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  • obj-c classes and sub classes (Cocos2d) conversion

    - by Lewis
    Hi I'm using this version of cocos2d: https://github.com/krzysztofzablocki/CCNode-SFGestureRecognizers Which supports the UIGestureRecognizer within a CCLayer in a cocos2d scene like so: @interface HelloWorldLayer : CCLayer <UIGestureRecognizerDelegate> { } Now I want to make this custom gesture work within the scene, attaching it to a sprite in cocos2d: #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> #import <UIKit/UIGestureRecognizerSubclass.h> @protocol OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizerDelegate <NSObject> @optional - (void) rotation: (CGFloat) angle; - (void) finalAngle: (CGFloat) angle; @end @interface OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizer : UIGestureRecognizer { CGPoint midPoint; CGFloat innerRadius; CGFloat outerRadius; CGFloat cumulatedAngle; id <OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizerDelegate> target; } - (id) initWithMidPoint: (CGPoint) midPoint innerRadius: (CGFloat) innerRadius outerRadius: (CGFloat) outerRadius target: (id) target; - (void)reset; - (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event; - (void)touchesMoved:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event; - (void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event; - (void)touchesCancelled:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event; @end #include <math.h> #import "OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizer.h" @implementation OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizer // private helper functions CGFloat distanceBetweenPoints(CGPoint point1, CGPoint point2); CGFloat angleBetweenLinesInDegrees(CGPoint beginLineA, CGPoint endLineA, CGPoint beginLineB, CGPoint endLineB); - (id) initWithMidPoint: (CGPoint) _midPoint innerRadius: (CGFloat) _innerRadius outerRadius: (CGFloat) _outerRadius target: (id <OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizerDelegate>) _target { if ((self = [super initWithTarget: _target action: nil])) { midPoint = _midPoint; innerRadius = _innerRadius; outerRadius = _outerRadius; target = _target; } return self; } /** Calculates the distance between point1 and point 2. */ CGFloat distanceBetweenPoints(CGPoint point1, CGPoint point2) { CGFloat dx = point1.x - point2.x; CGFloat dy = point1.y - point2.y; return sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy); } CGFloat angleBetweenLinesInDegrees(CGPoint beginLineA, CGPoint endLineA, CGPoint beginLineB, CGPoint endLineB) { CGFloat a = endLineA.x - beginLineA.x; CGFloat b = endLineA.y - beginLineA.y; CGFloat c = endLineB.x - beginLineB.x; CGFloat d = endLineB.y - beginLineB.y; CGFloat atanA = atan2(a, b); CGFloat atanB = atan2(c, d); // convert radiants to degrees return (atanA - atanB) * 180 / M_PI; } #pragma mark - UIGestureRecognizer implementation - (void)reset { [super reset]; cumulatedAngle = 0; } - (void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { [super touchesBegan:touches withEvent:event]; if ([touches count] != 1) { self.state = UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed; return; } } - (void)touchesMoved:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { [super touchesMoved:touches withEvent:event]; if (self.state == UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed) return; CGPoint nowPoint = [[touches anyObject] locationInView: self.view]; CGPoint prevPoint = [[touches anyObject] previousLocationInView: self.view]; // make sure the new point is within the area CGFloat distance = distanceBetweenPoints(midPoint, nowPoint); if ( innerRadius <= distance && distance <= outerRadius) { // calculate rotation angle between two points CGFloat angle = angleBetweenLinesInDegrees(midPoint, prevPoint, midPoint, nowPoint); // fix value, if the 12 o'clock position is between prevPoint and nowPoint if (angle > 180) { angle -= 360; } else if (angle < -180) { angle += 360; } // sum up single steps cumulatedAngle += angle; // call delegate if ([target respondsToSelector: @selector(rotation:)]) { [target rotation:angle]; } } else { // finger moved outside the area self.state = UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed; } } - (void)touchesEnded:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { [super touchesEnded:touches withEvent:event]; if (self.state == UIGestureRecognizerStatePossible) { self.state = UIGestureRecognizerStateRecognized; if ([target respondsToSelector: @selector(finalAngle:)]) { [target finalAngle:cumulatedAngle]; } } else { self.state = UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed; } cumulatedAngle = 0; } - (void)touchesCancelled:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event { [super touchesCancelled:touches withEvent:event]; self.state = UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed; cumulatedAngle = 0; } @end Header file for view controller: #import "OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizer.h" @interface OneFingerRotationGestureViewController : UIViewController <OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizerDelegate> @property (nonatomic, strong) IBOutlet UIImageView *image; @property (nonatomic, strong) IBOutlet UITextField *textDisplay; @end then this is in the .m file: gestureRecognizer = [[OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithMidPoint: midPoint innerRadius: outRadius / 3 outerRadius: outRadius target: self]; [self.view addGestureRecognizer: gestureRecognizer]; Now my question is, is it possible to add this custom gesture into the cocos2d project found on that github, and if so, what do I need to change in the OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizerDelegate to get it to work within cocos2d. Because at the minute it is setup in a standard iOS project and not a cocos2d project and I do not know enough about UIViews and classing/ sub classing in obj-c to get this to work. Also it seems to inherit from a UIView where cocos2d uses CCLayer. Kind regards, Lewis. I also realise I may have not included enough code from the custom gesture project for readers to interpret it fully, so the full project can be found here: https://github.com/melle/OneFingerRotationGestureDemo

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  • The Linux powered LAN Gaming House

    - by sachinghalot
    LAN parties offer the enjoyment of head to head gaming in a real-life social environment. In general, they are experiencing decline thanks to the convenience of Internet gaming, but Kenton Varda is a man who takes his LAN gaming very seriously. His LAN gaming house is a fascinating project, and best of all, Linux plays a part in making it all work.Varda has done his own write ups (short, long), so I'm only going to give an overview here. The setup is a large house with 12 gaming stations and a single server computer.The client computers themselves are rack mounted in a server room, and they are linked to the gaming stations on the floor above via extension cables (HDMI for video and audio and USB for mouse and keyboard). Each client computer, built into a 3U rack mount case, is a well specced gaming rig in its own right, sporting an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 560 along with a 60GB SSD drive.Originally, the client computers ran Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows and the games executed under WINE, but Varda had to abandon this scheme. As he explains on his site:"Amazingly, a majority of games worked fine, although many had minor bugs (e.g. flickering mouse cursor, minor rendering artifacts, etc.). Some games, however, did not work, or had bad bugs that made them annoying to play."Subsequently, the gaming computers have been moved onto a more conventional gaming choice, Windows 7. It's a shame that WINE couldn't be made to work, but I can sympathize as it's rare to find modern games that work perfectly and at full native speed. Another problem with WINE is that it tends to suffer from regressions, which is hardly surprising when considering the difficulty of constantly improving the emulation of the Windows API. Varda points out that he preferred working with Linux clients as they were easier to modify and came with less licensing baggage.Linux still runs the server and all of the tools used are open source software. The hardware here is a Intel Xeon E3-1230 with 4GB of RAM. The storage hanging off this machine is a bit more complex than the clients. In addition to the 60GB SSD, it also has 2x1TB drives and a 240GB SDD.When the clients were running Linux, they booted over PXE using a toolchain that will be familiar to anyone who has setup Linux network booting. DHCP pointed the clients to the server which then supplied PXELINUX using TFTP. When booted, file access was accomplished through network block device (NBD). This is a very easy to use system that allows you to serve the contents of a file as a block device over the network. The client computer runs a user mode device driver and the device can be mounted within the file system using the mount command.One snag with offering file access via NBD is that it's difficult to impose any security restrictions on different areas of the file system as the server only sees a single file. The advantage is perfomance as the client operating system simply sees a block device, and besides, these security issues aren't relevant in this setup.Unfortunately, Windows 7 can't use NBD, so, Varda had to switch to iSCSI (which works in both server and client mode under Linux). His network cards are not compliant with this standard when doing a netboot, but fortunately, gPXE came to the rescue, and he boostraps it over PXE. gPXE is also available as an ISO image and is worth knowing about if you encounter an awkward machine that can't manage a network boot. It can also optionally boot from a HTTP server rather than the more traditional TFTP server.According to Varda, booting all 12 machines over the Gigabit Ethernet network is surprisingly fast, and once booted, the machines don't seem noticeably slower than if they were using local storage. Once loaded, most games attempt to load in as much data as possible, filling the RAM, and the the disk and network bandwidth required is small. It's worth noting that these are aspects of this project that might differ from some other thin client scenarios.At time of writing, it doesn't seem as though the local storage of the client machines is being utilized. Instead, the clients boot into Windows from an image on the server that contains the operating system and the games themselves. It uses the copy on write feature of LVM so that any writes from a client are added to a differencing image allocated to that client. As the administrator, Varda can log into the Linux server and authorize changes to the master image for updates etc.SummaryOverall, Varda estimates the total cost of the project at about $40,000, and of course, he needed a property that offered a large physical space in order to house the computers and the gaming workstations. Obviously, this project has stark differences to most thin client projects. The balance between storage, network usage, GPU power and security would not be typical of an office installation, for example. The only letdown is that WINE proved to be insufficiently compatible to run a wide variety of modern games, but that is, perhaps, asking too much of it, and hats off to Varda for trying to make it work.

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  • Some New .NET Downloads and Resources

    - by Kevin Grossnicklaus
    Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit.  It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft.  The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of.  The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today.  Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)?  Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox).   With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target.  Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks.  Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment.  This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight.  You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model.   Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here.  You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/.   This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform.  If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs.  You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others.  Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies.  By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done.  Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need.  I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities.  Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results.  First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from.  For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings.  All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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  • How many developers before continuous integration becomes effective for us?

    - by Carnotaurus
    There is an overhead associated with continuous integration, e.g., set up, re-training, awareness activities, stoppage to fix "bugs" that turn out to be data issues, enforced separation of concerns programming styles, etc. At what point does continuous integration pay for itself? EDIT: These were my findings The set-up was CruiseControl.Net with Nant, reading from VSS or TFS. Here are a few reasons for failure, which have nothing to do with the setup: Cost of investigation: The time spent investigating whether a red light is due a genuine logical inconsistency in the code, data quality, or another source such as an infrastructure problem (e.g., a network issue, a timeout reading from source control, third party server is down, etc., etc.) Political costs over infrastructure: I considered performing an "infrastructure" check for each method in the test run. I had no solution to the timeout except to replace the build server. Red tape got in the way and there was no server replacement. Cost of fixing unit tests: A red light due to a data quality issue could be an indicator of a badly written unit test. So, data dependent unit tests were re-written to reduce the likelihood of a red light due to bad data. In many cases, necessary data was inserted into the test environment to be able to accurately run its unit tests. It makes sense to say that by making the data more robust then the test becomes more robust if it is dependent on this data. Of course, this worked well! Cost of coverage, i.e., writing unit tests for already existing code: There was the problem of unit test coverage. There were thousands of methods that had no unit tests. So, a sizeable amount of man days would be needed to create those. As this would be too difficult to provide a business case, it was decided that unit tests would be used for any new public method going forward. Those that did not have a unit test were termed 'potentially infra red'. An intestesting point here is that static methods were a moot point in how it would be possible to uniquely determine how a specific static method had failed. Cost of bespoke releases: Nant scripts only go so far. They are not that useful for, say, CMS dependent builds for EPiServer, CMS, or any UI oriented database deployment. These are the types of issues that occured on the build server for hourly test runs and overnight QA builds. I entertain that these to be unnecessary as a build master can perform these tasks manually at the time of release, esp., with a one man band and a small build. So, single step builds have not justified use of CI in my experience. What about the more complex, multistep builds? These can be a pain to build, especially without a Nant script. So, even having created one, these were no more successful. The costs of fixing the red light issues outweighed the benefits. Eventually, developers lost interest and questioned the validity of the red light. Having given it a fair try, I believe that CI is expensive and there is a lot of working around the edges instead of just getting the job done. It's more cost effective to employ experienced developers who do not make a mess of large projects than introduce and maintain an alarm system. This is the case even if those developers leave. It doesn't matter if a good developer leaves because processes that he follows would ensure that he writes requirement specs, design specs, sticks to the coding guidelines, and comments his code so that it is readable. All this is reviewed. If this is not happening then his team leader is not doing his job, which should be picked up by his manager and so on. For CI to work, it is not enough to just write unit tests, attempt to maintain full coverage, and ensure a working infrastructure for sizable systems. The bottom line: One might question whether fixing as many bugs before release is even desirable from a business prespective. CI involves a lot of work to capture a handful of bugs that the customer could identify in UAT or the company could get paid for fixing as part of a client service agreement when the warranty period expires anyway.

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  • WebLogic JDBC Use of Oracle Wallet for SSL

    - by Steve Felts
    Introduction Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) can be used to secure the connection between the middle tier “client”, WebLogic Server (WLS) in this case, and the Oracle database server.  Data between WLS and database can be encrypted.  The server can be authenticated so you have proof that the database can be trusted by validating a certificate from the server.  The client can be authenticated so that the database only accepts connections from clients that it trusts. Similar to the discussion in an earlier article about using the Oracle wallet for database credentials, the Oracle wallet can also be used with SSL to store the keys and certificates.  By using it correctly, clear text passwords can be eliminated from the JDBC configuration and client/server configuration can be simplified by sharing the wallet across multiple datasources. There is a very good Oracle Technical White Paper on using SSL with the Oracle thin driver at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/wp-oracle-jdbc-thin-ssl-130128.pdf [LINK1].  The link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/index-087556.html [LINK2] describes how to use WebLogic Server with Oracle JDBC Driver SSL. The information in this article is a guide on what steps need to be taken in the variety of available options; use the links above for details. SSL from the driver to the database server is basically turned on by specifying a protocol of “tcps” in the URL.  However, there is a fair amount of setup needed.  Also remember that there is an overhead in performance. Creating the wallets The common use cases are 1. “data encryption and server-only authentication”, requiring just a trust store, or 2. “data encryption and authentication of both tiers” (client and server), requiring a trust store and a key store. It is recommended to use the auto-login wallet type so that clear text passwords are not needed in the datasource configuration to open the wallet.  The store type for an auto-login wallet is “SSO” (Single Sign On), not “JKS” or “PKCS12” as in [LINK2].  The file name is “cwallet.sso”. Wallets are created using the orapki tool.  They need to be created based on the usage (encryption and/or authentication).  This is discussed in detail in [LINK1] in Appendix B or in the Advanced Security Administrator’s Guide of the Database documentation. Database Server Configuration It is necessary to update the sqlnet.ora and listener.ora files with the directory location of the wallet using WALLET_LOCATION.  These files also indicate whether or not SSL_CLIENT_AUTHENTICATION is being used (true or false). The Oracle Listener must also be configured to use the TCPS protocol.  The recommended port is 2484. LISTENER = (ADDRESS_LIST= (ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=servername)(PORT=2484))) WebLogic Server Classpath The WebLogic Server CLASSPATH must have three additional security files. The files that need to be added to the WLS CLASSPATH are $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_cert_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_core_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.oraclepki_1.0.0.0.jar One way to do this is to add them to PRE_CLASSPATH environment variable for use with the standard WebLogic scripts. Setting the Oracle Security Provider It’s necessary to enable the Oracle PKI provider on the client side.  This can either be done statically by updating the java.security file under the JRE or dynamically by setting it in a WLS startup class using java.security.Security.insertProviderAt(new oracle.security.pki.OraclePKIProvider (), 3); See the full example of the startup class in [LINK2]. Datasource Configuration When creating a WLS datasource, set the PROTOCOL in the URL to tcps as in the following. jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=host)(PORT=port))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=myservice))) For encryption and server authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.trustStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=”SSO” For client authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.keyStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.keyStoreType=”SSO” Note that the driver connection properties for the wallet require a file name, not a directory name. Active GridLink ONS over SSL For completeness, there is another SSL usage for WLS datasources.  The communication with the Oracle Notification Service (ONS) for load balancing information and node up/down events can use SSL also. Create an auto-login wallet and use the wallet on the client and server.  The following is a sample sequence to create a test wallet for use with ONS. orapki wallet create -wallet ons -auto_login -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet add -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -keysize 1024 -self_signed -validity 9999 -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet export -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -cert ons/cert.txt -pwd ONS_Wallet On the database server side, it’s necessary to define the walletfile directory in the file $CRS_HOME/opmn/conf/ons.config and run onsctl stop/start. When configuring an Active GridLink datasource, the connection to the ONS must be defined.  In addition to the host and port, the wallet file directory must be specified.  By not giving a password, a SSO wallet is assumed. Summary To use SSL with the Oracle thin driver without any clear text passwords, use an SSO Oracle Wallet.  SSL support in the Oracle thin driver is available starting in 10g Release 2.

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  • The Joy Of Hex

    - by Jim Giercyk
    While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s.  Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order.       CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language.     CHARACTER:  The character level is what is rendered by the computer.  A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable.  Each character represents 1 BYTE of data.  For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks.  Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte.  In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here:  http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX:  Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16.  Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch.  Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F.  Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10.  Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal.  DECIMAL:  The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions.  It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex.  In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module.  Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex.  This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day.  BINARY:  Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s.  It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0.  In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s?  Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ).  Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from  another in the computers head (or CPU).  Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time.  A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster.  There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference.    DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111   Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing.  This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned.  It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes.  There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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  • WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 5: Service Client (more Flexibility with WSTrustChannelFactory)

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    See the previous posts first. WIF includes an API to manually request tokens from a token service. This gives you more control over the request and more flexibility since you can use your own token caching scheme instead of being bound to the channel object lifetime. The API is straightforward. You first request a token from the STS and then use that token to create a channel to the relying party service. I’d recommend using the WS-Trust bindings that ship with WIF to talk to ADFS 2 – they are pre-configured to match the binding configuration of the ADFS 2 endpoints. The following code requests a token for a WCF service from ADFS 2: private static SecurityToken GetToken() {     // Windows authentication over transport security     var factory = new WSTrustChannelFactory(         new WindowsWSTrustBinding(SecurityMode.Transport),         stsEndpoint);     factory.TrustVersion = TrustVersion.WSTrust13;       var rst = new RequestSecurityToken     {         RequestType = RequestTypes.Issue,         AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress(svcEndpoint),         KeyType = KeyTypes.Symmetric     };       var channel = factory.CreateChannel();     return channel.Issue(rst); } Afterwards, the returned token can be used to create a channel to the service. Again WIF has some helper methods here that make this very easy: private static void CallService(SecurityToken token) {     // create binding and turn off sessions     var binding = new WS2007FederationHttpBinding(         WSFederationHttpSecurityMode.TransportWithMessageCredential);     binding.Security.Message.EstablishSecurityContext = false;       // create factory and enable WIF plumbing     var factory = new ChannelFactory<IService>(binding, new EndpointAddress(svcEndpoint));     factory.ConfigureChannelFactory<IService>();       // turn off CardSpace - we already have the token     factory.Credentials.SupportInteractive = false;       var channel = factory.CreateChannelWithIssuedToken<IService>(token);       channel.GetClaims().ForEach(c =>         Console.WriteLine("{0}\n {1}\n  {2} ({3})\n",             c.ClaimType,             c.Value,             c.Issuer,             c.OriginalIssuer)); } Why is this approach more flexible? Well – some don’t like the configuration voodoo. That’s a valid reason for using the manual approach. You also get more control over the token request itself since you have full control over the RST message that gets send to the STS. One common parameter that you may want to set yourself is the appliesTo value. When you use the automatic token support in the WCF federation binding, the appliesTo is always the physical service address. This means in turn that this address will be used as the audience URI value in the SAML token. Well – this in turn means that when you have an application that consists of multiple services, you always have to configure all physical endpoint URLs in ADFS 2 and in the WIF configuration of the service(s). Having control over the appliesTo allows you to use more symbolic realm names, e.g. the base address or a completely logical name. Since the URL is never de-referenced you have some degree of freedom here. In the next post we will look at the necessary code to request multiple tokens in a call chain. This is a common scenario when you first have to acquire a token from an identity provider and have to send that on to a federation gateway or Resource STS. Stay tuned.

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  • Agile Development Requires Agile Support

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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  • External USB 3 drive not recognized

    - by ilan123
    Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit seems not to recognize my external hard disk. It is a Vantec NST-310S3 external disk enclosure with a WD 3TB drive. The disk has two NTFS partitions. My PC is a dual boot system. Under Windows 7 the hard disk works fine but I can't make it work with Ubuntu. When the drive is connected to the PC then the command sudo fdisk -l seems to hang forever. Below are the output of lsusb and cat /proc/partitions without the external drive and then with it connected. I added also the last lines of the dmesg command at the end. First without the drive: ilan@linux:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13ba:0017 Unknown PS/2 Keyboard+Mouse Adapter Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c50e Logitech, Inc. Cordless Mouse Receiver Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0ac8:3420 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. Venus USB2.0 Camera ilan@linux:~$ cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 8 0 1953514584 sda 8 1 102400 sda1 8 2 629043200 sda2 8 3 367001600 sda3 8 4 1 sda4 8 5 471859200 sda5 8 6 157286400 sda6 8 7 324115456 sda7 8 8 4101120 sda8 11 0 1048575 sr0 Second with the USB 3 drive: ilan@linux:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 004 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13ba:0017 Unknown PS/2 Keyboard+Mouse Adapter Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:c50e Logitech, Inc. Cordless Mouse Receiver Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0ac8:3420 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. Venus USB2.0 Camera ilan@linux:~$ cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 8 0 1953514584 sda 8 1 102400 sda1 8 2 629043200 sda2 8 3 367001600 sda3 8 4 1 sda4 8 5 471859200 sda5 8 6 157286400 sda6 8 7 324115456 sda7 8 8 4101120 sda8 11 0 1048575 sr0 8 16 2930266584 sdb ilan@linux:~$ lsusb -v -s 004:002 Bus 004 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Couldn't open device, some information will be missing Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 3.00 bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level) bDeviceSubClass 0 bDeviceProtocol 0 bMaxPacketSize0 9 idVendor 0x174c ASMedia Technology Inc. idProduct 0x55aa bcdDevice 1.00 iManufacturer 2 iProduct 3 iSerial 1 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 44 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0xc0 Self Powered MaxPower 0mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 2 bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only iInterface 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0400 1x 1024 bytes bInterval 0 bMaxBurst 15 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x02 EP 2 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0400 1x 1024 bytes bInterval 0 bMaxBurst 15 ilan@linux:~$ sudo fdisk -l [sudo] password for ilan: Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xf1b4f1ee Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 206848 1258293247 629043200 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 1258293248 1992296447 367001600 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 1992298494 3907028991 957365249 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 1992298496 2936016895 471859200 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 2936018944 3250591743 157286400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda7 3250593792 3898824703 324115456 83 Linux /dev/sda8 3898826752 3907028991 4101120 82 Linux swap / Solaris dmesg output after connecting the external drive: [ 23.740567] e1000e: eth0 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: Rx/Tx [ 23.740786] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready [ 49.144673] usb 4-1: >new SuperSpeed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd [ 49.163039] usb 4-1: >Parent hub missing LPM exit latency info. Power management will be impacted. [ 49.166789] usb 4-1: >New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=55aa [ 49.166793] usb 4-1: >New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1 [ 49.166796] usb 4-1: >Product: AS2105 [ 49.166799] usb 4-1: >Manufacturer: ASMedia [ 49.166801] usb 4-1: >SerialNumber: 0123456789ABCDEF [ 49.206372] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas [ 49.228891] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver... [ 49.229042] scsi6 : usb-storage 4-1:1.0 [ 49.229115] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage [ 49.229116] USB Mass Storage support registered. [ 64.045528] scsi 6:0:0:0: >Direct-Access WDC WD30 EZRX-00MMMB0 80.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 [ 64.046224] sd 6:0:0:0: >Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 [ 64.046881] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16). [ 64.047610] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] 5860533168 512-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [ 64.048368] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] Write Protect is off [ 64.048373] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 [ 64.048984] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] No Caching mode page present [ 64.048987] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 64.049297] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16). [ 64.050942] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] No Caching mode page present [ 64.050944] sd 6:0:0:0: >[sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [ 94.245006] usb 4-1: >reset SuperSpeed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd [ 94.262553] usb 4-1: >Parent hub missing LPM exit latency info. Power management will be impacted. [ 94.263805] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: >xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800d37d1c00 [ 94.263808] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: >xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800d37d1c40 [ 125.262722] usb 4-1: >reset SuperSpeed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd [ 125.280304] usb 4-1: >Parent hub missing LPM exit latency info. Power management will be impacted. [ 125.281511] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: >xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800d37d1c00 [ 125.281516] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: >xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800d37d1c40

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  • Override an IOCTL Handler in PQOAL

    - by Kate Moss' Big Fan
    When porting or creating a BSP to a new platform, we often need to make change to OEMIoControl or HAL IOCTL handler for more specific. Since Microsoft introduced PQOAL in CE 5.0 and more and more BSP today leverages PQOAL to simplify the OAL, we no longer define the OEMIoControl directly. It is somehow analogous to migrate from pure Windows SDK to MFC; people starts to define those MFC handlers and forgot the WinMain and the big message loop. If you ever take a look at the interface between OAL and Kernel, PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\INC\oemglobal.h, the pfnOEMIoctl is still there just as the entry point of Windows Program is WinMain since day one. (For those may argue about pfnOEMIoctl is not OEMIoControl, I will encourage you to dig into PRIVATE\WINCEOS\COREOS\NK\OEMMAIN\oemglobal.c which initialized pfnOEMIoctl to OEMIoControl. The interface is just to split OAL and Kernel which no longer linked to one executable file in CE 6, all of the function signature is still identical) So let's trace into PQOAL to realize how it implements OEMIoControl and how can we override an IOCTL handler we interest. First thing to know is the entry point (just as finding the WinMain in MFC), OEMIoControl is defined in PLATFORM\COMMON\SRC\COMMON\IOCTL\ioctl.c. Basically, it does nothing special but scan a pre-defined IOCTL table, g_oalIoCtlTable, and then execute the handler. (The highlight part) Other than that is just for error handling and the use of critical section to serialize the function. BOOL OEMIoControl(     DWORD code, VOID *pInBuffer, DWORD inSize, VOID *pOutBuffer, DWORD outSize,     DWORD *pOutSize ) {     BOOL rc = FALSE;     UINT32 i; ...     // Search the IOCTL table for the requested code.     for (i = 0; g_oalIoCtlTable[i].pfnHandler != NULL; i++) {         if (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].code == code) break;     }     // Indicate unsupported code     if (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].pfnHandler == NULL) {         NKSetLastError(ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED);         OALMSG(OAL_IOCTL, (             L"OEMIoControl: Unsupported Code 0x%x - device 0x%04x func %d\r\n",             code, code >> 16, (code >> 2)&0x0FFF         ));         goto cleanUp;     }            // Take critical section if required (after postinit & no flag)     if (         g_ioctlState.postInit &&         (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].flags & OAL_IOCTL_FLAG_NOCS) == 0     ) {         // Take critical section                    EnterCriticalSection(&g_ioctlState.cs);     }     // Execute the handler     rc = g_oalIoCtlTable[i].pfnHandler(         code, pInBuffer, inSize, pOutBuffer, outSize, pOutSize     );     // Release critical section if it was taken above     if (         g_ioctlState.postInit &&         (g_oalIoCtlTable[i].flags & OAL_IOCTL_FLAG_NOCS) == 0     ) {         // Release critical section                    LeaveCriticalSection(&g_ioctlState.cs);     } cleanUp:     OALMSG(OAL_IOCTL&&OAL_FUNC, (L"-OEMIoControl(rc = %d)\r\n", rc ));     return rc; }   Where is the g_oalIoCtlTable? It is defined in your BSP. Let's use DeviceEmulator BSP as an example. The PLATFORM\DEVICEEMULATOR\SRC\OAL\OALLIB\ioctl.c defines the table as const OAL_IOCTL_HANDLER g_oalIoCtlTable[] = { #include "ioctl_tab.h" }; And that leads to PLATFORM\DEVICEEMULATOR\SRC\INC\ioctl_tab.h which defined some of IOCTL handler but others are defined in oal_ioctl_tab.h which is under PLATFORM\COMMON\SRC\INC\. Finally, we got the full table body! (Just like tracing MFC, always jumping back and forth). The format of table is very straight forward, IOCTL code, Flags and Handler Function // IOCTL CODE,                          Flags   Handler Function //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ { IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY,                   0,  OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry     }, { IOCTL_HAL_INIT_RTC,                       0,  OALIoCtlHalInitRTC          }, { IOCTL_HAL_REBOOT,                         0,  OALIoCtlHalReboot           }, The PQOAL scans through the table until it find a matched IOCTL code, then invokes the handler function. Since it scans the table from the top which means if we define TWO handler with same IOCTL code, the first one is always invoked with no exception. Now back to the PLATFORM\DEVICEEMULATOR\SRC\INC\ioctl_tab.h, with the following table { IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY,                   0,  OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry     }, ... #include <oal_ioctl_tab.h> Note the IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY handler are defined in both BSP's local ioctl_tab.h and the common oal_ioctl_tab.h, but due to BSP's local handler comes before "#include <oal_ioctl_tab.h>" so we know the OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry always get called. In this example, the DeviceEmulator BSP overrides the IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY handler from OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry to OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry by manipulating the g_oalIoCtlTable table. (In some point of view, it is similar to message map in MFC) Please be aware, when you override an IOCTL handler in PQOAL, you may want to clone the original implementation to your BSP and change to meet your need. It is recommended and save you the redundant works but remember to rename the handler function (Just like the DeviceEmulator it changes the name of OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry to OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry). If you don't change the name, linker may not be happy (due to name conflict) and the more important is by using different handler name, you could always redirect the handler back to original one. (It is like the concept of OOP that calling a function in base class; still not so clear? I am goinf to show you soon!) The OALIoCtlDeviceEmulatorHalInitRegistry setups DeviceEmulator specific registry settings and in the end, if everything goes well, it calls the OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry (PLATFORM\COMMON\SRC\COMMON\IOCTL\reginit.c) to do the rest.     if(fOk) {         fOk = OALIoCtlHalInitRegistry(code, pInpBuffer, inpSize, pOutBuffer,             outSize, pOutSize);     } Now you got the picture, whenever you want to override an IOCTL hadnler that is implemented in PQOAL just Clone the handler function to your BSP as a template. Simple name change for the handler function, and a name change in the IOCTL table header file that maps the IOCTL with the function Implement your IOCTL handler and whenever you need to redirect it back just calling the original handler function. It is the standard way of implementing a custom IOCTL and most Microsoft developers prefer. The mapping of IOCTL routine to IOCTL code is platform specific - you control the header file that does that mapping.

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  • Master Page: Dynamically Adding Rows in ASP Table on Button Click event

    - by Vincent Maverick Durano
    In my previous post here, I wrote an example that demonstrates how are we going to generate table rows dynamically using ASP Table on click of the Button control. Now based on some comments in my previous example and in the forums they wanted to implement it within Masterpage. Unfortunately the code in my previous example doesn't work in Masterpage for the following main reasons: The Table is dynamically added within the Form tag and so the TextBox control will not be generated correcty in the page. The data will not be retained on each and every postbacks because the SetPreviousData() method is looking for the Table element within the Page and not on the MasterPage. The Request.Form key value should be set correctly since all controls within the master page are prefixed with the naming containter ID to prevent duplicate ids on the final rendered HTML. For example the TextBox control with the ID of TextBoxRow will turn to ID to this ctl00$MainBody$TextBoxRow. In order for the previous example to work within Masterpage then we will have to correct those three main reasons above and this post will guide you how to correct it. Suppose we have this content page declaration below:   <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainHead" Runat="Server"> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainBody" Runat="Server"> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder1" runat="server"> <asp:Button ID="BTNAdd" runat="server" Text="Add New Row" OnClick="BTNAdd_Click" /> </asp:PlaceHolder> </asp:Content> As you notice I've added a PlaceHolder control within the MainBody ContentPlaceHolder. This is because we are going to generate the Table in the PlaceHolder instead of generating it within the Form element. Now since issue #1 is already corrected then let's proceed to the code beind part. Here are the full code blocks below:     using System; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; public partial class DynamicControlDemo : System.Web.UI.Page { private int numOfRows = 1; protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Generate the Rows on Initial Load if (!Page.IsPostBack) { GenerateTable(numOfRows); } } protected void BTNAdd_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (ViewState["RowsCount"] != null) { numOfRows = Convert.ToInt32(ViewState["RowsCount"].ToString()); GenerateTable(numOfRows); } } private void SetPreviousData(int rowsCount, int colsCount) { Table table = (Table)this.Page.Master.FindControl("MainBody").FindControl("Table1"); // **** if (table != null) { for (int i = 0; i < rowsCount; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < colsCount; j++) { //Extracting the Dynamic Controls from the Table TextBox tb = (TextBox)table.Rows[i].Cells[j].FindControl("TextBoxRow_" + i + "Col_" + j); //Use Request object for getting the previous data of the dynamic textbox tb.Text = Request.Form["ctl00$MainBody$TextBoxRow_" + i + "Col_" + j];//***** } } } } private void GenerateTable(int rowsCount) { //Creat the Table and Add it to the Page Table table = new Table(); table.ID = "Table1"; PlaceHolder1.Controls.Add(table);//****** //The number of Columns to be generated const int colsCount = 3;//You can changed the value of 3 based on you requirements // Now iterate through the table and add your controls for (int i = 0; i < rowsCount; i++) { TableRow row = new TableRow(); for (int j = 0; j < colsCount; j++) { TableCell cell = new TableCell(); TextBox tb = new TextBox(); // Set a unique ID for each TextBox added tb.ID = "TextBoxRow_" + i + "Col_" + j; // Add the control to the TableCell cell.Controls.Add(tb); // Add the TableCell to the TableRow row.Cells.Add(cell); } // And finally, add the TableRow to the Table table.Rows.Add(row); } //Set Previous Data on PostBacks SetPreviousData(rowsCount, colsCount); //Sore the current Rows Count in ViewState rowsCount++; ViewState["RowsCount"] = rowsCount; } }   As you observed the code is pretty much similar to the previous example except for the highlighted lines above. That's it! I hope someone find this post usefu! Technorati Tags: Dynamic Controls,ASP.NET,C#,Master Page

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  • Automating custom software installation in a zone

    - by mgerdts
    In Solaris 11, the internals of zone installation are quite different than they were in Solaris 10.  This difference allows the administrator far greater control of what software is installed in a zone.  The rules in Solaris 10 are simple and inflexible: if it is installed in the global zone and is not specifically excluded by package metadata from being installed in a zone, it is installed in the zone.  In Solaris 11, the rules are still simple, but are much more flexible:  the packages you tell it to install and the packages on which they depend will be installed. So, where does the default list of packages come from?  From the AI (auto installer) manifest, of course.  The default AI manifest is /usr/share/auto_install/manifest/zone_default.xml.  Within that file you will find:             <software_data action="install">                 <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name>             </software_data> So, the default installation will install pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server.  Cool.  What is that?  You can figure out what is in the package by looking for it in the repository with your web browser (click the manifest link), or use pkg(1).  In this case, it is a group package (pkg:/group/), so we know that it just has a bunch of dependencies to name the packages that really wants installed. $ pkg contents -t depend -o fmri -s fmri -r solaris-small-server FMRI compress/bzip2 compress/gzip compress/p7zip ... terminal/luit terminal/resize text/doctools text/doctools/ja text/less text/spelling-utilities web/wget If you would like to see the entire manifest from the command line, use pkg contents -r -m solaris-small-server. Let's suppose that you want to install a zone that also has mercurial and a full-fledged installation of vim rather than just the minimal vim-core that is part of solaris-small-server.  That's pretty easy. First, copy the default AI manifest somewhere where you will edit it and make it writable. # cp /usr/share/auto_install/manifest/zone_default.xml ~/myzone-ai.xml # chmod 644 ~/myzone-ai.xml Next, edit the file, changing the software_data section as follows:             <software_data action="install">                 <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name>                 <name>pkg:/developer/versioning/mercurial</name>                <name>pkg:/editor/vim</name>             </software_data> To figure out  the names of the packages, either search the repository using your browser, or use a command like pkg search hg. Now we are all ready to install the zone.  If it has not yet been configured, that must be done as well. # zonecfg -z myzone 'create; set zonepath=/zones/myzone' # zoneadm -z myzone install -m ~/myzone-ai.xml A ZFS file system has been created for this zone. Progress being logged to /var/log/zones/zoneadm.20111113T004303Z.myzone.install Image: Preparing at /zones/myzone/root. Install Log: /system/volatile/install.15496/install_log AI Manifest: /tmp/manifest.xml.XfaWpE SC Profile: /usr/share/auto_install/sc_profiles/enable_sci.xml Zonename: myzone Installation: Starting ... Creating IPS image Installing packages from: solaris origin: http://localhost:1008/solaris/54453f3545de891d4daa841ddb3c844fe8804f55/ DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 169/169 34047/34047 185.6/185.6 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 46498/46498 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 169/169 Image State Update Phase 2/2 Installation: Succeeded Note: Man pages can be obtained by installing pkg:/system/manual done. Done: Installation completed in 531.813 seconds. Next Steps: Boot the zone, then log into the zone console (zlogin -C) to complete the configuration process. Log saved in non-global zone as /zones/myzone/root/var/log/zones/zoneadm.20111113T004303Z.myzone.install Now, for a few things that I've seen people trip over: Ignore that bit about man pages - it's wrong.  Man pages are already installed so long as the right facet is set properly.  And that's a topic for another blog entry. If you boot the zone then just use zlogin myzone, you will see that services you care about haven't started and that svc:/milestone/config:default is starting.  That is because you have not yet logged into the console with zlogin -C myzone. If the zone has been booted for more than a very short while when you first connect to the zone console, it will seem like the console is hung.  That's not really the case - hit ^L (control-L) to refresh the sysconfig(1M) screen that is prompting you for information.

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  • Maximize Performance and Availability with Oracle Data Integration

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Alert: Oracle is hosting the 12c Launch Webcast for Oracle Data Integration and Oracle Golden Gate on Tuesday, November 12 (tomorrow) to discuss the new capabilities in detail and share customer perspectives. Hear directly from customer experts and executives from SolarWorld Industries America, British Telecom and Rittman Mead and get your questions answered live by product experts. Register for this complimentary webcast today and join in the discussion tomorrow. Author: Irem Radzik, Senior Principal Product Director, Oracle Organizations that want to use IT as a strategic point of differentiation prefer Oracle’s complete application offering to drive better business performance and optimize their IT investments. These enterprise applications are in the center of business operations and they contain critical data that needs to be accessed continuously, as well as analyzed and acted upon in a timely manner. These systems also need to operate with high-performance and availability, which means analytical functions should not degrade applications performance, and even system maintenance and upgrades should not interrupt availability. Oracle’s data integration products, Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle GoldenGate, and Oracle Enterprise Data Quality, provide the core foundation for bringing data from various business-critical systems to gain a broader, unified view. As a more advance offering to 3rd party products, Oracle’s data integration products facilitate real-time reporting for Oracle Applications without impacting application performance, and provide ability to upgrade and maintain the system without taking downtime. Oracle GoldenGate is certified for Oracle Applications, including E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, for moving transactional data in real-time to a dedicated operational reporting environment. This solution allows the app users to offload the resource-heavy queries to the reporting instance(s), reducing CPU utilization, improving OLTP performance, and extending the lifetime of existing IT assets. In addition, having a dedicated reporting instance with up-to-the-second transactional data allows optimizing the reporting environment and even decreasing costs as GoldenGate can move only the required data from expensive mainframe environments to cost-efficient open system platforms.  With real-time data replication capabilities GoldenGate is also certified to enable application upgrades and database/hardware/OS migration without impacting business operations. GoldenGate is certified for Siebel CRM, Communications Billing and Revenue Management and JD Edwards for supporting zero downtime upgrades to the latest app version. GoldenGate synchronizes a parallel, upgraded system with the old version in real time, thus enables continuous operations during the process. Oracle GoldenGate is also certified for minimal downtime database migrations for Oracle E-Business Suite and other key applications. GoldenGate’s solution also minimizes the risk by offering a failback option after the switchover to the new environment. Furthermore, Oracle GoldenGate’s bidirectional active-active data replication is certified for Oracle ATG Web Commerce to enable geographically load balancing and high availability for ATG customers. For enabling better business insight, Oracle Data Integration products power Oracle BI Applications with high performance bulk and real-time data integration. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is embedded in Oracle BI Applications version 11.1.1.7.1 and helps to integrate data end-to-end across the full BI Applications architecture, supporting capabilities such as data-lineage, which helps business users identify report-to-source capabilities. ODI is integrated with Oracle GoldenGate and provides Oracle BI Applications customers the option to use real-time transactional data in analytics, and do so non-intrusively. By using Oracle GoldenGate with the latest release of Oracle BI Applications, organizations not only leverage fresh data in analytics, but also eliminate the need for an ETL batch window and minimize the impact on OLTP systems. You can learn more about Oracle Data Integration products latest 12c version in our upcoming launch webcast and access the app-specific free resources in the new Data Integration for Oracle Applications Resource Center.

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  • Nothing drawing on screen OpenGL with GLSL

    - by codemonkey
    I hate to be asking this kind of question here, but I am at a complete loss as to what is going wrong, so please bear with me. I am trying to render a single cube (voxel) in the center of the screen, through OpenGL with GLSL on Mac I begin by setting up everything using glut glutInit(&argc, argv); glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGBA|GLUT_ALPHA|GLUT_DOUBLE|GLUT_DEPTH); glutInitWindowSize(DEFAULT_WINDOW_WIDTH, DEFAULT_WINDOW_HEIGHT); glutCreateWindow("Cubez-OSX"); glutReshapeFunc(reshape); glutDisplayFunc(render); glutIdleFunc(idle); _electricSheepEngine=new ElectricSheepEngine(DEFAULT_WINDOW_WIDTH, DEFAULT_WINDOW_HEIGHT); _electricSheepEngine->initWorld(); glutMainLoop(); Then inside the engine init camera & projection matrices: cameraPosition=glm::vec3(2,2,2); cameraTarget=glm::vec3(0,0,0); cameraUp=glm::vec3(0,0,1); glm::vec3 cameraDirection=glm::normalize(cameraPosition-cameraTarget); cameraRight=glm::cross(cameraDirection, cameraUp); cameraRight.z=0; view=glm::lookAt(cameraPosition, cameraTarget, cameraUp); lensAngle=45.0f; aspectRatio=1.0*(windowWidth/windowHeight); nearClippingPlane=0.1f; farClippingPlane=100.0f; projection=glm::perspective(lensAngle, aspectRatio, nearClippingPlane, farClippingPlane); then init shaders and check compilation and bound attributes & uniforms to be correctly bound (my previous question) These are my two shaders, vertex: #version 120 attribute vec3 position; attribute vec3 inColor; uniform mat4 mvp; varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void){ fragColor = inColor; gl_Position = mvp * vec4(position, 1.0); } and fragment: #version 120 varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void) { gl_FragColor = vec4(fragColor,1.0); } init the cube: setPosition(glm::vec3(0,0,0)); struct voxelData data[]={ //front face {{-1.0, -1.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}}, {{ 1.0, -1.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 1.0, 1.0}}, {{ 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}}, {{-1.0, 1.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 1.0, 1.0}}, //back face {{-1.0, -1.0, -1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}}, {{ 1.0, -1.0, -1.0}, {0.0, 1.0, 1.0}}, {{ 1.0, 1.0, -1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}}, {{-1.0, 1.0, -1.0}, {0.0, 1.0, 1.0}} }; glGenBuffers(1, &modelVerticesBufferObject); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, modelVerticesBufferObject); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(data), data, GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0); const GLubyte indices[] = { // Front 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 0, // Back 4, 6, 5, 4, 7, 6, // Left 2, 7, 3, 7, 6, 2, // Right 0, 4, 1, 4, 1, 5, // Top 6, 2, 1, 1, 6, 5, // Bottom 0, 3, 7, 0, 7, 4 }; glGenBuffers(1, &modelFacesBufferObject); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, modelFacesBufferObject); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(indices), indices, GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0); and then the render call: glClearColor(0.52, 0.8, 0.97, 1.0); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); //use the shader glUseProgram(shaderProgram); //enable attributes in program glEnableVertexAttribArray(shaderAttribute_position); glEnableVertexAttribArray(shaderAttribute_color); //model matrix using model position vector glm::mat4 mvp=projection*view*voxel->getModelMatrix(); glUniformMatrix4fv(shaderAttribute_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(mvp)); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, voxel->modelVerticesBufferObject); glVertexAttribPointer(shaderAttribute_position, // attribute 3, // number of elements per vertex, here (x,y) GL_FLOAT, // the type of each element GL_FALSE, // take our values as-is sizeof(struct voxelData), // coord every (sizeof) elements 0 // offset of first element ); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, voxel->modelVerticesBufferObject); glVertexAttribPointer(shaderAttribute_color, // attribute 3, // number of colour elements per vertex, here (x,y) GL_FLOAT, // the type of each element GL_FALSE, // take our values as-is sizeof(struct voxelData), // coord every (sizeof) elements (GLvoid *)(offsetof(struct voxelData, color3D)) // offset of colour data ); //draw the model by going through its elements array glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, voxel->modelFacesBufferObject); int bufferSize; glGetBufferParameteriv(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, GL_BUFFER_SIZE, &bufferSize); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, bufferSize/sizeof(GLushort), GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, 0); //close up the attribute in program, no more need glDisableVertexAttribArray(shaderAttribute_position); glDisableVertexAttribArray(shaderAttribute_color); but on screen all I get is the clear color :$ I generate my model matrix using: modelMatrix=glm::translate(glm::mat4(1.0), position); which in debug turns out to be for the position of (0,0,0): |1, 0, 0, 0| |0, 1, 0, 0| |0, 0, 1, 0| |0, 0, 0, 1| Sorry for such a question, I know it is annoying to look at someone's code, but I promise I have tried to debug around and figure it out as much as I can, and can't come to a solution Help a noob please? EDIT: Full source here, if anyone wants

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  • Changing the Game: Why Oracle is in the IT Operations Management Business

    - by DanKoloski
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Next week, in Orlando, is the annual Gartner IT Operations Management Summit. Oracle is a premier sponsor of this annual event, which brings together IT executives for several days of high level talks about the state of operational management of enterprise IT. This year, Sushil Kumar, VP Product Strategy and Business Development for Oracle’s Systems & Applications Management, will be presenting on the transformation in IT Operations required to support enterprise cloud computing. IT Operations transformation is an important subject, because year after year, we hear essentially the same refrain – large enterprises spend an average of two-thirds (67%!) of their IT resources (budget, energy, time, people, etc.) on running the business, with far too little left over to spend on growing and transforming the business (which is what the business actually needs and wants). In the thirtieth year of the distributed computing revolution (give or take, depending on how you count it), it’s amazing that we have still not moved the needle on the single biggest component of enterprise IT resource utilization. Oracle is in the IT Operations Management business because when management is engineered together with the technology under management, the resulting efficiency gains can be truly staggering. To put it simply – what if you could turn that 67% of IT resources spent on running the business into 50%? Or 40%? Imagine what you could do with those resources. It’s now not just possible, but happening. This seems like a simple idea, but it is a radical change from “business as usual” in enterprise IT Operations. For the last thirty years, management has been a bolted-on afterthought – we pick and deploy our technology, then figure out how to manage it. This pervasive dysfunction is a broken cycle that guarantees high ongoing operating costs and low agility. If we want to break the cycle, we need to take a more tightly-coupled approach. As a complete applications-to-disk platform provider, Oracle is engineering management together with technology across our stack and hooking that on-premise management up live to My Oracle Support. Let’s examine the results with just one piece of the Oracle stack – the Oracle Database. Oracle began this journey with the Oracle Database 9i many years ago with the introduction of low-impact instrumentation in the database kernel (“tell me what’s wrong”) and through Database 10g, 11g and 11gR2 has successively added integrated advisory (“tell me how to fix what’s wrong”) and lifecycle management and automated self-tuning (“fix it for me, and do it on an ongoing basis for all my assets”). When enterprises take advantage of this tight-coupling, the results are game-changing. Consider the following (for a full list of public references, visit this link): British Telecom improved database provisioning time 1000% (from weeks to minutes) which allows them to provide a new DBaaS service to their internal customers with no additional resources Cerner Corporation Saved $9.5 million in CapEx and OpEx AND launched a brand-new cloud business at the same time Vodafone Group plc improved response times 50% and reduced maintenance planning times 50-60% while serving 391 million registered mobile customers Or the recent Database Manageability and Productivity Cost Comparisons: Oracle Database 11g Release 2 vs. SAP Sybase ASE 15.7, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and IBM DB2 9.7 as conducted by independent analyst firm ORC. In later entries, we’ll discuss similar results across other portions of the Oracle stack and how these efficiency gains are required to achieve the agility benefits of Enterprise Cloud. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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  • Database Owner Conundrum

    - by Johnm
    Have you ever restored a database from a production environment on Server A into a development environment on Server B and had some items, such as Service Broker, mysteriously cease functioning? You might want to consider reviewing the database owner property of the database. The Scenario Recently, I was developing some messaging functionality that utilized the Service Broker feature of SQL Server in a development environment. Within the instance of the development environment resided two databases: One was a restored version of a production database that we will call "RestoreDB". The second database was a brand new database that has yet to exist in the production environment that we will call "DevDB". The goal is to setup a communication path between RestoreDB and DevDB that will later be implemented into the production database. After implementing all of the Service Broker objects that are required to communicate within a database as well as between two databases on the same instance I found myself a bit confounded. My testing was showing that the communication was successful when it was occurring internally within DevDB; but the communication between RestoreDB and DevDB did not appear to be working. Profiler to the rescue After carefully reviewing my code for any misspellings, missing commas or any other minor items that might be a syntactical cause of failure, I decided to launch Profiler to aid in the troubleshooting. After simulating the cross database messaging, I noticed the following error appearing in Profiler: An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 33009, State: 2. The database owner SID recorded in the master database differs from the database owner SID recorded in database '[Database Name Here]'. You should correct this situation by resetting the owner of database '[Database Name Here]' using the ALTER AUTHORIZATION statement. Now, this error message is a helpful one. Not only does it identify the issue in plain language, it also provides a potential solution. An execution of the following query that utilizes the catalog view sys.transmission_queue revealed the same error message for each communication attempt: SELECT     * FROM        sys.transmission_queue; Seeing the situation as a learning opportunity I dove a bit deeper. Reviewing the database properties  The owner of a specific database can be easily viewed by right-clicking the database in SQL Server Management Studio and selecting the "properties" option. The owner is listed on the "General" page of the properties screen. In my scenario, the database in the production server was created by Frank the DBA; therefore his server login appeared as the owner: "ServerName\Frank". While this is interesting information, it certainly doesn't tell me much in regard to the SID (security identifier) and its existence, or lack thereof, in the master database as the error suggested. I pulled together the following query to gather more interesting information: SELECT     a.name     , a.owner_sid     , b.sid     , b.name     , b.type_desc FROM        master.sys.databases a     LEFT OUTER JOIN master.sys.server_principals b         ON a.owner_sid = b.sid WHERE     a.name not in ('master','tempdb','model','msdb'); This query also helped identify how many other user databases in the instance were experiencing the same issue. In this scenario, I saw that there were no matching SIDs in server_principals to the owner SID for my database. What login should be used as the database owner instead of Frank's? The system stored procedure sp_helplogins will provide a list of the valid logins that can be used. Here is an example of its use, revealing all available logins: EXEC sp_helplogins;  Fixing a hole The error message stated that the recommended solution was to execute the ALTER AUTHORIZATION statement. The full statement for this scenario would appear as follows: ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON DATABASE:: [Database Name Here] TO [Login Name]; Another option is to execute the following statement using the sp_changedbowner system stored procedure; but please keep in mind that this stored procedure has been deprecated and will likely disappear in future versions of SQL Server: EXEC dbo.sp_changedbowner @loginname = [Login Name]; .And They Lived Happily Ever After Upon changing the database owner to an existing login and simulating the inner and cross database messaging the errors have ceased. More importantly, all messages sent through this feature now successfully complete their journey. I have added the ownership change to my restoration script for the development environment.

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  • HP Pavilion tx2000 - Wifi adapter no longer works after moving from 12.04 to a 12.10 clean install

    - by Marek L.
    I have a HP Pavilion tx2000 that I have been running Ubuntu 12.04 on for a couple of months without any problems (wifi worked great) until yesterday when my hard drive failed. I replaced the hard drive and decided to install Ubuntu 12.10. Unlike 12.04, the wifi did not work after the installation finished and all the updates where installed (over Ethernet). The network drop down in the top right didn't even show a wireless option. I Googled about for a bit and found some solutions that seemed like they might work. Unfortunately they did not. Here is what I tried: sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-lpphy-installer Restart the computer. And the wifi still didn't work. At which point I panicked a bit and tried to undo the previous commands by running: sudo apt-get remove b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-lpphy-installer sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source Restart the computer. The wifi still doesn't work. This is where I stopped because I have no idea what I am doing and don't want to mess something up. The network drop down still doesn't show a wireless option and the hardware wifi switch on the laptop is amber (it turns blue when the wifi is on). Using the hardware switch does not change the color. Output from: sudo lspci ... 08:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01) ... Output from: sudo lshw -class network *-network UNCLAIMED description: Network controller product: BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:d1100000-d1103fff ... Output from: sudo rfkill list all 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes UPDATE: After writing up this question tried the following command: sudo rfkill unblock all At first it didn't do anything but after running it about four times, sudo rfkill list all now returns: 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no But the network menu still does not have a wireless option and the hardware switch still glows amber. Pushing the hardware switch turns the hard block back on and I have to run sudo rfkill unblock all multiple times again to turn it off. Any help is appreciated! Update 2: Full output from sudo lspci -nn: 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 Host Bridge [1022:9600] 00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (int gfx) [1022:9602] 00:04.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 0) [1022:9604] 00:05.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 1) [1022:9605] 00:06.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 2) [1022:9606] 00:11.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1002:4391] 00:12.0 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller [1002:4397] 00:12.1 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0 USB OHCI1 Controller [1002:4398] 00:12.2 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller [1002:4396] 00:13.0 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller [1002:4397] 00:13.1 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0 USB OHCI1 Controller [1002:4398] 00:13.2 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller [1002:4396] 00:14.0 SMBus [0c05]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 SMBus Controller [1002:4385] (rev 3a) 00:14.1 IDE interface [0101]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 IDE Controller [1002:439c] 00:14.2 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) [1002:4383] 00:14.3 ISA bridge [0601]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 LPC host controller [1002:439d] 00:14.4 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge [1002:4384] 00:14.5 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI2 Controller [1002:4399] 00:18.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 11h Processor HyperTransport Configuration [1022:1300] (rev 40) 00:18.1 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 11h Processor Address Map [1022:1301] 00:18.2 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 11h Processor DRAM Controller [1022:1302] 00:18.3 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 11h Processor Miscellaneous Control [1022:1303] 00:18.4 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 11h Processor Link Control [1022:1304] 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS780M/RS780MN [Mobility Radeon HD 3200 Graphics] [1002:9612] 08:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:432b] (rev 01) 09:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 02)

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  • Oracle RightNow CX for Good Customer Experiences

    - by Andreea Vaduva
    Oracle RightNow CX is all about the customer experience, it’s about understanding what drives a good interaction and it’s about delivering a solution which works for our customers and by extension, their customers. One of the early guiding principles of Oracle RightNow was an 8-point strategy to providing good customer experiences. Establish a knowledge foundation Empowering the customer Empower employees Offer multi-channel choice Listen to the customer Design seamless experiences Engage proactively Measure and improve continuously The application suite provides all of the tools necessary to deliver a rewarding, repeatable and measurable relationship between business and customer. The Knowledge Authoring tool provides gap analysis, WYSIWIG editing (and includes HTML rich content for non-developers), multi-level categorisation, permission based publishing and Web self-service publishing. Oracle RightNow Customer Portal, is a complete web application framework that enables businesses to control their own end-user page branding experience, which in turn will allow customers to self-serve. The Contact Centre Experience Designer builds a combination of workspaces, agent scripting and guided assistances into a Desktop Workflow. These present an agent with the tools they need, at the time they need them, providing even the newest and least experienced advisors with consistently accurate and efficient information, whilst guiding them through the complexities of internal business processes. Oracle RightNow provides access points for customers to feedback about specific knowledge articles or about the support site in general. The system will generate ‘incidents’ based on the scoring of the comments submitted. This makes it easy to view and respond to customer feedback. It is vital, more now than ever, not to under-estimate the power of the social web – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – they have the ability to cause untold amounts of damage to businesses with a single post – witness musician Dave Carroll and his protest song on YouTube, posted in response to poor customer services from an American airline. The first day saw 150,000 views and is currently at 12,011,375. The Times reported that within 4 days of the post, the airline’s stock price fell by 10 percent, which represented a cost to shareholders of $180 million dollars. It is a universally acknowledged fact, that when customers are unhappy, they will not come back, and, generally speaking, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. The idea that customer loyalty can be regained by using social media channels was the subject of a 2011 Survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey discovered that 68% of customers who posted a negative review about a holiday on a social networking site received a response from the business. It further found that 33% subsequently posted a positive review and 34% removed the original negative review. Cloud Monitor provides the perfect mechanism for seeing what is being said about a business on public Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube posts; it allows agents to respond proactively – either by creating an Oracle RightNow incident or by using the same channel as the original post. This leaves step 8 – Measuring and Improving: How does a business know whether it’s doing the right thing? How does it know if its customers are happy? How does it know if its staff are being productive? How does it know if its staff are being effective? Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease. Oracle RightNow believes strongly in the customer owning their solution, and to provide the best foundation for success, Oracle University can give you the RightNow knowledge and skills you need. This is a selection of the courses offered: RightNow Customer Service Administration Rel 12.02 (3 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course familiarises users with the tasks and concepts needed to configure and maintain their system. RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course introduces basic CP structure and how to make changes to the look, feel and behaviour of their self-service pages RightNow Analytics Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand (Release 11.11 is available as In Class and Live Virtual Class) This course equips users with the skills necessary to understand data supplied by standard reports and to create custom reports RightNow Integration and Customization For Developers Rel 12.02 (5-days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course is for experienced web developers and offers an introduction to Add-In development using the Desktop Add-In Framework and introduces the core knowledge that developers need to begin integrating Oracle RightNow CX with other systems A full list of courses offered can be found on the Oracle University website. For more information and course dates please get in contact with your local Oracle University team. On top of the Service components, the suite also provides marketing tools, complex survey creation and tracking and sales functionality. I’m a fan of the application, and I think I’ve made that clear: It’s completely geared up to providing customers with support at point of need. It can be configured to meet even the most stringent of business requirements. Oracle RightNow is passionate about, and committed to, providing the best customer experience possible. Oracle RightNow CX is the application that makes it possible. About the Author: Sarah Anderson worked for RightNow for 4 years in both in both a consulting and training delivery capacity. She is now a Senior Instructor with Oracle University, delivering the following Oracle RightNow courses: RightNow Customer Service Administration RightNow Analytics RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration RightNow Marketing and Feedback

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  • Application Development: Python or Java (or PHP)

    - by luckysmack
    I'm looking to get into application development, such as Facebook or Android apps and games. I am doing this for fun and to learn. Once my skills are to par I would like to have some side income from the apps, but I'm not banking on living off that (just so you know where I'm coming from and know what my end goals are). Currently I know and am familiar with PHP and frameworks such as cakephp and yii. However, I have been wanting to learn another language to broaden my horizons and to become a better developer. So I have narrowed it down to 2 languages. Python, and Java (I can already hear people cringing at the difference in the languages I have chosen, but I have some reasons). Python: closer to PHP that Java. Cross platformability. Also great as a general scripting language and has many file system level benefits that PHP does not. Cleaner syntax, readability, blah blah and the list goed on. Python will work great for cross platform apps and can be run on many OS's and is supported by Facebook for app development. But there is no support on Android (for full fledged apps). Java: a much stronger typed language, very robust community and corporate backing. Knowing Java is also good for personal marketability for enterprises, if you're into that. The main benefit here is that Java can write apps natively for Android and the apps can be ported for web versions to play on Facebook. So while I have seen many developers prefer Java over the two, Java has this significant advantage, where I can market my apps in both markets and in the future build more potential income. But like I said it is for fun. While money isn't the goal, it would still be nice. PHP: I'm putting this here because I know it already, and I'm sure a case could be made for it. It obviously works great for Facebook but like Python does not do so well on android. While it's mostly the realm of 'application development' that appeals to me, I do find Android apps fairly interesting and something that has a ton of potential to. But then again Facebook has a ton more users and the apps can also potentially be more immersive (desktop vs. mobile). So this is why I'm kinda stuck on what route to choose. Python for Facebook and web apps, with likely faster development to production times, or Java which can be developed for any of the platforms to make apps. Side note: I'm not really trying to get into 3D development, mostly 2D. And I also want to make an app with real-time play (websockets, etc). Someone mentioned node, js to me for that but Python seems to be more globally versatile for my goals. So, to anyone that does Facebook or Android development in either language: what do you suggest? Any input is valuable and I do appreciate it. And sorry for being long winded. EDIT: as mentioned in one of the answers, my primary goal is gaming. Although I do have some plans for non gaming apps such as general web based and desktop based ones. But gaming is my main goal with the possibility of income. EDIT: Another consideration could be Jython. Writing Python code which is converted into Java bytecode. This would allow the ability to do Android apps using Python. I could be wrong though, I'm still looking into it. Update 1-26-11: I recently acquired a new job which required I learn .NET using C#. Im sure some of you are cringing already but I really like the whole system and how it all works together between desktop and web development. But, as I am still interested in Python very much, and after some research I have decided I will learn Python as well as the IronPython implementation for .NET. But (again: I know...) since .NET is mostly a Windows thing and not as cross-compatible as I like, I will be learning Mono which is a cross platform implementation of .NET where I can use what I learn at work using C# and what I want to learn, Python/IronPython. So while learning and writing C#/.NET @ work I will be learning Python - Mono - Iron Python for what I want to do personally. And the benefit of them all being very closely related will help me out a lot, I think. What do you guys think? I almost feel like that should be another question, but there's not much of a question. Either way, you guys gave very helpful input.

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  • Extended FindWindow

    - by João Angelo
    The Win32 API provides the FindWindow function that supports finding top-level windows by their class name and/or title. However, the title search does not work if you are trying to match partial text at the middle or the end of the full window title. You can however implement support for these extended search features by using another set of Win32 API like EnumWindows and GetWindowText. A possible implementation follows: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Text; public class WindowInfo { private IntPtr handle; private string className; internal WindowInfo(IntPtr handle, string title) { if (handle == IntPtr.Zero) throw new ArgumentException("Invalid handle.", "handle"); this.Handle = handle; this.Title = title ?? string.Empty; } public string Title { get; private set; } public string ClassName { get { if (className == null) { className = GetWindowClassNameByHandle(this.Handle); } return className; } } public IntPtr Handle { get { if (!NativeMethods.IsWindow(this.handle)) throw new InvalidOperationException("The handle is no longer valid."); return this.handle; } private set { this.handle = value; } } public static WindowInfo[] EnumerateWindows() { var windows = new List<WindowInfo>(); NativeMethods.EnumWindowsProcessor processor = (hwnd, lParam) => { windows.Add(new WindowInfo(hwnd, GetWindowTextByHandle(hwnd))); return true; }; bool succeeded = NativeMethods.EnumWindows(processor, IntPtr.Zero); if (!succeeded) return new WindowInfo[] { }; return windows.ToArray(); } public static WindowInfo FindWindow(Predicate<WindowInfo> predicate) { WindowInfo target = null; NativeMethods.EnumWindowsProcessor processor = (hwnd, lParam) => { var current = new WindowInfo(hwnd, GetWindowTextByHandle(hwnd)); if (predicate(current)) { target = current; return false; } return true; }; NativeMethods.EnumWindows(processor, IntPtr.Zero); return target; } private static string GetWindowTextByHandle(IntPtr handle) { if (handle == IntPtr.Zero) throw new ArgumentException("Invalid handle.", "handle"); int length = NativeMethods.GetWindowTextLength(handle); if (length == 0) return string.Empty; var buffer = new StringBuilder(length + 1); NativeMethods.GetWindowText(handle, buffer, buffer.Capacity); return buffer.ToString(); } private static string GetWindowClassNameByHandle(IntPtr handle) { if (handle == IntPtr.Zero) throw new ArgumentException("Invalid handle.", "handle"); const int WindowClassNameMaxLength = 256; var buffer = new StringBuilder(WindowClassNameMaxLength); NativeMethods.GetClassName(handle, buffer, buffer.Capacity); return buffer.ToString(); } } internal class NativeMethods { public delegate bool EnumWindowsProcessor(IntPtr hwnd, IntPtr lParam); [DllImport("user32.dll")] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] public static extern bool EnumWindows( EnumWindowsProcessor lpEnumFunc, IntPtr lParam); [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] public static extern int GetWindowText( IntPtr hWnd, StringBuilder lpString, int nMaxCount); [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] public static extern int GetWindowTextLength(IntPtr hWnd); [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] public static extern int GetClassName( IntPtr hWnd, StringBuilder lpClassName, int nMaxCount); [DllImport("user32.dll")] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] public static extern bool IsWindow(IntPtr hWnd); } The access to the windows handle is preceded by a sanity check to assert if it’s still valid, but if you are dealing with windows out of your control then the window can be destroyed right after the check so it’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a valid handle. Finally, to wrap this up a usage, example: static void Main(string[] args) { var w = WindowInfo.FindWindow(wi => wi.Title.Contains("Test.docx")); if (w != null) { Console.Write(w.Title); } }

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  • Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

    - by dapostolov
    So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face;  he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1   Best Regards D.

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  • The Unintended Consequences of Sound Security Policy

    - by Tanu Sood
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Author: Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM Meet the Author: Kevin Moulton, Senior Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM, has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East Enterprise Security Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. When I speak to a room of IT administrators, I like to begin by asking them if they have implemented a complex password policy. Generally, they all nod their heads enthusiastically. I ask them if that password policy requires long passwords. More nodding. I ask if that policy requires upper and lower case letters – faster nodding – numbers – even faster – special characters – enthusiastic nodding all around! I then ask them if their policy also includes a requirement for users to regularly change their passwords. Now we have smiles with the nodding! I ask them if the users have different IDs and passwords on the many systems that they have access to. Of course! I then ask them if, when they walk around the building, they see something like this: Thanks to Jake Ludington for the nice example. Can these administrators be faulted for their policies? Probably not but, in the end, end-users will find a way to get their job done efficiently. Post-It Notes to the rescue! I was visiting a business in New York City one day which was a perfect example of this problem. First I walked up to the security desk and told them where I was headed. They asked me if they should call upstairs to have someone escort me. Is that my call? Is that policy? I said that I knew where I was going, so they let me go. Having the conference room number handy, I wandered around the place in a search of my destination. As I walked around, unescorted, I noticed the post-it note problem in abundance. Had I been so inclined, I could have logged in on almost any machine and into any number of systems. When I reached my intended conference room, I mentioned my post-it note observation to the two gentlemen with whom I was meeting. One of them said, “You mean like this,” and he produced a post it note full of login IDs and passwords from his breast pocket! I gave him kudos for not hanging the list on his monitor. We then talked for the rest of the meeting about the difficulties faced by the employees due to the security policies. These policies, although well-intended, made life very difficult for the end-users. Most users had access to 8 to 12 systems, and the passwords for each expired at a different times. The post-it note solution was understandable. Who could remember even half of them? What could this customer have done differently? I am a fan of using a provisioning system, such as Oracle Identity Manager, to manage all of the target systems. With OIM, and email could be automatically sent to all users when it was time to change their password. The end-users would follow a link to change their password on a web page, and then OIM would propagate that password out to all of the systems that the user had access to, even if the login IDs were different. Another option would be an Enterprise Single-Sign On Solution. With Oracle eSSO, all of a user’s credentials would be stored in a central, encrypted credential store. The end-user would only have to login to their machine each morning and then, as they moved to each new system, Oracle eSSO would supply the credentials. Good-bye post-it notes! 3M may be disappointed, but your end users will thank you. I hear people say that this post-it note problem is not a big deal, because the only people who would see the passwords are fellow employees. Do you really know who is walking around your building? What are the password policies in your business? How do the end-users respond?

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  • SSIS Reporting Pack v0.4 – Execution Report updated

    - by jamiet
    SSIS Reporting Pack is a suite of reports that I maintain at http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/ that provide visualisation over the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server 2012 and attempt to add value over the reports that ship in the box. Work on the reports has stalled (my last SSIS Reporting Pack blog post was on 4th September 2011) as I’ve had rather more important things going on my life of late however I have recently checked-in a fix that couldn’t really be delayed. I discovered a problem with the Execution report that was causing the report to effectively hang, it was caused by this bit of SQL hidden away in the report definition: [generated_executables] AS (   SELECT  [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]   FROM    (           SELECT  [execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_close_square] + 1)           ,       [parent_execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_open_square])           FROM    (                   SELECT  [execution_path]                   ,       [char_index_open_square] = CHARINDEX('[',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [char_index_close_square] = CHARINDEX(']',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [length_exec_path] = LEN([execution_path])                   FROM    [exec_stats] es                   WHERE   execution_path LIKE '%\[%]%'  ESCAPE '\'                   )AS [loop_iteration]           ) AS [new_executable]   GROUP   BY [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]) It was there because SSIS does not currently treat a loop iteration as an executable yet I figured there was still value in being able to view it as such – this SQL essentially “invents” new executables for those loop iterations; its what enabled the following visualisation: where each of the three iterations of a For Each Loop called “FEL Loop over top performing regions” appear in the report. Unfortunately, as I alluded, this could under certain circumstances (most likely when there were many loop iterations) cause the report to hang as it waited for the results to be constructed and returned. The change that I have made eradicates this generation of “fake” executables and thus produces this visualisation instead: Notice that the three “children” of the For Each Loop are no longer the three iterations but actually the task (“EPT Call Data Export Package”) contained within that For Each Loop. The problem here is of course that there is no longer a visual distinction between those three iterations; I have instead made the full execution path viewable via a tooltip:   If you preferred the “old” way of presenting this information and are happy to put up with the performance degradation then I have kept the old version of the report hanging around in the reporting pack as “execution loop with iterations” however none of the other reports link to it so you will have to browse to it manually if you want to use it. Please let me know if you ARE using it – I would be very interested to hear about your experiences.   The last change to make you aware of in the execution report is that by default I no longer show OnPreValidate or OnPostValidate messages as I consider them to be superfluous and only serve to clutter up the results. If you want to put them back, well, its open source so go right ahead!   The latest release of SSIS Reporting Pack that contains all of these changes is v0.4 and can be downloaded from http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/releases/view/88178   Feedback on all of the above changes would be very much appreciated. @Jamiet

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  • Disaster Recovery Discovery

    - by Rodney Landrum
    Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting.  I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome.  Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply:  This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine.   Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored  it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login.  Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper.  Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine.  I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash,  sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD.  To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case,  and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein.  My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.  

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  • WIF-less claim extraction from ACS: SWT

    - by Elton Stoneman
    WIF with SAML is solid and flexible, but unless you need the power, it can be overkill for simple claim assertion, and in the REST world WIF doesn’t have support for the latest token formats.  Simple Web Token (SWT) may not be around forever, but while it's here it's a nice easy format which you can manipulate in .NET without having to go down the WIF route. Assuming you have set up a Relying Party in ACS, specifying SWT as the token format: When ACS redirects to your login page, it will POST the SWT in the first form variable. It comes through in the BinarySecurityToken element of a RequestSecurityTokenResponse XML payload , the SWT type is specified with a TokenType of http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2009/11/swt-token-profile-1.0 : <t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse xmlns:t="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust">   <t:Lifetime>     <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T07:31:18.655Z</wsu:Created>     <wsu:Expires xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T09:11:18.655Z</wsu:Expires>   </t:Lifetime>   <wsp:AppliesTo xmlns:wsp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy">     <EndpointReference xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">       <Address>http://localhost/x.y.z</Address>     </EndpointReference>   </wsp:AppliesTo>   <t:RequestedSecurityToken>     <wsse:BinarySecurityToken wsu:Id="uuid:fc8d3332-d501-4bb0-84ba-d31aa95a1a6c" ValueType="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2009/11/swt-token-profile-1.0" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> [ base64string ] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken>   </t:RequestedSecurityToken>   <t:TokenType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2009/11/swt-token-profile-1.0</t:TokenType>   <t:RequestType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust/Issue</t:RequestType>   <t:KeyType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/NoProofKey</t:KeyType> </t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse> Reading the SWT is as simple as base-64 decoding, then URL-decoding the element value:     var wrappedToken = XDocument.Parse(HttpContext.Current.Request.Form[1]);     var binaryToken = wrappedToken.Root.Descendants("{http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd}BinarySecurityToken").First();     var tokenBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(binaryToken.Value);     var token = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(tokenBytes);     var tokenType = wrappedToken.Root.Descendants("{http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust}TokenType").First().Value; The decoded token contains the claims as key/value pairs, along with the issuer, audience (ACS realm), expiry date and an HMAC hash, which are in query string format. Separate them on the ampersand, and you can write out the claim values in your logged-in page:     var decoded = HttpUtility.UrlDecode(token);     foreach (var part in decoded.Split('&'))     {         Response.Write("<pre>" + part + "</pre><br/>");     } - which will produce something like this: http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationinstant=2012-08-31T06:57:01.855Z http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationmethod=http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname=XYZ http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/[email protected] http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/[email protected] http://schemas.microsoft.com/accesscontrolservice/2010/07/claims/identityprovider=http://fs.svc.xyz.com/adfs/services/trust Audience=http://localhost/x.y.z ExpiresOn=1346402225 Issuer=https://x-y-z.accesscontrol.windows.net/ HMACSHA256=oDCeEDDAWEC8x+yBnTaCLnzp4L6jI0Z/xNK95PdZTts= The HMAC hash lets you validate the token to ensure it hasn’t been tampered with. You'll need the token signing key from ACS, then you can re-sign the token and compare hashes. There's a full implementation of an SWT parser and validator here: How To Request SWT Token From ACS And How To Validate It At The REST WCF Service Hosted In Windows Azure, and a cut-down claim inspector on my github code gallery: ACS Claim Inspector. Interestingly, ACS lets you have a value for your logged-in page which has no relation to the realm for authentication, so you can put this code into a generic claim inspector page, and set that to be your logged-in page for any relying party where you want to check what's being sent through. Particularly handy with ADFS, when you're modifying the claims provided, and want to quickly see the results.

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