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• Oracle BI and XS Energy Drinks – Don’t Miss the Amway Presentation!

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  By Maria Forney Amway is a global leader in the direct sales industry with $10.9B in annual sales in more than 100 countries and territories. The company has implemented a global BI framework that provides accurate, consistent, and timely insights to support global, regional and local analytical research, business planning, performance measurement and assessment. Oracle BI EE is used by 1500 employees across Amway sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain business units as well as Amway affiliates in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Last week, I spoke with Lead Data Analyst with Amway Global Sales, Dan Arganbright, and IT Manager with Amway BI Competency Center, Mike Olson, about their upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Scheduled during a prime speaking slot on Monday, October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007, Dan and Mike will discuss their experience building Amway’s Distributor Consulting solution, powered by Oracle BI EE. You can find more information here. As background, Amway offers people an opportunity to own their own businesses and consumers exclusive products in health and wellness, beauty and home care.  The Amway internal Sales organization is charged with consulting leadership-level Distributors to help them with data insights and ultimately grow their business. Until recently, this was a resource-intense process of gathering and formatting data. In some markets, it took over 40 hours to collect the data and produce the analysis needed for one consultation session. Amway began its global BI journey in 2006 and since then the company has migrated from having multiple technology providers and integration points to an integrated strategic vendor approach. Today, the company has standardized on Oracle technology for BI.  Amway has achieved cost savings through the retirement of redundant technology platforms. In addition, Mike’s organization has led the charge to align disparate BI organizations into a BI Competency Center.  The following diagram highlights the simplicity of the standardized architecture of Amway today. Dubbed Distributor Consulting, Amway has developed a BI solution using the Oracle technology stack to help Distributor leaders grow their businesses. The Distributor Consulting solution provides over 40 metrics for Sales staff to provide data-driven insights on the Distributors and organizations they support.  Using Oracle BI EE, Exadata, and Oracle Data Integrator, Amway provides customized and personalized business intelligence, and the Oracle BI EE dashboards were developed by the Amway Sales organization, which demonstrates business empowerment of the technology. Amway is also leveraging the power of BI to drive business growth in all of its markets.  A new set of Distributor Segmentation metrics are enabling a better understanding of distributor behaviors. A Global Scorecard that Amway developed provides key metrics at a market and global level for executive-level discussions. Product Analysis teams can now highlight repeat purchase rates, product penetration and the success of CRM campaigns. In the words of Dan and Mike, the addition of Exadata 11 months ago has been “a game changer.”  Amway has been able to dramatically reduce complexity, improve performance and increase business productivity and cost savings. For example, the number of indexes on the global data warehouse was reduced from more than 1,000 to less than 20.  Pulling data for the highest level distributors or the largest markets in the company now can be done in minutes instead of hours.  As a result, IT has shifted from performance tuning and keeping the system operational to higher-value business-focused activities. •       “The distributors that have been introduced to the BI reports have found them extremely helpful. Because they have never had this kind of information before, when they were presented with the reports, they wanted to take action immediately!”  -     Sales Development Manager in Latin America Without giving away more, the Amway case study presentation will be one of the unique customer sessions at OpenWorld this year. Speakers Dan Arganbright and Mike Olson have planned an interactive and entertaining session on Monday October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007. I’ll see you there!

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• Innovative SPARC: Lighting a Fire Under Oracle's New Hardware Business

  - by Paulo Folgado

  "There's a certain level of things you can do with commercially available parts," says Oracle Executive Vice President Mike Splain. But, he notes, you can do so much more if you design the parts yourself. Mike Splain,EVP, OracleYou can, for example, design cryptographic accelerators into your microprocessors so customers can run their networks fully encrypted if they choose.Of course, it helps if you've already built multiple processing "cores" into those chips so they can handle all that encrypting and decrypting while still getting their other work done.System on a ChipAs the leader of Oracle Microelectronics, Mike knows how implementing clever innovations in silicon can give systems a real competitive advantage.The SPARC microprocessors that his team designed at Sun pioneered the concept of multiple cores several years ago, and the UltraSPARC T2 processor--the industry's first "system on a chip"--packs up to eight cores per chip, each running as many as eight threads at once. That's the most cores and threads of any general-purpose processor. Looking back, Mike points out that the real value of large enterprise-class servers was their ability to run a lot of very large applications in parallel."The beauty of our CMT [chip multi-threading] machines is you can get that same kind of parallel-processing capability at a much lower cost and in a much smaller footprint," he says.The Whole StackWhat has Mike excited these days is that suddenly the opportunity to innovate is much bigger as part of Oracle."In my group, we used to look up the software stack and say, 'We can do any innovation we want, provided the only thing we have to change is what's in the Solaris operating system'--or maybe Java," he says. "If we wanted to change things beyond that, we'd have to go outside the walls of Sun and we'd have to convince the vendors: 'You have to align with us, you have to test with us, you have to build for us, and then you'll reap the benefits.' Now we get access to the entire stack. We can look all the way through the stack and say, 'Okay, what would make the database go faster? What would make the middleware go faster?'"Changing the WorldMike and his microelectronics team also like the fact that Oracle is not just any software company. We're #1 in database, middleware, business intelligence, and more."We're like all the other engineers from Sun; we believe we can change the world, if we can just figure out how to get people to pay attention to us," he says. "Now there's a mechanism at Oracle--much more so than we ever had at Sun."He notes, too, that every innovation in SPARC has involved some combination of hardware and softwareoptimization."Take our cryptography framework, for example. Sure, we can accelerate rapidly, but the Solaris OS has to provide the right set of interfaces that applications can tap into," Mike says. "Same thing with our multicore architecture. We have to have software that can utilize all those threads and run in parallel." His engineers, he points out, have never been interested in producing chips that sell as mere components."Our chips are always designed to go into systems and be combined with various pieces of software," he says. "Our job is to enable the creation of systems."

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• Unable to build my c++ code with g++ 4.6.3

  - by Mriganka

  I am facing multiple issues with building my c++ code on Ubuntu 12.04. This code was building and running fine on RH Enterprise. I am using g++ 4.6.3. Here's the output of g++ -v. g++ -v Using built-in specs. COLLECT_GCC=g++ COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/lto-wrapper Target: i686-linux-gnu Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5' --with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.6/README.Bugs --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr --program-suffix=-4.6 --enable-shared --enable-linker-build-id --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.6 --libdir=/usr/lib --enable-nls --with-sysroot=/ --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-libstdcxx-time=yes --enable-gnu-unique-object --enable-plugin --enable-objc-gc --enable-targets=all --disable-werror --with-arch-32=i686 --with-tune=generic --enable-checking=release --build=i686-linux-gnu --host=i686-linux-gnu --target=i686-linux-gnu Thread model: posix gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) Here's a sample of my code: #include "Word.h" #include < string> using namespace std; pthread_mutex_t Word::_lock = PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER; Word::Word(): _occurrences(1) { memset(_buf, 0, 25); } Word::Word(char *str): _occurrences(1) { memset(_buf, 0, 25); if (str != NULL) { strncpy(_buf, str, strlen(str)); } } g++ -c -ansi or g++ -c -std=c++98 or g++ -c -std=c++03, none of these options are able to build the code correctly. I get the following compilation errors: mriganka@ubuntu:~/WordCount$ make g++ -c -g -ansi Word.cpp -o Word.o Word.cpp: In constructor ‘Word::Word()’: Word.cpp:10:21: error: ‘memset’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp: In constructor ‘Word::Word(char*)’: Word.cpp:16:21: error: ‘memset’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp:19:34: error: ‘strlen’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp:19:35: error: ‘strncpy’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp: In member function ‘void Word::operator=(const Word&)’: Word.cpp:37:42: error: ‘strlen’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp:37:43: error: ‘strncpy’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp: In copy constructor ‘Word::Word(const Word&)’: Word.cpp:44:21: error: ‘memset’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp:45:52: error: ‘strlen’ was not declared in this scope Word.cpp:45:53: error: ‘strncpy’ was not declared in this scope So basically g++ 4.6.3 on Ubuntu 12.04 is not able to recognize the standard c++ headers. And I am not finding a way out of this situation. Second problem: In order to make progress, I included < string.h instead of < string. But now I am facing linking errors with my message queue and pthread library functions. Here's the error that I am getting: mriganka@ubuntu:~/WordCount$ make g++ -c -g -ansi Word.cpp -o Word.o g++ -lrt -I/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu Word.o HashMap.o main.o -o word_count main.o: In function `main': /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:75: undefined reference to `pthread_create' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:90: undefined reference to `mq_open' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:93: undefined reference to `mq_getattr' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:113: undefined reference to `mq_send' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:123: undefined reference to `pthread_join' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:129: undefined reference to `mq_close' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:130: undefined reference to `mq_unlink' main.o: In function `count_words(void*)': /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:151: undefined reference to `mq_open' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:154: undefined reference to `mq_getattr' /home/mriganka/WordCount/main.cpp:162: undefined reference to `mq_timedreceive' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status Here's my makefile: CC=g++ CFLAGS=-c -g -ansi LDFLAGS=-lrt INC=-I/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu SOURCES=Word.cpp HashMap.cpp main.cpp OBJECTS=$(SOURCES:.cpp=.o) EXECUTABLE=word_count all: $(SOURCES) $(EXECUTABLE) $(EXECUTABLE): $(OBJECTS) $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) $(INC) -pthread $(OBJECTS) -o $@ .cpp.o: $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@ clean: rm -f *.o word_count Please help me to resolve both the issues. I searched online relentlessly for any solution of these problems, but no one seems to have encountered these issues.

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• Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

  - by Michael Stephenson

  In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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• Best Practices for Handing over Legacy Code

  - by PersonalNexus

  In a couple of months a colleague will be moving on to a new project and I will be inheriting one of his projects. To prepare, I have already ordered Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But this books as well as most questions on legacy code I found so far are concerned with the case of inheriting code as-is. But in this case I actually have access to the original developer and we do have some time for an orderly hand-over. Some background on the piece of code I will be inheriting: It's functioning: There are no known bugs, but as performance requirements keep going up, some optimizations will become necessary in the not too distant future. Undocumented: There is pretty much zero documentation at the method and class level. What the code is supposed to do at a higher level, though, is well-understood, because I have been writing against its API (as a black-box) for years. Only higher-level integration tests: There are only integration tests testing proper interaction with other components via the API (again, black-box). Very low-level, optimized for speed: Because this code is central to an entire system of applications, a lot of it has been optimized several times over the years and is extremely low-level (one part has its own memory manager for certain structs/records). Concurrent and lock-free: While I am very familiar with concurrent and lock-free programming and have actually contributed a few pieces to this code, this adds another layer of complexity. Large codebase: This particular project is more than ten thousand lines of code, so there is no way I will be able to have everything explained to me. Written in Delphi: I'm just going to put this out there, although I don't believe the language to be germane to the question, as I believe this type of problem to be language-agnostic. I was wondering how the time until his departure would best be spent. Here are a couple of ideas: Get everything to build on my machine: Even though everything should be checked into source code control, who hasn't forgotten to check in a file once in a while, so this should probably be the first order of business. More tests: While I would like more class-level unit tests so that when I will be making changes, any bugs I introduce can be caught early on, the code as it is now is not testable (huge classes, long methods, too many mutual dependencies). What to document: I think for starters it would be best to focus documentation on those areas in the code that would otherwise be difficult to understand e.g. because of their low-level/highly optimized nature. I am afraid there are a couple of things in there that might look ugly and in need of refactoring/rewriting, but are actually optimizations that have been out in there for a good reason that I might miss (cf. Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I) How to document: I think some class diagrams of the architecture and sequence diagrams of critical functions accompanied by some prose would be best. Who to document: I was wondering what would be better, to have him write the documentation or have him explain it to me, so I can write the documentation. I am afraid, that things that are obvious to him but not me would otherwise not be covered properly. Refactoring using pair-programming: This might not be possible to do due to time constraints, but maybe I could refactor some of his code to make it more maintainable while he was still around to provide input on why things are the way they are. Please comment on and add to this. Since there isn't enough time to do all of this, I am particularly interested in how you would prioritize.

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• SharePoint 2010 release date - is it that important?

  - by CharlesLee

  There has been lots of excitement in the SharePoint community over the last few days as Microsoft have announced the official release date of SharePoint 2010. May 12th is the date for your diaries (RTM in April.) The twittersphere has been telling everyone for the last few days about this news and there is much excitement. The major conferences this year all seem to have a SharePoint 2010 focus and some are entirely focussed on the new product (e.g. SharePoint Evolution Conference.)  Now by all accounts Microsoft have plugged some significant functionality gaps that exist in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 and provided some exciting new functionality.  You don't need me to tell you about these as the MVPs (and other community members) are doing a sterling job, after all that is why Microsoft has MVPs in the first place. Lets get real for a second though as there is a significant investment involved in moving to SharePoint 2010:  Firstly you need 64 bit architecture across the board, now for some environments that is no inconsequential hurdle, that's a pretty significant roadblock.   The development farm, test farm and UAT farm are all going to require the same infrastructure upgrades. To take advantage of the tooling for SP2010 you will need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and your development team is going to require 64 bit hardware/OS too.  I would not recommend installing SP 2010 in client installation mode (i.e. for Windows 7) on your developer machines, I would use this for demo machines only. Something that lots of people seem to forget in all their whooping and hollering about the new release is that there is a large amount of end user training going to be required as the browser UI has now adopted the omnipotent ribbon interface and there are other new and more complicated features. SharePoint Designer has also entirely changed in both look and feel and some significant feature changes have taken place. Lest we should forget that some companies have not long upgraded to MOSS 2007 and are yet to see a significant ROI for that project. And the reticence that most companies feel about implementing v1 Microsoft products.  This is only the surface of the deeper issues which would be involved in any upgrade process, so I guess I share a small part of the concern voiced by Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint.com.  Is SharePoint 2010 relevant? I don't share this sentiment in its entirety as I firmly believe that all companies should be looking at SharePoint 2010 from day one, however most large scale existing implementations of MOSS 2007 are going to be several years away from a serious upgrade project.  So should the conference organisers and the SharePoint community as a whole be a little more understanding of the real world issues?  It's easy to get carried away in the excitement of a new product and new tools to play with but there needs to be a focus on the real world issues that most people are facing day to day and at the moment and for the short term future (at the very least the next 12 months) that is fairly and squarely in the WSS 2.0/3.0 and SPS 2003/MOSS 2007 camps. Don't get me wrong, I am very very excited about getting to grips with SharePoint 2010 in the real world and I cannot wait for my first real project to come along, but for now I am just being realistic about the reality for most people who work with SharePoint. I have been spending a lot of time on www.sharepointoverflow.com recently as there is a community of people building up who are committed to answering the real world questions that folks are dealing with every day.  I urge you to take a look and either ask or answer some questions direct from the front line of the SharePoint world.

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• Big Data – Beginning Big Data – Day 1 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  What is Big Data? I want to learn Big Data. I have no clue where and how to start learning about it. Does Big Data really means data is big? What are the tools and software I need to know to learn Big Data? I often receive questions which I mentioned above. They are good questions and honestly when we search online, it is hard to find authoritative and authentic answers. I have been working with Big Data and NoSQL for a while and I have decided that I will attempt to discuss this subject over here in the blog. In the next 21 days we will understand what is so big about Big Data. Big Data – Big Thing! Big Data is becoming one of the most talked about technology trends nowadays. The real challenge with the big organization is to get maximum out of the data already available and predict what kind of data to collect in the future. How to take the existing data and make it meaningful that it provides us accurate insight in the past data is one of the key discussion points in many of the executive meetings in organizations. With the explosion of the data the challenge has gone to the next level and now a Big Data is becoming the reality in many organizations. Big Data – A Rubik’s Cube I like to compare big data with the Rubik’s cube. I believe they have many similarities. Just like a Rubik’s cube it has many different solutions. Let us visualize a Rubik’s cube solving challenge where there are many experts participating. If you take five Rubik’s cube and mix up the same way and give it to five different expert to solve it. It is quite possible that all the five people will solve the Rubik’s cube in fractions of the seconds but if you pay attention to the same closely, you will notice that even though the final outcome is the same, the route taken to solve the Rubik’s cube is not the same. Every expert will start at a different place and will try to resolve it with different methods. Some will solve one color first and others will solve another color first. Even though they follow the same kind of algorithm to solve the puzzle they will start and end at a different place and their moves will be different at many occasions. It is  nearly impossible to have a exact same route taken by two experts. Big Market and Multiple Solutions Big Data is exactly like a Rubik’s cube – even though the goal of every organization and expert is same to get maximum out of the data, the route and the starting point are different for each organization and expert. As organizations are evaluating and architecting big data solutions they are also learning the ways and opportunities which are related to Big Data. There is not a single solution to big data as well there is not a single vendor which can claim to know all about Big Data. Honestly, Big Data is too big a concept and there are many players – different architectures, different vendors and different technology. What is Next? In this 31 days series we will be exploring many essential topics related to big data. I do not claim that you will be master of the subject after 31 days but I claim that I will be covering following topics in easy to understand language. Architecture of Big Data Big Data a Management and Implementation Different Technologies – Hadoop, Mapreduce Real World Conversations Best Practices Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer one of the very essential questions – What is Big Data? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Experimenting with ACID Transactions, SQL Compliant, Elastically Scalable Database

  - by pinaldave

  Database technology is huge and big world. I like to explore always beyond what I know and share the learning. Weekend is the best time when I sit around download random software on my machine which I like to call as a lab machine (it is a pretty old laptop, hardly a quality as lab machine) and experiment it. There are so many free betas available for download that it’s hard to keep track and even harder to find the time to play with very many of them.  This blog is about one you shouldn’t miss if you are interested in the learning various relational databases. NuoDB just released their Beta 7.  I had already downloaded their Beta 6 and yesterday did the same for 7.   My impression is that they are onto something very very interesting.  In fact, it might be something really promising in terms of database elasticity, scale and operational cost reduction. The folks at NuoDB say they are working on the world’s first “emergent” database which they tout as a brand new transitional database that is intended to dramatically change what’s possible with OLTP.  It is SQL compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, yet scales elastically on heterogeneous and decentralized cloud-based resources. Interesting note for sure, making me explore more. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they are solving the architectural challenge that exists between elastic, cloud-based compute infrastructures designed to scale out in response to workload requirements versus the traditional relational database management system’s architecture of central control. Here’s my experience with the NuoDB Beta 6 so far: First they pretty much threw away all the features you’d associate with existing RDBMS architectures except the SQL and ACID transactions which they were smart to keep.  It looks like they have incorporated a number of the big ideas from various algorithms, systems and techniques to achieve maximum DB scalability. From a user’s perspective, the NuoDB Beta software behaves like any other traditional SQL database and seems to offer all the benefits users have come to expect from standards-based SQL solutions. One of the interesting feature is that one can run a transactional node and a storage node on my Windows laptop as well on other platforms – indeed interesting for sure. It’s quite amazing to see a database elastically scale across machine boundaries. So, one of the basic NuoDB concepts is that as you need to scale out, you can easily use more inexpensive hardware when/where you need it.  This is unlike what we have traditionally done to scale a database for an application – we replace the hardware with something more powerful (faster CPU and Disks). This is where I started to feel like NuoDB is on to something that has the potential to elastically scale on commodity hardware while reducing operational expense for a big OLTP database to a degree we’ve never seen before. NuoDB is able to fully leverage the cloud in an asynchronous and highly decentralized manner – while providing both SQL compliance and ACID transactions. Basically what NuoDB is doing is so new that it is all hard to believe until you’ve experienced it in action.  I will keep you up to date as I test the NuoDB Beta 7 but if you are developing a web-scale application or have an on-premise app you are thinking of moving to the cloud, testing this beta is worth your time. If you do try it, let me know what you think.  Before I say anything more, I am going to do more experiments and more test on this product and compare it with other existing similar products. For me it was a weekend worth spent on learning something new. I encourage you to download Beta 7 version and share your opinions here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• OSI Model

  - by kaleidoscope

  The Open System Interconnection Reference Model (OSI Reference Model or OSI Model) is an abstract description for layered communications and computer network protocol design. In its most basic form, it divides network architecture into seven layers which, from top to bottom, are the Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data Link, and Physical Layers. It is therefore often referred to as the OSI Seven Layer Model. A layer is a collection of conceptually similar functions that provide services to the layer above it and receives service from the layer below it. Description of OSI layers: Layer 1: Physical Layer ·         Defines the electrical and physical specifications for devices. In particular, it defines the relationship between a device and a physical medium. ·         Establishment and termination of a connection to a communications medium. ·         Participation in the process whereby the communication resources are effectively shared among multiple users. ·         Modulation or conversion between the representation of digital data in user equipment and the corresponding signals transmitted over a communications channel. Layer 2: Data Link Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data between network entities. ·         Detect and possibly correct errors that may occur in the Physical Layer. The error check is performed using Frame Check Sequence (FCS). ·         Addresses is then sought to see if it needs to process the rest of the frame itself or whether to pass it on to another host. ·         The Layer is divided into two sub layers: The Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Logical Link Control (LLC) layer. ·         MAC sub layer controls how a computer on the network gains access to the data and permission to transmit it. ·         LLC layer controls frame synchronization, flow control and error checking.   Layer 3: Network Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length data sequences from a source to a destination via one or more networks. ·         Performs network routing functions, and might also perform fragmentation and reassembly, and report delivery errors. ·         Network Layer Routers operate at this layer—sending data throughout the extended network and making the Internet possible.   Layer 4: Transport Layer ·         Provides transparent transfer of data between end users, providing reliable data transfer services to the upper layers. ·         Controls the reliability of a given link through flow control, segmentation/de-segmentation, and error control. ·         Transport Layer can keep track of the segments and retransmit those that fail. Layer 5: Session Layer ·         Controls the dialogues (connections) between computers. ·         Establishes, manages and terminates the connections between the local and remote application. ·         Provides for full-duplex, half-duplex, or simplex operation, and establishes checkpointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures. ·         Implemented explicitly in application environments that use remote procedure calls. Layer 6: Presentation Layer ·         Establishes a context between Application Layer entities, in which the higher-layer entities can use different syntax and semantics, as long as the presentation service understands both and the mapping between them. The presentation service data units are then encapsulated into Session Protocol data units, and moved down the stack. ·         Provides independence from differences in data representation (e.g., encryption) by translating from application to network format, and vice versa. The presentation layer works to transform data into the form that the application layer can accept. This layer formats and encrypts data to be sent across a network, providing freedom from compatibility problems. It is sometimes called the syntax layer. Layer 7: Application Layer ·         This layer interacts with software applications that implement a communicating component. ·         Identifies communication partners, determines resource availability, and synchronizes communication. o       When identifying communication partners, the application layer determines the identity and availability of communication partners for an application with data to transmit. o       When determining resource availability, the application layer must decide whether sufficient network or the requested communication exists. o       In synchronizing communication, all communication between applications requires cooperation that is managed by the application layer. Technorati Tags: Kunal,OSI,Networking

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• Why Cornell University Chose Oracle Data Masking

  - by Troy Kitch

  One of the eight Ivy League schools, Cornell University found itself in the unfortunate position of having to inform over 45,000 University community members that their personal information had been breached when a laptop was stolen. To ensure this wouldn’t happen again, Cornell took steps to ensure that data used for non-production purposes is de-identified with Oracle Data Masking. A recent podcast highlights why organizations like Cornell are choosing Oracle Data Masking to irreversibly de-identify production data for use in non-production environments. Organizations often copy production data, that contains sensitive information, into non-production environments so they can test applications and systems using “real world” information. Data in non-production has increasingly become a target of cyber criminals and can be lost or stolen due to weak security controls and unmonitored access. Similar to production environments, data breaches in non-production environments can cost millions of dollars to remediate and cause irreparable harm to reputation and brand. Cornell’s applications and databases help carry out the administrative and academic mission of the university. They are running Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions that include highly sensitive faculty, student, alumni, and prospective student data. This data is supported and accessed by a diverse set of developers and functional staff distributed across the university. Several years ago, Cornell experienced a data breach when an employee’s laptop was stolen.  Centrally stored backup information indicated there was sensitive data on the laptop. With no way of knowing what the criminal intended, the university had to spend significant resources reviewing data, setting up service centers to handle constituent concerns, and provide free credit checks and identity theft protection services—all of which cost money and took time away from other projects. To avoid this issue in the future Cornell came up with several options; one of which was to sanitize the testing and training environments. “The project management team was brought in and they developed a project plan and implementation schedule; part of which was to evaluate competing products in the market-space and figure out which one would work best for us.  In the end we chose Oracle’s solution based on its architecture and its functionality.” – Tony Damiani, Database Administration and Business Intelligence, Cornell University The key goals of the project were to mask the elements that were identifiable as sensitive in a consistent and efficient manner, but still support all the previous activities in the non-production environments. Tony concludes,  “What we saw was a very minimal impact on performance. The masking process added an additional three hours to our refresh window, but it was well worth that time to secure the environment and remove the sensitive data. I think some other key points you can keep in mind here is that there was zero impact on the production environment. Oracle Data Masking works in non-production environments only. Additionally, the risk of exposure has been significantly reduced and the impact to business was minimal.” With Oracle Data Masking organizations like Cornell can: Make application data securely available in non-production environments Prevent application developers and testers from seeing production data Use an extensible template library and policies for data masking automation Gain the benefits of referential integrity so that applications continue to work Listen to the podcast to hear the complete interview.  Learn more about Oracle Data Masking by registering to watch this SANS Institute Webcast and view this short demo.

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• Open Your Windows - 4/Maio/10

  - by Claudia Costa

  This FREE technical briefing is designed to show ISVs/SIs how to leverage the Oracle11g Technology especially in the small to medium business. The briefing focuses on Oracle's 11g platform on Windows & Linux and gives a very comprehensive technical competitive overview to the products offered by Microsoft. The technical part covers Integration and Migration aspects of various Microsoft products such as SQL Server, .NET and Active Directory. Register Today! With Oracle11g Oracle introduced various products (ApplicationExpress, OracleExpress Edition, ADF, BPEL) and licenses (Oracle Database Standard Edition One, Application Server Java Edition) specifically targetting the small to medium business market and to show that Oracle Database and Application Server are as easy to use and costs less than Microsoft products in terms of purchase price and ongoing support & maintenance and even much much less when considering the Linux platform.. For those ISVs have already adopted Microsoft .NET framework and using SQL Server as their database layer, we will demostrate that Oracle11g Database is as easy as SQL Server to install, configure, and manage. In addition to that, their application development .NET platform does not requires dramatic changes to enable it to run on the Oracle database. Besides the standard functionalities, Oracle has enhanced some of the advanced features; such as Intermedia, Security, Ref Cursor, etc., tightly integrated with .NET framework so that .NET developers can take full advantage of the Oracle technology, without worrying or programming the complexity components. Objectives ·         Understand Oracle's strategy and commitment on Windows & Linux ·         Learn how to migrate from SQL Server to Oracle on Windows AND Linux ·         Understand that Oracle11g is easy to manage and to install on Windows & Linux ·         Learn how to integrate Windows products with the Oracle11g Platform ·         Learn how Oracle products interoperate & integrate with Microsoft .NET ·         Learn how an Oracle database on Windows will easily be ported to a lower cost Linux database platform and interoperate with a .NET application Prerequisites General Operating System expertise including MS-Windows and Linux. Agenda ·         Welcome and Intro ·         Oracle at a glance ·         Strategy; Small to Medium Business, Microsoft and Linux ·         Oracle 11g Architecture on Linux & Windows ·         Managing Oracle 11g on Linux & Windows ·         Application Development ·         Migration ·         Value propositions for ISVs & Wrap-up   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Para mais informações/inscrições, contacte: [email protected].

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• Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended

  - by Edward

  Adobe Photoshop has been an industry standard for most web designers & photographers worldwide. Photoshop CS5 has made photography editing much more refined and the composition process has become much easier than ever before.  To study the advantage of Photoshop CS5 extended over Photoshop CS5 we have written this comparison article, with both a Designer’s & Photographer’s perspective. Hopefully it shall help you in your buying/upgrade decision. Photoshop CS5 Photoshop CS5 has refining feature with powerful photography tools. It made editing process easy as fewer steps are involved to remove noise, add grain, create vignettes, correct lens distortions, sharpen, and create HDR images. It has quick image correction and color and tone control for professional purpose. Intelligent image editing and enhancement , extraordinary advanced compositing has made it a better tool than earlier versions for photographers. It allows users to accelerate workflow with fast performance on 64-bit Windows® and Mac hardware systems and smoother interactions due to more GPU-accelerated features. It also boasts of a state-of-the-art processing with Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 6 and helps to maximize creative impact. It provides for tremendous precision and freedom. It allows user to easily select intricate image elements, such as hair and create realistic painting effects. It also allows to remove any image element and see the space fill in almost magically. It has easy access to core editing and streamlined work flow and flexible work ambience. It has creative tools and contents. Photoshop CS5 Extended Photoshop CS5 extended is quite innovative and has incorporated 3D elements to 2D artwork directly within digital imaging application, which enables user to do an easy on-ramp to 3D image creation. It also provides for 3D editing. It has intelligent image editing and enhancement. It offers advance composing and has extraordinary painting and drawing toolset. It provides for video and animation designing. It helps to work with specialized images for architecture, manufacturing, engineering, science, and medicine. Where CS5 extended scores over CS5 CS5 extended has many features, which were not included in CS5. These features make it score more over CS5. These features are: Technology for creating 3D extrusion 3D material library and picker Field depth for 3D 3D merging and scene composition improvements 3D workflow improvement Customization of 3D features Image based light source Shadow catcher for shadow creation Enhanced ray tracer Context sensitive widgets, which allows easy control of objects, lights and cameras. Overlays for materials and mesh boundaries Photoshop CS5 extended is far better than CS5 as it incorporates all the features of CS5 and have more advanced features. It allows 3D creation and editing and has other advanced tools to make it better. Redefining the Image-Editing Experience  : A Photographer’s point of View Photoshop CS5 delivers amazing features and creative options so even new users can perform advanced image manipulations and compositions. Breath taking image intelligence behind Content-Aware Fill magically removes any image detail or object, examines the surroundings and seamlessly fills in the space left behind. Lighting, tone and noise of the surrounding area can be matched. New Refine Edge makes nearly-impossible image selections possible. Masking was never easier, the toughest types of edges, such as hair and foliage seem easier to fix. To sum up following are few advantages of CS5 extended over previous versions 64-bit processing Content Aware Fill Refine Edge, “makes nearly-impossible image selections impossible” HDR Pro, including ghost artifact removal and HDR toning, which gives the look of HDR with a single exposure New brush options Improved image management with enhanced Adobe Bridge Lens corrections Improved black-and-white conversions Puppet Warp: Precisely reposition or warp any image element Adobe Camera Raw 6 Upgrade Buy Online Pricing and Availability Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended are available through Adobe Authorized Resellers & the Adobe Store. Estimated street price for Adobe Photoshop CS5 is US$699 and US$999 for Photoshop CS5 Extended. Upgrade pricing and volume licensing are also available. Related posts:10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software Web based Alternatives to Photoshop 15 Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials For Designers

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• Book Review: Programming Windows Identity Foundation

  - by DigiMortal

  Programming Windows Identity Foundation by Vittorio Bertocci is right now the only serious book about Windows Identity Foundation available. I started using Windows Identity Foundation when I made my first experiments on Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service. I wanted to generalize the way how people authenticate theirselves to my systems and AppFabric ACS seemed to me like good point where to start. My first steps trying to get things work opened the door to whole new authentication world for me. As I went through different blog postings and articles to get more information I discovered that the thing I am trying to use is the one I am looking for. As best security API for .NET was found I wanted to know more about it and this is how I found Programming Windows Identity Foundation. What’s inside? Programming WIF focuses on architecture, design and implementation of WIF. I think Vittorio is very good at teaching people because you find no too complex topics from the book. You learn more and more as you read and as a good thing you will find that you can also try out your new knowledge on WIF immediately. After giving good overview about WIF author moves on and introduces how to use WIF in ASP.NET applications. You will get complete picture how WIF integrates to ASP.NET request processing pipeline and how you can control the process by yourself. There are two chapters about ASP.NET. First one is more like introduction and the second one goes deeper and deeper until you have very good idea about how to use ASP.NET and WIF together, what issues you may face and how you can configure and extend WIF. Other two chapters cover using WIF with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) band   Windows Azure. WCF chapter expects that you know WCF very well. This is not introductory chapter for beginners, this is heavy reading if you are not familiar with WCF. The chapter about Windows Azure describes how to use WIF in cloud applications. Last chapter talks about some future developments of WIF and describer some problems and their solutions. Most interesting part of this chapter is section about Silverlight. Who should read this book? Programming WIF is targeted to developers. It does not matter if you are beginner or old bullet-proof professional – every developer should be able to be read this book with no difficulties. I don’t recommend this book to administrators and project managers because they find almost nothing that is related to their work. I strongly recommend this book to all developers who are interested in modern authentication methods on Microsoft platform. The book is written so well that I almost forgot all things around me when I was reading the book. All additional tools you need are free. There is also Azure AppFabric ACS test version available and you can try it out for free. Table of contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Windows Identity Foundation for Everybody 1 Claims-Based Identity 2 Core ASP.NET Programming Part II Windows Identity Foundation for Identity Developers 3 WIF Processing Pipeline in ASP.NET 4 Advanced ASP.NET Programming 5 WIF and WCF 6 WIF and Windows Azure 7 The Road Ahead Index

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• Add the Vista Style Sidebar Back to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you are moving from Vista to Windows 7, you might miss the Sidebar which was introduced in Vista. Today we take a look at a couple options for getting a Sidebar back in Windows 7. Copy Files from Vista Note: In this example we are using 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7. Make sure you are logged in with Administrator credentials. If you have a Vista machine running, we can copy the Windows Sidebar files over to the Windows 7 machine. On the Vista machine navigate to C:\Program Files and copy the Windows Sidebar folder and all of its contents over to a flash drive or network location. On the Windows 7 machine go to C:\Program Files and rename the Windows Sidebar folder to something like Windows Sidebar_old. Now copy the Vista Windows Sidebar folder into C:\Program Files… Now you will have both folders…Windows Sidebar and Windows Sidebar_old in your C:\Program Files folder. Right-click on the desktop and select Gadgets. There you are…the Original Vista Sidebar is back and will act as it did in Vista. Move Sidebar Gadgets Another work around if you don’t have a copy of Vista, you can simply move the Desktop Gadgets you want over to the right side of the screen and they will stay there…no dock needed. Type gadgets into the Search box in the Windows Start Menu and click on Desktop Gadgets. Then drag the included Gadgets you want over to the right side of the screen. Or click on the link to Get more gadgets online to find more. Once you have them where you want, each time you reboot they will still be in the same location. This holds true no matter where you place them on your desktop as well. Install Desktop Sidebar If you want an enhanced sidebar that includes a lot of different features, and don’t have a copy of Vista, you might want to check out Desktop Sidebar Beta (link below). This is a freeware application that works with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. After installation you can access it from the Start Menu… Here is how it will look after you launch it… It includes several pre-installed panels including a clock, Media Player, Search Bar, Slideshow, Messenger, Outlook inbox, Tasks, Quick Launch, Performance…and a lot more. It is highly customizable and allows you to change skins, add various levels of transparency, and a lot more. One caveat with going with Desktop Sidebar is we didn’t find a way to add Windows Gadgets to it (though there might be a plugin for it that we’re not aware of). But there are so many options, you may not mind. However, you can still use the desktop gadgets as you normally would in Windows 7. Believe it or not, some people actually prefer the Vista style Sidebar and would like it back in Windows 7. With these options you can get the Vista Sidebar back if you have a copy of Vista, place the Gadgets on the desktop, or go the freeware route. Download Desktop Sidebar (freeware) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable Windows Sidebar in VistaHow To Repair Your Crashed or Hanging Vista SidebarApplying Themes To Your Windows Vista SidebarDisable Sidebar / Desktop Gadgets on Windows 7Put AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) In your Windows Sidebar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox)

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• Add Social Elements to Your Gmail Contacts with Rapportive

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to discover more about your contacts?  Xobni is a great tool for this in Outlook, and thanks to a small plugin for Gmail, you can get similar functionality right from your favorite webmail app. Setup Rapportive on Your Gmail Browse to the Rapportive site (link below), and click install to add it to your browser.  Rapportive currently only supports Firefox and Google Chrome.  In this test, we installed it on Google Chrome.  Notice that Chrome warns Rapportive may access your private data from Gmail, though Rapportive says that they only use this data securely on your computer or their servers. Next time you log into Gmail, open a message to see the new Rapportive sidebar.  Click Log in to get started. Choose if you want to let Rapportive to access your data. Finally, choose whether to stay logged into Rapportive or to log out when you log out of Gmail.   Using Rapportive Now, when you open an email, you should see more information about your contact on the right side of the message where you usually see Google AdSense ads. You may see an avatar, short bio, and links to their social networks.  You can add notes about a contact also, which lets you use Rapportive as a CRM. You may see more information on some contacts.  Here we see a contact that shows recent Tweets and links to several social networks. Take Rapportive Further You can add more features to Rapportive with Raplets, which are small extensions that add more information or CRM functionality.  To add these, click the Rapportive button on the top of Gmail, and select Add Raplets to Rapportive. Find a Raplet you want, and click Add This. A popup will open to give you more information about the Raplet; click the Add button at the bottom if you still want it. And, if you’re wish to close Rapportive without logging out of Gmail, click the Rapportive link in Gmail and select Log out. Conclusion Whether you want to find out more about your contacts or keep track of notes about them, Rapportive is a great way to do this from Gmail.  With tools like this, Gmail gets a bit more powerful and feels more like a desktop application. If you would like this type of functionality in Outlook, check out our article on how to power up Outlook’s search and contacts with Xobni. Add Rapportive to Gmail Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Import Gmail Contacts Into Outlook 2007Enhance Your Gmail Account in ChromeFigure out which Online accounts are selling your email to spammersAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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• Gamify your Web

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  Yesterday Valencia welcomed the Gamification World Congress that I follow virtually through #GWC2012. BBVA, Iberia, Ligeresa, Axe, Wayra, ESADE, GlaxoSmithKline, Macmillan, Gamisfaction, Nomaders, Blaffin were among the companies presenting success stories on gaming. It has been proved that people remember things easily when an emotion is created. The marketing expectations around Gamification techniques have a lot to do with Neuromarketing theories. There are a lot of expectations on internal enterprise Gamification. In the public Web some sectors are taking the lead on following the trend. The Gartner Analyst Brian Burke opened another Gamification recent event in Madrid remembering that “Gamification is mostly about Engagement”, and this can be applied both to customers or employees. Gamification and Banking The experience of the Spanish Financial Group BBVA that just launched BBVA Game was also presented a week ago at the BBVA Innovation Centre during the event “Gamification & Banking: a fad or a serious business?” . One of the objectives of the BBVA Game was to double the name of registered users. “People like the efficiency of the online channel want to keep a one-to-one contact with the brand”-explained Bernardo Crespo. Another interested data coming out the BBVA presentation was that “only 20% of Spanish users –out of the total holders of Bank Accounts in the country- is familiar with the use of a Web Site to consult their bank accounts”, the project aims also to reverse this situation helping people to learn making a heavy use of the Video in the gaming context. In general Banking presenters seem to agree that Gamification techniques are helping to increase the time spent on the Web. Gamification and Health Using Gamification techniques for chronic illness rehabilitation was another topic of the World Congress. Here you can find some ideas and experiences What can games do for the health (In Spanish) I have personally started my own mental-health gaming project at http://www.lumosity.com/ Gamification in the Enterprise I really recommend Reading this excellent post of Ultan ÓBroin my Introduction to Gamification and Applications. Employee´s motivation and learning are experiencing a 360º turn and it looks than some of us will become soon the Dragon of the year instead of the Employee of the Year. Using Web 2.0 Tools for Gamification Projects  What type of tools do we need for a quick-win Gamification project? To certain extend Gamification can be considered an evolution of the participative Web. Badging, avatars, points and awards, leader boards, progress charts, virtual currencies, gifting and giving challenges and quests are common components and elements. The Web is offering new development frameworks to that purpose as this Avatar Framework from Paypal or Badgeville to include in web applications. Besides, tools to create communities around a game are required to comment, share and vote players as well as for an efficient multimedia management. Due to its entirely open architecture, its community features, and its multimedia and imaging solutions is were I see WebCenter as a tool helping brands to success. Link to Sources & Recommended Readings YouTube Video of BBVAGame presentation Where To Apply Gamification In Your Incentive Jim Calhoun Cancer Challenge Ride and Walkh For my Spanish Readers El aburrimiento es el enemigo número uno del éxito

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• Asynchrony in C# 5: Dataflow Async Logger Sample

  - by javarg

  Check out this (very simple) code examples for TPL Dataflow. Suppose you are developing an Async Logger to register application events to different sinks or log writers. The logger architecture would be as follow: Note how blocks can be composed to achieved desired behavior. The BufferBlock<T> is the pool of log entries to be process whereas linked ActionBlock<TInput> represent the log writers or sinks. The previous composition would allows only one ActionBlock to consume entries at a time. Implementation code would be something similar to (add reference to System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll in %User Documents%\Microsoft Visual Studio Async CTP\Documentation): TPL Dataflow Logger var bufferBlock = new BufferBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> infoLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Info: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> errorLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}", e.Item2)); bufferBlock.LinkTo(infoLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Info) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(errorLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Error) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Info, "info message")); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Error, "error message")); Note the filter applied to each link (in this case, the Logging Level selects the writer used). We can specify message filters using Predicate functions on each link. Now, the previous sample is useless for a Logger since Logging Level is not exclusive (thus, several writers could be used to process a single message). Let´s use a Broadcast<T> buffer instead of a BufferBlock<T>. Broadcast Logger var bufferBlock = new BroadcastBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(     e => new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(e.Item1, e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> infoLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Info: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> errorLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> allLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(     e => Console.WriteLine("All: {0}", e.Item2)); bufferBlock.LinkTo(infoLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Info) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(errorLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Error) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(allLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.All) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Info, "info message")); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Error, "error message")); As this block copies the message to all its outputs, we need to define the copy function in the block constructor. In this case we create a new Tuple, but you can always use the Identity function if passing the same reference to every output. Try both scenarios and compare the results.

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• Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. 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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• Integrating Windows Form Click Once Application into SharePoint 2007 &ndash; Part 1 of 2

  - by Kelly Jones

  Last year, I had the opportunity to build a solution that involved integrating a Windows Form application into a SharePoint 2007 (WSS version 3.0). In this post, I’ll layout our architecture thinking and in part two, I’ll describe the technical details. Business Case Our challenge was this: we needed an easy way for a small group of our users to upload documents, in batches.  They also needed to quickly set the meta data values, as well as set security on individual files. Using the out of the box uploads just didn’t fit.  The single file upload allows set the meta data, but our users would be uploading dozens of files.  The multiple upload would allow our users to upload batches of files, but it doesn’t allow them to set the meta data during upload.  Also, neither upload method allows the users to set the permissions on the file. Our Solution We looked into building a web control of some kind, but ruled that out due to security complexities (if I remember correctly).  Another option would have been using a technology like Silverlight (or Flash?), but our team didn’t have the skills necessary to build with these. So, after looking at what was technically possible, and also what skills our team had, we settled on a Windows Form application.  We also decided to deliver it to the clients via Click Once, so we would have the ability to easily update the application in the future. Lessons Learned After deploying our solution, we’ve learned a few lessons.  First, you’ll need to have the .Net Framework installed on the client computers.  We knew this, but we still ran into issues making sure our users had the proper framework version installed.  Second, we had issues with authentication.  Our issues were due to our testing domain being a separate Active Directory domain from the domain that our end users and their workstations were members of.  (See my earlier post about Clearing Saved Passwords for the fix to our problem). Our third issue was how we dealt with uploading files that were named the same.  Our application would replace the existing file with the new file, which is the way we expected it to work.  However, our users wanted to upload weekly reports, named the same as the previous week.  We solved this by using folders within the document library to keep the sets of reports separate from previous weeks. One last thing to consider before implementing a solution like this, is what browsers and platforms your users will be working from.  We only needed to support IE and Windows, which works fine.  However, if you need to support Firefox, there are add-ons that allow Click Once to work with Firefox.  This is still a Windows only solution though.  In order to support Macs, you’d have to focus on either browser techniques (AJAX?) or Silverlight/Flash. Summary Our users are happy with the Click Once app.  It allowed them to move all of their content to our SharePoint site in under a couple hours, which they were thrilled with.  We’re happy because we can easily deploy updates, our development time was small, and we met all of our business requirements.

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• Few events I&rsquo;m speaking at in early 2013

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  2013 has started great and the SQL community is already brimming with events. At some of these events you can come say hi. I’ll be glad you do! These are the events with dates and locations that I know I’ll be speaking at so far.   February 16th: SQL Saturday #198 - Vancouver, Canada The session I’ll present in Vancouver is SQL Impossible: Restoring/Undeleting a table Yes, you read the title right. No, it's not about the usual "one table per partition" and "restore full backup then copy the data over" methods. No, there are no 3rd party tools involved. Just you and your SQL Server. Yes, it's crazy. No, it's not for production purposes. And yes, that's why it's so much fun. Prepare to dive into the world of data pages, log records, deletes, truncates and backups and how it all works together to get your table back from the endless void. Want to know more? Come and see! This is an advanced level session where we’ll dive into the internals of data pages, transaction log records and page restores.   March 8th-9th: SQL Saturday #194 - Exeter, UK In Exeter I’ll be presenting twice. On the first day I’ll have a full day precon titled: From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch This pre-con will give you insight into both of the current tracing technologies in SQL Server. The old SQL Trace which has served us well over the past 10 or so years is on its way out because the overhead and details it produces are no longer enough to deal with today's loads. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. The new Extended Events are a new lightweight tracing mechanism built directly into the SQLOS thus giving us information SQL Trace just couldn't. They were designed and built with performance in mind and it shows. Mastering Extended Events requires learning at least one new skill: XML querying. The second session I’ll have on Saturday titled: SQL Injection from website to SQL Server SQL Injection is still one of the biggest reasons various websites and applications get hacked. The solution as everyone tells us is simple. Use SQL parameters. But is that enough? In this session we'll look at how would an attacker go about using SQL Injection to gain access to your database, see its schema and data, take over the server, upload files and do various other mischief on your domain. This is a fun session that always brings out a few laughs in the audience because they didn’t realize what can be done.   April 23rd-25th: NTK conference - Bled, Slovenia (Slovenian website only) This is a conference with history. This year marks its 18th year running. It’s a relatively large IT conference that focuses on various Microsoft technologies like .Net, Azure, SQL Server, Exchange, Security, etc… The main session’s language is Slovenian but this is slowly changing so it’s becoming more interesting for foreign attendees. This year it’s happening in the beautiful town of Bled in the Alps. The scenery alone is worth the visit, wouldn’t you agree? And this year there are quite a few well known speakers present! Session title isn’t known yet.       May 2nd-4th: SQL Bits XI – Nottingham, UK SQL Bits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe. It’s a 3 day conference with top speakers and content all dedicated to SQL Server. The session I’ll present here is an hour long version of the precon I’ll give in Exeter. From SQL Traces to Extended Events - The next big switch The session description is the same as for the Exeter precon but we'll focus more on how the Extended Events work with only a brief overview of old SQL Trace architecture.

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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• New Release Overview Part 2

  - by brian.harrison

  To continue our discussion of the next release of WCI, lets take a look at a few other new features that have been developed and tested. Password Management With customer implementations starting to go more external, we were finding that these customers wanted to use the native users within the portal because the customer did not want to provide an LDAP server that is externally facing. However, the portal does not provide anything close to the same level of password policy that a standard LDAP environment would provide. With that being the case, we made the decision to provide the same kind of password policies directly within WCI that a standard LDAP environment would have. Password Expiration - In how many days will a password expire which will force the user to change their password? Also, in how many days prior to expiration with the user be notified that their password is about the expire? Password Rotation - How many of your previous passwords will you not be able to use when changing your password? Password Policies - What are the requirements for the password that is being created by the user? Number of Characters Numbers Required Symbols Required Capitalization Required Easily Configurable - Configuration is handled through the Portal Settings utility within Administration. All options are available on the main page of the utility. In addition to the configuration options that were mention above, there has also been a complete rewrite of the Change Password screen to provide better information to the user when they are changing their password. The Change Password will now provide a red light/green light listing of all the policies the user must meet for the changed password to be successful. As the user is typing the password, the red lights will change to green lights as the policies as met. In addition, text will show next to the password text box stating what policy has not been met yet. NOTE: The password policy functionality is not held within the User Editor page within Administration. We did not want to remove the option for Administrators to change a user's password on the fly in the case of a password reset situation. Miscellaneous Features In addition to the Password Management feature, there are a few other features that are related to WCI that should be mentioned. Consolidated Installer - Instead of having up to 12 or 13 different installers, one for each of the main products and separate services, we are going to only provide two installers. One that will be used for Collaboration and its respective images. The second will contain WCI and all of the relevant services required for a WCI architecture as well as the IDK, .NET App Accelerator, SharePoint Console as well as all Content Web Services and Identity Services. Updated Documentation - Most of us are aware that the documentation hasn't been properly kept up to date with the last couple of releases. We are doing everything that we can to remedy this with the next release by consolidating and reviewing everything that is available. We are making sure to fill in the gaps that are already there, add in all documentation for the functionality as well as clearing anything that is no longer valid based on the newly released version. I hope that you enjoyed reading through this new release information. Next time we will start to talk about the new functionality that will be available within the next release of Collaboration. If there is anything in particular that you would like to get more detail about, then please don't hesitate to send me a comment.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Client-Side Validation Summary with jQuery Validation (Unobtrusive JavaScript)

  - by Soe Tun

  When we were working with ASP.NET MVC 2, we needed to write our own JavaScript to get Client-Side Validation Summary with jQuery Validation plugin. I am one of those unfortunate people still stuck with .NET Framework Runtime 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.5; meaning I am still on ASP.NET MVC 2. So I will still keep on supporting by answering any question you may have with my original code.   Long awaited ASP.NET MVC 3 has been released, and it supports Client Side Validation Summary with jQuery out-of-the-box with new features like Unobtrusive JavaScript.   1. _Layout.cshtml Template Notice that I am using Protocol Relative URLs ( i.e., '//'.  Not 'http://' or 'https://' ) to reference script files and css files and you should use it too like that! However, please note that IE7 and IE8 will download the CSS files twice so use it with judgement. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>@ViewBag.Title</title> <link href="@Url.Content("~/Assets/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.9/themes/redmond/jquery-ui.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" /> </head> <body> @RenderBody() <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.9/jquery-ui.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="//ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery.Validate/1.7/jQuery.Validate.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="//ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/mvc/3.0/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </body> </html>   2. MVC View Template There are 3 things you *must* do exactly to get Client Side Validation Summary working. (1)  You must declare your Validation Summary **inside** the `Html.BeginForm()` block like below. (2)  You must pass `excludePropertyErrors: false` to the  Html.ValidationSummary()  method. @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(false, "Please fix these errors."); <!-- The rest of your View Template --> }   (3)  You have to put the following two elements in the `<appSettings />` block of your Web.config file. <add key="ClientValidationEnabled" value="true"/> <add key="UnobtrusiveJavaScriptEnabled" value="true"/>   That is all you need to do.  Simple, right? I will upload a sample project for download soon.  Please let me know if you run into some issues.     P.S: Without getting into too much technical details, I just wanted to let you know what I went through to get this to work. I had to look into the ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM Source Code and the jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js source. Initially, I thought I have to hack the jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js or something to get this to work. But after digging into MVC3 RTM source, I found out how to do it.

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• FFmpeg Video Hosting for Linux and Windows Server

  - by Aditi

  FFmpeg hosting is a special type of web hosting where the host servers have video transcoding software loaded on them, which allows the automatic conversion of videos from one format to another. FFmpeg is a cross-platform solution for recording, converting, transcoding and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg hosting gets its name from a set of server side programs (modules) called FFmpeg. There are a number of applications or web scripts available, which allow webmasters to create their own video sharing websites. Video hosting typically requires: PHP 4.3 and above (including support of CLI) Mencoder and also Mplayer FFMpeg-PHP MySQL database server LAME MP3 Encoder Libogg + Libvorbis GD Library 2 or higher CGI-BIN There are number of web service providers who provide FFmpeg hosting service. Following is a list of some of the Best FFmpeg hosting providers for both Linux and Windows Server below. Dream Host Dreamhost provides for web based email access, mail filtering, spam filtering, unlimited email ids, vacation autoresponder, python support, full CGI access and many more services. Price: $7.95 View Details Micfo It offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Other services include free domain for life and free Website Transfer with many more services. All in all one of the best option to consider. Price: $5 View Details Host Upon HostUpon offers FFMpeg Hosting on all their hosting packages, with readily installed modules to start a Video website or Social Network with Video uploading. These scripts such as Boonex Dolphin / PHPMotion / Social Engine / ABKsoft Scripts / Joomla Video Plugin / Clipshare / ClipBucket / Social Media / Rayzz / Vidi Script work with their ffmpeg. Their FFMPEG hosting plan offers 24/7/365 support with typical response time of 15min or less. Price: $5.95 View Details DownTown Host DownTown Host provides full and exceptional support by live chat and telephone. It has high-power, modern servers and the finest web server technology. It offers free search engine Submission and continuous data backup protection with free email forwarding and site move. There are many more services too. Site5 This ffmpeg service provider offers uptime guarantee, a real time stats on each server and many more attractive services. Price: $4.95 View Details Cirtex Hosting Cirtex Hosting allows to host 7 websites & domains and provides for unlimited storage space and monthly bandwidth. It also offers FTP and email accounts and many more services. Price: $2.49 View Details FLV Hosting FLV hosting supplies RTMP SERVER STREAMING for large size video streaming and server side recording. It is flexible and costs less. They customize to the clients requirements. Price: $9.95 View Details AptHost This hosting service provides for 24x7x365 Premium Support and fully ffmpeg enabled services. Price: $4.95 View Details HostMDS Great Support, Priced Low. It provides for SSH access, CGI, Ruby on Rails, Perl, PHP, MySQL, front page extentions, 24/7 Support, FREE Domain transfer and spam filtering. It offers instant account setup, low latency fast bandwidth & much more! They were formerly known as Vistapages. Price: $4.95 View Details Related posts:Best WordPress Video Themes for a Video Blog Free Web Based Applications 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

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• Non-standard installation (installing Linux from Linux)

  - by Evan Plaice

  So, here's my setup. I have one partition with the newest version installed, a second partition with an older version installed (as a backup just in case), a swap partition that both share, and a boot partition so the bootloader doesn't need to be setup after each upgrade. Partitions: sda1 ext3 /boot sda2 ext4 / (current version) sda3 ext4 / (old version) sda4 swap /swap sda5 ntfs (contains folders symbolically linked to /home on /) So far it has been a very good setup. I can create new boot loaders without screwing it up and adding my personal files into a new install is as simple as creating some symbolic links (the partition is NTFS in case I need to load windows on the system again). Here's the issue. I'd like to be able to drop the install into /distro on the current version and install a new version on / on the old version effectively replacing/upgrading it. The goal is to be able to just swap out new versions as they are released while maintaining redundancy in case I don't like th update. So far I have: downloaded the install.iso created a folder in /distro copied the install.iso into /distro extracted vmlinuz and initrd.lz into /distro Then I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst with the following entry: title Install Linux root (hd0,1) kernel /distro/vmlinuz initrd /distro/initrd.lz vmlinuz loads perfectly but it says it can't find initrd.lz on boot. I have also tried to uncompress the image with: unlzma < initrd.lz > initrd.img And, updating the menu.lst file to match; but that doesn't work either. I'm assuming that vmlinuz (linux kernel) loads, fires up the virtual filesystem by creating a ramdisk (initrd), mounts the iso, and launches the installer. Am I missing something here? Update: First, I wanted to say that the accepted answer would have been the best option if I was doing a normal Ubuntu install. Unfortunately, I was installing Linux Mint (which lacks the script needed to make debootstrap work. So the problem I with the above approach was, I was missing the command that vmlinuz (linux kernel) needed to execute to start boot into LiveCD mode. By looking in the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file I found what I was missing. Although this method will work, it requires that the installation files reside on their own partition. I took the easy route and used unetbootin to drop the LiveCD on a usb drive and booted from that. Like I said before. Debootstrap would have been the ideal solution here. Even though I couldn't use it I wrote down the steps it would've taken to use it. Step One: Format sda3 (the partition with the old copy of linux that's being overwritten) I used gparted to format it as ext4 from within the current linux install. How this is done varies based on what tools you prefer to use. Step Two: Mount the newly formatted partition (we'll call the mount ubuntu for simplicity) sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu sudo mount -o -loop /dev/sda3 /mnt/ubuntu Step Three: Get debootstrap sudo apt-get install debootstrap Step Four: Mount the install disk (replace ubuntu.iso with the name if your install disk) sudo mkdir /media/cdrom sudo mount -o loop ~/ubuntu.iso /media/cdrom Step Five: Install the OS using debootstrap (replace fiesty with the version you're installing and amd64 with your processor's architecture) sudo debootstrap --arch amd64 fiesty /mnt/ubuntu file:/media/cdrom The settings here varies. While I loaded debootstrap using an install iso, you can also have debootstrap automatically download and install if with a repository link (While most of these repositories contain debian versions I'm still not clear as to whether Ubuntu has similar repositories). Here a list of the debian package repositories and their mirrors. This is how you'd deploy debootstrap if you were doing it directly from a repository: sudo debootstrap --arch amd64 squeeze /mnt/debian http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian Here's the link that I primarily used to figure this out.

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