracle On Demand hosted environment, the complete set of PeopleSoft HCM configurable business processes, and timely management of regular updates and enhancements to the application functionality and underlying technology. Standard Edition has a convenient monthly fee that is scalable by number of employees, which helps align the customer’s overall cost of ownership with its size and anticipated growth and business needs. In addition to providing PeopleSoft HCM applications' world class business functionality and Oracle On Demand's embassy-grade security, Oracle’s hosted solution distinguishes itself from competitors by offering customers the ability to transition between different deployment and service models at any point in the application ownership lifecycle. As our customers’ business and economic climates change, they are free to transition their applications back to on-premise at any time. HCM On Demand Standard Edition is based on configurability options rather than customizations, requiring no additional code to develop or maintain. This keeps the cost of ownership low and time to production less than a month on average. Oracle On Demand offers the highest standard of security and performance by leveraging a state-of-the-art data center with dedicated databases, servers, and secured URL all within a private cloud. Customers will not share databases, environments, platforms, or access portals with other customers because we value how mission critical your data are to your business. Oracle’s On Demand also provides a full breadth of disaster recovery services to provide customers the peace of mind that their data are secure and that backup operations are in place to keep their businesses up and running in the case of an emergency. Currently we have over 50 PeopleSoft customers delegating us with the management of their applications through Oracle On Demand. If you are a customer interested in learning more about the PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Standard Edition and how it can help your organization minimize your variable IT costs and free up your resources to work on other business initiatives, contact Oracle or your Account Services Representative today.

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery - Part 2

  - by Bob Zurek

  As discussed in my last blog posting on this topic, Information Discovery, a core capability of the Oracle Endeca Information Discovery solution enables businesses to search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. With search as a core advanced capabilities of our product it is important to understand some of the key differences and capabilities in the underlying data store of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and that is our Endeca Server. In the last post on this subject, we talked about Exploratory Search capabilities along with support for cascading relevance. Additional search capabilities in the Endeca Server, which differentiate from simple keyword based "search boxes" in other Information Discovery products also include: The Endeca Server Supports Set Search.  The Endeca Server is organized around set retrieval, which means that it looks at groups of results (all the documents that match a search), as well as the relationship of each individual result to the set. Other approaches only compute the relevance of a document by comparing the document to the search query – not by comparing the document to all the others. For example, a search for “U.S.” in another approach might match to the title of a document and get a high ranking. But what if it were a collection of government documents in which “U.S.” appeared in many titles, making that clue less meaningful? A set analysis would reveal this and be used to adjust relevance accordingly. The Endeca Server Supports Second-Order Relvance. Unlike simple search interfaces in traditional BI tools, which provide limited relevance ranking, such as a list of results based on key word matching, Endeca enables users to determine the most salient terms to divide up the result. Determining this second-order relevance is the key to providing effective guidance. Support for Queries and Filters. Search is the most common query type, but hardly complete, and users need to express a wide range of queries. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery also includes navigation, interactive visualizations, analytics, range filters, geospatial filters, and other query types that are more commonly associated with BI tools. Unlike other approaches, these queries operate across structured, semi-structured and unstructured content stored in the Endeca Server. Furthermore, this set is easily extensible because the core engine allows for pluggable features to be added. Like a search engine, queries are answered with a results list, ranked to put the most likely matches first. Unlike “black box” relevance solutions, which generalize one strategy for everyone, we believe that optimal relevance strategies vary across domains. Therefore, it provides line-of-business owners with a set of relevance modules that let them tune the best results based on their content. The Endeca Server query result sets are summarized, which gives users guidance on how to refine and explore further. Summaries include Guided Navigation® (a form of faceted search), maps, charts, graphs, tag clouds, concept clusters, and clarification dialogs. Users don’t explicitly ask for these summaries; Oracle Endeca Information Discovery analytic applications provide the right ones, based on configurable controls and rules. For example, the analytic application might guide a procurement agent filtering for in-stock parts by visualizing the results on a map and calculating their average fulfillment time. Furthermore, the user can interact with summaries and filters without resorting to writing complex SQL queries. The user can simply just click to add filters. Within Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, all parts of the summaries are clickable and searchable. We are living in a search driven society where business users really seem to enjoy entering information into a search box. We do this everyday as consumers and therefore, we have gotten used to looking for that box. However, the key to getting the right results is to guide that user in a way that provides additional Discovery, beyond what they may have anticipated. This is why these important and advanced features of search inside the Endeca Server have been so important. They have helped to guide our great customers to success. 

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• A .NET Developers day with the iPad.

  - by mbcrump

  The Apple iPad is currently getting a lot of buzz because of the app store, the book store and of course iTunes. I had the chance to play with one and this is what I have learned about the device. Let’s get this out of the way first, the iPad is awesome. It is the device for media consumption and casual web browsing. But how does it measure up to those of us with .NET on our brains all days. Let’s find out… Main Screen – you can customize everything on this page. I guess I should replace that image with a C# or VS logo. Its pretty standard stuff if you have an iPhone.   Programming Books If you have a subscription to Safari Books Online, then you are in luck, its very easy to read the books on the iPad. Just fire up Safari web browser and goto the Safari Books Online. The biggest benefit that I can see with the iPad is the ability to read books wherever and not have to worry about purchasing books that I already have the .PDF for. Below is a sample from Code Complete 2nd Edition. Below is a PDF of the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification. As you can see its very readable and you should have no problem reading actual code.   Example of Code shown below: It is however easier to read the PDF and store them with a 3rd party PDF reader. I have seen several for .99 cents or less. You can however switch the screen to vertical to get more viewing space as shown below: I was disappointed with the iBooks application. I could not find a single .NET programming book anywhere. I was able to download the excellent sci-fi book “A memory of Wind” for free though. If I just overlooked them, then please email me with the names and titles. I couldn’t even find a technology category in the categories list. Web Surfing – Technical Sites Below is an example of my site in Safari. The code is very readable and the experience was identical to viewing it in Firefox. I tried multiple programming site and the pages looked great except those that used flash and of course it did not display on those pages.   News Apps - Technical Content The standard NY Times and USA Today looked great, but the Technical Content was lacking. It would probably be better to use Google Reader for online technical news.     YouTube Videos – Technical Content  Since its YouTube, we already know that a lot of technical content exist and it plays great on the iPad. I watched several programming videos and could clearly see the code being written. Taking Technical Notes The iPad comes with a great notepad for taking notes. I found that it was easy to take notes regarding projects that I am currently working on.   Calendar The calendar that ships with the iPad is great for organizing. You can setup exchange server or manually enter the information. Pretty standard stuff.    Random Applications that I like: TweetDeck.   and Adobe Ideas. Adobe Ideas is kinda like SketchFlow except you use your finger to mock up the sketches.  Don’t forget that the iPad is great for any type of podcasting. That pretty much sums it up, I would definitely recommend this device as it will only get better. I believe the iOS4 comes out on the 24th and the iPad will only get more and more apps. You could save a few bucks by waiting for the 2nd generation, but that’s a call that only you can make.

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• Spotlight on Oracle Social Relationship Management. Social Enable Your Enterprise with Oracle SRM.

  - by Pat Ma

  Facebook is now the most popular site on the Internet. People are tweeting more than they send email. Because there are so many people on social media, companies and brands want to be there too. They want to be able to listen to social chatter, engage with customers on social, create great-looking Facebook pages, and roll out social-collaborative work environments within their organization. This is where Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) comes in. Oracle SRM is a product that allows companies to manage their presence with prospects and customers on social channels. Let's talk about two popular use cases with Oracle SRM. Easy Publishing - Companies now have an average of 178 social media accounts - with every product or geography or employee group creating their own social media channel. For example, if you work at an international hotel chain with every single hotel creating their own Facebook page for their location, that chain can have well over 1,000 social media accounts. Managing these channels is a mess - with logging in and out of every account, making sure that all accounts are on brand, and preventing rogue posts from destroying the brand. This is where Oracle SRM comes in. With Oracle Social Relationship Management, you can log into one window and post messages to all 1,000+ social channels at once. You can set up approval flows and have each account generate their own content but that content must be approved before publishing. The benefits of this are easy social media publishing, brand consistency across all channels, and protection of your brand from inappropriate posts. Monitoring and Listening - People are writing and talking about your company right now on social media. 75% of social media users have written a negative post about a brand after a poor customer service experience. Think about all the negative posts you see in your Facebook news feed about delayed flights or being on hold for 45 minutes. There is so much social chatter going on around your brand that it's almost impossible to keep up or comprehend what's going on. That's where Oracle SRM comes in. With Social Relationship Management, a company can monitor and listen to what people are saying about them on social channels. They can drill down into individual posts or get a high level view of trends and mentions. The benefits of this are comprehending what's being said about your brand and its competitors, understanding customers and their intent, and responding to negative posts before they become a PR crisis. Oracle SRM is part of Oracle Cloud. The benefits of cloud deployment for customers are faster deployments, less maintenance, and lower cost of ownership versus on-premise deployments. Oracle SRM also fits into Oracle's vision to social enable your enterprise. With Oracle SRM, social media is not just a marketing channel. Social media is also mechanism for sales, customer support, recruiting, and employee collaboration. For more information about how Oracle SRM can social enable your enterprise, please visit oracle.com/social. For more information about Oracle Cloud, please visit cloud.oracle.com.

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• Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

  - by haylem

  I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

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• The long road to bug-free software

  - by Tony Davis

  The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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• Can anybody help me in designing my UITableView into MVC Pattern ?

  - by user2877880

  I have written a ViewController in which i get data from the internet and display it in a UItableview using a json parser which uses object for key to identify its objects. What i would like your help in is to convert it into MVC pattern to make it less clumsy instead of including everything in the same controller class. Please try explaining it to me in terms of my code. THANKS IN ADVANCE. The code is as given below #import "ViewController.h" #import "AFNetworking.h" #import "ModelTableArray.h" @implementation ViewController @synthesize tableView = _tableView, activityIndicatorView = _activityIndicatorView, movies = _movies; - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Setting Up Table View self.tableView = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, self.view.bounds.size.width, self.view.bounds.size.height) style:UITableViewStylePlain]; self.tableView.dataSource = self; self.tableView.delegate = self; self.tableView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight; self.tableView.hidden = YES; [self.view addSubview:self.tableView]; // Setting Up Activity Indicator View self.activityIndicatorView = [[UIActivityIndicatorView alloc] initWithActivityIndicatorStyle:UIActivityIndicatorViewStyleGray]; self.activityIndicatorView.hidesWhenStopped = YES; self.activityIndicatorView.center = self.view.center; [self.view addSubview:self.activityIndicatorView]; [self.activityIndicatorView startAnimating]; // Initializing Data Source self.movies = [[NSArray alloc] init]; NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@"http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=rocky&country=us&entity=movie"]; NSURLRequest *request = [[NSURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url]; UIRefreshControl *refreshControl = [[UIRefreshControl alloc] init]; [refreshControl addTarget:self action:@selector(refresh:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventValueChanged]; [self.tableView addSubview:refreshControl]; [refreshControl endRefreshing]; AFJSONRequestOperation *operation = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, id JSON) { self.movies = [JSON objectForKey:@"results"]; [self.activityIndicatorView stopAnimating]; [self.tableView setHidden:NO]; [self.tableView reloadData]; } failure:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, NSError *error, id JSON) { NSLog(@"Request Failed with Error: %@, %@", error, error.userInfo); }]; [operation start]; } - (void)refresh:(UIRefreshControl *)sender { NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@"http://itunes.apple.com/search?term=rambo&country=us&entity=movie"]; NSURLRequest *request = [[NSURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url]; AFJSONRequestOperation *operation = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, id JSON) { self.movies = [JSON objectForKey:@"results"]; [self.activityIndicatorView stopAnimating]; [self.tableView setHidden:NO]; [self.tableView reloadData]; } failure:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, NSError *error, id JSON) { NSLog(@"Request Failed with Error: %@, %@", error, error.userInfo); }]; [operation start]; [sender endRefreshing]; } - (void)viewDidUnload { [super viewDidUnload]; } - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { return YES; } // Table View Data Source Methods - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { if (self.movies && self.movies.count) { return self.movies.count; } else { return 0; } } - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *cellID = @"Cell Identifier"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:cellID]; if (!cell) { cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle reuseIdentifier:cellID]; } NSDictionary *movie = [self.movies objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; cell.textLabel.text = [movie objectForKey:@"trackName"]; cell.detailTextLabel.text = [movie objectForKey:@"artistName"]; NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:[movie objectForKey:@"artworkUrl100"]]; [cell.imageView setImageWithURL:url placeholderImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"placeholder"]]; return cell; } @end

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• I thought the new AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE in Oracle Database 11g looked at all the rows in a table so why do I see a very small sample size on some tables?

  - by Maria Colgan

  I recently got asked this question and thought it was worth a quick blog post to explain in a little more detail what is going on with the new AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE in Oracle Database 11g and what you should expect to see in the dictionary views. Let’s take the SH.CUSTOMERS table as an example.  There are 55,500 rows in the SH.CUSTOMERS tables. If we gather statistics on the SH.CUSTOMERS using the new AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE but without collecting histogram we can check what sample size was used by looking in the USER_TABLES and USER_TAB_COL_STATISTICS dictionary views. The sample sized shown in the USER_TABLES is 55,500 rows or the entire table as expected. In USER_TAB_COL_STATISTICS most columns show 55,500 rows as the sample size except for four columns (CUST_SRC_ID, CUST_EFF_TO, CUST_MARTIAL_STATUS, CUST_INCOME_LEVEL ). The CUST_SRC_ID and CUST_EFF_TO columns have no sample size listed because there are only NULL values in these columns and the statistics gathering procedure skips NULL values. The CUST_MARTIAL_STATUS (38,072) and the CUST_INCOME_LEVEL (55,459) columns show less than 55,500 rows as their sample size because of the presence of NULL values in these columns. In the SH.CUSTOMERS table 17,428 rows have a NULL as the value for CUST_MARTIAL_STATUS column (17428+38072 = 55500), while 41 rows have a NULL values for the CUST_INCOME_LEVEL column (41+55459 = 55500). So we can confirm that the new AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE algorithm will use all non-NULL values when gathering basic table and column level statistics. Now we have clear understanding of what sample size to expect lets include histogram creation as part of the statistics gathering. Again we can look in the USER_TABLES and USER_TAB_COL_STATISTICS dictionary views to find the sample size used. The sample size seen in USER_TABLES is 55,500 rows but if we look at the column statistics we see that it is same as in previous case except  for columns  CUST_POSTAL_CODE and  CUST_CITY_ID. You will also notice that these columns now have histograms created on them. The sample size shown for these columns is not the sample size used to gather the basic column statistics. AUTO_SAMPLE_SIZE still uses all the rows in the table - the NULL rows to gather the basic column statistics (55,500 rows in this case). The size shown is the sample size used to create the histogram on the column. When we create a histogram we try to build it on a sample that has approximately 5,500 non-null values for the column.  Typically all of the histograms required for a table are built from the same sample. In our example the histograms created on CUST_POSTAL_CODE and the CUST_CITY_ID were built on a single sample of ~5,500 (5,450 rows) as these columns contained only non-null values. However, if one or more of the columns that requires a histogram has null values then the sample size maybe increased in order to achieve a sample of 5,500 non-null values for those columns. n addition, if the difference between the number of nulls in the columns varies greatly, we may create multiple samples, one for the columns that have a low number of null values and one for the columns with a high number of null values.  This scheme enables us to get close to 5,500 non-null values for each column. +Maria Colgan

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• nginx php5-fpm "File not found" -- FastCGI sent in stderr: "Primary script unknown"

  - by jmfayard

  so I'm trying to run for the first time the nginx web server with php5-fpm on a debian wheezy server Hitting a php file display simply File not found I have done my research (waste a lot of hours actually ;), there are a lot of people that have similar problems, yet I didn't succeed to correct it with what worked for them. I still have the same error : $ tail /var/log/nginx/access.log /var/log/nginx/error.log /var/log/php5-fpm.log | less == /var/log/nginx/error.log <== 2013/10/26 21:36:00 [error] 6900#0: *1971 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Primary script unknown" while reading response header from upstream, I have tried a lot of things, it's hard to remember what. I have put my config files on github my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf my /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf Currently, the nginx.conf configuration uses this... server { server_name mydomain.tld; root /srv/data1/test; location ~ \.php$ { try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; } } /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf contains listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 I have tried the unix socket version, same thing. fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; I made sure the server is started $ netstat -alnp | grep LISTEN tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:9000 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 6913/php-fpm.conf) tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 4785/mysqld tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:842 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2286/inetd tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2812/rpcbind tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 5710/nginx tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2560/sshd tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:443 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 5710/nginx tcp6 0 0 :::111 :::* LISTEN 2812/rpcbind unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 323648 6574/tmux /tmp//tmux-1000/default unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 619072 6790/fcgiwrap /var/run/fcgiwrap.socket unix 2 [ ACC ] SEQPACKET LISTENING 323 464/udevd /run/udev/control unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 610686 2812/rpcbind /var/run/rpcbind.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 318633 4785/mysqld /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock Each time I modify the nginx.conf file, I make sure to relaunch this command nginx -t && nginx -s reload && echo "nginx configuration reloaded" and same thing for php5-fpm /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart Thanks for your help :-)

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• RDS installation failure on 2012 R2 Server Core VM in Hyper-V Server

  - by Giles

  I'm currently installing a test-bed for my firms Infrastructure replacement. 10 or so Windows/Linux servers will be replaced by 2 physical servers running Hyper-V server. All services (DC, RDS, SQL) will be on Windows 2012 R2 Server Core VMs, Exchange on Server 2012 R2 GUI, and the rest are things like Elastix, MailArchiver etc, which aren't part of the equation thus far. I have installed Hyper-V server on a test box, and sucessfully got two virtual DC's running, SQL 2014 running, and 8.1 which I use for the RSAT tools. When trying to install RDS (The old fashioned kind, not the newer VDI(?) style), I get a failed installation due to the server not being able to reboot. A couple of articles have said not to do it locally, so I've moved on. Sitting at the Powershell prompt on the Domain Controller or SQL server (Both Server Core), I run the following commands: Import-Module RemoteDesktop New-SessionDeployment -ConnectionBroker "AlstersTS.Alsters.local" -SessionHost "AlstersTS.Alsters.local" The installation begins, carries on for 2 or 3 minutes, then I receive the following error message: New-SessionDeployment : Validation failed for the "RD Connection Broker" parameter. AlstersTS.Alsters.local Unable to connect to the server by using WindowsPowerShell remoting. Verify that you can connect to the server. At line:1 char:1 + NewSessionDeployment -ConnectionBroker "AlstersTS.Alsters.local" -SessionHost " ... + + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Write-Error], WriteErrorException + FullyQualifiedErrorID : Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WriteErrorException,New-SessionDeployment So far, I have: Triple, triple checked syntax. Tried various other commands, and a script to accomplish the same task. Checked DNS is functioning as it should. Checked to the best of my knowledge that AD is working as it should. Checked that the Network Service has the needed permissions. Created another VM and placed the two roles on different servers. Deleted all VMs, started again with a new domain name (Lather, rinse, repeat) Performed the whole installation on a second physical box running Hyper-V Server Pleaded with it Interestingly, if I perform the installation via a GUI installation, the thing just works! Now I know I could convert this to a Server Core role after installation, but this wouldn't teach me what was wrong in the first instance. I've probably got 10 pages through various Google searches, each page getting a little less relevant. The closest matches seem to have good information, but it doesn't seem to be the fix for my set-up. As a side note, I expected to be able to "tee" or "out-file" the error message into a text file, but couldn't get that to work either, so I've typed in the error message manually. Chaps, any suggestions, from the glaringly obvious, to the long-winded and complex? Thanks!

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• SBS 2008 Backup Drive Full - Error Code '2147942512'

  - by HK1

  We are using Windows Backup on SBS 2008 SP2 and backing up to 1TB external hard drives. Recently after switching drives our backup started failing because the backup drive is full and auto-delete isn't automatically deleting older backups/show copies. I'm trying to get more information to help me effectively prevent this problem from reoccurring in the future. How I can tell that the drive is getting full: In the event viewer under Windows Logs Application, I'm seeing Event ID 517 but it fails to show an intelligible description. However, under Applications and Services Logs Microsoft Windows Backup Operational, I'm seeing an event with the ID of 5 and a description like this: Backup started at '10/4/2011 12:30:12 PM' failed with following error code '2147942512'. One of the most informative posts I've found on this error is located on Microsoft's Technet Forums here. In that post, a Microsoft representative gives this hazy explanation: auto-delete feature to ensure that at least some old backup copies are maintained on the disk -- does not automatically delete backups if space utilization by older copies is less than 1/8 of the disk size or in other words, 13% of the disk size. that means if the one full backup copy does not fit in the 7/8 of the disk size, backup may fail with disk full error. auto-delete will not automatically delete older versions to reclaim more older versions of backup. In the above explanation, I do not understand what is meant by "older copies" except that it appears that anything older than the very last shadow copy would be considered "older copies". I'm going to make the assumption that this problem where auto-delete will not work will affect any hard drive that is large enough to make an effective backup drive, or in other words, any hard drive that is large enough to hold more than one backup/shadow copy at once. The same MS representative proposes the solution of using a larger backup drive. I can't understand how this will help. It appears to me it will simply delay the problem until a later date. In order to resolve this problem for now, I did the following: Assign the backup drive a disk letter under disk management. Run the command line with Administrative rights. diskshadow.exe [enter] delete shadows oldest x: [enter] (where X: is the letter you assigned your backup drive) I manually ran the above command some 60 or 80 times to free up about 200 GB of space on my 1 Terrabyte External Hard drive. However, I do not feel this is a satisfactory solution to prevent the problem from happening again in the future. Does anyone have a solution to prevent your Windows Server backup drive from getting full?

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• How to start networking on a wired interface before logon in Ubuntu Desktop Edition

  - by Burly

  Problem Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition (and possibly previous versions as well, I haven't tested them) has no network connections after boot until at least 1 user logs in. This means any services that require networking (e.g. openssh-server) are not available until someone logs in locally either via gdm, kdm, or a TTY. Background Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition uses the NetworkManager service to take commands from the nm-applet in Gnome (or it's equivalent in KDE). As I understand it, while NetworkManager is running at boot, it is not issued any commands to connect until you login for the first time because nm-applet isn't running until you login and your Gnome session starts (or similar for KDE). I'm not sure what prompts NetworkManager to connect to the network when you login via a TTY. There are several relevant variables involved in starting up the network connections including: Wired vs Wireless (and the resulting drivers, SSID, passwords, and priorities) Static vs DHCP Multiple interfaces Constraints Support Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (bonus points for additional supported versions) Support wired eth0 interface Receive an IP address via DHCP Receive DNS information via DHCP (obviously the DHCP server must provide this information) Enable networking at the proper time (e.g. some time after file systems are loaded but before network services like ssh start) Switching distros or versions (e.g. to Server Edition) is not an acceptable solution Switching to a Static IP configuration is not an acceptable solution Question How to start networking on a wired interface before logon in Ubuntu Desktop Edition? What I have tried Per this guide, adding the following entry into /etc/network/interfaces so that NetworkManager won't manage the eth0 interface: auth eth0 iface inet dhcp After reboot eth0 is down. Issuing ifconfig eth0 up brings the interface up but it receives no IP address. Issuing dhclient eth0 instead Does bring up the interface and it Does receive an IP address. Completely removing the NetworkManager package in addition to the settings above. I'm a bit confused with the whole UpStart/SysVinit mangling that's going in Ubuntu currently (I'm more familiar with the CentOS world). However, directly issuing sudo /etc/init.d/networking start Or sudo start networking does not bring up the eth0 interface at all, much less get an IP address. See-Also How to force NetworkManager to make a connection before login? References Ubuntu Desktop Edition Ubuntu Networking Configuration Using Command Line Automatic Network Configuration Via Command-Line Start network connection before login

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• Partitioning recommendations for a Proxmox VM Server (OpenVZ)

  - by luison

  We are new to virtualization and we are planning to turn our online server into a virualized one, mainly for maintenance, backup and recovery improvements. Initially we would only have one real virtual system with load plus 1-3 copys for testing and recovering and maybe a small centralized syslog virtual machine. We would like, if possible the host machine to include an iptables plus rsync to back up to other machines and some other global security systems. Due to this and the offerings of our hosting supplier we are mainly considering Proxmox for its simplicity (we like the idea of its web admin panel) and as I also understand that the container approach of OpenVMZ systems may fit well resource wise with our setup. The base system comes with debian so we can personalise it to our requirements. Proxmox installations default installs an LVM partition for the VMs. Our doubts are with the fact of what would be the best partition structure for this considering that: we would like to have a mirror of the root partition we could boot from if required (our provider supports booting the system from another partition via control panel) we ideally would like to have a partition that could be shared among the VM systems. We still don't know if this is possible directly with OpenVMZ containers, otherwise we are considering doing this by sharing it via NFS on the host machine. we want to use the backup system available on the proxmox host administrator to programme VMs backups and then rsync it to another machine. With this based on a Linux Raid of aprox (750Gb) we are considering something like: ext3_1/ - (20Gb) ext3_2/bak_root - (20Gb) mostly unmounted, root partition sync LVM_1 /var/lib/vz - (390Gb) partition for virtual images LVM_2 /shared_data - (30Gb) LVM_3 /backups - (300Gb) where all backups would be allocated Our initial tests with Proxmox seem to have issues with snapshots backups like this, perhaps caused by the fact that they can not be done to another LVM partition (error: command 'lvcreate --size 1024M --snapshot --name vzsnap-ns204084.XXX.net-0 /dev/pve/LV' failed with exit code 5) in which case we might have to use a standart ext3 partition (but unsure if we can do this with the 4 primary partition limitations). Does this makes more or less sense? Would it be mad to for example write VMs /var/logs to a NFS mounted partition (on the host system)? Are their any other easier ways to mount host system partitions (or folders) to the VMs?

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• VMware Player loses internet connectivity

  - by Martha

  Periodically, the internet simply stops working in my virtual machine, and the only way I can get it working again is to restart the host computer. Since I use the virtual machine specifically for testing web pages, this is, shall we say, a bother. Details: I have Windows XP Pro running in VMware Player (v. 3.0.0 build-203739) on a Windows 7 host. It's set to NAT (shared IP address) because the firewall won't allow a bridged connection. Every couple of days or so, first the internet slows down to a crawl, then eventually it stops working altogether. Both VMWare and the virtual OS report that they are connected, everything looks just peachy, I can reach the internet from the host, but on the VM, all web pages time out and/or report that the server could not be found. (Browser-independent; tried with IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.) When this happens, the only way I've found to restore the internet connectivity is to restart the host machine. Restarting the VM doesn't help, nor does refreshing network connections on either the host or the guest. (Although I'm not entirely sure I've found the proper way to refresh a network connection in Windows 7...) I have not noticed any predictability about when the problem occurs, i.e. it's not immediately after I do anything special. It seems to occur mostly after putting the host to sleep once or twice, but it has happened even if the host has been in continuous use. It also seems independent of when I start using the VM - sometimes, I wake up the VM and the internet is really slow in it, then eventually stops working altogether; other times, I wake up the VM, use it perfectly happily for a while, then suddenly the internet is gone. Does anyone know why this is occurring? Failing that, is there a workaround that's less drastic than restarting the host? (Windows 7 startup times are blazingly fast compared to previous versions of Windows, but it's still a hassle to close all my programs and reopen them again.) Edit: while badges overall are nice, the Tumbleweed badge isn't helping me to solve my problem. Hasn't anyone encountered anything even remotely similar?

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• Creating a dynamic lacp trunk from HP Procurve 2412zl to Proliant DL380 G7

  - by Maalobs

  I'm configuring an IEEE 802.3ad (LACP) dynamic trunk from a HP Procurve 2412zl (firmware version K.15.07) switch to a HP Proliant DL380 G7 server. The DL380 has 4 NICs and is running Win2008 R2, so I'm teaming the NICs together and leaving everything on the recommended "automatic" setting in the HP NIC configuration tool. The server is one of two, they'll be connected on interfaces F17-F20 and F21-F24 respectively on the switch. I need the servers in a separate VLAN, here is the configuration for the VLAN: vlan 10 name "Lab_Mgmt" untagged B2,F17-F24 ip address 172.22.71.3 255.255.255.0 tagged B21 exit There is a DHCP-relay into the VLAN 10 from another device beyond interface B21. The Advanced Traffic Management Guide says that in order to run a dynamic LACP trunk on another VLAN besides the DEFAULT_VLAN, you need to first enable GVRP and then use "forbid" to stop the interfaces from automatically joining DEFAULT_VLAN when the dynamic trunk is created. GVRP brings some other stuff with it that I don't want or need, so I disable it with "unknown-vlans disable" on all other interfaces. Here is how I do it: procurve-5412zl-1(config)# gvrp procurve-5412zl-1(config)# interface A1-A24,B1-B24,C1-C24,D1-D10,D13-D24,E1-E24, F1-F16,K1,K2 unknown-vlans disable procurve-5412zl-1(config)# vlan 1 forbid F17-F24 procurve-5412zl-1(config)# interface F17-F20 lacp active The result afterwards looks all successful: procurve-5412zl-1(config)# show trunks Load Balancing Method: L3-based (Default), L2-based if non-IP traffic Port | Name Type | Group Type ---- + -------------------------------- --------- + ------ -------- F17 | XYZTEAM3_NIC1 100/1000T | Dyn2 LACP F18 | XYZTEAM3_NIC2 100/1000T | Dyn2 LACP F19 | XYZTEAM3_NIC3 100/1000T | Dyn2 LACP F20 | XYZTEAM3_NIC4 100/1000T | Dyn2 LACP procurve-5412zl-1(config)# vlan 10 procurve-5412zl-1(vlan-10)# show lacp LACP LACP Trunk Port LACP Admin Oper Port Enabled Group Status Partner Status Key Key ---- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------ ------ F17 Active Dyn2 Up Yes Success 0 0 F18 Active Dyn2 Up Yes Success 0 0 F19 Active Dyn2 Up Yes Success 0 0 F20 Active Dyn2 Up Yes Success 0 0 On the Proliant server, the NIC configuration Tool is also indicating that a 802.3ad dynamic trunk has been established. Everything should be good, but it isn't. The server is not getting an IP-address from the DHCP, which it does if I'm not enabling LACP. If I configure the server to a static IP-address on the VLAN 10 subnet, it can't even ping the switch IP-address, much less anything outside of the VLAN. The switch can't ping the server either. I did another attempt with F17-F20 tagged, and checking the box "Default Native Tag (VLAN 10)" in the NIC configuration tool on the server, but there was no difference. Does anyone have any idea what I might have missed?

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• Win7 playback of dvr-ms files stutters

  - by Jim Lynn

  I've just had to install Windows 7 on my Media Center machine because my Vista installation had a faulty drive. I've got the latest drivers that I can find - Intel 945GM integrated Graphics, Realtek audio drivers. Things are working OK with one exception. Playback of old recordings, from dvr-ms format files, is choppy. The picture freezes for a fraction of a second, then quickly catches up. The sound is uninterrupted and doesn't pause. These freezes happen once every 5 seconds or so. It's very regular. Playback of Live TV from the digital tuner is perfectly smooth. DVD playback is perfectly smooth. As an experiment, I used the MPEG editing package VideoReDo to create a small test file in three different formats. This program takes the raw MPEG streams and repackages them into the desired container. I took the same clip and created three files in three formats: dvr-ms (Microsoft's old recorded TV format); mpg (standard MPEG); and ts (raw MPEG transport stream of the kind often produced by PVRs). When these three files are played back under Windows 7, the mpg and ts files play smoothly, but the dvr-ms file stutters. The last piece of data I have is that two other Windows 7 machines can play back dvr-ms files smoothly with no stuttering. One is a netbook, with less grunt than the media centre. So there must be something specific about my Media Center machine that's causing the problem. Does anyone have any idea where I can look now? I don't know much about AV software, codecs, filter graphs etc. but I suspect that's where the problem lies. Rendering the video isn't the problem, but extracting the streams is. How would I go about diagnosing the problem? Edited to add: I just used the GraphStudio tool to look at the filter graph on the offending PC. The filter graph it uses by default for dvr-ms looks identical to the other machines, and, interestingly, when I play the files using GraphStudio they run smoothly. Under Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center they stutter. I'd like to see the filter graph for WMP but GraphStudio won't show it. It looks like WMP and WMC are using a different decoding path to GraphStudio. Edited again to add: Today I purchased a new HDTV. The same Media Center driving the TV at 1080p is now playing back the old Recorded TV files smoothly, without stuttering. So whatever the cause of the original problem, using a different resolution seems to have removed the problem. It might also explain why nobody else has had this problem. I doubt many people use Media Centre with a 14in portable TV.

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• Is there a way to route all traffic from Android through a proxy/tunnel to my Tomato router?

  - by endolith

  I'd like to be able to connect my Android phone to public Wi-Fi points with unencrypted connections, but People can see what I'm doing by intercepting my radio transmissions People who own the access point can see what I'm doing. There are tools like WeFi and probably others to automatically connect to access points, but I don't trust random APs. I'd like all my traffic to go through an encrypted tunnel to my home router, and from there out to the Internet. I've done such tunnels from other computers with SSH/SOCKS and PPTP before. Is there any way to do this with Android? I've asked the same question on Force Close, so I'll change this question to be about both sides of the tunnel. More specifically: My phone now has CyanogenMod 4.2.3 My router currently has Tomato Version 1.25 I'm willing to change the router firmware, but I was having issues with DD-WRT disconnecting, which is why I'm using Tomato. Some possible solutions: SSH with dynamic SOCKS proxy: Android supposedly supports this through ConnectBot, but I don't know how to get it to route all traffic. Tomato supports this natively. I've been using this with MyEntunnel for my web browsing at work. Requires setting up each app to go through the proxy, though. PPTP: Android supports this natively. Tomato does not support this, unless you get the jyavenard mod and compile it? I previously used PPTP for web browsing at work and in China because it's native in Windows and DD-WRT. After a while I started having problems with it, then I started having problems with DD-WRT, so I switched to the SSH tunnel instead. Also it supposedly has security flaws, but I don't understand how big of a problem it is. IPSec L2TP: Android (phone) and Windows (work/China) both support this natively I don't know of a router that does. I could run it on my computer using openswan, but then there are two points of failure. OpenVPN: CyanogenMod apparently includes this, and now has an entry to create a new OpenVPN in the normal VPN interface, but I have no idea how to configure it. TunnelDroid apparently handles some of this. Future versions will have native support in the VPN settings? Tomato does not support this, but there are mods that do? I don't know how to configure this, either. TomatoVPN roadkill mod SgtPepperKSU mod Thor mod I could also run a VPN server on my desktop, I guess, though that's less reliable and presumably slower than running it in the router itself. I could change the router firmware, but I'm wary of more fundamental things breaking. Tomato has been problem-free for the regular stuff. Related: Anyone set up a SSH tunnel to their (rooted) G1 for browsing?

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