hardware sharing - Page 345

Getting Started with Kinect for Windows.

- by Vishal

Hello folks, Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day. Minority Report Movie clip. Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and recently on Feb 1st 2012, Microsoft released the official Kinect for Windows SDK. That’s just 10 years from the movie release. Although, the product is in it early stages but with developer creativity and continuously improving hardware, those features shown in the movie are not very far away from becoming a reality. Soon after releasing the SDK, Microsoft again announced in March the release of its new Kinect for Windows SDK version 1.5 which is coming out in sometime May. More history about Kinect. Anyways, so for a newbie with Kinect, where would you start. Here is what I would suggest you can do. Watch the Kinect for Windows Quick start Series by Den Fernandez. Download the Kinect for Windows SDK and start playing around with the demos in it. It also comes with some basic Kinect documentation. Coding4Fun Kinect Projects | Lot many more videos and open sources projects information. Kinect for Windows Session at Techdays NL demo by Jesus Rodriguez. Book: Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK. | I did go through few of the chapters in this book and based on that, it does talk deeply about core Kinect concepts but in very easy to understand way. I would definitely suggest this book for any Kinect developers. I liked the way it explained the Gestures recognition in Chapter 6. Buy your Kinect device from either Amazon or NewEgg. You will get it cheaper then buying it from Microsoft Store. Personally, I love Newegg.com as I never had any order related or shipping issues with them. I always hate developing UI application but well, you would need to get your hands dirty with WPF too in order to work with Kinect. So get started with WPF concepts too. I will keep adding stuff to the list once I come across them but so far the above list would definitely get you started building your first Kinect apps. Till then Happy Kinecting…!!!!! Thanks, Vishal Mody

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How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

- by Carlos

I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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Playing a video logs me out

- by Kartick Vaddadi

When I try to play a video in vlc, totem or banshee, it immediately logs me out. Sometimes this happens when I try to full screen the video. This seems to happen only after upgrading to ubuntu 11, and happens for multiple kinds of files, like avi and m4v. The motherboard is Asus a8v-mx. Please help me fix my ubuntu installation. Thanks. Here are the relevant entries from syslog: 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.157457] powernow-k8: Hardware error - pending bit very stuck - no further pstate changes possible May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.158634] powernow-k8: transition frequency failed May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.264015] powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.306466] agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.306489] agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V3 device into 8x mode May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.306562] pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V3 device into 8x mode May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.372044] powernow-k8: error - out of sync, fix 0x2 0xa, vid 0x4 0x4 May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.372055] powernow-k8: ph2 null fid transition 0xa May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 1987 of process 1987 (n/a) owned by '105' high priority at nice level -11. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 1988 of process 1987 (n/a) owned by '105' RT at priority 5. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 1989 of process 1987 (n/a) owned by '105' RT at priority 5. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. May 1 21:12:32 enlightenment gdm-simple-greeter[1975]: Gtk-WARNING: /build/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.24.4/gtk/gtkwidget.c:5687: widget not within a GtkWindow May 1 21:12:32 enlightenment gdm-simple-greeter[1975]: WARNING: Unable to load CK history: no seat-id found May 1 21:12:34 enlightenment gdm-session-worker[1978]: GLib-GObject-CRITICAL: g_value_get_boolean: assertion `G_VALUE_HOLDS_BOOLEAN (value)' failed May 1 21:12:38 enlightenment gdm-session-worker[1978]: pam_sm_authenticate: Called May 1 21:12:38 enlightenment gdm-session-worker[1978]: pam_sm_authenticate: username = [rama] May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 2108 of process 2108 (n/a) owned by '1000' high priority at nice level -11. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 2 users. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment pulseaudio[2108]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 2111 of process 2108 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 5. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 5 threads of 2 processes of 2 users. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 2112 of process 2

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Cannot get Virtualbox to install properly on Ubuntu 12.04

- by lopac1029

I cannot get Virtualbox to install properly on my 12.04. I first went with a manual install for the .deb from the old builds section of the Virtualbox page. That .deb opened up the Software Center and installed. Then I got the error coming up of VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. which I can only assume was due to my Ubuntu version being 32-bit (System Details - Overview - OC type: 32-bit, right?) So I followed these instructions to remove the .deb manually, restarted my laptop, and then FOUND the actual Virtualbox install in the Software Center and installed from that (assuming it would give me the correct version I need for my system) So after all that (and then some), I'm still getting the same error when I connect to my new job's project in Virtualbox. Can anyone point me in the right direction of what to do here? This is the first time I've ever worked with Virtualbox, and no one at this company is using Ubuntu, so I'm on my own here. EDIT: Here is the direct info from running the 2 suggested commands Inspiron-1750-brick:~ $lscpu Architecture: i686 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 2 On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel CPU family: 6 Model: 23 Stepping: 10 CPU MHz: 2100.000 BogoMIPS: 4189.45 L1d cache: 32K L1i cache: 32K L2 cache: 2048K Inspiron-1750-brick:~ $cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz stepping : 10 microcode : 0xa07 cpu MHz : 1200.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm bogomips : 4189.80 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz stepping : 10 microcode : 0xa07 cpu MHz : 1200.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm bogomips : 4189.45 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:

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Updating a database connection password using a script

- by Tim Dexter

An interesting customer requirement that I thought was worthy of sharing today. Thanks to James for the requirement and Bryan for the proposed solution and me for testing the solution and proving it works :0) A customers implementation of Sarbanes Oxley requires them to change all database account passwords every 90 days. This is scripted leveraging shell scripts today for most of their environments. But how can they manage the BI Publisher connections? Now, the customer is running 11g and therefore using weblogic on the middle tier, which is the first clue to Bryans proposed solution. To paraphrase and embellish Bryan's solution a little; why not use a JNDI connection from BIP to the database. Then employ the web logic scripting engine to make updates to the JNDI as needed? BIP is completely uninvolved and with a little 'timing' users will be completely unaware of the password updates i.e. change the password when reports are not being executed. Perfect! James immediately tracked down the WLST script that could be used here, http://middlewaremagic.com/weblogic/?p=4261 (thanks Ravish) Now it was just a case of testing the theory. Some steps: Create the JNDI connection in WLS Create the JNDI connection in BI Publisher pointing to the WLS connection Build new data models using or re-point data sources to use the JNDI connection. Create the WLST script to update the WLS JNDI password as needed. Test! Some details. Creating the JNDI connection in web logic is pretty straightforward. Log into hte console and look for Data Sources under the Services section of the home page and click it Click New >> Generic Datasource Give the connection a name. For the JNDI name, prefix it with 'jdbc/' so I have 'jdbc/localdb' - this name is important you'll need it on the BIP side. Select your db type - this will influence the drivers and information needed on the next page. Being a company man, Im using an Oracle db. Click Next Select the driver of choice, theres lots I know, you can read about them I just chose 'Oracle's Driver (Thin) for Instance connections; Versions 9.0.1 and later' Click Next >> Next Fill out the db name (SID), server, port, username to connect and password >> Next Test the config to ensure you can connect. >> Next Now you need to deploy the connection to your BI server, select it and click Next. You're done with the JNDI config. Creating the JNDI connection on the Publisher side is covered here. Just remember to the connection name you created in WLS e.g. 'jdbc/localdb' Not gonna tell you how to do this, go read the user guide :0) Suffice to say, it works. This requires a little reading around the subject to understand the scripting engine and how to execute scripts. Nicely covered here. However a bit of googlin' and I found an even easier way of running the script. ${ServerHome}/common/bin/wlst.sh updatepwd.py Where updatepwd.py is my script file, it can be in another directory. As part of the wlst.sh script your environment is set up for you so its very simple to execute. The nitty gritty: Need to take Ravish's script above and create a file with a .py extension. Its going to need some modification, as he explains on the web page, to make it work in your environment. I played around with it for a while but kept running into errors. The script as is, tries to loop through all of your connections and modify the user and passwords for each. Not quite what we are looking for. Remember our requirement is to just update the password for a given connection. I also found another issue with the script. WLS 10.x does not allow updates to passwords using clear type ie un-encrypted text while the server is in production mode. Its a bit much to set it back to developer mode bounce it, change the passwords and then bounce and then change back to production and bounce again. After lots of messing about I finally came up with the following: ############################################################################# # # Update password for JNDI connections # ############################################################################# print("*** Trying to Connect.... *****") connect('weblogic','welcome1','t3://localhost:7001') print("*** Connected *****") edit() startEdit() print ("*** Encrypt the password ***") en = encrypt('hr') print "Encrypted pwd: ", en print ("*** Changing pwd for LocalDB ***") dsName = 'LocalDB' print 'Changing Password for DataSource ', dsName cd('/JDBCSystemResources/'+dsName+'/JDBCResource/'+dsName+'/JDBCDriverParams/'+dsName) set('PasswordEncrypted',en) save() activate() Its pretty simple and you can expand on it to loop through the data sources and change each as needed. I have hardcoded the password into the file but you can pass it as a parameter as needed using the properties file method. Im not going to get into the detail of that here but its covered with an example here. Couple of points to note: 1. The change to the password requires a server bounce to get the changes picked up. You can add that to the shell script you will use to call the script above. 2. The script above needs to be run from the MW_HOME\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain directory to get the encryption libraries set correctly. My command to run the whole script was: d:\oracle\bi_mw\wlserver_10.3\common\bin\wlst.cmd updatepwd.py - where wlst.cmd is the scripting command line and updatepwd.py was my update password script above. I have not quite spoon fed everything you need to make it a robust script but at least you know you can do it and you can work out the rest I think :0)

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OBIA on Teradata - Part 2 Teradata DB Utilization for ETL

- by Mohan Ramanuja

Techniques to Monitor Queries and ETL Load CPU and Disk I/OSelect username, processor, sum(cputime), sum(diskio) from dbc.ampusage where processor ='1-0' order by 2,3 descgroup by 1,2;UserName Vproc Sum(CpuTime) Sum(DiskIO)AC00916 10 6.71 24975 List Hardware ErrorsThere is a possibility that the system might have adequate disk space but out of free cylinders. In order to monitor hardware errors, the following query was used:Select * from dbc.Software_Event_Log where Text like '%restart%' order by thedate, thetime;For active users, usage of CPU and analysis of bad CPU to I/O ratiosSelect * from DBC.AMPUSAGE where username='CRMSTGC_DEV_ID'; AND SUBSTR(ACCOUNTNAME,6,3)='006'; Usage By I/OSelect AccountName, UserName, sum(CpuTime), sum(DiskIO) from DBC.AMPUSAGE group by AccountName, UserName Order by Sum(DiskIO) desc; AccountName UserName Sum(CpuTime) Sum(DiskIO)$M1$10062209 AB89487 374628.612 7821847$M1$10062210 AB89487 186692.244 2799412$M1$10062213 COC_ETL_ID 119531.068 331100426$M1$10062200 AB63472 118973.316 109881984$M1$10062204 AB63472 110825.356 94666986$M1$10062201 AB63472 110797.976 75016994$M1$10062202 AC06936 100924.448 407839702$M1$10062204 AB67963 0 4$M1$10062207 AB91990 0 2$M1$10062208 AB63461 0 24$M1$10062211 AB84332 0 6$M1$10062214 AB65484 0 8$M1$10062205 AB77529 0 58$M1$10062210 AC04768 0 36$M1$10062206 AB54940 0 22 Usage By CPUSelect AccountName, UserName, sum(CpuTime), sum(DiskIO) from DBC.AMPUSAGE group by AccountName, UserName Order by Sum(CpuTime) desc;AccountName UserName Sum(CpuTime) Sum(DiskIO)$M1$10062209 AB89487 374628.612 7821847$M1$10062210 AB89487 186692.244 2799412$M1$10062213 COC_ETL_ID 119531.068 331100426$M1$10062200 AB63472 118973.316 109881984$M1$10062204 AB63472 110825.356 94666986$M1$10062201 AB63472 110797.976 75016994$M2$100622105813004760047LOAD T23_ETLPROC_ENT 0 6$M1$10062215 AA37720 0 180$M1$10062209 AB81670 0 6Select count(distinct vproc) from dbc.ampusage;432select * from dbc.dbcinfo;AccountName UserName CpuTime DiskIO CpuTimeNorm Vproc VprocType Model$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.32 1764 12.7423999023438 0 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.28 1730 11.1495999145508 3 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.304 1736 12.1052799072266 4 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.248 1731 9.87535992431641 7 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.332 1731 13.2202398986816 8 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.284 1712 11.3088799133301 11 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.24 1757 9.55679992675781 12 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.292 1737 11.6274399108887 15 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.268 1753 10.6717599182129 16 AMP 2580$M1$10062205 CRM_STGC_DEV_ID 0.276 1732 10.9903199157715 19 AMP 2580select * from dbc.dbcinfo;InfoKey InfoDataLANGUAGE SUPPORT MODE StandardRELEASE 12.00.03.03VERSION 12.00.03.01a

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Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 on 12.10 Quantal: fglrx (legacy) 12.6 unsupported, what to do?

- by Andrew Mao

After upgrading to 12.10 quantal, the packaged version of fglrx no longer works. I discovered that this is because there is a separate 'legacy' fglrx driver for the HD 2k-4k series cards, but it is incompatible with the xorg server on 12.10. This is the most current version of the driver for HD 2000 through HD 4000 series cards. You can't use the non-legacy fglrx driver, but you can use the open-source radeon driver if you prefer your WM compositing to be laggy and your YouTube videos to play like they would on a Pentium MMX series: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst126legacyproducts.aspx Usually this driver can be installed in the following way, necessary because apt-get install fglrx would pull in the non-legacy driver: wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/legacy/amd-driver-installer-12.6-legacy-x86.x86_64.zip unzip amd-driver-installer-* sudo sh ./amd-driver-installer-*.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/quantal sudo dpkg -i fglrx*.deb sudo aticonfig --initial -f If you use a different version of fglrx (for example, a newer 12.9 that doesn't support those cards) then the final command will give you an error no supported hardware detected or something similar. However, everything works at this point and you will get a reasonable xorg.conf: ... other stuff Section "Device" Identifier "aticonfig-Device[0]-0" Driver "fglrx" BusID "PCI:1:5:0" EndSection ... other stuff At this point you're supposed to reboot and everything will be working with the fglrx driver. However, upon rebooting, you'll be treated to the following errors in Xorg.0.log when fglrx attempts to load: (EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so: undefined symbol: noXFree86DRIExtension Some searching around will show that this is a problem with the legacy ATI drivers not supporting xserver 1.13 or newer. (Arch Linux thread) ATI has released a fixed driver for its most recent (HD 5000 series or later) cards, but not for the 'legacy' cards yet. The non-legacy ATI drivers can't be used with the old cards. What should an Ubuntu user, using one of these HD 2000-4000 series cards, do? Wait for an updated 'legacy' ATI driver that properly works with xserver 1.13? Downgrade back to 12.04 Precise, which uses xserver 1.11? Try to downgrade xserver on 12.10 Quantal to 1.12, which could possibly break Unity and GNOME? Forced upgrade to HD 5000 series or later card? (Not possible with integrated graphics...) Some other 1337 action that fixes this problem painlessly?

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Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

- by Tanu Sood

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:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; 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mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. 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:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC. He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors. Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC. Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries. His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC. He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail. Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC. He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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Chargeback and showback...both a 'throw back'

- by llaszews

Been getting asked again by customers and partners about chargeback and showback in the cloud so thought I would blog on my response to this question. Charge Back background, information and industry analysis: Cloud computing is all about shared resources. These shared resources are computer servers (including memory and CPU), network devices, hard disk storage, database servers, application servers, cooling, floor space, electricity and more. These resources are shared by departments within a company, or by a number of companies, when resources are hosted in the public or hybrid cloud. Currently, hosting providers that run other companies on their cloud platforms do not have an accurate way to measure the shared computing resources used by a specific user let alone used by a specific customer. Additionally, companies running their own cloud data centers, for private or hybrid clouds, have no way of measure and charging back the departments in the company that are using these shared cloud resources. In both cases, the lack of determine shared resource costs and to charge them back to the company, department or user that is using this resources is limited a clear measure of business benefit and impacting company’s ability to measure the Return on Investment (ROI). An IT chargeback system is an accounting strategy that applies the costs of IT services, hardware or software to the business unit in which they are used. This system contrasts with traditional IT accounting models in which a centralized department bears all of the IT costs in an organization and those costs are treated simply as corporate overhead. Showback involves showing the IT costs to a department or customer but not actually charging them for their IT usage. Showback is a gradual method of introducing chargeback into an enterprise. Most companies implement a show back mechanism before a full chargeback system is put in place. Oracle chargeback product: Oracle Enterprise Manager provides tools for defining detailed Chargeback plans spanning different metrics collected for each type of resources as well as defining Cost Centers for grouping costs across multiple developers. Chargeback plans can use not only usage based costs, but also configuration based costs (e.g. version of the platform) or fixed costs (e.g. flat-rate management fee). Chargeback has rich out of the box reports. Trending reports show how charge and resource consumption varies over time, while Summary reports show the breakdown of charges or usage by different dimensions such as Cost Center or Target Type. These reports help consumers in understanding how their charges relate to their consumption and also assist the IT department with budgeting and planning activities. With BI Publisher, the reports can be made available in a variety of formats such as PDF, HTML, Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

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DOAG 2012 and Educause 2012

- by Chris Kawalek

Oracle understands the value of desktop virtualization and how customers have really embraced it as a top tier method to deliver access to applications and data. Just as supporting operating systems other than Windows in the enterprise desktop space started to become necessary perhaps 5-7 years ago, supporting desktop virtualization with VDI, application virtualization, thin clients, and tablet access is becoming necessary today in 2012. Any application strategy needs to have a secure mobile component, and a solution that gives you a holistic strategy across both mobile and fixed-asset (i.e., desktop PCs) devices is crucial to success. This means it's probably useful to learn about desktop virtualization, even if it's not in your typical area of responsibility. A good way to do that is at one of the many trade shows where we exhibit. Here are two examples: DOAG 2012 Conference + Exhibition The DOAG Conference is fast approaching, starting November 20th in Nuremberg, Germany. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that we attended last year as well. This conference is fantastic for us because we get to speak directly to users of Oracle products. In many cases, those DBAs, IT managers, and other infrastructure folks are looking for ways to deal with the burgeoning BYOD model, as well as ways of streamlining their standard desktop and access technologies. We have a couple of sessions where you can learn a great deal about how Oracle can help with these points. Session Schedule (look under "Infrastruktur & Hardware") The two sessions focused on desktop virtualization are: Oracle VDI Best Practice unter Linux (Oracle VDI Best Practice Under Linux) Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Implementierungen und Praxiserfahrungen (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Implementations and Best Practices) We will also have experts on hand at the booth to answer your questions on using desktop virtualization. If you're at the show, please stop by and say hello to our team there! Educause 2012 Another good example is Educause. We've gone the last few years to show off a slough of education oriented applications and capabilities in the Oracle product portfolio. And every year, we display those applications through Oracle desktop virtualization. This means the demonstration can easily be setup ahead of time and replicated out to however many "demo pods" that we have available. There's no need for our product teams to setup individual laptops for demos -- we can display a standardized Windows desktop virtual machine with their apps all ready to go on a whole bunch of devices like your standard trade show laptop, our Sun Ray Clients, and iPad. Educause 2012 just wrapped, so we're sorry we missed you this year. But there is always next year! Until then, here are a few pictures from this year's show: You can also watch this video to see how Catholic Education Australia uses Oracle Secure Global Desktop to help cope with the ever changing ways that people access their applications. -Chris

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RPi and Java Embedded GPIO: Sensor Connections for Java Enabled Interface

- by hinkmond

Now we're ready to connect the hardware needed to make a static electricity sensor for the Raspberry Pi and use Java code to access it through a GPIO port. First, very carefully bend the NTE312 (or MPF-102) transistor "gate" pin (see the diagram on the back of the package or refer to the pin diagram on the Web). You can see it in the inset photo on the bottom left corner. I bent the leftmost pin of the NTE312 transistor as I held the flat part toward me. That is going to be your antenna. So, connect one of the jumper wires to the bent pin. I used the dark green jumper wire (looks almost black; coiled at the bottom) in the photo. Then push the other 2 pins of the transistor into your breadboard. Connect one of the pins to Pin # 1 (3.3V) on the GPIO header of your RPi. See the diagram if you need to glance back at it. In the photo, that's the orange jumper wire. And connect the final unconnected transistor pin to Pin # 22 (GPIO25) on the RPi header. That's the blue jumper wire in my photo. For reference, connect the LED anode (long pin on a common anode LED/short pin on a common cathode LED, check your LED pin diagram) to the same breadboard hole that is connecting to Pin # 22 (same row of holes where the blue wire is connected), and connect the other pin of the LED to GROUND (row of holes that connect to the black wire in the photo). Test by blowing up a balloon, rubbing it on your hair (or your co-worker's hair, if you are hair-challenged) to statically charge it, and bringing it near your antenna (green wire in the photo). The LED should light up when it's near and go off when you pull it away. If you need more static charge, find a co-worker with really long hair, or rub the balloon on a piece of silk (which is just as good but not as fun). Next blog post is where we do some Java coding to access this sensor on your RPi. Finally, back to software! Ha! Hinkmond

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One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

- by Bob Rhubart

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

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One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

- by Bob Rhubart

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

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Ubuntu 14.04 : Lost my sound randomly tried a few commands and I think I failed

- by Marc-Antoine Théberge

I lost my sound the other day and I tried to delete pulseaudio then reinstall, then I tried to delete it and install alsa, It did not work and I had to reinstall everything; overall bad idea... now I can't have any sound. Should I do a fresh install? I don't know how to boot an usb drive with GRUB... Here's my sysinfo System information report, generated by Sysinfo: 2014-05-28 05:45:58 http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsysinfo SYSTEM INFORMATION Running Ubuntu Linux, the Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) release. GNOME: 3.8.4 (Ubuntu 2014-03-17) Kernel version: 3.13.0-27-generic (#50-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 15 18:08:16 UTC 2014) GCC: 4.8 (i686-linux-gnu) Xorg: 1.15.1 (16 April 2014 01:40:08PM) (16 April 2014 01:40:08PM) Hostname: mark-laptop Uptime: 0 days 11 h 43 min CPU INFORMATION GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz Number of CPUs: 2 CPU clock currently at 1333.000 MHz with 512 KB cache Numbering: family(6) model(28) stepping(2) Bogomips: 3192.13 Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm dtherm MEMORY INFORMATION Total memory: 2007 MB Total swap: 1953 MB STORAGE INFORMATION SCSI device - scsi0 Vendor: ATA Model: ST9160310AS HARDWARE INFORMATION MOTHERBOARD Host bridge Intel Corporation Mobile 945GSE Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8340 PCI bridge(s) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) ISA bridge Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 830f IDE interface Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7-M Family) SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master]) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 830f GRAPHIC CARD VGA controller Intel Corporation Mobile 945GSE Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8340 SOUND CARD Multimedia controller Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 831a NETWORK Ethernet controller Qualcomm Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit or Fast Ethernet (rev b0) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8324

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Thought Oracle Usability Advisory Board Was Stuffy? Wrong. Justification for Attending OUAB: ROI

- by ultan o'broin

Looking for reasons tell your boss why your organization needs to join the Oracle Usability Advisory Board or why you need approval to attend one of its meetings (see the requirements)? Try phrases such as "Continued Return on Investment (ROI)", "Increased Productivity" or "Happy Workers". With OUAB your participation is about realizing and sustaining ROI across the entire applications life-cycle from input to designs to implementation choices and integration, usage and performance and on measuring and improving the onboarding and support experience. If you think this is a boring meeting of middle-aged people sitting around moaning about customizing desktop forms and why the BlackBerry is here to stay, think again! How about this for a rich agenda, all designed to engage the audience in a thought-provoking and feedback-illiciting day of swirling interactions, contextual usage, global delivery, mobility, consumerizationm, gamification and tailoring your implementation to reflect real users doing real work in real environments. Foldable, rollable ereader devices provide a newspaper-like UK for electronic news. Or a way to wrap silicon chips, perhaps. Explored at the OUAB Europe Meeting (photograph from Terrace Restaurant in TVP. Nom.) At the 7 December 2012 OUAB Europe meeting in Oracle Thames Valley Park, UK, Oracle partners and customers stepped up to the mic and PPT decks with a range of facts and examples to astound any UX conference C-level sceptic. Over the course of the day we covered much ground, but it was all related in a contextual, flexibile, simplication, engagement way aout delivering results for business: that means solving problems. This means being about the user and their tasks and how to make design and technology transforms work into a productive activity that users and bean counters will be excited by. The sessions really gelled for me: 1. Mobile design patterns and the powerful propositions for customers and partners offered by using the design guidance with Oracle ADF Mobile. Customers' and partners' developers existing ADF developers are now productive, efficient ADF Mobile developers applying proven UX guidance using ADF Mobile components and other Oracle Fusion Middleware in the development toolkit. You can find the Mobile UX Design Patterns and Guidance on Building Mobile Apps on OTN. 2. Oracle Voice and Apps. How this medium offers so much potentual in the enterprise and offers a window in Fusion Apps cloud webservices, Oracle RightNow NLP and Nuance technology. Exciting stuff, demoed live on a mobile phone. Stay tuned for more features and modalities and how you can tailor your own apps experience. 3. Oracle RightNow Natural Language Processing (NLP) Virtual Assistant technology (Ella): how contextual intervention and learning from users sessions delivers a great personalized UX for users interacting with Ella, a fifth generation VA to solve problems and seek knowledge. 4. BYOD Keynote: A balanced keynote address contrasting Fujitsu's explaining of the conceprt, challenges, and trends and setting the expectation that BYOD must be embraced in a flexible way, with the resolute, crafted high security enterprise requirements that nuancing the BYOD concept and proposals with the realities of their world of water tight information and device sharing policies. Fascinating stuff, as well providing anecdotes to make us thing about out own DYOD Deployments. One size does not fit all. 5. Icon Cultural Surveys Results and Insights Arising: Ever wondered about the cultural appropriateness of icons used in software UIs and how these icons assessed for global use? Or considered that social media "Like" icons might be unacceptable hand gestures in culture or enterprise? Or do the old world icons like Save floppy disk icons still find acceptable? Well the survey results told you. Challenges must be tested, over time, and context of use is critical now, including external factors such as the internet and social media adoption. Indeed the fears about global rejection of the face and hand icons was not borne out, and some of the more anachronistic icons (checkbooks, microphones, real-to-real tape decks, 3.5" floppies for "save") have become accepted metaphors for current actions. More importantly the findings brought into focus the reason for OUAB - engage with and illicit feedback though working groups before we build anything. 6. EReaders and Oracle iBook: What is the uptake and trends of ereaders? And how about a demo of an iBook with enterprise apps content? Well received by the audience, the session included a live running poll of ereader usage. 7. Gamification Design Jam: Fun, hands on event for teams of Oracle staff, partners and customers, actually building gamified flows, a practice that can be applied right away by customers and partners. 8. UX Direct: A new offering of usability best practices, coming to an external website for you in 2013. FInd a real user, observe their tasks, design and approve, build and measure. Simple stuff to improve apps implications no end. 9. FUSE (an internal term only, basically Fusion Simplified Experience): demo of the new Face of Fusion Applications: inherently mobile, simple to use, social, personalizable and FAST, three great demos from the HCM, CRM and ICT world on how these UX designs can be used in different ways. So, a powerful breadth and depth of UX solutions and opporunities for customers and partners to engage with and explore how they can make their users happy and benefit their business reaping continued ROI from those apps investments. Find out more about the OUAB and how to get involved here ...

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Oracle's Integrated Systems Management and Support Experience

- by Scott McNeil

With its recent launch, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g introduced a new approach to integrated systems management and support. What this means is taking both areas of IT management and vendor support and combining them into one integrated comprehensive and centralized platform. Traditional Ways Under the traditional method, IT operational teams would often focus on running their systems using management tools that weren’t connected to their vendor’s support systems. If you needed support with a product, administrators would often contact the vendor by phone or visit the vendor website for support and then log a service request in order to fix the issues. This method was also very time consuming, as administrators would have to collect their software configurations, operating systems and hardware settings, then manually enter them into an online form or recite them to a support analyst on the phone. For the vendor, they had to analyze all the configuration data to recreate the problem in order to solve it. This approach was very manual, uncoordinated and error-prone where duplication between the customer and vendor frequently occurred. A Better Support Experience By removing the boundaries between support, IT management tools and the customer’s IT infrastructure, Oracle paved the way for a better support experience. This was achieved through integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and My Oracle Support. Administrators can not only manage their IT infrastructure and applications through Oracle Enterprise Manager’s centralized console but can also receive proactive alerts and patch recommendations right within the console they use day-in-day-out. Having one single source of information saves time and potentially prevents unforeseen problems down the road. All for One, and One for All The first step for you is to allow Oracle Enterprise Manager to upload configuration data into Oracle’s secure configuration repository, where it can be analyzed for potential issues or conflicts for all customers. A fix to a problem encountered by one customer may actually be relevant to many more. The integration between My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager allows all customers who may be impacted by the problem to receive a notification about the fix. Once the alert appears in Oracle Enterprise Manager’s console, the administrator can take his/her time to do further investigations using automated workflows provided in Oracle Enterprise Manager to analyze potential conflicts. Finally, administrators can schedule a time to test and automatically apply the fix to all the systems that need it. In the end, this helps customers maintain their service levels without compromise and avoid experiencing unplanned downtime that may result from potential issues or conflicts. This new paradigm of integrated systems management and support helps customers keep their systems secure, compliant, and up-to-date, while eliminating the traditional silos between IT management and vendor support. Oracle’s next generation platform also works hand-in-hand to provide higher quality of service to business users while at the same time making life for administrators less complicated. For more information on Oracle’s integrated systems management and support experience, be sure to visit our Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Resource Center for the latest customer videos, webcast, and white papers.

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Correcting color-shifted mirrored i915 driver in 12.04?

- by Will Martin

I was called in to fix a friend's malfunctioning HP Pavilion. She's not sure exactly which model, but the sticker on the bottom says "G60". The problem was a failed upgrade to 12.04. I was able to mostly repair it with sudo apt-get -f install, which ran setup and configuration for several hundred packages. The biggest problem at the moment is Xorg. The login screen (lightdm) loads normally but at a reduced resolution (1024x768 instead of 1366x768). But once you log in, it looks like this: Observe that the colors of the dock on the left and the bar at the top are normal. But the background is filled with bizarro color-skewed ghost images of the desktop. In all cases, the actual contents of any programs you run is a totally illegible mess, except that the bar at the top of any program windows looks and acts normally. And the ghost images are interactive! For example, if you click the icon in the top right corner to get the "shut down" menu, the same menu will appear in the ghost images below. Starting a terminal will start a terminal window in both the real desktop and the ghost images, and moving it around updates both the real and ghost desktops. I suspect Xorg is using some kind of wrong driver and/or parameter for the graphics hardware. Here is the graphics-relevant portion of the lspci -v output: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 09) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 360b Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Capabilities: [e0] Vendor Specific Information: Len=0a <?> Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 360b Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 44 Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M] Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] I/O ports at 5110 [size=8] Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] Capabilities: [90] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit- Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 3 Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: i915 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 360b Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Memory at d2500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M] Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 3 I'm not sure what to check next. I would ordinarily check xorg.conf to see what it says, but that apparently doesn't exist any more, and my googling has not yielded any useful techniques for getting Xorg to tell me what settings it decided to use. The weird part is that it works fine on the login screen. It's only when you actually log in as a user that the display gets screwed up. Suggestions?

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Synchronizing ODSEE and OUD

- by Etienne Remillon

When it comes to synchronizing between ODSEE and OUD, what should be the best options ? Couple options are available - Use one of OUD internal capability called Replication Gateway - Use our synchronization tool called Directory Integration Platform part of Oracle Directory Services Plus - Manuel export and import Let's check pro and cons on each method. Replication Gateway is the natural, out of the box solution to perform the task. We created this as a feature of OUD because it works at our replication protocol level. The gateway perform the required adaptation between the ODSEE's replication protocol and OUD's one. The benefits of doing this is that it provide strong consistency between the to type of directories. This fully leverage conflict management implemented in the replication protocols to ensure that changes are applied in a coherent and ordered manner. It does not require specific modification on existing ODSEE production instances such as turning on "retro changelog". Changes are propagated at near speed of replication in both directions. Replication Gateway can also synchronize information that are stored internally in the directory server such as "xxxxx" account locking managed at ODSEE server level and not via the nsyyyy attribute. OUD replication gateway does no require any specific tools or installation specific procedure. It is manged like other OUD component with monitoring and configuration via the standard console. OUD Replication Gateway does not perform adaptation between ODSEE and OUD. Using Directory Integration Protocol as external component to OUD, brings flexibility in remapping and transformations between ODSEE and OUD. There is a price to pay in using DIP to perform the synchronization task. You will have to turn on the retro change log to get access to changes on the ODSEE side (this will impact disk and CPU usage and performances which could be a serious challenge for your existing ODSEE environment (if you have not provisioned additional hardware and instances). You will not benefits of conflict resolution management and this might have to be addressed at application level, which is not always possible to implement. Using export and import seams very simple, but this methodology cannot ensure an highly available deployment with up to date entries on booth sides. This solution can be used if full HA with up-to-date data is not needed (during synchronization time). It often used if data-cleaning need to take place to avoid polluting a new environment with old un-necessary data.

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Open port in gufw is closed, no incoming connection on deluge

- by user66987

I have a problem configuring gufw. I open ports on it, but when i test in deluge it shows as closed. Any help on setting up the firewall would be greatly appreciated. This is the output I get on the firewall in terminal: Active Internet connections (only servers) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1346/dnsmasq tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:631 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 970/cupsd tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:55521 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 17362/python tcp6 0 0 ::1:631 :::* LISTEN 970/cupsd tcp6 0 0 :::55521 :::* LISTEN 17362/python udp 0 0 10.0.0.125:1900 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:1900 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:1900 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53162 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53 0.0.0.0:* 1346/dnsmasq udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:68 0.0.0.0:* 1312/dhclient udp 0 0 10.0.0.125:36948 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:37240 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 10.0.0.125:6771 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:6771 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:6771 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 10.0.0.125:50034 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:58340 0.0.0.0:* 982/avahi-daemon: r udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5353 0.0.0.0:* 982/avahi-daemon: r udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:56947 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:57059 0.0.0.0:* 17362/python udp6 0 0 :::49793 :::* 982/avahi-daemon: r udp6 0 0 :::5353 :::* 982/avahi-daemon: r kenneth@kenneth-K53U:~$ sudo ufw status Status: aktive Til Handling Fra --- -------- --- 6881:6891/tcp ALLOW Anywhere 6881:6891/udp ALLOW Anywhere 55521/tcp ALLOW Anywhere 6881:6891/tcp ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 6881:6891/udp ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 55521/tcp ALLOW Anywhere (v6) I also want to be able to use the firewall with linuxdc, so I need other ports open as well. This is connected to the firewall. Because when I turn off the firewall, the port is open. So this is not a problem with my modem. Do I need the firewall? The broadband modem has a hardware firewall. Update: Forgot to add. When my firewall is inactive, it closes ports after a time. So when I use linuxdc, I have to flush iptabels and activating it again. Is this supposed to do this when the firewall is deactivated? Update again: All my ports are closed now, flushing the iptable does not work anymore. I have uninstalled gufw, but still all my ports are closed. And to say it again, this has nothing to do with my broadband modem since it worked when I used windows 7. I need help to open the ports.

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Five development tools I can't live without

- by bconlon

When applying to join Geeks with Blogs I had to specify the development tools I use every day. That got me thinking, it's taken a long time to whittle my tools of choice down to the selection I use, so it might be worth sharing. Before I begin, I appreciate we all have our preferred development tools, but these are the ones that work for me. Microsoft Visual Studio Microsoft Visual Studio has been my development tool of choice for more years than I care to remember. I first used this when it was Visual C++ 1.5 (hats off to those who started on 1.0) and by 2.2 it had everything I needed from a C++ IDE. Versions 4 and 5 followed and if I had to guess I would expect more Windows applications are written in VC++ 6 and VB6 than any other language. Then came the not so great versions Visual Studio .Net 2002 (7.0) and 2003 (7.1). If I'm honest I was still using v6. 2005 was better and 2008 was simply brilliant. Everything worked, the compiler was super fast and I was happy again...then came 2010...oh dear. 2010 is a big step backwards for me. It's not encouraging for my upcoming WPF exploits that 2010 is fronted in WPF technology, with the forever growing Find/Replace dialog, the issues with C++ intellisense, and the buggy debugger. That said it is still my tool of choice but I hope they sort the issue in SP1. I've tried other IDEs like Visual Age and Eclipse, but for me Visual Studio is the best. A really great tool. Liquid XML Studio XML development is a tricky business. The W3C standards are often difficult to get to the bottom of so it's great to have a graphical tool to help. I first used Liquid Technologies 5 or 6 years back when I needed to process XML data in C++. Their excellent XML Data Binding tool has an easy to use Wizard UI (as compared to Castor or JAXB command line tools) and allows you to generate code from an XML Schema. So instead of having to deal with untyped nodes like with a DOM parser, instead you get an Object Model providing a custom API in C++, C#, VB etc. More recently they developed a graphical XML IDE with XML Editor, XSLT, XQuery debugger and other XML tools. So now I can develop an XML Schema graphically, click a button to generate a Sample XML document, and click another button to run the Wizard to generate code including a Sample Application that will then load my Sample XML document into the generated object model. This is a very cool toolset. Note: XML Data Binding is nothing to do with WPF Data Binding, but I hope to cover both in more detail another time. .Net Reflector Note: I've just noticed that starting form the end of February 2011 this will no longer be a free tool !! .Net Reflector turns .Net byte code back into C# source code. But how can it work this magic? Well the clue is in the name, it uses reflection to inspect a compiled .Net assembly. The assembly is compiled to byte code, it doesn't get compiled to native machine code until its needed using a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The byte code still has all of the information needed to see classes, variables. methods and properties, so reflector gathers this information and puts it in a handy tree. I have used .Net Reflector for years in order to understand what the .Net Framework is doing as it sometimes has undocumented, quirky features. This really has been invaluable in certain instances and I cannot praise enough kudos on the original developer Lutz Roeder. Smart Assembly In order to stop nosy geeks looking at our code using a tool like .Net Reflector, we need to obfuscate (mess up) the byte code. Smart Assembly is a tool that does this. Again I have used this for a long time. It is very quick and easy to use. Another excellent tool. Coincidentally, .Net Reflector and Smart Assembly are now both owned by Red Gate. Again kudos goes to the original developer Jean-Sebastien Lange. TortoiseSVN SVN (Apache Subversion) is a Source Control System developed as an open source project. TortoiseSVN is a graphical UI wrapper over SVN that hooks into Windows Explorer to enable files to be Updated, Committed, Merged etc. from the right click menu. This is an essential tool for keeping my hard work safe! Many years ago I used Microsoft Source Safe and I disliked CVS type systems. But TortoiseSVN is simply the best source control tool I have ever used. --- So there you have it, my top 5 development tools that I use (nearly) every day and have helped to make my working life a little easier. I'm sure there are other great tools that I wish I used but have never heard of, but if you have not used any of the above, I would suggest you check them out as they are all very, very cool products. #

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Session Report - Java on the Raspberry Pi

- by Janice J. Heiss

On mid-day Wednesday, the always colorful Oracle Evangelist Simon Ritter demonstrated Java on the Raspberry Pi at his session, “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?”. The Raspberry Pi consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there is a single feature that makes the Raspberry Pi significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things really makes it stand out. First, it's $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. You do have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine and Acorn RISC Machine) processor is noteworthy, because it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. When you add in the enormous community support, it offers a great platform for teaching everyone about computing.”Some 200 enthusiastic attendees were present at the session which had the feel of Simon Ritter sharing a fun toy with friends. The main point of the session was to show what Oracle was doing to support Java on the Raspberry Pi in a way that is entertaining and fun. Ritter pointed out that, in addition to being great for teaching, it’s an excellent introduction to the ARM architecture, and runs well with Java and will get better once it has official hard float support. The possibilities are vast.Ritter explained that the Raspberry Pi Project started in 2006 with the goal of devising a computer to inspire children; it drew inspiration from the BBC Micro literacy project of 1981 that produced a series of microcomputers created by the Acorn Computer company. It was officially launched on February 29, 2012, with a first production of 10,000 boards. There were 100,000 pre-orders in one day; currently about 4,000 boards are produced a day. Ritter described the specification as follows:* CPU: ARM 11 core running at 700MHz Broadcom SoC package Can now be overclocked to 1GHz (without breaking the warranty!) * Memory: 256Mb* I/O: HDMI and composite video 2 x USB ports (Model B only) Ethernet (Model B only) Header pins for GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C He took attendees through a brief history of ARM Architecture:* Acorn BBC Micro (6502 based) Not powerful enough for Acorn’s plans for a business computer * Berkeley RISC Project UNIX kernel only used 30% of instruction set of Motorola 68000 More registers, less instructions (Register windows) One chip architecture to come from this was… SPARC * Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) 32-bit data, 26-bit address space, 27 registers First machine was Acorn Archimedes * Spin off from Acorn, Advanced RISC MachinesNext he presented its features:* 32-bit RISC Architecture– ARM accounts for 75% of embedded 32-bit CPUs today– 6.1 Billion chips sold last year (zero manufactured by ARM)* Abstract architecture and microprocessor core designs– Raspberry Pi is ARM11 using ARMv6 instruction set* Low power consumption– Good for mobile devices– Raspberry Pi can be powered from 700mA 5V only PSU– Raspberry Pi does not require heatsink or fanHe described the current ARM Technology:* ARMv6– ARM 11, ARM Cortex-M* ARMv7– ARM Cortex-A, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R* ARMv8 (Announced)– Will support 64-bit data and addressingHe next gave the Java Specifics for ARM: Floating point operations* Despite being an ARMv6 processor it does include an FPU– FPU only became standard as of ARMv7* FPU (Hard Float, or HF) is much faster than a software library* Linux distros and Oracle JVM for ARM assume no HF on ARMv6– Need special build of both– Raspbian distro build now available– Oracle JVM is in the works, release date TBDNot So RISCPerformance Improvements* DSP Enhancements* Jazelle* Thumb / Thumb2 / ThumbEE* Floating Point (VFP)* NEON* Security Enhancements (TrustZone)He spent a few minutes going over the challenges of using Java on the Raspberry Pi and covered:* Sound* Vision * Serial (TTL UART)* USB* GPIOTo implement sound with Java he pointed out:* Sound drivers are now included in new distros* Java Sound API– Remember to add audio to user’s groups– Some bits work, others not so much* Playing (the right format) WAV file works* Using MIDI hangs trying to open a synthesizer* FreeTTS text-to-speech– Should work once sound works properlyHe turned to JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi:* Currently internal builds only– Will be released as technology preview soon* Work involves optimal implementation of Prism graphics engine– X11?* Once the JavaFX implementation is completed there will be little of concern to developers-- It’s just Java (WORA). He explained the basis of the Serial Port:* UART provides TTL level signals (3.3V)* RS-232 uses 12V signals* Use MAX3232 chip to convert* Use this for access to serial consoleHe summarized his key points. The Raspberry Pi is a very cool (and cheap) computer that is great for teaching, a great introduction to ARM that works very well with Java and will work better in the future. The opportunities are limitless. For further info, check out, Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree. From there, Ritter tried out several fun demos, some of which worked better than others, but all of which were greeted with considerable enthusiasm and support and good humor (even when he ran into some glitches). All in all, this was a fun and lively session.

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Investing in Servers by Intel

- by Koushal Deshpande

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BizTalkAndOtherTechs/archive/2013/10/31/investing-in-servers-by-intel.aspxA nice article reference from Intel, refer here. Referees to cloud as well. Choose correctly what you need. 1 Do determine right server for your company. There is no use getting a server that has redundant services but still add to the costs. 2 Do get servers that can be upgraded. A server with limited memory and storage may not be able to keep up with your business growth. The basic memory and storage options might not be sufficient. Consider at least 8GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of hard disk space. 3 Do check the server has at least one Gigabit Ethernet port. This allows high speed transferring of files and increases productivity for your employees. USB and Firewire ports may not be enough as their transfer speed is too low and will affect the productivity of your company. Infinite Technologies is ready to help perform this upgrade. Contact Infinite Technologies now View our other resellers » 4 Do verify that the server comes with documentation. Documentation allows you to make a claim when your server breaks down and is supported by a warranty. 6 Do check the support options for the server from the manufacturer. Different manufacturer has different support options such as maintenance plans and software upgrades. 5 Do always look into the warranty. Get an enhanced warranty that guarantees response and repair time to avoid disruption. 7 Do get server management tools that can be used on any computer. Server management tools should be cross compatible across different operating systems to take into account future PC replacements. 8 Do check the power usage of the servers. Get the right power supply to avoid damaging server hardware and consider the Intel® Xeon® E3 processor to help save on your electricity bills. 9 Do check what built-in security packages are available. Ensure that your server is protected. Built-in security1 helps you save on getting add on security packages.

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Oracle Romania Summer School

- by Maria Sandu

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 What would you say about a Summer School within a corporation where you can learn, play and practice? You might think that this is something usually uncommon for a company and you would be right. However, Oracle’s main value being innovation, we came up with a new project for Romanian students and graduates. We organised Oracle Summer School , offering them the opportunity to develop their soft skills and gain valuable business knowledge and exposure. How was Oracle Summer School programme organised? We focused on students and graduates’ needs and combined business experience with training and practice. The twenty four participants had different backgrounds, being interested in Software, Hardware, Finance, Marketing or other areas. The programme fulfilled each of these needs, bringing them in contact with Specialists and Managers. The first two weeks were dedicated to the company visits, business presentations and networking. The participants got an insight about employees’ activities and projects. Storytelling was also part of the program and people from different departments spent a couple of hours with the participants, sharing their experiences, knowledge and interesting stories. The Recruitment team delivered a training about the job interview skills in order to make the participants feel better prepared for a Recruitment process. The second module consisted of two weeks of Soft Skills trainings delivered by professional trainers from different departments. The participants gained useful insight on the competencies required within a business environment. The evenings were dedicated to social activities and it not very long until they started feel part of a team. The third module will take place at the end of September and will put the participants in contact with senior people from the business who will become their Mentors. What do the participants say about Oracle Summer School? “ As a fresh computer science graduate, Oracle Summer School gave me the opportunity of finding what are the technical and nontechnical skills required in a large multinational company. It was a great way of seeing how the theoretical knowledge I received during college is applied in real-life scenarios and what skills I still need to develop. “ (Cosmin Radu) “ When arriving at Oracle I had high expectations, but did not know exactly what was going to unfold because of the program's lack of precedence. Right after the first day, my feedback outgrew the initial forecast and the following weeks continued to build upon it. I had the pleasure to acquaint with brilliant people. The program was outlined on various profiles, delivering a comprehensive experience. It was very engaging, informative and nevertheless fun. “ (Vlad Manciu) „ Oracle Summer School is by far the best summer school that I have ever attended. For me it has been a great experience so far, because I’ve learned not only how to use soft skills in a corporate environment, but I’ve learned a great deal about myself as well. However, the most valuable asset of this 3-week period were the people that I’ve met: great individuals and great professionals, whom I really grew fond of.” (Alexandru Purcarea) “Applying to Oracle Summer School has been the best decision I took in regard to how to spend my summer holiday. I had the chance to do job shadowing at some of the departments I was interested in and I attended great trainings on various subjects such as time management and emotional intelligence. Moreover, I made friends with the other participants and we enjoyed going out together after “classes”.(Andreea Tudor) If you are interested in joining our team and attending our events please follow us on https://campus.oracle.com/campus/HR/emea_main.html /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Learn programming backwards, or "so I failed the FizzBuzz test. Now what?"

- by moraleida

A Little Background I'm 28 today, and I've never had any formal training in software development, but I do have two higher education degrees equivalent to a B.A in Public Relations and an Executive MBA focused on Project Management. I've worked on those fields for about 6 years total an then, 2,5 years ago I quit/lost my job and decided to shift directions. After a month thinking things through I decided to start freelancing developing small websites in WordPress. I self-learned my way into it and today I can say I run a humble but successful career developing themes and plugins from scratch for my clients - mostly agencies outsourcing some of their dev work for medium/large websites. But sometimes I just feel that not having studied enough math, or not having a formal understanding of things really holds me behind when I have to compete or work with more experienced developers. I'm constantly looking for ways to learn more but I seem to lack the basics. Unfortunately, spending 4 more years in Computer Science is not an option right now, so I'm trying to learn all I can from books and online resources. This method is never going to have NASA employ me but I really don't care right now. My goal is to first pass the bar and to be able to call myself a real programmer. I'm currently spending my spare time studying Java For Programmers (to get a hold on a language everyone says is difficult/demanding), reading excerpts of Code Complete (to get hold of best practices) and also Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (to grasp the inner workings of computers). TL;DR So, my current situation is this: I'm basically capable of writing any complete system in PHP (with the help of Google and a few books), integrating Ajax, SQL and whatnot, and maybe a little slower than an experienced dev would expect due to all the research involved. But I was stranded yesterday trying to figure out (not Google) a solution for the FizzBuzz test because I didn't have the if($n1 % $n2 == 0) method modulus operator memorized. What would you suggest as a good way to solve this dilemma? What subjects/books should I study that would get me solving problems faster and maybe more "in a programmers way"? EDIT - Seems that there was some confusion about what did I not know to solve FizzBuzz. Maybe I didn't express myself right: I knew the steps needed to solve the problem. What I didn't memorize was the modulus operator. The problem was in transposing basic math to the program, not in knowing basic math. I took the test for fun, after reading about it on Coding Horror. I just decided it was a good base-comparison line between me and formally-trained devs. I just used this as an example of how not having dealt with math in a computer environment before makes me lose time looking up basic things like modulus operators to be able to solve simple problems.

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Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

- by user739873

The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally. I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models." This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list. In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut. Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities. Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale." 2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task. We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes. In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success. Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on. We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise. Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations. It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education. In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above. Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in. The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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