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  • Url Navigation

    - by russ.bishop
    One of the new features is URL-based navigation which is useful for creating intranet links or auto-generating email links (such as from workflow systems, etc). For IIS 6 and earlier, the format is as follows: http://machine/drm-client/Logon.aspx? app=<appname>&action=go&ver=<version name>&hier=<hier name>&node=<node name> Just replace the fields with their appropriate values (URL-encoded of course). <node name> is optional. If provided it will open the hierarchy and expand directly to the target node. Otherwise the hierarchy is opened to the top node. Note that if the specified version is not loaded it will be loaded automatically.

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  • How can I cache a Subversion password on a server, without storing it in unencrypted form?

    - by Zilk
    My Subversion server only provides access via HTTPS; support for svn+ssh has been dropped because we wanted to avoid creating system users on that machine just for SVN access. Now I'm trying to provide a way for users to cache their passwords for a while, without leaving them stored on the filesystem in unencrypted form. This is no problem for Gnome or KDE users, because they can use gnome-keyring and kwallet, respectively. IIRC, TortoiseSVN has a similar caching mechanism, too. But what about users on a non-GUI system? Some context: in this case, we have a development/testing server where one project has been checked out into the Apache htdocs directory. Development for this project is almost complete, and only minor text/layout changes are performed directly on this server. Nevertheless, the changes should be checked into the repository. There's no kwallet and no gnome-keyring on this system, and the ssh-agent can't help because the repository is accessed via https instead of svn+ssh. As far as I know, that leaves them the choice of entering the password every time they talk to the SVN server, or storing it in an insecure way. Is there any way to get something like what gnome-keyring and kwallet provide in a non-GUI environment?

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  • The Krewe App Post-Mortem

    - by Chris Gardner
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/23/the-krewe-app-post-mortem.aspxNow that teched has come and gone, I thought I would use this opportunity to do a little post-mortem on The Krewe app. It is one thing to test the app at home. It is a completely different animal to see how it responds in the environment TechEd creates. At a future time, I will list all the things that I would like to change with the app. At this point, I will find some good way to get community feedback. I want to break all this down screen by screen. We'll start with the screen I got right. The first of these is the events calendar. This is the one screen that, to you guys, just worked. However, there was an issue here. When I wrote v1 for last year, I was lazy and placed everything in CST. This caused problems with the achievements, which I will explain later. Furthermore, the event locations were not check-in locations. This created another problem with the achievements. Next, we get to the Twitter page. For what this page does, it works great. For those that don't know, I have an Azure Worker Role that polls Twitter pretty close to the rate limit. I cache these results in my database, and serve them upon request. This gives me great control over the content. I just have to remember to flush past tweets after a period, to save database growth. The next screen is the check-in screen. This screen has been the bane of my existence since I first created the thing. Last year, I used a background task to check people out of locations after they traveled. This year, I removed the background task in favor of a foursquare model. You are checked out after 3 hours or when you check-in to some other location. This seemed to work well, until those pesky achievements came into the mix. Again, more on this later. Next, I want to address the Connect and Connections screens together. I wanted to use some of the capabilities of the phone, and NFC seemed a natural choice. From this, I came up with the gamification aspects of the app. Since we are, fundamentally, a networking organization, I wanted to encourage people to actually network. Users could make and share a profile, similar to a virtual business card. I just had to figure out how to get people to use the feature. Why not just give someone a business card? Thus, the achievements were born. This was such a good idea. It would have been a great idea, if I have come up with it about two months earlier... When I came up with these ideas, I had about 2 weeks to implement them. Version 1 of the app was, basically, a pure consumption app. We provided data and centralized it. With version 2, the app became a much more interactive experience. The API was not ready for this change in such a short period of time. Most of this became apparent when I started implementing the achievements. The achievements based on count and specific person when fairly easy. The problem came with tying them to locations and events. This took some true SQL kung fu. This also showed me the rookie mistake of putting CST, not UTC, in the database. Once I got all of that cleaned up, I had to find a way to get the achievement system to talk to the phone. I knew I needed to be able to dynamically add achievements. I wouldn't know the precise location of some things until I got to Houston. I wanted the server to approve the achievements. This, unfortunately, required a decent data connection. Some achievements required GPS levels of location accuracy in areas of network triangulation. All of this became a huge nightmare. My flagship feature was based on some silly assumptions. Still, I managed to get 31 people to get the first achievement (Make 1 Connection.) Quite a few of those managed to get to the higher levels. Soon, I will post a list of the feature and changes that need to happen to the API. This includes things like proper objects for communication, geo-fencing, and caching. However, that is for another day.

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  • 'Development dashboard' web application

    - by espais
    Hi all, I am not sure if something like this exists in that it is ready out of the box. I currently have some web space that I use for various projects, and I would like to setup an area for some friends and I to develop web applications together. My ideal setup would be to create a folder, say, webdev.domain.com. We could all go to this domain, login, and then be able to setup new applications, pick which language will be used, setup database tables, allow HTML based file uploading, and create sub-folders to basically have a test bed for the applications. In retrospect, it seems like I'm describing a limited version of cpanel. I could come up with something in Drupal I'm sure, but I don't want to have to really spend time configuring much. Like I said, I want to install it and have minimal configuration. Does something like this exist (preferably in open-source)?

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  • Keeping crosshairs & GUI onscreen - SFML

    - by nihohit
    I read this question, but didn't understand the implementation suggestions with SFML on c#. For example, right now I'm just trying to make sure that the mouse crosshairs stay onscreen constatnly. I tried using this code: View lastView = this._mainWindow.GetView(); this._mainWindow.SetView(this._mainWindow.DefaultView); this._mainWindow.Draw(crosshair); this._mainWindow.SetView(lastView); after drawing all other sprites and before call this._mainWindow.display(), when beforehand I set crosshair.Position based on its position relative to the window, not the view. This just keeps the screen locked and prevents screen scrolling. Any suggestions?

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  • How to keep menu in a single place without using frames

    - by TJ Ellis
    This is probably a duplicate, but I can't find the answer anywhere (maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing?) and so I'm going to go ahead and ask. What is the accepted standard practice for creating a menu that is stored in a single file, but is included on every page across a site? Back in the day, one used frames, but this seems to be taboo now. I can get things layed out just the way I want, but copy/pasting across every page is a pain. I have seen php-based solutions, but my cheap-o free hosting doesn't support php (which is admittedly a pain, but it's a fairly simple webpage...). Any ideas for doing this that does not require server-side scripting?

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  • Squid, authentication, Outlook Anywhere, Windows 7 and HTTP 1.1 = NIGHTMARE

    - by Massimo
    I'm running a Squid proxy (latest version, 3.1.4) on Linux CentOS 5.4 with Samba 3.5.4, in order to allow authenticated web access for domain users; everything works fine, and even Windows 7 clients are fully supported. Authentication is transparent for domain users, while it is explicitly requested for non-domain ones, and it works if the user can provide valid domain credentials. All nice and good. Then, Outlook Anywhere kicks in and pain and suffering ensue. When Outlook (be it 2007 or 2010, it doesn't matter) runs on Windows XP clients, it connects gracefully through the Squid proxy to its remote Exchange server. When it runs on Windows 7, it doesn't. If the authentication requirement is lifted from the proxy, everything works on Windows 7 too, so the problem is obviously related to NTLM authentication with Squid. Digging more deeply (WireShark), I discovered Outlook Anywhere uses HTTP 1.1 when it runs on Windows 7, while it uses HTTP 1.0 when on Windows XP. And it looks like Squid, even in its latest incarnation, still has some serious troubles handling HTTP 1.1 properly, particularly when SSL and proxy authentication are thrown in the mix. While waiting for Squid to fully and officially support HTTP 1.1 (and it looks like this could take quite a long time), I'm looking for one of the following solutions: Make Squid handle this correctly, if it is at all possible. Identify Outlook Anywhere connections and have Squid not require authentication for them. But it isn't easy: again, the behaviour of Outlook differs when running on Windows XP and Windows 7, and while on Windows XP Outlook sends a really nice user-agent string of "MSRPC", on Windows 7 it doesn't send any (why? WHY?!?). Force Outlook Anywhere to use HTTP 1.0 even when running on Windows 7. And no, this is not as simple as deselecting "use HTTP 1.1" in Internet Explorer, looks like Outlook ignores that setting and chooses on its own which protocol to use. Any other feasible solution which doesn't involve whitelisting specific destination Exchange servers, which is the last-resort solution I'm trying to avoid.

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  • 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards - Part 2

    - by Michelle Kimihira
    Author: Moazzam Chaudry Continuing from Friday's blog on 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards, this blog (Part 2) will provide more details around the customers. It was a tremendous honor to be in single room of winners. We only wish we could have had more time to share stories from all the winners.  We received great insight from all the innovative solutions that our customers deploy and would like to share them broadly, so that others can benefit from best practices. There was a customer panel session joined by Ingersoll Rand, Nike and Motability and here is what was discussed: Barry Bonar, Enterprise Architect from Ingersoll Rand shared details around their solution, comprised of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite. This combined solutoin enabled their business transformation to increase decision-making, speed and efficiency, resulting in 40% reduced IT spend, 41X Faster response time and huge cost savings. Ashok Balakrishnan, Architect from Nike shared how they leveraged Oracle Coherence to analyze their digital "footprint" of activities. This helps them compete, collaborate and compare athletic data over time. Lastly, Ashley Doodly, Head of IT from Motability shared details around their solution compromised of Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, ADF, Coherence, BO and E-Business Suite. This solution helped Motability achieve 100% ROI within the first few months, performance in seconds vs. 10's of minutes and tremendous improvement in throughput that increased up to 50%.  This year's winners by category are: Oracle Exalogic Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Netshoes ATG on Exalogic: 6X Reduced H/W foot print, 6.2X increased throughput and 3 weeks time to market Claro Part of America Movil, running mission critical Java Application on Exalogic with 35X Faster Java response time, 5X Throughput Underwriters Laboratories Exalogic as an Apps Consolidation platform to power tremendous growth Ingersoll Rand EBS on Exalogic: Up to 40% Reduction in overall IT budget, 3x reduced foot print Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  Mazda Motor Corporation Tuxedo ART Batch runtime environment to migrate their batch apps on new open environment and reduce main frame cost. HOTELBEDS Technology Open Source to WebLogic transformation Globalia Corporation Introduced Oracle Coherence to fully reengineer DTH system and provide multiple business and technical benefits Nike Nike+, digital sports platform, has 8M users and is expecting an 5X increase in users, many of who will carry multiple devices that frequently sync data with the Digital Sport platform Comcast Corporation The solution is expected to increase availability, continuity, performance, and simplify and make the code at the application layer more flexible. Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM Customer Results using Fusion Middleware NTT Docomo Network traffic solution based on Oracle event processing and coherence - massive in scale: 12M users (50M in future) - 800,000 events/sec. Schneider National, Inc. SOA/B2B/ADF/Data Integration to orchestrate key order processes across Siebel, OTM & EBS.  Platform runs 60M trans/day and  50 million composite SOA instances per day across 10G and 11G Amadeus Oracle BPM solution: Business Rules and processes vary across local (80), regional (~10) and corporate approval process. Up to 10 levels of approval. Plans to deploy across 20+ markets Navitar SOA solution integrates a fully non-Oracle legacy application/ERP environment using Oracle’s SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Motability Uses SOA Suite to synchronize data across the systems and to manage the vehicle remarketing process Oracle WebCenter Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  News Limited Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers University of Louisville “Facebook for Medicine”: Oracle Webcenter platform and Oracle BIEE to analyze patient test data and uncover potential health issues. Expecting annualized ROI of 277% China Mobile Jiangsu Company portal (25k users) to drive collaboration & productivity Life Technologies Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments LA Dept. of Water & Power Oracle WebCenter Portal to power ladwp.com on desktop and mobile for 1.6million users Oracle Identity Management Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Education Testing Service Identity Management platform for provisioning & SSO of 6 million GRE, GMAT, TOEFL customers Avea Oracle Identity Manager allowing call center personnel to quickly change Identity Profile to handle varying call loads based on a user self service interface. Decreased Admin Cost by 30% Oracle Data Integration Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Raymond James Near real-time integration for improved systems (throughput & performance) and enhanced operational flexibility in a 24 X 7 environment Wm Morrison Supermarkets Electronic Point of Sale integration handling over 80 million transactions a day in near real time (15 min intervals) Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Qualcomm Incorporated Solution providing  immediate business value enabling a self-service model necessary for growing the new customer base, an increase in customer satisfaction, reduced “time-to-deliver” Micros Systems, Inc. ADF, SOA Suite, WebCenter  enables services that include managing distribution of hotel rooms availability and rates to channels such as Hotel Web-site, Expedia, etc. Marfin Egnatia Bank A new web 2.0 UI provides a much richer experience through the ADF solution with the end result being one of boosting end-user productivity    Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM, Oracle Exalytics) Customer Results using Fusion Middleware INC Research Self-service customer portal delivering 5–10% of the overall revenue - expected to grow fast with the BI solution Experian Reduction in Time to Complete the Financial Close Process Hologic Inc Solution, saving months of decision-making uncertainty! We look forward to seeing many more innovative nominations. The nominatation process for 2013 begins in April 2013.    Additional Information: Blog: Oracle WebCenter Award Winners Blog: Oracle Identity Management Winners Blog: Oracle Exalogic Winners Blog: SOA, BPM and Data Integration will be will feature award winners in its respective areas this week Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

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  • How To Block Web Sites at the Router Level for Network Wide Filtering

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    A comprehensive network filtering system is overkill if all you want to do is block a handful of web sites. Read on as we show you how—with nothing more than your router—you can selectively block and temporarily restrict individual websites. For many people a massive commercial internet filter is overkill. What if you just want to block Facebook when your kids are supposed to be doing their homework or Reddit when you’re supposed to be getting work done? You don’t need a huge system for that, all you need is the access restrictions module in your router. Today we’re looking at how you can quickly and easily block traffic on your network using router-based access restrictions. HTG Explains: When Do You Need to Update Your Drivers? How to Make the Kindle Fire Silk Browser *Actually* Fast! Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablet: the How-To Geek Review

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  • What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    From tiny laptop hard drives to beefier desktop models, traditional disk-based hard drives have a very bold warning on them: DO NOT COVER THIS HOLE. What exactly is the hole and what terrible fate would befall you if you covered it? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites. How Hackers Can Disguise Malicious Programs With Fake File Extensions Can Dust Actually Damage My Computer? What To Do If You Get a Virus on Your Computer

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  • How to make my screen brightness not change when I plug my laptop in

    - by user63985
    I do not want my laptop to change brightness when my laptop power is plugged in or unplugged. I set my brightness based on how bright my surroundings are. If I am in a dark room, I set my brightness very low and when I plug my laptop in the brightness gets set to maximum which feels like sticking my eyes in boiling lava. In System Settings ? Brightness and Lock the Dim screen to save power checkbox is unchecked. My laptop is an HP Mini 110 In case it is an acpi issue I have put my acpi-support file here http://paste.ubuntu.com/1008244/

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  • Browser sends http request with RANGE

    - by nute
    I have a local testing environment in a Fedora virtual machine. Strangely, resources (css and js files) don't seem to work. Looking at Firebug, I see that the browser sends the HTTP request with "Range bytes=0-". The server responds with either an empty 200OK or an empty 206 Partial Content. Here is an example: Response Headers Date Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:33:26 GMT Server Apache/2.2.13 (Fedora) Last-Modified Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:58:55 GMT Etag "18-3aec-478c14dbee138" Accept-Ranges bytes Content-Length 15084 Content-Range bytes 0-15083/15084 Connection close Content-Type text/css Request Headers Host fedora.test User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091105 Fedora/3.5.5-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.5 Accept text/css,*/*;q=0.1 Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive 300 Connection keep-alive Referer http://fedora.test/pictures/ Cookie __utma=26341546.1613992749.1258504422.1258569125.1258752550.4; __utmz=26341546.1258504422.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); PHPSESSID=tqf8jfmc77qihe97rl4tmhq685 Range bytes=0- If-Range "18-3aec-478c14dbee138" I don't know if the browser is sending the wrong request, or if it's the server that is doing this. Request made to the outside (such as google analytics) are working fine. This is running in Fedora 11 in VirtualBox. Apache. PHP. The files are being served through the "shared folders" feature of VirtualBox (could it be related?). No error logs could help me.

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  • How can I automatically change the system keyboard layout when plugging in an external keyboard?

    - by Andrew Bolster
    I have a US-Style laptop, which is fine, but I also have a UK-style Ergonomic USB keyboard. As such I usually have the US key layout set, but when I settle in at my desk and use the UK USB keyboard I find myself making stupid mistakes on symbols (normally a pretty good touch typist on either ergo or standard kbd). Can anyone think of a clean way of setting the keyboard layout based on the inferred layout/USBID of any plugged in Keyboard? Even having a custom setting such as adding a specific USB ID to a runtime script that checks if its plugged in or not. Can this be done without the user having to logout/in? I remember doing something similar with xorg.conf, but that required logout.

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  • Understanding Photography and Color Temperature

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Most digital cameras have the ability to set the “color temperature” based on the condition, but what exactly does that mean? This simple cheat sheet highlights the differences between various lighting situations and what settings you should use. Courtesy of Digital Camera World, the above chart shows where on the scale various color temperatures fall, how the automatic white balance works, and which presets you should use if available. What Is Color Temperature? [via Unpluggd] HTG Explains: Why Linux Doesn’t Need Defragmenting How to Convert News Feeds to Ebooks with Calibre How To Customize Your Wallpaper with Google Image Searches, RSS Feeds, and More

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  • Windows CE: Newsgroups Shutdown

    - by Bruce Eitman
    As of June 1, 2010 many of the Windows CE newsgroups have been shut down by Microsoft, and the rest will be shut down by October 1, 2010.  This is part of an overall Microsoft strategy to move community from newsgroups to web based forums. The newsgroups have been indexed by Google, so the existing content can and should be searched for answers using http://groups.google.com/advanced_search Microsoft has replaced the newsgroups with http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/windowsembeddedcompact which has forums for OS Development, Managed Application Development and Native Application Development. Note that with the planned release for Q4 2010, Microsoft is renaming Windows Embedded CE to Windows Embedded Compact.  This name change is reflected in the forum naming. Copyright © 2010 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

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  • Polymorphism and passing

    - by Tucker Morgan
    Ok i am going to try and state my question as clearly as possible, but if you have trouble understanding it please just ask for clarification, i really want to figure out how to do this. I am writing a text based RPG, and i have three class that inherit from a super class, they all have special attacks that they can preform, at the same time i have a class that holds the function which handles battles in my game. Now how do i get the unique special abilities functions for whatever role the player chooses into the battle function. Also i am using the vector.push_back method to handle how my sub classes are referenced Please help me your my only hope

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  • What discipline does Computer Science belong to?

    - by Macneil
    Is Computer Science science, applied mathematics, engineering, art, philosophy? "Other"? To provide background, here is Steven Wartik's blog posting for Scientific American titled "I'm not a real scientist, and that's okay." The article covers some good topics for this question, but it leaves open more than it answers. If you can think of the discipline, how would computer science fit into its definition? Should the discipline for Computer Science be based on what programmers do, or what academics do? What kind of answers do you get from people who've seemed to think deeply about this? What reasons do they give?

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  • Are there any empirical studies on the effect of different languages on software quality?

    - by jgre
    The proponents of functional programming languages assert that functional programming makes it easier to reason about code. Those in favor of statically typed languages say that their compilers catch enough errors to make up for the additional complexity of type systems. But everything I read on these topics is based on rational argument, not on empirical data. Are there any empirical studies on what effects the different categories of programming languages have on defect rates or other quality metrics? (The answers to this question seem to indicate that there are no such studies, at least not for the dynamic vs. static debate)

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  • CouchDB crashes at startup when path to config file has space(s)

    - by Barry Wark
    I'm hoping to run CouchDB as a per-user Launch Agent on OS X. I'm using the coucdbx-core folder from the CouchDB Server.app as the base of my CouchDB deployment. I'd like each user to have their own couch instance (on a different port), necessitating separate config files for each instance. The logical place to put these files is in ~/Library/Application Support/ for each user. I can put the entire distribution in ~/Library/Application Support/my-app/coucdbx, and put the .ini at ~/Library/Application Support/my-app/local.ini. Starting couchdb as bin/couchdb -a ../local.ini (from ~/Library/Application Support/my-app/coucdbx) works great. But I'd like to save every user the ~50MB couchdbx and install the couchdbx-core in a shared location (e.g. within my app's .app bundle). When I do this, the path to the per-user config file contains a space, and I get the following error when starting CouchDB: $ bin/couchdb -n -a ~/Library/Application\ Support/us.physion.ovation/default.ini {"init terminating in do_boot",{{badmatch,{error,{bad_return,{{couch_app,start,[normal,["/Users/hs/prj/build-couchdb/build/etc/couchdb/default.ini","/Users/hs/prj/build-couchdb/build/etc/couchdb/local.ini"]]},{'EXIT',{{badmatch,{error,{error,enoent}}},[{couch_server_sup,start_server,1,[{file,"/Users/hs/prj/build-couchdb/dependencies/couchdb/src/couchdb/couch_server_sup.erl"},{line,56}]},{application_master,start_it_old,4,[{file,"application_master.erl"},{line,274}]}]}}}}}},[{couch,start,0,[{file,"/Users/hs/prj/build-couchdb/dependencies/couchdb/src/couchdb/couch.erl"},{line,18}]},{init,start_it,1,[]},{init,start_em,1,[]}]}} Is there any way to provide a config file at the command line, if that config file's path includes space(s)? Despite my best efforts in the mailing list archives, wiki and google, I haven't been able to find a solution or a definitive "it can't work". Any help greatly appreciated.

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  • schedule backup and restore of SSAS 2008 database

    - by Manjot
    Hi, I can backup and restore databases on Microsoft SQL server Analysis Service 2008 using GUI as from Backup SSAS I want to schedule backup and restore it to another server every night. so what i did is : I scripted out the backup and restore process from the GUI. Created a new SQL server agent job in database engine and added a "Run SSAS query" step. Copied the scripts to this step. But it fails. the scripts that the GUI copied out look like: <Backup xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine"> <Object> <DatabaseID>DB</DatabaseID> </Object> <File>C:\Backup\DB.abf</File> <AllowOverwrite>true</AllowOverwrite> </Backup> <Restore xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine"> <File>\\server\C$\Backup\DB.abf</File> <DatabaseName>DB</DatabaseName> <AllowOverwrite>true</AllowOverwrite> </Restore> Any help please?

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  • Can you "swap" the Sysprep answer file in Windows 7

    - by Ben
    I have a load of new Lenovo laptops which I am due to distribute in my company. We are distributed in multiple locations and I want to ship the laptops "boxed" and untouched by IT hand for distribution. We are using LANDesk to do all the software distribution and provisioning, but are currently falling at the first hurdle as when booted, the laptops kick into the Lenovo mini-setup wizard. I assume this is because they have been sysprepped at Lenovo. In order to keep with our (almost) zero touch strategy I want the users to PXE boot into a PE of some sort, which will run a script on startup which replaces the sysprep answer file with one of my own. (i.e. prepopulated with product key, company info etc.) and then reboot to complete Sysprep. The plan is that this will run, and then install the LANDesk agent as a post-sysprep task, which in turn will complete the provisioning. Anyone have any experience / know any pitfalls to look out for / can suggest a suitable, PXE-bootable PE environment? Apologies for the verbosity of the question - it takes a bit of explaining! Thanks in advance, Ben

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  • Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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  • Best way to throw exception and avoid code duplication

    - by JF Dion
    I am currently writing code and want to make sure all the params that get passed to a function/method are valid. Since I am writing in PHP I don't have access to all the facilities of other languages like C, C++ or Java to check for parameters values and types public function inscriptionExists($sectionId, $userId) // PHP vs. public boolean inscriptionExists(int sectionId, int userId) // Java So I have to rely on exceptions if I want to make sure that my params are both integers. Since I have a lot of places where I need to check for param validity, what would be the best way to create a validation/exception machine and avoid code duplication? I was thinking on a static factory (since I don't want to pass it to all of my classes) with a signature like: public static function factory ($value, $valueType, $exceptionType = 'InvalidArgumentException'); Which would then call the right sub process to validate based on the type. Am I on the right way, or am I going completely off the road and overthinking my problem?

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  • OTN Database Developer Day in LA/OC

    - by shay.shmeltzer
    We are taking a little break from the Fusion OTN Developer Days, and instead we'll be taking part in several OTN Developer Days ran by the database team. The aim is to show what Oracle has to offer to various developer groups. As you might guess we specifically are going to be in the Java track. Specifically we are running a lab that will get you to experience Oracle JDeveloper (or OEPE) and will show you how to build an application based on EJB/JSF with Ajax UI. I'm going to be in the upcoming event on May 5th - if you are in the LA area and haven't experienced JDeveloper yet - come in and see what it is all about. Details here.

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  • Advice on learning programming languages and math.

    - by Joris Ooms
    I feel like I'm getting stuck lately when it comes to learning about programming-related things; I thought I'd ask a question here and write it all down in the hope to get some pointers/advice from people. Perhaps writing it down helps me put things in perspective for myself aswell. I study Interactive Multimedia Design. This course is based on two things: graphic design on one hand, and web development on the other hand. I have quite a decent knowledge of web-related languages (the usual HTML/JS/PHP) and I'll be getting a course on ASP.NET next year. In my free time, I have learnt how to work with CodeIgniter, aswell as some diving into Ruby (and Rails) and basic iOS programming. In my first year of college I also did a class on Java (19/20 on the end result). This grade doesn't really mean anything though; I have the basics of OOP down but Java-wise, we learnt next to nothing. Considering the time I have been programming in, for example, PHP.. I can't say I'm bad at it. I'm definitely not good or great at it, but I'm decent. My teachers tell me I have the programming thing down. They just tell me I should keep on learning. So that's what I do, and I try to take in as much as possible; however, sometimes I'm unsure where to start and I have this tendency to always doubt myself. Now, for the 'question'. I want to get into iOS programming. I know iOS programming boils down to programming in Cocoa Touch and Objective-C. I also know Obj-C is a superset of C. I have done a class on C a couple of years ago, but I failed miserably. I got stuck at pointers and never really understood them.. Until like a month ago. I suddenly 'got' it. I have been working through a book on Objective-C for a week or so now, and I understand the basics (I'm at like.. chapter 6 or so). However, I keep running into similar problems as the ones I had when I did the C class: I suck at math. No, really. I come from a Latin-Modern Languages background in high school and I had nearly no math classes back then. I wanted to study Computer Science, but I failed there because of the miserable state of my mathematics knowledge. I can't explain why I'm suddenly talking about math here though, because it isn't directly related to programming.. yet it is. For example, the examples in the book I'm reading now are about programming a fraction-calculator. All good, I can do the programming when I get the formulas down.. but it takes me a full day or more to actually get to that point. I also find it hard to come up with ideas for myself. I made one small iOS app the other day and it's just a button / label kind of thing. When I press the button, it generates a random number. That's really all I could come up with. Can you 'learn' that? It probably comes down to creativity, but evidently, I'm not too great at being creative. Are there any sites or resources out there that provide something like a basic list of things you can program when you're just starting out? Maybe I'm focusing on too many things at once. I want to keep my HTML/CSS at a decent level, while learning PHP and CodeIgniter, while diving into Ruby on Rails and learning Objective-C and the iOS SDK at the same time. I just want to be good at something, I guess. The problem is that I can't seem to be happy with my PHP stuff. I want more, something 'harder'; that's why I decided to pick up the iOS thing. Like I said, I have the basics down of a lot of different languages. I can program something simple in Java, in C, in Objective-C as of this week.. but it ends there. Mostly because I can't come up with ideas for more complex applications, and also because I just doubt myself: 'Oh, that's too complex, I can never do that'. And then it ends there. To conclude my rant, let me basically rephrase my questions into a 'tl;dr' part. A. I want to get into iOS programming and I have basic knowledge of C/Objective-C. However, I struggle to come up with ideas of my own and implement them and I also suck at math which is something that isn't directly related to, yet often needed while programming. What can I do? B. I have an interest in a lot of different programming languages and I can't stop reading/learning. However, I don't feel like I'm good in anything. Should I perhaps focus on just one language for a year or longer, or keep taking it all in at the same time and hope I'll finally get them all down? C. Are there any resources out there that provide basic ideas of things I can program? I'm thinking about 'simple' command-line applications here to help me while studying C/Obj-C away from the whole iPhone SDK. Like I said, the examples in my book are mainly math-based (fraction calculator) and it's kinda hard. :( Thanks a lot for reading my post. I didn't plan it to be this long but oh well. Thanks in advance for any answers.

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