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• Share a Printer on Your Network from Vista or XP to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  The other day we looked at sharing a printer between Windows 7 machines, but you may only have one Windows 7 machine and the printer is connected to a Vista or XP computer. Today we show you how to share a printer from either Vista or XP to Windows 7. We previously showed you how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and XP. But what if you have a printer connected to an XP or Vista machine in another room, and you want to print to it from Windows 7? This guide will walk you through the process. Note: In these examples we’re using 32-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista, and XP on a basic home network. We are using an HP PSC 1500 printer, but keep in mind every printer is different so finding and installing the correct drivers will vary. Share a Printer from Vista To share the printer on a Vista machine click on Start and enter printers into the search box and hit Enter. Right-click on the printer you want to share and select Sharing from the context menu. Now in Printer Properties, select the Sharing tab, mark the box next to Share this printer, and give the printer a name. Make sure the name is something simple with no spaces then click Ok. Share a Printer from XP To share a printer from XP click on Start then select Printers and Faxes. In the Printers and Faxes window right-click on the printer to share and select Sharing. In the Printer Properties window select the Sharing tab and the radio button next to Share this printer and give it a short name with no spaces then click Ok. Add Printer to Windows 7 Now that we have the printer on Vista or XP set up to be shared, it’s time to add it to Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and click on Devices and Printers. In Devices and Printers click on Add a printer. Next click on Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer. Windows 7 will search for the printer on your network and once its been found click Next. The printer has been successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer and send a test page to verify everything works. If everything is successful, close out of the add printer screens and you should be good to go.   Alternate Method If the method above doesn’t work, you’ll can try the following for either XP or Vista. In our example, when trying to add the printer connected to our XP machine, it wasn’t recognized automatically. If you’re search pulls up nothing then click on The printer that I want isn’t listed. In the Add Printer window under Find a printer by name or TCP/IP address click the radio button next to Select a shared printer by name. You can either type in the path to the printer or click on Browse to find it. In this instance we decided to browse to it and notice we have 5 computers found on the network. We want to be able to print to the XPMCE computer so we double-click on that. Type in the username and password for that computer… Now we see the printer and can select it. The path to the printer is put into the Select a shared printer by name field. Wait while Windows connects to the printer and installs it… It’s successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer or not and print a test page to make sure everything works successfully. Now when we go back to Devices and Printers under Printers and Faxes, we see the HP printer on XPMCE. Conclusion Sharing a printer from one machine to another can sometimes be tricky, but the method we used here in our setup worked well. Since the printer we used is fairly new, there wasn’t a problem with locating any drivers for it. Windows 7 includes a lot of device drivers already so you may be surprised on what it’s able to install. Your results may vary depending on your type of printer, Windows version, and network setup. This should get you started configuring the machines on your network—hopefully with good results.  If you you have two Windows 7 computers, then sharing a printer or files is easy through the Homegroup feature. You can also share a printer between Windows 7 machines on the same network but not Homegroup. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share a Printer Between Windows 7 Machines Not in the Same HomegroupShare Files and Printers between Windows 7 and XPHow To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and VistaEnable Mapping to \HostnameC$ Share on Windows 7 or VistaUse the Homegroup Feature in Windows 7 to Share Printers and Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Share a Printer on Your Network from Vista or XP to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  The other day we looked at sharing a printer between Windows 7 machines, but you may only have one Windows 7 machine and the printer is connected to a Vista or XP computer. Today we show you how to share a printer from either Vista or XP to Windows 7. We previously showed you how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and XP. But what if you have a printer connected to an XP or Vista machine in another room, and you want to print to it from Windows 7? This guide will walk you through the process. Note: In these examples we’re using 32-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista, and XP on a basic home network. We are using an HP PSC 1500 printer, but keep in mind every printer is different so finding and installing the correct drivers will vary. Share a Printer from Vista To share the printer on a Vista machine click on Start and enter printers into the search box and hit Enter. Right-click on the printer you want to share and select Sharing from the context menu. Now in Printer Properties, select the Sharing tab, mark the box next to Share this printer, and give the printer a name. Make sure the name is something simple with no spaces then click Ok. Share a Printer from XP To share a printer from XP click on Start then select Printers and Faxes. In the Printers and Faxes window right-click on the printer to share and select Sharing. In the Printer Properties window select the Sharing tab and the radio button next to Share this printer and give it a short name with no spaces then click Ok. Add Printer to Windows 7 Now that we have the printer on Vista or XP set up to be shared, it’s time to add it to Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and click on Devices and Printers. In Devices and Printers click on Add a printer. Next click on Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer. Windows 7 will search for the printer on your network and once its been found click Next. The printer has been successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer and send a test page to verify everything works. If everything is successful, close out of the add printer screens and you should be good to go.   Alternate Method If the method above doesn’t work, you’ll can try the following for either XP or Vista. In our example, when trying to add the printer connected to our XP machine, it wasn’t recognized automatically. If you’re search pulls up nothing then click on The printer that I want isn’t listed. In the Add Printer window under Find a printer by name or TCP/IP address click the radio button next to Select a shared printer by name. You can either type in the path to the printer or click on Browse to find it. In this instance we decided to browse to it and notice we have 5 computers found on the network. We want to be able to print to the XPMCE computer so we double-click on that. Type in the username and password for that computer… Now we see the printer and can select it. The path to the printer is put into the Select a shared printer by name field. Wait while Windows connects to the printer and installs it… It’s successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer or not and print a test page to make sure everything works successfully. Now when we go back to Devices and Printers under Printers and Faxes, we see the HP printer on XPMCE. Conclusion Sharing a printer from one machine to another can sometimes be tricky, but the method we used here in our setup worked well. Since the printer we used is fairly new, there wasn’t a problem with locating any drivers for it. Windows 7 includes a lot of device drivers already so you may be surprised on what it’s able to install. Your results may vary depending on your type of printer, Windows version, and network setup. This should get you started configuring the machines on your network—hopefully with good results.  If you you have two Windows 7 computers, then sharing a printer or files is easy through the Homegroup feature. You can also share a printer between Windows 7 machines on the same network but not Homegroup. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share a Printer Between Windows 7 Machines Not in the Same HomegroupShare Files and Printers between Windows 7 and XPHow To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and VistaEnable Mapping to \HostnameC$ Share on Windows 7 or VistaUse the Homegroup Feature in Windows 7 to Share Printers and Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Java Embedded @ JavaOne: Q & A

  - by terrencebarr

  There has been a lot of interest in Java Embedded @ JavaOne since it was announced a short while ago (see my previous post). As this is a new conference we did get a number of questions regarding the conference. So we put together a brief Q & A on audience focus, dates, registrations, pricing, submissions, etc. Hope this helps and, remember, the Call for Papers ends next week, Jul 18th 2012! Cheers, – Terrence    Java Embedded @ JavaOne : Q & A  Q. Where can I learn more about “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. Please visit: http://oracle.com/javaone/embedded Q. What is the purpose of “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. This net-new event is designed to provide business and technical decision makers, as well as Java embedded ecosystem partners, a unique occasion to come together and learn about how they can use Java Embedded technologies for new business opportunities. Q. What broad audiences would benefit by attending “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. Java licensees; Government agencies; ISVs, Device Manufacturers; Service Providers such as Telcos, Utilities, Healthcare, Energy, Smart Grid/Smart Metering; Automotive/Telematics; Home/Building Automation; Factory Automation; Media/TV; and Payment vendors. Q. What business titles would benefit by attending “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. The ideal audience for this event is business and technical decision makers (e.g. System Integrators, CTO, CXO, Chief Architects/Architects, Business Development Managers, Project Managers, Purchasing managers, Technical Leads, Senior Decision Makers, Practice Leads, R&D Heads, and Development Managers/Leads). Q. When is “Java Embedded @ JavaOne” taking place? A. The event takes place on Wednesday, Oct. 3th through Thursday, Oct. 4th. Q. Where is “Java Embedded @ JavaOne” taking place? A. The event takes place in the Hotel Nikko. Q. Won’t “Java Embedded @ JavaOne” impact the flagship JavaOne conference since the Hotel Nikko is one of the 3 flagship JavaOne conference’s venue hotels? A. No. Separate space in the Hotel Nikko will be used for “Java Embedded @ JavaOne” and will in no way impact scale and scope of the flagship JavaOne conference’s content mix. Q. Will there be a call for papers for “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. Yes.  The call for papers has started but is ONLY for business focused submissions. Q. What type of business submissions can I make for “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. We are accepting 3 types of business submissions: Best Practices: Java Embedded business solutions, methods, and techniques that consistently show results superior to those achieved with other means, as well as discussions on how Java Embedded can improve business operations, and increase competitive differentiation and profitability. Case Studies: Discussions with Oracle customers and partners that describe the unique business drivers that convinced them to implement Java Embedded as part of an infrastructure technology mix. The discussions will highlight the issues they faced, the decision making involved, and the implementation choices made to create value and improve business differentiation. Panel: Moderator-driven open discussion focused on the emerging opportunities Java Embedded offers businesses, as well as other topics such as strategy, overcoming common challenges, etc. Q. What is the call for papers timeline for “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. The timeline is as follows: CFP Launched – June 18th Deadline for submissions – July 18th Notifications (Accepts/Declines) – week of July 29th Deadline for speakers to accept speaker invitation – August 10th Presentations due for review – August 31st Q. Where can I find more call for paper details for “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. Please go to: http://www.oracle.com/javaone/embedded/call-for-papers/information/index.html Q. How much does it cost to attend “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? A. The cost to attend is: $595.00 U.S. — Early Bird (Launch date – July 13, 2012) $795.00 U.S. — Pre-Registration (July 14 – September 28, 2012) $995.00 U.S. — Onsite Registration (September 29 – October 4, 2012) Q. Can an attendee of the flagship JavaOne event and Oracle OpenWorld attend “Java Embedded @ JavaOne”? ?A. Yes.  Attendees of both the flagship JavaOne event and Oracle OpenWorld can attend “Java Embedded @ JavaOne” by purchasing a $100.00 U.S. upgrade to their full conference pass. Filed under: Mobile & Embedded Tagged: Call for Papers, Java Embedded @ JavaOne, JavaOne San Francisco

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• A Taxonomy of Numerical Methods v1

  - by JoshReuben

  Numerical Analysis – When, What, (but not how) Once you understand the Math & know C++, Numerical Methods are basically blocks of iterative & conditional math code. I found the real trick was seeing the forest for the trees – knowing which method to use for which situation. Its pretty easy to get lost in the details – so I’ve tried to organize these methods in a way that I can quickly look this up. I’ve included links to detailed explanations and to C++ code examples. I’ve tried to classify Numerical methods in the following broad categories: Solving Systems of Linear Equations Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively Interpolation Curve Fitting Optimization Numerical Differentiation & Integration Solving ODEs Boundary Problems Solving EigenValue problems Enjoy – I did ! Solving Systems of Linear Equations Overview Solve sets of algebraic equations with x unknowns The set is commonly in matrix form Gauss-Jordan Elimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Jordan_elimination C++: http://www.codekeep.net/snippets/623f1923-e03c-4636-8c92-c9dc7aa0d3c0.aspx Produces solution of the equations & the coefficient matrix Efficient, stable 2 steps: · Forward Elimination – matrix decomposition: reduce set to triangular form (0s below the diagonal) or row echelon form. If degenerate, then there is no solution · Backward Elimination –write the original matrix as the product of ints inverse matrix & its reduced row-echelon matrix à reduce set to row canonical form & use back-substitution to find the solution to the set Elementary ops for matrix decomposition: · Row multiplication · Row switching · Add multiples of rows to other rows Use pivoting to ensure rows are ordered for achieving triangular form LU Decomposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_decomposition C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-lu-decomposition-for-solving.html Represent the matrix as a product of lower & upper triangular matrices A modified version of GJ Elimination Advantage – can easily apply forward & backward elimination to solve triangular matrices Techniques: · Doolittle Method – sets the L matrix diagonal to unity · Crout Method - sets the U matrix diagonal to unity Note: both the L & U matrices share the same unity diagonal & can be stored compactly in the same matrix Gauss-Seidel Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Seidel_method C++: http://www.nr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=722 Transform the linear set of equations into a single equation & then use numerical integration (as integration formulas have Sums, it is implemented iteratively). an optimization of Gauss-Jacobi: 1.5 times faster, requires 0.25 iterations to achieve the same tolerance Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively find roots of polynomials – there may be 0, 1 or n solutions for an n order polynomial use iterative techniques Iterative methods · used when there are no known analytical techniques · Requires set functions to be continuous & differentiable · Requires an initial seed value – choice is critical to convergence à conduct multiple runs with different starting points & then select best result · Systematic - iterate until diminishing returns, tolerance or max iteration conditions are met · bracketing techniques will always yield convergent solutions, non-bracketing methods may fail to converge Incremental method if a nonlinear function has opposite signs at 2 ends of a small interval x1 & x2, then there is likely to be a solution in their interval – solutions are detected by evaluating a function over interval steps, for a change in sign, adjusting the step size dynamically. Limitations – can miss closely spaced solutions in large intervals, cannot detect degenerate (coinciding) solutions, limited to functions that cross the x-axis, gives false positives for singularities Fixed point method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_iteration C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=weYj75E_t6MC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=fixed+point+method++c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=LQ-5P_taoC&sig=lENUUIYBK53tZtTwNfHLy5PEWDk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wezDUPW1J5DptQaMsIHQCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=fixed%20point%20method%20%20c%2B%2B&f=false Algebraically rearrange a solution to isolate a variable then apply incremental method Bisection method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method C++: http://numericalcomputing.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval, keep bisecting it ad midpoint into sub-intervals and then apply incremental method on smaller & smaller intervals – zoom in Adv: unaffected by function gradient à reliable Disadv: slow convergence False Position Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_position_method C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/126100-bisection-and-false-position-methods/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval , & use the relative value of function at interval end points to select next sub-intervals (estimate how far between the end points the solution might be & subdivide based on this) Newton-Raphson method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_method C++: http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/classes/Summer-2012/csci1113/index.php?page=./newt3 Also known as Newton's method Convenient, efficient Not bracketed – only a single initial guess is required to start iteration – requires an analytical expression for the first derivative of the function as input. Evaluates the function & its derivative at each step. Can be extended to the Newton MutiRoot method for solving multiple roots Can be easily applied to an of n-coupled set of non-linear equations – conduct a Taylor Series expansion of a function, dropping terms of order n, rewrite as a Jacobian matrix of PDs & convert to simultaneous linear equations !!! Secant Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_method C++: http://forum.vcoderz.com/showthread.php?p=205230 Unlike N-R, can estimate first derivative from an initial interval (does not require root to be bracketed) instead of inputting it Since derivative is approximated, may converge slower. Is fast in practice as it does not have to evaluate the derivative at each step. Similar implementation to False Positive method Birge-Vieta Method http://mat.iitm.ac.in/home/sryedida/public_html/caimna/transcendental/polynomial%20methods/bv%20method.html C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=cL1boM2uyQwC&pg=SA3-PA51&lpg=SA3-PA51&dq=Birge-Vieta+Method+c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=QZmnDTK3rC&sig=BPNcHHbpR_DKVoZXrLi4nVXD-gg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-_DUK2iNIjzsgbE5ID4Dg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Birge-Vieta%20Method%20c%2B%2B&f=false combines Horner's method of polynomial evaluation (transforming into lesser degree polynomials that are more computationally efficient to process) with Newton-Raphson to provide a computational speed-up Interpolation Overview Construct new data points for as close as possible fit within range of a discrete set of known points (that were obtained via sampling, experimentation) Use Taylor Series Expansion of a function f(x) around a specific value for x Linear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation C++: http://www.hamaluik.com/?p=289 Straight line between 2 points à concatenate interpolants between each pair of data points Bilinear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation C++: http://supercomputingblog.com/graphics/coding-bilinear-interpolation/2/ Extension of the linear function for interpolating functions of 2 variables – perform linear interpolation first in 1 direction, then in another. Used in image processing – e.g. texture mapping filter. Uses 4 vertices to interpolate a value within a unit cell. Lagrange Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_polynomial C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/approximation/interpolation/lagrange.php For polynomials Requires recomputation for all terms for each distinct x value – can only be applied for small number of nodes Numerically unstable Barycentric Interpolation http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/S0036144502417715 C++: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/621445-barycentric-coordinates-c-code-check/ Rearrange the terms in the equation of the Legrange interpolation by defining weight functions that are independent of the interpolated value of x Newton Divided Difference Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_polynomial C++: http://jee-appy.blogspot.co.il/2011/12/newton-divided-difference-interpolation.html Hermite Divided Differences: Interpolation polynomial approximation for a given set of data points in the NR form - divided differences are used to approximately calculate the various differences. For a given set of 3 data points , fit a quadratic interpolant through the data Bracketed functions allow Newton divided differences to be calculated recursively Difference table Cubic Spline Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation C++: https://www.marcusbannerman.co.uk/index.php/home/latestarticles/42-articles/96-cubic-spline-class.html Spline is a piecewise polynomial Provides smoothness – for interpolations with significantly varying data Use weighted coefficients to bend the function to be smooth & its 1st & 2nd derivatives are continuous through the edge points in the interval Curve Fitting A generalization of interpolating whereby given data points may contain noise à the curve does not necessarily pass through all the points Least Squares Fit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares C++: http://www.ccas.ru/mmes/educat/lab04k/02/least-squares.c Residual – difference between observed value & expected value Model function is often chosen as a linear combination of the specified functions Determines: A) The model instance in which the sum of squared residuals has the least value B) param values for which model best fits data Straight Line Fit Linear correlation between independent variable and dependent variable Linear Regression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression C++: http://www.oocities.org/david_swaim/cpp/linregc.htm Special case of statistically exact extrapolation Leverage least squares Given a basis function, the sum of the residuals is determined and the corresponding gradient equation is expressed as a set of normal linear equations in matrix form that can be solved (e.g. using LU Decomposition) Can be weighted - Drop the assumption that all errors have the same significance –-> confidence of accuracy is different for each data point. Fit the function closer to points with higher weights Polynomial Fit - use a polynomial basis function Moving Average http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average C++: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17860/A-Simple-Moving-Average-Algorithm Used for smoothing (cancel fluctuations to highlight longer-term trends & cycles), time series data analysis, signal processing filters Replace each data point with average of neighbors. Can be simple (SMA), weighted (WMA), exponential (EMA). Lags behind latest data points – extra weight can be given to more recent data points. Weights can decrease arithmetically or exponentially according to distance from point. Parameters: smoothing factor, period, weight basis Optimization Overview Given function with multiple variables, find Min (or max by minimizing –f(x)) Iterative approach Efficient, but not necessarily reliable Conditions: noisy data, constraints, non-linear models Detection via sign of first derivative - Derivative of saddle points will be 0 Local minima Bisection method Similar method for finding a root for a non-linear equation Start with an interval that contains a minimum Golden Search method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/optimization/golden.php Bisect intervals according to golden ratio 0.618.. Achieves reduction by evaluating a single function instead of 2 Newton-Raphson Method Brent method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent's_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/cpp_src/brent/brent.cpp Based on quadratic or parabolic interpolation – if the function is smooth & parabolic near to the minimum, then a parabola fitted through any 3 points should approximate the minima – fails when the 3 points are collinear , in which case the denominator is 0 Simplex Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm C++: http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/article.php/c17505/Simplex-Optimization-Algorithm-and-Implemetation-in-C-Programming.htm Find the global minima of any multi-variable function Direct search – no derivatives required At each step it maintains a non-degenerative simplex – a convex hull of n+1 vertices. Obtains the minimum for a function with n variables by evaluating the function at n-1 points, iteratively replacing the point of worst result with the point of best result, shrinking the multidimensional simplex around the best point. Point replacement involves expanding & contracting the simplex near the worst value point to determine a better replacement point Oscillation can be avoided by choosing the 2nd worst result Restart if it gets stuck Parameters: contraction & expansion factors Simulated Annealing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing C++: http://code.google.com/p/cppsimulatedannealing/ Analogy to heating & cooling metal to strengthen its structure Stochastic method – apply random permutation search for global minima - Avoid entrapment in local minima via hill climbing Heating schedule - Annealing schedule params: temperature, iterations at each temp, temperature delta Cooling schedule – can be linear, step-wise or exponential Differential Evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_evolution C++: http://www.amichel.com/de/doc/html/ More advanced stochastic methods analogous to biological processes: Genetic algorithms, evolution strategies Parallel direct search method against multiple discrete or continuous variables Initial population of variable vectors chosen randomly – if weighted difference vector of 2 vectors yields a lower objective function value then it replaces the comparison vector Many params: #parents, #variables, step size, crossover constant etc Convergence is slow – many more function evaluations than simulated annealing Numerical Differentiation Overview 2 approaches to finite difference methods: · A) approximate function via polynomial interpolation then differentiate · B) Taylor series approximation – additionally provides error estimate Finite Difference methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method C++: http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-051807-164436/unrestricted/EAMPADU.pdf Find differences between high order derivative values - Approximate differential equations by finite differences at evenly spaced data points Based on forward & backward Taylor series expansion of f(x) about x plus or minus multiples of delta h. Forward / backward difference - the sums of the series contains even derivatives and the difference of the series contains odd derivatives – coupled equations that can be solved. Provide an approximation of the derivative within a O(h^2) accuracy There is also central difference & extended central difference which has a O(h^4) accuracy Richardson Extrapolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_extrapolation C++: http://mathscoding.blogspot.co.il/2012/02/introduction-richardson-extrapolation.html A sequence acceleration method applied to finite differences Fast convergence, high accuracy O(h^4) Derivatives via Interpolation Cannot apply Finite Difference method to discrete data points at uneven intervals – so need to approximate the derivative of f(x) using the derivative of the interpolant via 3 point Lagrange Interpolation Note: the higher the order of the derivative, the lower the approximation precision Numerical Integration Estimate finite & infinite integrals of functions More accurate procedure than numerical differentiation Use when it is not possible to obtain an integral of a function analytically or when the function is not given, only the data points are Newton Cotes Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas C++: http://www.siafoo.net/snippet/324 For equally spaced data points Computationally easy – based on local interpolation of n rectangular strip areas that is piecewise fitted to a polynomial to get the sum total area Evaluate the integrand at n+1 evenly spaced points – approximate definite integral by Sum Weights are derived from Lagrange Basis polynomials Leverage Trapezoidal Rule for default 2nd formulas, Simpson 1/3 Rule for substituting 3 point formulas, Simpson 3/8 Rule for 4 point formulas. For 4 point formulas use Bodes Rule. Higher orders obtain more accurate results Trapezoidal Rule uses simple area, Simpsons Rule replaces the integrand f(x) with a quadratic polynomial p(x) that uses the same values as f(x) for its end points, but adds a midpoint Romberg Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romberg's_method C++: http://code.google.com/p/romberg-integration/downloads/detail?name=romberg.cpp&can=2&q= Combines trapezoidal rule with Richardson Extrapolation Evaluates the integrand at equally spaced points The integrand must have continuous derivatives Each R(n,m) extrapolation uses a higher order integrand polynomial replacement rule (zeroth starts with trapezoidal) à a lower triangular matrix set of equation coefficients where the bottom right term has the most accurate approximation. The process continues until the difference between 2 successive diagonal terms becomes sufficiently small. Gaussian Quadrature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_quadrature C++: http://www.alglib.net/integration/gaussianquadratures.php Data points are chosen to yield best possible accuracy – requires fewer evaluations Ability to handle singularities, functions that are difficult to evaluate The integrand can include a weighting function determined by a set of orthogonal polynomials. Points & weights are selected so that the integrand yields the exact integral if f(x) is a polynomial of degree <= 2n+1 Techniques (basically different weighting functions): · Gauss-Legendre Integration w(x)=1 · Gauss-Laguerre Integration w(x)=e^-x · Gauss-Hermite Integration w(x)=e^-x^2 · Gauss-Chebyshev Integration w(x)= 1 / Sqrt(1-x^2) Solving ODEs Use when high order differential equations cannot be solved analytically Evaluated under boundary conditions RK for systems – a high order differential equation can always be transformed into a coupled first order system of equations Euler method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method C++: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Euler_method First order Runge–Kutta method. Simple recursive method – given an initial value, calculate derivative deltas. Unstable & not very accurate (O(h) error) – not used in practice A first-order method - the local error (truncation error per step) is proportional to the square of the step size, and the global error (error at a given time) is proportional to the step size In evolving solution between data points xn & xn+1, only evaluates derivatives at beginning of interval xn à asymmetric at boundaries Higher order Runge Kutta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet1441.htm 2nd & 4th order RK - Introduces parameterized midpoints for more symmetric solutions à accuracy at higher computational cost Adaptive RK – RK-Fehlberg – estimate the truncation at each integration step & automatically adjust the step size to keep error within prescribed limits. At each step 2 approximations are compared – if in disagreement to a specific accuracy, the step size is reduced Boundary Value Problems Where solution of differential equations are located at 2 different values of the independent variable x à more difficult, because cannot just start at point of initial value – there may not be enough starting conditions available at the end points to produce a unique solution An n-order equation will require n boundary conditions – need to determine the missing n-1 conditions which cause the given conditions at the other boundary to be satisfied Shooting Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_method C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-shooting-method-for-solving.html Iteratively guess the missing values for one end & integrate, then inspect the discrepancy with the boundary values of the other end to adjust the estimate Given the starting boundary values u1 & u2 which contain the root u, solve u given the false position method (solving the differential equation as an initial value problem via 4th order RK), then use u to solve the differential equations. Finite Difference Method For linear & non-linear systems Higher order derivatives require more computational steps – some combinations for boundary conditions may not work though Improve the accuracy by increasing the number of mesh points Solving EigenValue Problems An eigenvalue can substitute a matrix when doing matrix multiplication à convert matrix multiplication into a polynomial EigenValue For a given set of equations in matrix form, determine what are the solution eigenvalue & eigenvectors Similar Matrices - have same eigenvalues. Use orthogonal similarity transforms to reduce a matrix to diagonal form from which eigenvalue(s) & eigenvectors can be computed iteratively Jacobi method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobi_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/classes/acs2_2008/openmp/jacobi/jacobi.html Robust but Computationally intense – use for small matrices < 10x10 Power Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_iteration For any given real symmetric matrix, generate the largest single eigenvalue & its eigenvectors Simplest method – does not compute matrix decomposition à suitable for large, sparse matrices Inverse Iteration Variation of power iteration method – generates the smallest eigenvalue from the inverse matrix Rayleigh Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh's_method_of_dimensional_analysis Variation of power iteration method Rayleigh Quotient Method Variation of inverse iteration method Matrix Tri-diagonalization Method Use householder algorithm to reduce an NxN symmetric matrix to a tridiagonal real symmetric matrix vua N-2 orthogonal transforms     Whats Next Outside of Numerical Methods there are lots of different types of algorithms that I’ve learned over the decades: Data Mining – (I covered this briefly in a previous post: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2007/12/31/ssas-dm-algorithms.aspx ) Search & Sort Routing Problem Solving Logical Theorem Proving Planning Probabilistic Reasoning Machine Learning Solvers (eg MIP) Bioinformatics (Sequence Alignment, Protein Folding) Quant Finance (I read Wilmott’s books – interesting) Sooner or later, I’ll cover the above topics as well.

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• Linux-Containers — Part 1: Overview

  - by Lenz Grimmer

  "Containers" by Jean-Pierre Martineau (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Linux Containers (LXC) provide a means to isolate individual services or applications as well as of a complete Linux operating system from other services running on the same host. To accomplish this, each container gets its own directory structure, network devices, IP addresses and process table. The processes running in other containers or the host system are not visible from inside a container. Additionally, Linux Containers allow for fine granular control of resources like RAM, CPU or disk I/O. Generally speaking, Linux Containers use a completely different approach than "classicial" virtualization technologies like KVM or Xen (on which Oracle VM Server for x86 is based on). An application running inside a container will be executed directly on the operating system kernel of the host system, shielded from all other running processes in a sandbox-like environment. This allows a very direct and fair distribution of CPU and I/O-resources. Linux containers can offer the best possible performance and several possibilities for managing and sharing the resources available. Similar to Containers (or Zones) on Oracle Solaris or FreeBSD jails, the same kernel version runs on the host as well as in the containers; it is not possible to run different Linux kernel versions or other operating systems like Microsoft Windows or Oracle Solaris for x86 inside a container. However, it is possible to run different Linux distribution versions (e.g. Fedora Linux in a container on top of an Oracle Linux host), provided it supports the version of the Linux kernel that runs on the host. This approach has one caveat, though - if any of the containers causes a kernel crash, it will bring down all other containers (and the host system) as well. For example, Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) is supported for both Oracle Linux 5 and 6. This makes it possible to run Oracle Linux 5 and 6 container instances on top of an Oracle Linux 6 system. Since Linux Containers are fully implemented on the OS level (the Linux kernel), they can be easily combined with other virtualization technologies. It's certainly possible to set up Linux containers within a virtualized Linux instance that runs inside Oracle VM Server for Oracle VM Virtualbox. Some use cases for Linux Containers include: Consolidation of multiple separate Linux systems on one server: instances of Linux systems that are not performance-critical or only see sporadic use (e.g. a fax or print server or intranet services) do not necessarily need a dedicated server for their operations. These can easily be consolidated to run inside containers on a single server, to preserve energy and rack space. Running multiple instances of an application in parallel, e.g. for different users or customers. Each user receives his "own" application instance, with a defined level of service/performance. This prevents that one user's application could hog the entire system and ensures, that each user only has access to his own data set. It also helps to save main memory — if multiple instances of a same process are running, the Linux kernel can share memory pages that are identical and unchanged across all application instances. This also applies to shared libraries that applications may use, they are generally held in memory once and mapped to multiple processes. Quickly creating sandbox environments for development and testing purposes: containers that have been created and configured once can be archived as templates and can be duplicated (cloned) instantly on demand. After finishing the activity, the clone can safely be discarded. This allows to provide repeatable software builds and test environments, because the system will always be reset to its initial state for each run. Linux Containers also boot significantly faster than "classic" virtual machines, which can save a lot of time when running frequent build or test runs on applications. Safe execution of an individual application: if an application running inside a container has been compromised because of a security vulnerability, the host system and other containers remain unaffected. The potential damage can be minimized, analyzed and resolved directly from the host system. Note: Linux Containers on Oracle Linux 6 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) are still marked as Technology Preview - their use is only recommended for testing and evaluation purposes. The Open-Source project "Linux Containers" (LXC) is driving the development of the technology behind this, which is based on the "Control Groups" (CGroups) and "Name Spaces" functionality of the Linux kernel. Oracle is actively involved in the Linux Containers development and contributes patches to the upstream LXC code base. Control Groups provide means to manage and monitor the allocation of resources for individual processes or process groups. Among other things, you can restrict the maximum amount of memory, CPU cycles as well as the disk and network throughput (in MB/s or IOP/s) that are available for an application. Name Spaces help to isolate process groups from each other, e.g. the visibility of other running processes or the exclusive access to a network device. It's also possible to restrict a process group's access and visibility of the entire file system hierarchy (similar to a classic "chroot" environment). CGroups and Name Spaces provide the foundation on which Linux containers are based on, but they can actually be used independently as well. A more detailed description of how Linux Containers can be created and managed on Oracle Linux will be explained in the second part of this article. Additional links related to Linux Containers: OTN Article: The Role of Oracle Solaris Zones and Linux Containers in a Virtualization Strategy Linux Containers on Wikipedia - Lenz Grimmer Follow me on: Personal Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Linux Blog |

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• 8 Backup Tools Explained for Windows 7 and 8

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Backups on Windows can be confusing. Whether you’re using Windows 7 or 8, you have quite a few integrated backup tools to think about. Windows 8 made quite a few changes, too. You can also use third-party backup software, whether you want to back up to an external drive or back up your files to online storage. We won’t cover third-party tools here — just the ones built into Windows. Backup and Restore on Windows 7 Windows 7 has its own Backup and Restore feature that lets you create backups manually or on a schedule. You’ll find it under Backup and Restore in the Control Panel. The original version of Windows 8 still contained this tool, and named it Windows 7 File Recovery. This allowed former Windows 7 users to restore files from those old Windows 7 backups or keep using the familiar backup tool for a little while. Windows 7 File Recovery was removed in Windows 8.1. System Restore System Restore on both Windows 7 and 8 functions as a sort of automatic system backup feature. It creates backup copies of important system and program files on a schedule or when you perform certain tasks, such as installing a hardware driver. If system files become corrupted or your computer’s software becomes unstable, you can use System Restore to restore your system and program files from a System Restore point. This isn’t a way to back up your personal files. It’s more of a troubleshooting feature that uses backups to restore your system to its previous working state. Previous Versions on Windows 7 Windows 7′s Previous Versions feature allows you to restore older versions of files — or deleted files. These files can come from backups created with Windows 7′s Backup and Restore feature, but they can also come from System Restore points. When Windows 7 creates a System Restore point, it will sometimes contain your personal files. Previous Versions allows you to extract these personal files from restore points. This only applies to Windows 7. On Windows 8, System Restore won’t create backup copies of your personal files. The Previous Versions feature was removed on Windows 8. File History Windows 8 replaced Windows 7′s backup tools with File History, although this feature isn’t enabled by default. File History is designed to be a simple, easy way to create backups of your data files on an external drive or network location. File History replaces both Windows 7′s Backup and Previous Versions features. Windows System Restore won’t create copies of personal files on Windows 8. This means you can’t actually recover older versions of files until you enable File History yourself — it isn’t enabled by default. System Image Backups Windows also allows you to create system image backups. These are backup images of your entire operating system, including your system files, installed programs, and personal files. This feature was included in both Windows 7 and Windows 8, but it was hidden in the preview versions of Windows 8.1. After many user complaints, it was restored and is still available in the final version of Windows 8.1 — click System Image Backup on the File History Control Panel. Storage Space Mirroring Windows 8′s Storage Spaces feature allows you to set up RAID-like features in software. For example, you can use Storage Space to set up two hard disks of the same size in a mirroring configuration. They’ll appear as a single drive in Windows. When you write to this virtual drive, the files will be saved to both physical drives. If one drive fails, your files will still be available on the other drive. This isn’t a good long-term backup solution, but it is a way of ensuring you won’t lose important files if a single drive fails. Microsoft Account Settings Backup Windows 8 and 8.1 allow you to back up a variety of system settings — including personalization, desktop, and input settings. If you’re signing in with a Microsoft account, OneDrive settings backup is enabled automatically. This feature can be controlled under OneDrive > Sync settings in the PC settings app. This feature only backs up a few settings. It’s really more of a way to sync settings between devices. OneDrive Cloud Storage Microsoft hasn’t been talking much about File History since Windows 8 was released. That’s because they want people to use OneDrive instead. OneDrive — formerly known as SkyDrive — was added to the Windows desktop in Windows 8.1. Save your files here and they’ll be stored online tied to your Microsoft account. You can then sign in on any other computer, smartphone, tablet, or even via the web and access your files. Microsoft wants typical PC users “backing up” their files with OneDrive so they’ll be available on any device. You don’t have to worry about all these features. Just choose a backup strategy to ensure your files are safe if your computer’s hard disk fails you. Whether it’s an integrated backup tool or a third-party backup application, be sure to back up your files.

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 12 &ndash; Networking Security

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Identify security risks in LANs and WANs and design security policies that minimize risks Explain how physical security contributes to network security Discuss hardware and design based security techniques Understand methods of encryption such as SSL and IPSec, that can secure data in storage and in transit Describe how popular authentication protocols such as RADIUS< TACACS,Kerberos, PAP, CHAP, and MS-CHAP function Use network operating system techniques to provide basic security Understand wireless security protocols such as WEP, WPA and 802.11i Security Audits Before spending time and money on network security, examine your networks security risks – rate and prioritize risks. Different organizations have different levels of network security requirements. Security Risks Not all security breaches result from a manipulation of network technology – there are human factors that can play a role as well. The following categories are areas of considerations… Risks associated with People Risks associated with Transmission and Hardware Risks associated with Protocols and Software Risks associated with Internet Access An effective security policy A security policy identifies your security goals, risks, levels of authority, designated security coordinator and team members, responsibilities for each team member, and responsibilities for each employee. In addition it specifies how to address security breaches. It should not state exactly which hardware, software, architecture, or protocols will be used to ensure security, nor how hardware or software will be installed and configured. A security policy must address an organizations specific risks. to understand your risks, you should conduct a security audit that identifies vulnerabilities and rates both the severity of each threat and its likelihood of occurring. Security Policy Content Security policy content should… Policies for each category of security Explain to users what they can and cannot do and how these measures protect the networks security Should define what confidential means to the organization Response Policy A security policy should provide for a planned response in the event of a security breach. The response policy should identify the members of a response team, all of whom should clearly understand the the security policy, risks, and measures in place. Some of the roles concerned could include… Dispatcher – the person on call who first notices the breach Manager – the person who coordinates the resources necessary to solve the problem Technical Support Specialist – the person who focuses on solving the problem Public relations specialist – the person who acts as the official spokesperson for the organization Physical Security An important element in network security is restricting physical access to its components. There are various techniques for this including locking doors, security people at access points etc. You should identify the following… Which rooms contain critical systems or data and must be secured Through what means might intruders gain access to these rooms How and to what extent are authorized personnel granted access to these rooms Are authentication methods such as ID cards easy to forge etc. Security in Network Design The optimal way to prevent external security breaches from affecting you LAN is not to connect your LAN to the outside world at all. The next best protection is to restrict access at every point where your LAN connects to the rest of the world. Router Access List – can be used to filter or decline access to a portion of a network for certain devices. Intrusion Detection and Prevention While denying someone access to a section of the network is good, it is better to be able to detect when an attempt has been made and notify security personnel. This can be done using IDS (intrusion detection system) software. One drawback of IDS software is it can detect false positives – i.e. an authorized person who has forgotten his password attempts to logon. Firewalls A firewall is a specialized device, or a computer installed with specialized software, that selectively filters or blocks traffic between networks. A firewall typically involves a combination of hardware and software and may reside between two interconnected private networks. The simplest form of a firewall is a packet filtering firewall, which is a router that examines the header of every packet of data it receives to determine whether that type of packet is authorized to continue to its destination or not. Firewalls can block traffic in and out of a LAN. NOS (Network Operating System) Security Regardless of the operating system, generally every network administrator can implement basic security by restricting what users are authorized to do on a network. Some of the restrictions include things related to Logons – place, time of day, total time logged in, etc Passwords – length, characters used, etc Encryption Encryption is the use of an algorithm to scramble data into a format that can be read only by reversing the algorithm. The purpose of encryption is to keep information private. Many forms of encryption exist and new ways of cracking encryption are continually being invented. The following are some categories of encryption… Key Encryption PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) SSH (Secure Shell) SCP (Secure CoPy) SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) For a detailed explanation on each section refer to pages 596 to 604 of textbook Authentication Protocols Authentication protocols are the rules that computers follow to accomplish authentication. Several types exist and the following are some of the common authentication protocols… RADIUS and TACACS PAP (Password Authentication Protocol) CHAP and MS-CHAP EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) 802.1x (EAPoL) Kerberos Wireless Network Security Wireless transmissions are particularly susceptible to eavesdropping. The following are two wireless network security protocols WEP WPA

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• First round playing with Memcached

  - by Shaun

  To be honest I have not been very interested in the caching before I’m going to a project which would be using the multi-site deployment and high connection and concurrency and very sensitive to the user experience. That means we must cache the output data for better performance. After looked for the Internet I finally focused on the Memcached. What’s the Memcached? I think the description on its main site gives us a very good and simple explanation. Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems facing large data caches. Its API is available for most popular languages. The original Memcached was built on *nix system are is being widely used in the PHP world. Although it’s not a problem to use the Memcached installed on *nix system there are some windows version available fortunately. Since we are WISC (Windows – IIS – SQL Server – C#, which on the opposite of LAMP) it would be much easier for us to use the Memcached on Windows rather than *nix. I’m using the Memcached Win X64 version provided by NorthScale. There are also the x86 version and other operation system version.   Install Memcached Unpack the Memcached file to a folder on the machine you want it to be installed, we can see that there are only 3 files and the main file should be the “memcached.exe”. Memcached would be run on the server as a service. To install the service just open a command windows and navigate to the folder which contains the “memcached.exe”, let’s say “C:\Memcached\”, and then type “memcached.exe -d install”. If you are using Windows Vista and Windows 7 system please be execute the command through the administrator role. Right-click the command item in the start menu and use “Run as Administrator”, otherwise the Memcached would not be able to be installed successfully. Once installed successful we can type “memcached.exe -d start” to launch the service. Now it’s ready to be used. The default port of Memcached is 11211 but you can change it through the command argument. You can find the help by typing “memcached -h”.   Using Memcached Memcahed has many good and ready-to-use providers for vary program language. After compared and reviewed I chose the Memcached Providers. It’s built based on another 3rd party Memcached client named enyim.com Memcached Client. The Memcached Providers is very simple to set/get the cached objects through the Memcached servers and easy to be configured through the application configuration file (aka web.config and app.config). Let’s create a console application for the demonstration and add the 3 DLL files from the package of the Memcached Providers to the project reference. Then we need to add the configuration for the Memcached server. Create an App.config file and firstly add the section on top of it. Here we need three sections: the section for Memcached Providers, for enyim.com Memcached client and the log4net. 1: <configSections> 2: <section name="cacheProvider" 3: type="MemcachedProviders.Cache.CacheProviderSection, MemcachedProviders" 4: allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" 5: restartOnExternalChanges="true"/> 6: <sectionGroup name="enyim.com"> 7: <section name="memcached" 8: type="Enyim.Caching.Configuration.MemcachedClientSection, Enyim.Caching"/> 9: </sectionGroup> 10: <section name="log4net" 11: type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler,log4net"/> 12: </configSections> Then we will add the configuration for 3 of them in the App.config file. The Memcached server information would be defined under the enyim.com section since it will be responsible for connect to the Memcached server. Assuming I installed the Memcached on two servers with the default port, the configuration would be like this. 1: <enyim.com> 2: <memcached> 3: <servers> 4: <!-- put your own server(s) here--> 5: <add address="192.168.0.149" port="11211"/> 6: <add address="10.10.20.67" port="11211"/> 7: </servers> 8: <socketPool minPoolSize="10" maxPoolSize="100" connectionTimeout="00:00:10" deadTimeout="00:02:00"/> 9: </memcached> 10: </enyim.com> Memcached supports the multi-deployment which means you can install the Memcached on the servers as many as you need. The protocol of the Memcached responsible for routing the cached objects into the proper server. So it’s very easy to scale-out your system by Memcached. And then define the Memcached Providers configuration. The defaultExpireTime indicates how long the objected cached in the Memcached would be expired, the default value is 2000 ms. 1: <cacheProvider defaultProvider="MemcachedCacheProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MemcachedCacheProvider" 4: type="MemcachedProviders.Cache.MemcachedCacheProvider, MemcachedProviders" 5: keySuffix="_MySuffix_" 6: defaultExpireTime="2000"/> 7: </providers> 8: </cacheProvider> The last configuration would be the log4net. 1: <log4net> 2: <!-- Define some output appenders --> 3: <appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender"> 4: <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> 5: <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger [%property{NDC}] - %message%newline"/> 6: </layout> 7: </appender> 8: <!--<threshold value="OFF" />--> 9: <!-- Setup the root category, add the appenders and set the default priority --> 10: <root> 11: <priority value="WARN"/> 12: <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender"> 13: <filter type="log4net.Filter.LevelRangeFilter"> 14: <levelMin value="WARN"/> 15: <levelMax value="FATAL"/> 16: </filter> 17: </appender-ref> 18: </root> 19: </log4net>   Get, Set and Remove the Cached Objects Once we finished the configuration it would be very simple to consume the Memcached servers. The Memcached Providers gives us a static class named DistCache that can be used to operate the Memcached servers. Get<T>: Retrieve the cached object from the Memcached servers. If failed it will return null or the default value. Add: Add an object with a unique key into the Memcached servers. Assuming that we have an operation that retrieve the email from the name which is time consuming. This is the operation that should be cached. The method would be like this. I utilized Thread.Sleep to simulate the long-time operation. 1: static string GetEmailByNameSlowly(string name) 2: { 3: Thread.Sleep(2000); 4: return name + "@ethos.com.cn"; 5: } Then in the real retrieving method we will firstly check whether the name, email information had been searched previously and cached. If yes we will just return them from the Memcached, otherwise we will invoke the slowly method to retrieve it and then cached. 1: static string GetEmailByName(string name) 2: { 3: var email = DistCache.Get<string>(name); 4: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(email)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("==> The name/email not be in memcached so need slow loading. (name = {0})==>", name); 7: email = GetEmailByNameSlowly(name); 8: DistCache.Add(name, email); 9: } 10: else 11: { 12: Console.WriteLine("==> The name/email had been in memcached. (name = {0})==>", name); 13: } 14: return email; 15: } Finally let’s finished the calling method and execute. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var name = string.Empty; 4: while (name != "q") 5: { 6: Console.Write("==> Please enter the name to find the email: "); 7: name = Console.ReadLine(); 8:  9: var email = GetEmailByName(name); 10: Console.WriteLine("==> The email of {0} is {1}.", name, email); 11: } 12: } The first time I entered “ziyanxu” it takes about 2 seconds to get the email since there’s nothing cached. But the next time I entered “ziyanxu” it returned very quickly from the Memcached.   Summary In this post I explained a bit on why we need cache, what’s Memcached and how to use it through the C# application. The example is fairly simple but hopefully demonstrated on how to use it. Memcached is very easy and simple to be used since it gives you the full opportunity to consider what, when and how to cache the objects. And when using Memcached you don’t need to consider the cache servers. The Memcached would be like a huge object pool in front of you. The next step I’m thinking now are: What kind of data should be cached? And how to determined the key? How to implement the cache as a layer on top of the business layer so that the application will not notice that the cache is there. How to implement the cache by AOP so that the business logic no need to consider the cache. I will investigate on them in the future and will share my thoughts and results.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Tweaking a few URL validation settings on ASP.NET v4.0

  - by Carlyle Dacosta

  ASP.NET has a few default settings for URLs out of the box. These can be configured quite easily in the web.config file within the  <system.web>/<httpRuntime> configuration section. Some of these are: <httpRuntime maxUrlLength=”<number here>”. This number should be an integer value (defaults to 260 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. This attribute gates the length of the Url without query string. <httpRuntime maxQueryStringLength=”<number here>”. This number should be an integer value (defaults to 2048 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”List of characters you need included in ASP.NETs validation checks”. By default the characters are “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?”. However once can easily change this by setting by modifying web.config. Remember, these characters can be specified in a variety of formats. For example, I want the character ‘!’ to be included in ASP.NETs URL validation logic. So I set the following: <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,!”. A character could also be specified in its xml encoded form. ‘&lt;;’ would mean the ‘<’ sign). I could specify the ‘!’ in its xml encoded unicode format such as requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,$#x0021;” or I could specify it in its unicode encoded form or in the “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,%u0021” format. The following settings can be applied at Root Web.Config level, App Web.config level, Folder level or within a location tag: <location path="some path here"> <system.web> <httpRuntime maxUrlLength="" maxQueryStringLength="" requestPathInvalidChars="" .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If any of the above settings fail request validation, an Http 400 “Bad Request” HttpException is thrown. These can be easily handled on the Application_Error handler on Global.asax.   Also, a new attribute in <httpRuntime /> called “relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping” has been added with a default of false. <httpRuntime … relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true|false" /> When the relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping attribute is set to false inbound Urls still need to be valid NTFS file paths. For example Urls (sans query string) need to be less than 260 characters; no path segment within a Url can use old-style DOS device names (LPT1, COM1, etc…); Urls must be valid Windows file paths. A url like “http://digg.com/http://cnn.com” should work with this attribute set to true (of course a few characters will need to be unblocked by removing them from requestPathInvalidCharacters="" above). Managed configuration for non-NTFS-compliant Urls is determined from the first valid configuration path found when walking up the path segments of the Url. For example, if the request Url is "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", and there is a web.config in the "/foo/bar" directory, then the managed configuration for the request comes from merging the configuration hierarchy to include the web.config from "/foo/bar". The value of the public property HttpRequest.PhysicalPath is set to [physical file path of the application root] + "REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH". For example, given a request Url like "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", where the application root is "/foo/bar" and the physical file path for that root is "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar", then PhysicalPath would be "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar\ REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH". Carl Dacosta ASP.NET QA Team

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• How to Access a Windows Desktop From Your Tablet or Phone

  - by Chris Hoffman

  iPads and Android tablets can’t run Windows apps locally, but they can access a Windows desktops remotely — even with a physical keyboard. In a pinch, the same tricks can be used to access a Windows desktop from a smartphone. Microsoft recently launched their own official Remote Desktop app for iOS and Android devices. Microsoft’s official apps are primarily useful for businesses — if you’re a typical home user, you’ll want to use a different remote desktop solution. Microsoft’s Remote Desktop App Microsoft now offers official Remote Desktop apps for iPad and iPhone as well as Android tablets and smartphones. The apps use Microsoft’s RDP protocol to connect to remote Windows systems. They’re essentially just new clients for the Remote Desktop feature that has been included in Windows for more than a decade. There are big problems with these apps if you’re an average home user. Microsoft’s Remote Desktop server is not available on standard or Home versions of Windows, only Professional and Enterprise editions. If you do have the appropriate edition of Windows, you’ll have to set up port-forwarding and a dynamic DNS service if you want to access your Windows desktop from outside your local network. You could also set up a VPN — either way you’ll need to do some footwork. This app is a gift to businesses who are already using Remote Desktop and enthusiasts who have the more expensive versions of Windows and don’t mind the configuration process. To set this up, follow our guide to setting up Remote Desktop for Internet access and connect using the Remote Desktop app instead of traditional Remote Desktop clients. TeamViewer If you have the standard edition of Windows or you just don’t want to mess around with port-forwarding and dynamic DNS configuration, you’ll want to skip Remote Desktop and use something else. We like TeamViewer for this. Just as it’s a great way to remotely troubleshoot your relatives’ computers, it’s also a great way to remotely access your own computer. It doesn’t have the same limitations Microsoft’s Remote Desktop system has — it’s completely free for personal use, runs on any edition of Windows, and is easy to set up. There’s no messing around with port-forwarding or dynamic DNS configuration. To get started, just download and run the TeamViewer program on your computer. You can get started with it immediately, but you’ll want to set up unattended access to connect remotely without using the codes displayed on your screen. To connect, just install the TeamViewer mobile app and log in with the details the TeamViewer window displays. TeamViewer also offers software that runs on Mac and Linux, so you can remote-control other types of computers from your tablet. Other Options Microsoft’s Remote Desktop app and TeamViewer aren’t the only options, of course. There are a variety of different apps and services built for this. Splashtop is another fairly popular remote desktop solution that some people report as being faster. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely free — the iPad and iPhone app costs $20 at regular price. To use it over the Internet, you’ll have to purchase an additional “Anywhere Access Pack.” If you’re frustrated with TeamViewer’s speed and you don’t mind spending money, you may want to try Splashtop instead. As always, you could use any VNC server along with a VNC client app. VNC is the do-it-yourself solution — it’s an open protocol. Unlike Microsoft’s RDP protocol, you can install a VNC server of your own, configure it how you like, and use any mobile VNC client app. This is more flexible because you can install a VNC server on any edition of Windows or even non-Windows operating systems, but it otherwise has all the same issues — you have to worry about port-forwarding, setting up dynamic DNS, and securing your VNC server. Keep an eye on Chrome Remote Desktop. Chrome already offers a built-in remote desktop feature that allows you to remotely control your PC from another Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS device. Google is rumored to be building an Android app for Chrome Remote Desktop, which would allow you to easily access a computer running Chrome from Android tablets. Google’s solution is much more user-friendly for average people than Microsoft’s Remote Desktop solution, which is clearly geared towards businesses. Chrome Remote Desktop just requires signing in with a Google account. Remote desktop solutions like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop app and TeamViewer are also available for Windows tablets. On Windows RT devices like the Surface RT and Surface 2, they allow you to use the full Windows desktop that’s unavailable on your tablet.     

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• Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers.  As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA.  Most of my fears were unrealized.   But I made it.  I was here.  I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen.  The name  badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home.  It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade.   A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device).  The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs.  Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching.   “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself.  “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate.  Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs.  Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations…   …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball…   …vintage video games…           …and a even giant chess board.  Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry.   The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life.  Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots:   And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace.  On a high-tech mode of transport, of course.   She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next.  Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret.   Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.”  Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft…   …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth.   Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area.  Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day.  While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day.  And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks…   …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds.  This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once.  No one went away hungry.   The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue.   Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing.  There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area.  But they were only rumors.   Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff.  Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always.  Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day.  Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers?  These folks did.  Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks!   And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing:  Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event.  Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry.   So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me.  The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands.  And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks.  Win-win.   Until New Orleans…

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• What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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• Tweaking a few URL validation settings on ASP.NET v4.0

  - by Carlyle Dacosta

  ASP.NET has a few default settings for URLs out of the box. These can be configured quite easily in the web.config file within the  <system.web>/<httpRuntime> configuration section. Some of these are: <httpRuntime maxUrlLength=”<number here>” This number should be an integer value (defaults to 260 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. This attribute gates the length of the Url without query string. <httpRuntime maxQueryStringLength=”<number here>”. This number should be an integer value (defaults to 2048 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”List of characters you need included in ASP.NETs validation checks” /> By default the characters are “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?”. However once can easily change this by setting by modifying web.config. Remember, these characters can be specified in a variety of formats. For example, I want the character ‘!’ to be included in ASP.NETs URL validation logic. So I set the following: <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,!”. A character could also be specified in its xml encoded form. ‘&lt;;’ would mean the ‘<’ sign). I could specify the ‘!’ in its xml encoded unicode format such as requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,$#x0021;” or I could specify it in its unicode encoded form or in the “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,%u0021” format. The following settings can be applied at Root Web.Config level, App Web.config level, Folder level or within a location tag: <location path="some path here"> <system.web> <httpRuntime maxUrlLength="" maxQueryStringLength="" requestPathInvalidChars="" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If any of the above settings fail request validation, an Http 400 “Bad Request” HttpException is thrown. These can be easily handled on the Application_Error handler on Global.asax.   Also, a new attribute in <httpRuntime /> called “relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping” has been added with a default of false. <httpRuntime … relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true|false" /> When the relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping attribute is set to false inbound Urls still need to be valid NTFS file paths. For example Urls (sans query string) need to be less than 260 characters; no path segment within a Url can use old-style DOS device names (LPT1, COM1, etc…); Urls must be valid Windows file paths. A url like “http://digg.com/http://cnn.com” should work with this attribute set to true (of course a few characters will need to be unblocked by removing them from requestPathInvalidCharacters="" above). Managed configuration for non-NTFS-compliant Urls is determined from the first valid configuration path found when walking up the path segments of the Url. For example, if the request Url is "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", and there is a web.config in the "/foo/bar" directory, then the managed configuration for the request comes from merging the configuration hierarchy to include the web.config from "/foo/bar". The value of the public property HttpRequest.PhysicalPath is set to [physical file path of the application root] + "REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH". For example, given a request Url like "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", where the application root is "/foo/bar" and the physical file path for that root is "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar", then PhysicalPath would be "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar\ REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH".

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• Leaks on Wikis: "Corporations...You're Next!" Oracle Desktop Virtualization Can Help.

  - by adam.hawley

  Between all the press coverage on the unauthorized release of 251,287 diplomatic documents and on previous extensive releases of classified documents on the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, one could be forgiven for thinking massive leaks are really an issue for governments, but it is not: It is an issue for corporations as well. In fact, corporations are apparently set to be the next big target for things like Wikileaks. Just the threat of such a release against one corporation recently caused the price of their stock to drop 3% after the leak organization claimed to have 5GB of information from inside the company, with the implication that it might be damaging or embarrassing information. At the moment of this blog anyway, we don't know yet if that is true or how they got the information but how did the diplomatic cable leak happen? For the diplomatic cables, according to press reports, a private in the military, with some appropriate level of security clearance (that is, he apparently had the correct level of security clearance to be accessing the information...he reportedly didn't "hack" his way through anything to get to the documents which might have raised some red flags...), is accused of accessing the material and copying it onto a writeable CD labeled "Lady Gaga" and walking out the door with it. Upload and... Done. In the same article, the accused is quoted as saying "Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain." Now think about all the confidential information in your company or non-profit... from credit card information, to phone records, to customer or donor lists, to corporate strategy documents, product cost information, etc, etc.... And then think about that last quote above from what was a very junior level person in the organization...still feeling comfortable with your ability to control all your information? So what can you do to guard against these types of breaches where there is no outsider (or even insider) intrusion to detect per se, but rather someone with malicious intent is physically walking out the door with data that they are otherwise allowed to access in their daily work? A major first step it to make it physically, logistically much harder to walk away with the information. If the user with malicious intent has no way to copy to removable or moble media (USB sticks, thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, memory cards, or even laptop disk drives) then, as a practical matter it is much more difficult to physically move the information outside the firewall. But how can you control access tightly and reliably and still keep your hundreds or even thousands of users productive in their daily job? Oracle Desktop Virtualization products can help.Oracle's comprehensive suite of desktop virtualization and access products allow your applications and, most importantly, the related data, to stay in the (highly secured) data center while still allowing secure access from just about anywhere your users need to be to be productive.  Users can securely access all the data they need to do their job, whether from work, from home, or on the road and in the field, but fully configurable policies set up centrally by privileged administrators allow you to control whether, for instance, they are allowed to print documents or use USB devices or other removable media.  Centrally set policies can also control not only whether they can download to removable devices, but also whether they can upload information (see StuxNet for why that is important...)In fact, by using Sun Ray Client desktop hardware, which does not contain any disk drives, or removable media drives, even theft of the desktop device itself would not make you vulnerable to data loss, unlike a laptop that can be stolen with hundreds of gigabytes of information on its disk drive.  And for extreme security situations, Sun Ray Clients even come standard with the ability to use fibre optic ethernet networking to each client to prevent the possibility of unauthorized monitoring of network traffic.But even without Sun Ray Client hardware, users can leverage Oracle's Secure Global Desktop software or the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client to securely access server-resident applications, desktop sessions, or full desktop virtual machines without persisting any application data on the desktop or laptop being used to access the information.  And, again, even in this context, the Oracle products allow you to control what gets uploaded, downloaded, or printed for example.Another benefit of Oracle's Desktop Virtualization and access products is the ability to rapidly and easily shut off user access centrally through administrative polices if, for example, an employee changes roles or leaves the company and should no longer have access to the information.Oracle's Desktop Virtualization suite of products can help reduce operating expense and increase user productivity, and those are good reasons alone to consider their use.  But the dynamics of today's world dictate that security is one of the top reasons for implementing a virtual desktop architecture in enterprises.For more information on these products, view the webpages on www.oracle.com and the Oracle Technology Network website.

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• Windows Azure Use Case: Hybrid Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx  Description: Organizations see the need for computing infrastructures that they can “rent” or pay for only when they need them. They also understand the benefits of distributed computing, but do not want to create this infrastructure themselves. However, they may have considerations that prevent them from moving all of their current IT investment to a distributed environment: Private data (do not want to send or store sensitive data off-site) High dollar investment in current infrastructure Applications currently running well, but may need additional periodic capacity Current applications not designed in a stateless fashion In these situations, a “hybrid” approach works best. In fact, with Windows Azure, a hybrid approach is an optimal way to implement distributed computing even when the stipulations above do not apply. Keeping a majority of the computing function in an organization local while exploring and expanding that footprint into Windows and SQL Azure is a good migration or expansion strategy. A “hybrid” architecture merely means that part of a computing cycle is shared between two architectures. For instance, some level of computing might be done in a Windows Azure web-based application, while the data is stored locally at the organization. Implementation: There are multiple methods for implementing a hybrid architecture, in a spectrum from very little interaction from the local infrastructure to Windows or SQL Azure. The patterns fall into two broad schemas, and even these can be mixed. 1. Client-Centric Hybrid Patterns In this pattern, programs are coded such that the client system sends queries or compute requests to multiple systems. The “client” in this case might be a web-based codeset actually stored on another system (which acts as a client, the user’s device serving as the presentation layer) or a compiled program. In either case, the code on the client requestor carries the burden of defining the layout of the requests. While this pattern is often the easiest to code, it’s the most brittle. Any change in the architecture must be reflected on each client, but this can be mitigated by using a centralized system as the client such as in the web scenario. 2. System-Centric Hybrid Patterns Another approach is to create a distributed architecture by turning on-site systems into “services” that can be called from Windows Azure using the service Bus or the Access Control Services (ACS) capabilities. Code calls from a series of in-process client application. In this pattern you move the “client” interface into the server application logic. If you do not wish to change the application itself, you can “layer” the results of the code return using a product (such as Microsoft BizTalk) that exposes a Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) endpoint to Windows Azure using the Application Fabric. In effect, this is similar to creating a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, and has the advantage of de-coupling your computing architecture. If each system offers a “service” of the results of some software processing, the operating system or platform becomes immaterial, assuming it adheres to a service contract. There are important considerations when you federate a system, whether to Windows or SQL Azure or any other distributed architecture. While these considerations are consistent with coding any application for distributed computing, they are especially important for a hybrid application. Connection resiliency - Applications on-premise normally have low-latency and good connection properties, something you’re not always guaranteed in a distributed and hybrid application. Whether a centralized client or a distributed one, the code should be able to handle extended retry logic. Authorization and Access - In a single authorization environment like a Active Directory domain, security is handled at a user-password level. In a distributed computing environment, you have more options. You can mitigate this with  using The Windows Azure Application Fabric feature of ACS to make the Azure application aware of the App Fabric as an ADFS provider. However, a claims-based authentication structure is often a superior choice.  Consistency and Concurrency - When you have a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), Consistency and Concurrency are part of the design. In a Service Architecture, you need to plan for sequential message handling and lifecycle. Resources: How to Build a Hybrid On-Premise/In Cloud Application: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ignitionshowcase/archive/2010/11/09/how-to-build-a-hybrid-on-premise-in-cloud-application.aspx  General Architecture guidance: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2010/12/21/windows-azure-learning-plan-architecture.aspx   

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• Edit ePub eBooks with Your Favorite HTML Editor

  - by Matthew Guay

  ePub eBooks are increasingly popular today, but often they’ve been made by converting other file formats. Here’s how you can edit ePub books to remove irregularities and make them better for reading on your devices. ePub’s are actually a zip file containing images, XHTML files with your text, and more with the .epub extension. You can make them better by editing the XHTML files directly.  Code gurus can edit the code directly, but even if you’ve never edited HTML, you can still quickly make changes with a WYSIWYG editor. Extract the Files from your ePub eBook As mentioned before, ePub files are actually renamed zip files.  So first let’s get all of the files in your ePub eBook accessible.  Find an eBook you want to edit and then change the file extension to .zip. If you don’t see the file extensions, click Organize in the menu bar and select Folder and search options. Select the View tab, and then uncheck the box beside Hide extensions for known file types.  Click Ok, and then change the file type as above. Windows will warn you about changing the file type; click Yes to proceed. Now you can browse the files of the ePub file.  Notice that it contains mostly HTML or XHTML files and images.  Click Extract all files to save them all in a folder so you can easily edit them. Alternately, you can open the ePub file directly in your favorite file archival program such as 7-zip.  Browse to the location of your ePub file, double-click it, and it’ll automatically open even if you don’t change the file extension to zip.  Now you can extract the folder, or extract individual files as before.   Edit Your eBook in KompoZer The actual ebook contents are stored in HTML or XHTML files.  These may be stored on the top folder of you ePub file’s directory, or they may be stored in \OEBPS\text in the file. To change the contents of your eBook, you’ll want to edit these files.  Often there may be separate files for each chapter, so you may have to use trial and error to find the one you need to edit.  You could edit them by hand in Windows using Notepad if you don’t have an HTML editor installed. A better option would be to use an HTML editor.  Here we’ll use the free KompoZer program to edit the files just like we’d edit a document in Word. Download KompoZer (link below), and unzip the files.  Then open the new folder and launch kompozer.exe; you don’t even need to install it.  In fact, you could even store KompoZer on a flash drive so you could edit HTML files from any computer. In KompoZer, open the HTML or XHTML file from your eBook that you want to edit. Now you can edit the file just like you would edit a document in Word.  Remove extra and unneeded text, make titles stand out, correct misspellings … anything you want!  This is especially helpful if your ePub file was created by converting a PDF as these often have many small errors. Or, if you’d rather edit the code itself, select the Source tab and edit as you wish. When you’re done making the changes, make sure to save the file in the same location with the same file name. Recreate Your Edited ePub eBook Once you’ve made all the changes you wanted, it’s time to turn this folder of files back into ePub.  Make sure you change the name of the folder if it still has the same name as the original ePub or zip file so you don’t mix them up or have trouble with overwriting the old files. Zip the folder using Windows Explorer or your favorite archival utility.  If you are using another archival program, make sure to compress it as a zip folder; other compression methods will render the ePub unreadable by your eReader app. Now change the file extension again, this time back to .epub. Now you can read your eBook with your changes in your favorite reader program or app on your mobile device. Conclusion Whether you need to remove an odd, misplaced character or need to do fine editing, using an HTML editor is a great way to make your ePub eBooks look just like you want.  Also, with an editor like KompoZer it’s not even difficult. Download KompoZer Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxConvert a PDF eBook to ePub Format for Your iPad, iPhone, or eReaderRead Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCEdit Your Firefox Bookmarks Easier with Flat Bookmark EditorChange the Default Editor for Batch Files in Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter

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• Fed Authentication Methods in OIF / IdP

  - by Damien Carru

  This article is a continuation of my previous entry where I explained how OIF/IdP leverages OAM to authenticate users at runtime: OIF/IdP internally forwards the user to OAM and indicates which Authentication Scheme should be used to challenge the user if needed OAM determine if the user should be challenged (user already authenticated, session timed out or not, session authentication level equal or higher than the level of the authentication scheme specified by OIF/IdP…) After identifying the user, OAM internally forwards the user back to OIF/IdP OIF/IdP can resume its operation In this article, I will discuss how OIF/IdP can be configured to map Federation Authentication Methods to OAM Authentication Schemes: When processing an Authn Request, where the SP requests a specific Federation Authentication Method with which the user should be challenged When sending an Assertion, where OIF/IdP sets the Federation Authentication Method in the Assertion Enjoy the reading! Overview The various Federation protocols support mechanisms allowing the partners to exchange information on: How the user should be challenged, when the SP/RP makes a request How the user was challenged, when the IdP/OP issues an SSO response When a remote SP partner redirects the user to OIF/IdP for Federation SSO, the message might contain data requesting how the user should be challenged by the IdP: this is treated as the Requested Federation Authentication Method. OIF/IdP will need to map that Requested Federation Authentication Method to a local Authentication Scheme, and then invoke OAM for user authentication/challenge with the mapped Authentication Scheme. OAM would authenticate the user if necessary with the scheme specified by OIF/IdP. Similarly, when an IdP issues an SSO response, most of the time it will need to include an identifier representing how the user was challenged: this is treated as the Federation Authentication Method. When OIF/IdP issues an Assertion, it will evaluate the Authentication Scheme with which OAM identified the user: If the Authentication Scheme can be mapped to a Federation Authentication Method, then OIF/IdP will use the result of that mapping in the outgoing SSO response: AuthenticationStatement in the SAML Assertion OpenID Response, if PAPE is enabled If the Authentication Scheme cannot be mapped, then OIF/IdP will set the Federation Authentication Method as the Authentication Scheme name in the outgoing SSO response: AuthenticationStatement in the SAML Assertion OpenID Response, if PAPE is enabled Mappings In OIF/IdP, the mapping between Federation Authentication Methods and Authentication Schemes has the following rules: One Federation Authentication Method can be mapped to several Authentication Schemes In a Federation Authentication Method <-> Authentication Schemes mapping, a single Authentication Scheme is marked as the default scheme that will be used to authenticate a user, if the SP/RP partner requests the user to be authenticated via a specific Federation Authentication Method An Authentication Scheme can be mapped to a single Federation Authentication Method Let’s examine the following example and the various use cases, based on the SAML 2.0 protocol: Mappings defined as: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport mapped to LDAPScheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication BasicScheme urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:X509 mapped to X509Scheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication Use cases: SP sends an AuthnRequest specifying urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:X509 as the RequestedAuthnContext: OIF/IdP will authenticate the use with X509Scheme since it is the default scheme mapped for that method. SP sends an AuthnRequest specifying urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport as the RequestedAuthnContext: OIF/IdP will authenticate the use with LDAPScheme since it is the default scheme mapped for that method, not the BasicScheme SP did not request any specific methods, and user was authenticated with BasisScheme: OIF/IdP will issue an Assertion with urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport as the FederationAuthenticationMethod SP did not request any specific methods, and user was authenticated with LDAPScheme: OIF/IdP will issue an Assertion with urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport as the FederationAuthenticationMethod SP did not request any specific methods, and user was authenticated with BasisSessionlessScheme: OIF/IdP will issue an Assertion with BasisSessionlessScheme as the FederationAuthenticationMethod, since that scheme could not be mapped to any Federation Authentication Method (in this case, the administrator would need to correct that and create a mapping) Configuration Mapping Federation Authentication Methods to OAM Authentication Schemes is protocol dependent, since the methods are defined in the various protocols (SAML 2.0, SAML 1.1, OpenID 2.0). As such, the WLST commands to set those mappings will involve: Either the SP Partner Profile and affect all Partners referencing that profile, which do not override the Federation Authentication Method to OAM Authentication Scheme mappings Or the SP Partner entry, which will only affect the SP Partner It is important to note that if an SP Partner is configured to define one or more Federation Authentication Method to OAM Authentication Scheme mappings, then all the mappings defined in the SP Partner Profile will be ignored. Authentication Schemes As discussed in the previous article, during Federation SSO, OIF/IdP will internally forward the user to OAM for authentication/verification and specify which Authentication Scheme to use. OAM will determine if a user needs to be challenged: If the user is not authenticated yet If the user is authenticated but the session timed out If the user is authenticated, but the authentication scheme level of the original authentication is lower than the level of the authentication scheme requested by OIF/IdP So even though an SP requests a specific Federation Authentication Method to be used to challenge the user, if that method is mapped to an Authentication Scheme and that at runtime OAM deems that the user does not need to be challenged with that scheme (because the user is already authenticated, session did not time out, and the session authn level is equal or higher than the one for the specified Authentication Scheme), the flow won’t result in a challenge operation. Protocols SAML 2.0 The SAML 2.0 specifications define the following Federation Authentication Methods for SAML 2.0 flows: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:unspecified urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:InternetProtocol urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Telephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileOneFactorUnregistered urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PersonalTelephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PreviousSession urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileOneFactorContract urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Smartcard urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Password urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:InternetProtocolPassword urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:X509 urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:TLSClient urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PGP urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SPKI urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:XMLDSig urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SoftwarePKI urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Kerberos urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SecureRemotePassword urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:NomadTelephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:AuthenticatedTelephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileTwoFactorUnregistered urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileTwoFactorContract urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SmartcardPKI urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:TimeSyncToken Out of the box, OIF/IdP has the following mappings for the SAML 2.0 protocol: Only urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport is defined This Federation Authentication Method is mapped to: LDAPScheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication FAAuthScheme BasicScheme BasicFAScheme This mapping is defined in the saml20-sp-partner-profile SP Partner Profile which is the default OOTB SP Partner Profile for SAML 2.0 An example of an AuthnRequest message sent by an SP to an IdP with the SP requesting a specific Federation Authentication Method to be used to challenge the user would be: <samlp:AuthnRequest xmlns:samlp="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:protocol" Destination="https://idp.com/oamfed/idp/samlv20" ID="id-8bWn-A9o4aoMl3Nhx1DuPOOjawc-" IssueInstant="2014-03-21T20:51:11Z" Version="2.0">  <saml:Issuer ...>https://acme.com/sp</saml:Issuer>  <samlp:NameIDPolicy AllowCreate="false" Format="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified"/>  <samlp:RequestedAuthnContext Comparison="minimum">    <saml:AuthnContextClassRef xmlns:saml="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:assertion">      urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport </saml:AuthnContextClassRef>  </samlp:RequestedAuthnContext></samlp:AuthnRequest> An example of an Assertion issued by an IdP would be: <samlp:Response ...>    <saml:Issuer ...>https://idp.com/oam/fed</saml:Issuer>    <samlp:Status>        <samlp:StatusCode Value="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:status:Success"/>    </samlp:Status>    <saml:Assertion ...>        <saml:Issuer ...>https://idp.com/oam/fed</saml:Issuer>        <dsig:Signature>            ...        </dsig:Signature>        <saml:Subject>            <saml:NameID ...>[email protected]</saml:NameID>            <saml:SubjectConfirmation Method="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:cm:bearer">                <saml:SubjectConfirmationData .../>            </saml:SubjectConfirmation>        </saml:Subject>        <saml:Conditions ...>            <saml:AudienceRestriction>                <saml:Audience>https://acme.com/sp</saml:Audience>            </saml:AudienceRestriction>        </saml:Conditions>        <saml:AuthnStatement AuthnInstant="2014-03-21T20:53:55Z" SessionIndex="id-6i-Dm0yB-HekG6cejktwcKIFMzYE8Yrmqwfd0azz" SessionNotOnOrAfter="2014-03-21T21:53:55Z">            <saml:AuthnContext>                <saml:AuthnContextClassRef>                    urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport                </saml:AuthnContextClassRef>            </saml:AuthnContext>        </saml:AuthnStatement>    </saml:Assertion></samlp:Response> An administrator would be able to specify a mapping between a SAML 2.0 Federation Authentication Method and one or more OAM Authentication Schemes SAML 1.1 The SAML 1.1 specifications define the following Federation Authentication Methods for SAML 1.1 flows: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:unspecified urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:HardwareToken urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:password urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:X509-PKI urn:ietf:rfc:2246 urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:PGP urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:SPKI urn:ietf:rfc:3075 urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:XKMS urn:ietf:rfc:1510 urn:ietf:rfc:2945 Out of the box, OIF/IdP has the following mappings for the SAML 1.1 protocol: Only urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:password is defined This Federation Authentication Method is mapped to: LDAPScheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication FAAuthScheme BasicScheme BasicFAScheme This mapping is defined in the saml11-sp-partner-profile SP Partner Profile which is the default OOTB SP Partner Profile for SAML 1.1 An example of an Assertion issued by an IdP would be: <samlp:Response ...>    <samlp:Status>        <samlp:StatusCode Value="samlp:Success"/>    </samlp:Status>    <saml:Assertion Issuer="https://idp.com/oam/fed" ...>        <saml:Conditions ...>            <saml:AudienceRestriction>                <saml:Audience>https://acme.com/sp/ssov11</saml:Audience>            </saml:AudienceRestriction>        </saml:Conditions>        <saml:AuthnStatement AuthenticationInstant="2014-03-21T20:53:55Z" AuthenticationMethod="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:password">            <saml:Subject>                <saml:NameID ...>[email protected]</saml:NameID>                <saml:SubjectConfirmation>                   <saml:ConfirmationMethod>                       urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:cm:bearer                   </saml:ConfirmationMethod>                </saml:SubjectConfirmation>            </saml:Subject>        </saml:AuthnStatement>        <dsig:Signature>            ...        </dsig:Signature>    </saml:Assertion></samlp:Response> Note: SAML 1.1 does not define an AuthnRequest message. An administrator would be able to specify a mapping between a SAML 1.1 Federation Authentication Method and one or more OAM Authentication Schemes OpenID 2.0 The OpenID 2.0 PAPE specifications define the following Federation Authentication Methods for OpenID 2.0 flows: http://schemas.openid.net/pape/policies/2007/06/phishing-resistant http://schemas.openid.net/pape/policies/2007/06/multi-factor http://schemas.openid.net/pape/policies/2007/06/multi-factor-physical Out of the box, OIF/IdP does not define any mappings for the OpenID 2.0 Federation Authentication Methods. For OpenID 2.0, the configuration will involve mapping a list of OpenID 2.0 policies to a list of Authentication Schemes. An example of an OpenID 2.0 Request message sent by an SP/RP to an IdP/OP would be: https://idp.com/openid?openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.mode=checkid_setup&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.assoc_handle=id-6a5S6zhAKaRwQNUnjTKROREdAGSjWodG1el4xyz3&openid.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Facme.com%2Fopenid%3Frefid%3Did-9PKVXZmRxAeDYcgLqPm36ClzOMA-&openid.realm=https%3A%2F%2Facme.com%2Fopenid&openid.ns.ax=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&openid.ax.mode=fetch_request&openid.ax.type.attr0=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&openid.ax.if_available=attr0&openid.ns.pape=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fextensions%2Fpape%2F1.0&openid.pape.max_auth_age=0 An example of an Open ID 2.0 SSO Response issued by an IdP/OP would be: https://acme.com/openid?refid=id-9PKVXZmRxAeDYcgLqPm36ClzOMA-&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.mode=id_res&openid.op_endpoint=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.com%2Fopenid&openid.claimed_id=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.com%2Fopenid%3Fid%3Did-38iCmmlAVEXPsFjnFVKArfn5RIiF75D5doorhEgqqPM%3D&openid.identity=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.com%2Fopenid%3Fid%3Did-38iCmmlAVEXPsFjnFVKArfn5RIiF75D5doorhEgqqPM%3D&openid.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Facme.com%2Fopenid%3Frefid%3Did-9PKVXZmRxAeDYcgLqPm36ClzOMA-&openid.response_nonce=2014-03-24T19%3A20%3A06Zid-YPa2kTNNFftZkgBb460jxJGblk2g--iNwPpDI7M1&openid.assoc_handle=id-6a5S6zhAKaRwQNUnjTKROREdAGSjWodG1el4xyz3&openid.ns.ax=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&openid.ax.mode=fetch_response&openid.ax.type.attr0=http%3A%2F%2Fsession%2Fcount&openid.ax.value.attr0=1&openid.ax.type.attr1=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fschema%2FnamePerson%2Ffriendly&openid.ax.value.attr1=My+name+is+Bobby+Smith&openid.ax.type.attr2=http%3A%2F%2Fschemas.openid.net%2Fax%2Fapi%2Fuser_id&openid.ax.value.attr2=bob&openid.ax.type.attr3=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&openid.ax.value.attr3=bob%40oracle.com&openid.ax.type.attr4=http%3A%2F%2Fsession%2Fipaddress&openid.ax.value.attr4=10.145.120.253&openid.ns.pape=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fextensions%2Fpape%2F1.0&openid.pape.auth_time=2014-03-24T19%3A20%3A05Z&openid.pape.auth_policies=http%3A%2F%2Fschemas.openid.net%2Fpape%2Fpolicies%2F2007%2F06%2Fphishing-resistant&openid.signed=op_endpoint%2Cclaimed_id%2Cidentity%2Creturn_to%2Cresponse_nonce%2Cassoc_handle%2Cns.ax%2Cax.mode%2Cax.type.attr0%2Cax.value.attr0%2Cax.type.attr1%2Cax.value.attr1%2Cax.type.attr2%2Cax.value.attr2%2Cax.type.attr3%2Cax.value.attr3%2Cax.type.attr4%2Cax.value.attr4%2Cns.pape%2Cpape.auth_time%2Cpape.auth_policies&openid.sig=mYMgbGYSs22l8e%2FDom9NRPw15u8%3D In the next article, I will provide examples on how to configure OIF/IdP for the various protocols, to map OAM Authentication Schemes to Federation Authentication Methods.Cheers,Damien Carru

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• Oracle Coherence & Oracle Service Bus: REST API Integration

  - by Nino Guarnacci

  This post aims to highlight one of the features found in Oracle Coherence which allows it to be easily added and integrated inside a wider variety of projects.  The features in question are the REST API exposed by the Coherence nodes, with which you can interact in the wider mode in memory data grid.Oracle Coherence and Oracle Service Bus are natively integrated through a feature found in the Oracle Service Bus, which allows you to use the coherence grid cache during the configuration phase of a business service. This feature allows you to use an intermediate layer of cache to retrieve the answers from previous invocations of the same service, without necessarily having to invoke the real business service again. Directly from the web console of Oracle Service Bus, you can decide the policies of eviction of the objects / answers and define the discriminating parameters that identify their uniqueness.The coherence REST APIs, however, allow you to integrate both products for other necessities enabling realization of new architectures design.  Consider coherence’s node as a simple service which interoperates through the stardard services and in particular REST (with JSON and XML). Thinking of coherence as a company’s shared service, able to have an implementation of a centralized “map and reduce” which you can access  by a huge variety of protocols (transport and envelopes).An amazing step forward for those who still imagine connectors and code. This type of integration does not require writing custom code or complex implementation to be self-supported. The added value is made unique by the incredible value of both products independently, and still more out of their simple and robust integration.As already mentioned this scenario discovers a hidden new door behind the columns of these two products. The door leads to new ideas and perspectives for enterprise architectures that increasingly wink to next-generation applications: simple and dynamic, perhaps towards the mobile and web 2.0.Below, a small and simple demo useful to demonstrate how easily is to integrate these two products using the Coherence REST API. This demo is also intended to imagine new enterprise architectures using this approach.The idea is to create a centralized system of alerting, fed easily from any company’s application, regardless of the technology with which they were built . Then use a representation standard protocol: RSS, using a service exposed by the service bus; So you can browse and search only the alerts that you are interested on, by category, author, title, date, etc etc.. The steps needed to implement this system are very simple and very few. Here they are listed below and described to be easily replicated within your environment. I would remind you that the demo is only meant to demonstrate how easily is to integrate Oracle Coherence and the Oracle Service Bus, and stimulate your imagination to new technological approaches.1) Install the two products: In this demo used (if necessary, consult the installation guides of 2 products)  - Oracle Service Bus ver. 11.1.1.5.0 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/service-bus/downloads/index.html - Oracle Coherence ver. 3.7.1 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/downloads/index.html 2) Because you choose to create a centralized alerting system, we need to define a structure type containing some alerting attributes useful to preserve and organize the information of the various alerts sent by the different applications. Here, then it was built a java class named Alert containing the canonical properties of an alarm information:- Title- Description- System- Time- Severity 3) Therefore, we need to create two configuration files for the coherence node, in order to save the Alert objects within the grid, through the rest/http protocol (more than the native API for Java, C + +, C,. Net). Here are the two minimal configuration files for Coherence:coherence-rest-config.xml resty-server-config.xml This minimum configuration allows me to use a distributed cache named "alerts" that can  also be accessed via http - rest on the host "localhost" over port "8080", objects are of type “oracle.cohsb.Alert”. 4) Below  a simple Java class that represents the type of alert messages: 5) At this point we just need to startup our coherence node, able to listen on http protocol to manage the “alerts” cache, which will receive incoming XML or JSON objects of type Alert. Remember to include in the classpath of the coherence node, the Alert java class and the following coherence libraries and configuration files:  At this point, just run the coherence class node “com.tangosol.net.DefaultCacheServer”advising you to set the following parameters:-Dtangosol.coherence.log.level=9 -Dtangosol.coherence.log=stdout -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=[PATH_TO_THE_FILE]\resty-server-config.xml 6) Let's create a procedure to test our configuration of Coherence and in order to insert some custom alerts in our cache. The technology with which you want to achieve this functionality is fully not considerable: Javascript, Python, Ruby, Scala, C + +, Java.... Because the protocol to communicate with Coherence is simply HTTP / JSON or XML. For this little demo i choose Java: A method to send/put the alert to the cache: A method to query and view the content of the cache: Finally the main method that execute our methods:  No special library added in the classpath for our class (json struct static defined), when it will be executed, it asks some information such as title, description,... in order to compose and send an alert to the cache and then it will perform an inquiry, to the same cache. At this point, a good exercise at this point, may be to create the same procedure using other technologies, such as a simple html page containing some JavaScript code, and then using Python, Ruby, and so on.7) Now we are ready to start configuring the Oracle Service Bus in order to integrate the two products. First integrate the internal alerting system of Oracle Service Bus with our centralized alerting system based on coherence node. This ensures that by monitoring, or directly from within our Proxy Message Flow, we can throw alerts and save them directly into the Coherence node. To do this I choose to use the jms technology, natively present inside the Oracle Weblogic / Service Bus. Access to the Oracle WebLogic Administration console and create and configure a new JMS connection factory and a new jms destination (queue). Now we should create a new resource of type “alert destination” within our Oracle Service Bus project. The new “alert destination” resource should be configured using the newly created connection factory jms and jms destination. Finally, in order to withdraw the message alert enqueued in our JMS destination and send it to our coherence node, we just need to create a new business service and proxy service within our Oracle Service Bus project.Our business service is responsible for sending a message to our REST service Coherence using as a method action: PUT Finally our proxy service have to collect all messages enqueued on the destination, execute an xquery transformation on those messages  in order to translate them into valid XML / alert objects useful to be sent to our coherence service, through the newly created business service. The message flow pipeline containing the xquery transformation: Incredibly,  we just did a basic first integration between the native alerting system of Oracle Service Bus and our centralized alerting system by simply configuring our coherence node without developing anything.It's time to test it out. To do this I create a proxy service able to generate an alert using our "alert destination", whenever the proxy is invoked. After some invocation to our proxy that generates fake alerts, we could open an Internet browser and type the URL  http://localhost: 8080/alerts/  so we could see what has been inserted within the coherence node. 8) We are ready for the final step.  We would create a new message flow, that can be used to search and display the results in standard mode. To do this I choosen the standard representation of RSS, to display a formatted result on a huge variety of devices such as readers for the iPhone and Android. The inquiry may be defined already at the time of the request able to return only feed / items related to our needs. To do this we need to create a new business service, a new proxy service, and finally a new XQuery Transformation to take care of translating the collection of alerts that will be return from our coherence node in a nicely formatted RSS standard document.So we start right from this resource (xquery), which has the task of transforming a collection of alerts / xml returned from the node coherence in a type well-formatted feed RSS 2.0 our new business service that will search the alerts on our coherence node using the Rest API. And finally, our last resource, the proxy service that will be exposed as an RSS / feeds to various mobile devices and traditional web readers, in which we will intercept any search query, and transform the result returned by the business service in an RSS feed 2.0. The message flow with the transformation phase (Alert TO Feed Items): Finally some little tricks to follow during the routing to the business service, - check for any queries present in the url to require a subset of alerts  - the http header "Accept" to help get an answer XML instead of JSON: In our little demo we also static added some coherence parameters to the request:sort=time:desc;start=0;count=100I would like to get from Coherence that the results will be sorted by date, and starting from 1 up to a maximum of 100.Done!!Just incredible, our centralized alerting system is ready. Inheriting all the qualities and capabilities of the two products involved Oracle Coherence & Oracle Service Bus: - RASP (Reliability, Availability, Scalability, Performance)Now try to use your mobile device, or a normal Internet browser by accessing the RSS just published: Some urls you may test: Search for the last 100 alerts : http://localhost:7001/alarmsSearch for alerts that do not have time set to null (time is not null):http://localhost:7001/alarms?q=time+is+not+nullSearch for alerts that the system property is “Web Browser” (system = ‘Web Browser’):http://localhost:7001/alarms?q=system+%3D+%27Web+Browser%27Search for alerts that the system property is “Web Browser” and the severity property is “Fatal” and the title property contain the word “Javascript”  (system = ‘Web Broser’ and severity = ‘Fatal’ and title like ‘%Javascript%’)http://localhost:8080/alerts?q=system+%3D+%27Web+Browser%27+AND+severity+%3D+%27Fatal%27+AND+title+LIKE+%27%25Javascript%25%27 To compose more complex queries about your need I would suggest you to read the chapter in the coherence documentation inherent the Cohl language (Coherence Query Language) http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24290_01/coh.371/e22837/api_cq.htm . Some useful links: - Oracle Coherence REST API Documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24290_01/coh.371/e22839/rest_intro.htm - Oracle Service Bus Documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/soa.htm#osb - REST explanation from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer At this URL could be downloaded the whole materials of this demo http://blogs.oracle.com/slc/resource/cosb/coh-sb-demo.zip Author: Nino Guarnacci.

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• Make a Drive Image Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Cloning a hard drive is useful, but what if you have to make several copies, or you just want to make a complete backup of a hard drive? Drive images let you put everything, and we mean everything, from your hard drive in one big file. With an Ubuntu Live CD, this is a simple process – the versatile tool dd can do this for us right out of the box. We’ve used dd to clone a hard drive before. Making a drive image is very similar, except instead of copying data from one hard drive to another, we copy from a hard drive to a file. Drive images are more flexible, as you can do what you please with the data once you’ve pulled it off the source drive. Your drive image is going to be a big file, depending on the size of your source drive – dd will copy every bit of it, even if there’s only one tiny file stored on the whole hard drive. So, to start, make sure you have a device connected to your computer that will be large enough to hold the drive image. Some ideas for places to store the drive image, and how to connect to them in an Ubuntu Live CD, can be found at this previous Live CD article. In this article, we’re going to make an image of a 1GB drive, and store it on another hard drive in the same PC. Note: always be cautious when using dd, as it’s very easy to completely wipe out a drive, as we will show later in this article. Creating a Drive Image Boot up into the Ubuntu Live CD environment. Since we’re going to store the drive image on a local hard drive, we first have to mount it. Click on Places and then the location that you want to store the image on – in our case, a 136GB internal drive. Open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and navigate to the newly mounted drive. All mounted drives should be in /media, so we’ll use the command cd /media and then type the first few letters of our difficult-to-type drive, press tab to auto-complete the name, and switch to that directory. If you wish to place the drive image in a specific folder, then navigate to it now. We’ll just place our drive image in the root of our mounted drive. The next step is to determine the identifier for the drive you want to make an image of. In the terminal window, type in the command sudo fdisk -l Our 1GB drive is /dev/sda, so we make a note of that. Now we’ll use dd to make the image. The invocation is sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=./OldHD.img This means that we want to copy from the input file (“if”) /dev/sda (our source drive) to the output file (“of”) OldHD.img, which is located in the current working directory (that’s the “.” portion of the “of” string). It takes some time, but our image has been created…Let’s test to make sure it works. Drive Image Testing: Wiping the Drive Another interesting thing that dd can do is totally wipe out the data on a drive (a process we’ve covered before). The command for that is sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda This takes some random data as input, and outputs it to our drive, /dev/sda. If we examine the drive now using sudo fdisk –l, we can see that the drive is, indeed, wiped. Drive Image Testing: Restoring the Drive Image We can restore our drive image with a call to dd that’s very similar to how we created the image. The only difference is that the image is going to be out input file, and the drive now our output file. The exact invocation is sudo dd if=./OldHD.img of=/dev/sda It takes a while, but when it’s finished, we can confirm with sudo fdisk –l that our drive is back to the way it used to be! Conclusion There are a lots of reasons to create a drive image, with backup being the most obvious. Fortunately, with dd creating a drive image only takes one line in a terminal window – if you’ve got an Ubuntu Live CD handy! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayHow to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CDWipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy WayClone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace

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• WLS MBeans

  - by Jani Rautiainen

  WLS provides a set of Managed Beans (MBeans) to configure, monitor and manage WLS resources. We can use the WLS MBeans to automate some of the tasks related to the configuration and maintenance of the WLS instance. The MBeans can be accessed a number of ways; using various UIs and programmatically using Java or WLST Python scripts.For customization development we can use the features to e.g. manage the deployed customization in MDS, control logging levels, automate deployment of dependent libraries etc. This article is an introduction on how to access and use the WLS MBeans. The goal is to illustrate the various access methods in a single article; the details of the features are left to the linked documentation.This article covers Windows based environment, steps for Linux would be similar however there would be some differences e.g. on how the file paths are defined. MBeansThe WLS MBeans can be categorized to runtime and configuration MBeans.The Runtime MBeans can be used to access the runtime information about the server and its resources. The data from runtime beans is only available while the server is running. The runtime beans can be used to e.g. check the state of the server or deployment.The Configuration MBeans contain information about the configuration of servers and resources. The configuration of the domain is stored in the config.xml file and the configuration MBeans can be used to access and modify the configuration data. For more information on the WLS MBeans refer to: Understanding WebLogic Server MBeans WLS MBean reference Java Management Extensions (JMX)We can use JMX APIs to access the WLS MBeans. This allows us to create Java programs to configure, monitor, and manage WLS resources. In order to use the WLS MBeans we need to add the following library into the class-path: WL_HOME\lib\wljmxclient.jar Connecting to a WLS MBean server The WLS MBeans are contained in a Mbean server, depending on the requirement we can connect to (MBean Server / JNDI Name): Domain Runtime MBean Server weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime Runtime MBean Server weblogic.management.mbeanservers.runtime Edit MBean Server weblogic.management.mbeanservers.edit To connect to the WLS MBean server first we need to create a map containing the credentials; Hashtable<String, String> param = new Hashtable<String, String>(); param.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, "weblogic");        param.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, "weblogic1");        param.put(JMXConnectorFactory.PROTOCOL_PROVIDER_PACKAGES, "weblogic.management.remote"); These define the user, password and package containing the protocol. Next we create the connection: JMXServiceURL serviceURL =     new JMXServiceURL("t3","127.0.0.1",7101,     "/jndi/weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime"); JMXConnector connector = JMXConnectorFactory.connect(serviceURL, param); MBeanServerConnection connection = connector.getMBeanServerConnection(); With the connection we can now access the MBeans for the WLS instance. For a complete example see Appendix A of this post. For more details refer to Accessing WebLogic Server MBeans with JMX Accessing WLS MBeans The WLS MBeans are structured hierarchically; in order to access content we need to know the path to the MBean we are interested in. The MBean is accessed using “MBeanServerConnection. getAttribute” API.  WLS provides entry points to the hierarchy allowing us to navigate all the WLS MBeans in the hierarchy (MBean Server / JMX object name): Domain Runtime MBean Server com.bea:Name=DomainRuntimeService,Type=weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime.DomainRuntimeServiceMBean Runtime MBean Servers com.bea:Name=RuntimeService,Type=weblogic.management.mbeanservers.runtime.RuntimeServiceMBean Edit MBean Server com.bea:Name=EditService,Type=weblogic.management.mbeanservers.edit.EditServiceMBean For example we can access the Domain Runtime MBean using: ObjectName service = new ObjectName( "com.bea:Name=DomainRuntimeService," + "Type=weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime.DomainRuntimeServiceMBean"); Same syntax works for any “child” WLS MBeans e.g. to find out all application deployments we can: ObjectName domainConfig = (ObjectName)connection.getAttribute(service,"DomainConfiguration"); ObjectName[] appDeployments = (ObjectName[])connection.getAttribute(domainConfig,"AppDeployments"); Alternatively we could access the same MBean using the full syntax: ObjectName domainConfig = new ObjectName("com.bea:Location=DefaultDomain,Name=DefaultDomain,Type=Domain"); ObjectName[] appDeployments = (ObjectName[])connection.getAttribute(domainConfig,"AppDeployments"); For more details refer to Accessing WebLogic Server MBeans with JMX Invoking operations on WLS MBeans The WLS MBean operations can be invoked with MBeanServerConnection. invoke API; in the following example we query the state of “AppsLoggerService” application: ObjectName appRuntimeStateRuntime = new ObjectName("com.bea:Name=AppRuntimeStateRuntime,Type=AppRuntimeStateRuntime"); Object[] parameters = { "AppsLoggerService", "DefaultServer" }; String[] signature = { "java.lang.String", "java.lang.String" }; String result = (String)connection.invoke(appRuntimeStateRuntime,"getCurrentState",parameters, signature); The result returned should be "STATE_ACTIVE" assuming the "AppsLoggerService" application is up and running. WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) The WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) is a command-line scripting environment that we can access the same WLS MBeans. The tool is located under: $MW_HOME\oracle_common\common\bin\wlst.bat Do note that there are several instances of the wlst script under the $MW_HOME, each of them works, however the commands available vary, so we want to use the one under “oracle_common”. The tool is started in offline mode. In offline mode we can access and manipulate the domain configuration. In online mode we can access the runtime information. We connect to the Administration Server : connect("weblogic","weblogic1", "t3://127.0.0.1:7101") In both online and offline modes we can navigate the WLS MBean using commands like "ls" to print content and "cd" to navigate between objects, for example: All the commands available can be obtained with: help('all') For details of the tool refer to WebLogic Scripting Tool and for the commands available WLST Command and Variable Reference. Also do note that the WLST tool can be invoked from Java code in Embedded Mode. Running Scripts The WLST tool allows us to automate tasks using Python scripts in Script Mode. The script can be manually created or recorded by the WLST tool. Example commands of recording a script: startRecording("c:/temp/recording.py") <commands that we want to record> stopRecording() We can run the script from WLST: execfile("c:/temp/recording.py") We can also run the script from the command line: C:\apps\Oracle\Middleware\oracle_common\common\bin\wlst.cmd c:/temp/recording.py There are various sample scripts are provided with the WLS instance. UI to Access the WLS MBeans There are various UIs through which we can access the WLS MBeans. Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console Fusion Middleware Control MBean Browser In the integrated JDeveloper environment only the Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console is available to us. For more information refer to the documentation, one noteworthy feature in the console is the ability to record WLST scripts based on the navigation. In addition to the UIs above the JConsole included in the JDK can be used to access the WLS MBeans. The JConsole needs to be started with specific parameter to force WLS objects to be used and jar files in the classpath: "C:\apps\Oracle\Middleware\jdk160_24\bin\jconsole" -J-Djava.class.path=C:\apps\Oracle\Middleware\jdk160_24\lib\jconsole.jar;C:\apps\Oracle\Middleware\jdk160_24\lib\tools.jar;C:\apps\Oracle\Middleware\wlserver_10.3\server\lib\wljmxclient.jar -J-Djmx.remote.protocol.provider.pkgs=weblogic.management.remote For more details refer to the Accessing Custom MBeans from JConsole. Summary In this article we have covered various ways we can access and use the WLS MBeans in context of integrated WLS in JDeveloper to be used for Fusion Application customization development. References Developing Custom Management Utilities With JMX for Oracle WebLogic Server Accessing WebLogic Server MBeans with JMX WebLogic Server MBean Reference WebLogic Scripting Tool WLST Command and Variable Reference Appendix A package oracle.apps.test; import java.io.IOException;import java.net.MalformedURLException;import java.util.Hashtable;import javax.management.MBeanServerConnection;import javax.management.MalformedObjectNameException;import javax.management.ObjectName;import javax.management.remote.JMXConnector;import javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorFactory;import javax.management.remote.JMXServiceURL;import javax.naming.Context;/** * This class contains simple examples on how to access WLS MBeans using JMX. */public class BlogExample {    /**     * Connection to the WLS MBeans     */    private MBeanServerConnection connection;    /**     * Constructor that takes in the connection information for the      * domain and obtains the resources from WLS MBeans using JMX.     * @param hostName host name to connect to for the WLS server     * @param port port to connect to for the WLS server     * @param userName user name to connect to for the WLS server     * @param password password to connect to for the WLS server     */    public BlogExample(String hostName, String port, String userName,                       String password) {        super();        try {            initConnection(hostName, port, userName, password);        } catch (Exception e) {            throw new RuntimeException("Unable to connect to the domain " +                                       hostName + ":" + port);        }    }    /**     * Default constructor.     * Tries to create connection with default values. Runtime exception will be     * thrown if the default values are not used in the local instance.     */    public BlogExample() {        this("127.0.0.1", "7101", "weblogic", "weblogic1");    }    /**     * Initializes the JMX connection to the WLS Beans     * @param hostName host name to connect to for the WLS server     * @param port port to connect to for the WLS server     * @param userName user name to connect to for the WLS server     * @param password password to connect to for the WLS server     * @throws IOException error connecting to the WLS MBeans     * @throws MalformedURLException error connecting to the WLS MBeans     * @throws MalformedObjectNameException error connecting to the WLS MBeans     */    private void initConnection(String hostName, String port, String userName,                                String password)                                 throws IOException, MalformedURLException,                                        MalformedObjectNameException {        String protocol = "t3";        String jndiroot = "/jndi/";        String mserver = "weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime";        JMXServiceURL serviceURL =            new JMXServiceURL(protocol, hostName, Integer.valueOf(port),                              jndiroot + mserver);        Hashtable<String, String> h = new Hashtable<String, String>();        h.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, userName);        h.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, password);        h.put(JMXConnectorFactory.PROTOCOL_PROVIDER_PACKAGES,              "weblogic.management.remote");        JMXConnector connector = JMXConnectorFactory.connect(serviceURL, h);        connection = connector.getMBeanServerConnection();    }    /**     * Main method used to invoke the logic for testing     * @param args arguments passed to the program     */    public static void main(String[] args) {        BlogExample blogExample = new BlogExample();        blogExample.testEntryPoint();        blogExample.testDirectAccess();        blogExample.testInvokeOperation();    }    /**     * Example of using an entry point to navigate the WLS MBean hierarchy.     */    public void testEntryPoint() {        try {            System.out.println("testEntryPoint");            ObjectName service =             new ObjectName("com.bea:Name=DomainRuntimeService,Type=" +"weblogic.management.mbeanservers.domainruntime.DomainRuntimeServiceMBean");            ObjectName domainConfig =                (ObjectName)connection.getAttribute(service,                                                    "DomainConfiguration");            ObjectName[] appDeployments =                (ObjectName[])connection.getAttribute(domainConfig,                                                      "AppDeployments");            for (ObjectName appDeployment : appDeployments) {                String resourceIdentifier =                    (String)connection.getAttribute(appDeployment,                                                    "SourcePath");                System.out.println(resourceIdentifier);            }        } catch (Exception e) {            throw new RuntimeException(e);        }    }    /**     * Example of accessing WLS MBean directly with a full reference.     * This does the same thing as testEntryPoint in slightly difference way.     */    public void testDirectAccess() {        try {            System.out.println("testDirectAccess");            ObjectName appDeployment =                new ObjectName("com.bea:Location=DefaultDomain,"+                               "Name=AppsLoggerService,Type=AppDeployment");            String resourceIdentifier =                (String)connection.getAttribute(appDeployment, "SourcePath");            System.out.println(resourceIdentifier);        } catch (Exception e) {            throw new RuntimeException(e);        }    }    /**     * Example of invoking operation on a WLS MBean.     */    public void testInvokeOperation() {        try {            System.out.println("testInvokeOperation");            ObjectName appRuntimeStateRuntime =                new ObjectName("com.bea:Name=AppRuntimeStateRuntime,"+                               "Type=AppRuntimeStateRuntime");            String identifier = "AppsLoggerService";            String serverName = "DefaultServer";            Object[] parameters = { identifier, serverName };            String[] signature = { "java.lang.String", "java.lang.String" };            String result =                (String)connection.invoke(appRuntimeStateRuntime, "getCurrentState",                                          parameters, signature);            System.out.println("State of " + identifier + " = " + result);        } catch (Exception e) {            throw new RuntimeException(e);        }    }}

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• 10 Great Free Icon Packs To Theme Your Android Phone

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android allows you to customize your home screen, adding widgets, arranging shortcuts and folders, choosing a background, and even replacing the included launcher entirely. You can install icon packs to theme your app icons, too. Third-party launchers use standard app icons by default, but they don’t have to. You can install icon packs that third-party launchers will use in place of standard app icons. How to Use Icon Packs To use icon packs, you’ll need to use a third-party launcher that supports them, such as Nova, Apex, ADW, Go Launcher, Holo Launcher, or Action Launcher Pro. Once you’re using a third-party launcher, you can install an icon pack and go into your launcher’s settings. You’ll find an option that allows you to choose between the icon packs you’ve installed. Many of these icon packs also include wallpapers, which you can set in the normal way. MIUI 5 Icons This icon pack offers over 1900 free icons that are similar to the icons used by the MIUi ROM developed by China’s Xiaomi Tech. The large list of icons is a big plus — this pack will give the majority of your app icons a very slick, consistent look. DCikonZ Theme DCikonZ is a free icon theme that includes a whopping 4000+ icons with a consistent look. This icon theme stands out not just because it’s huge, but also for offering for going in its own direction and avoiding the super-simple, flat look many icon packs use. Holo Icons Holo Icons replaces many app icons with simple, consistent-looking that match Google’s Holo style. If you’re a fan of Android’s Holo look, give it a try. It even tweaks many of the icons from Google’s own apps to make them look more consistent. Square Icon Pack Square Icon Pack turns your icons into simple squares. Even Google Chrome becomes an orb instead of a square. This makes every icon a consistent size and offers a unique look. The icons here almost look a bit like the small-size tiles available on Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The free version doesn’t offer as many icons as the paid version, but it does offer icons for many popular apps. Rounded Want rounded icons instead? Try the Rounded icon theme, which offers simple rounded icons. The developer says they’re inspired by the consistently round icons used on Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Crumbled Icon Pack Crumbled Icon Pack applies an effect that makes icons look as if they’r crumbling. Rather than theming individual icons, Crumbled Icon Pack adds an effect to every app icon on your device. This means that all your app icons will be themed and consistent. Dainty Icon Pack Is your Android home screen too colorful? Dainty Icon Pack offers simple, gray-on-white icons for over 1200 apps. It’d be ideal over a simple background. The contrast may be a bit low here with the gray-on-white, but it’s otherwise very slick. Simplex Icons Simplex Icons offers more contrast, with black-on-gray icons. This icon pack could simplify busy home screens, allowing photographic wallpapers to come through. Min Icon Set Min attempts to go as minimal as possible, offering simple white icons for over 570 apps. It would be ideal over a simple wallpaper with app names hidden in your launcher, offering a calming, minimal home screen. For apps it doesn’t recognize, it will enclose part of the app’s icon in a white circle. Elegance Elegance goes in another direction entirely, offering icons that incorporate more details and gradients rather than going for minimalism. Its over 1200 icons offer another good option for people who aren’t into the minimal, flat look. Icon pack designers generally have to create and include their own icons to replace icons associated with specific apps, so you’ll probably find a few of your app icons aren’t replaced with most of these themes. Of course, a standard Android phone without an icon pack doesn’t have consistent icons, either. Even if all the icons in your app drawer aren’t themed, the few app icons you have on your home screen will be if you use widely used apps.     

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• Begin the Clone Wars Have!

  - by Antony Reynolds

  Creating a New Virtual Machine from an Existing Virtual Disk In previous posts I described how I set up an OEL6 machine under VirtualBox that can run an 11gR2 database and FMW 11.1.1.5.  That is great if you want the DB and FMW running in the same virtual image and it has served me well for some proof of concepts and also for some testing of different JVMs.  However I also wanted to run some testing of FMW with the database running on a separate physical machine.  So in this post I will show how to take a VirtualBox image and create a new image based on the disks from that original image. What are my Options? There is more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case to create two separate VMs that can run on different hardware.  Some of the options include: Create new virtual disk images for each new VM. Clone the existing disk images and point the new VM at the cloned images. Point the new VM at the existing snapshots. #1 is too much like hard work, install OEL twice, install a database again, install FMW again, run RCU again!  Life is too short! #2 is probably the safest way of doing things.  VirtualBox allows you to clone a disk image for use in a separate machine.  However this of course duplicates the disk and means that it is now occupying 3 times the space, once for the original disk and twice more for the two clones I would need. #3 is the most space efficient way of doing things.  It does mean however that I can only run the new “cloned” images if I have access to the original image because that is where the base snapshots reside.  However this is not a problem for me as long as I remember to keep all threee images together.  So this is the approach we will follow. Snapshot, What Snapshot? As we are going to create new virtual machines based on existing snapshots we need to figure out which snapshot to use.  We do this by opening the “Media Manager” from within VirtualBox and moving the mouse over the snapshot images until we find the snapshots we want – the snapshot name is identified in the “Attached to:” comment.  In my case I wanted the FMW installed snapshot because that had a database configured for FMW alongside the FMW software.  I made a note of the filename of that snapshot (actually I just noted the first 5 characters as that was all that was needed to uniquely identify the snapshot file). When we create the new machines we will point them at the snapshot filename we have just checked. Network or NotWork? Because we want the two new machines to communicate with each other when hosted in different physical machines we can’t use the default NAT networking mode without a lot of hassle.  But at the same time we need them to have fixed IP addresses relative to each other so that they can see each other whilst also being able to see the outside world. To achieve all these requirements I created two network adapters for each machine.  Adapter 1 was a standard NAT mapping.  This will allow each machine to get a dynamic IP address (10.0.2.15 by default) that can be used to access the external world through the VBox provided NAT gateway.  This is the same as the existing configuration. The second adapter I created as a bridged adapter.  This gives the virtual machine direct access to the host network card and by using fixed IP addresses each machine can see the other.  It is important to choose fixed IP addresses that are not routable across your internal network so you don’t get any clashes with other machines on your network.  Of course you could always get proper fixed IP addresses from your network people, but I have serveral people using my images and as long as I don’t have two instances of the same VM on the same network segment this is easier and avoids reconfiguring the network every time someone wants a copy of my VM.  If it is available I would suggest using the 10.0.3.* network as 10.0.2.* is the default NAT network.  You can check availability by pinging 10.0.3.1 and 10.0.3.2 from your host machine.  If it times out then you are probably safe to use that. Creating the New VMs Now that I had collected the data that I needed I went ahead and created the new VMs. When asked for a “Boot Hard Disk” I used the “Choose a virtual hard disk file…” link to find the snapshot I had previously selected and set that to be the existing hard disk.  I chose the previously existing SOA 11.1.1.5 install for both the new DB and FMW machines because that snapshot had the database with the RCU completed that I wanted for my DB machine and it had the SOA software installed which I wanted for my FMW machine. After the initial creation of the virtual machine go into the network setting section and enable a second adapter which will be bridged.  Make a note of the MAC addresses (the last four digits should be sufficient) of the two adapters so that you can later set the bridged adapter to use fixed IP and the NAT adapter to use DHCP. We are now ready to start the VMs and reconfigure Linux. Reconfiguring Linux Because I now have two new machines I need to change their network configuration.  In particular I need to change the hostname, update the hosts file and change the network settings. Changing the Hostname I renamed both hosts by running the hostname command as root: hostname vboxfmw.oracle.com I also edited the /etc/sysconfig file and set the correct hostname in there. HOSTNAME=vboxfmw.oracle.com Changing the Network Settings I needed to change the network configuration to give the bridged network a fixed IP address.  I first explicitly set the MAC addresses of the two adapters, because the order of the virtual adapters in the VirtualBox Manager is not necessarily the same as the order of the adapters in the guest OS.  So I went in to the System->Preferences->Network Connections screen and explicitly set the “Device MAC address” for the two adapters. Having correctly mapped the Linux adapters to the VirtualBox adapters I then set the Bridged adapter to use fixed IP addressing rather than DHCP.  There is no need for additional routing or default gateways because we expect the two machine to be on the same LAN segment. Updating the Hosts File Having renamed the machines and reconfigured the network I then updated the /etc/hosts file to refer to the new machine name add a new line to the hosts file to provide an additional IP address for my server (the new fixed IP address) add a new line for the fixed IP address of the other virtual machine 10.0.3.101      vboxdb.oracle.com       vboxdb  # Added by NetworkManager 10.0.2.15       vboxdb.oracle.com       vboxdb  # Added by NetworkManager 10.0.3.102      vboxfmw.oracle.com      vboxfmw # Added by NetworkManager 127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost ::1     vboxdb.oracle.com       vboxdb  localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 To make sure everything takes effect I restarted the server. Reconfiguring the Database on the DB Machine Because we changed the hostname the listener and the EM console no longer start so I need to modify the listener.ora to use the new hostname and I also need to rebuild the EM configuration because it also relies on the hostname. I edited the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/listener.ora and changed the listening address to the new hostname:       (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = vboxdb.oracle.com)(PORT = 1521)) After changing the listener.ora I was able to start the listener using: lsnrctl start I also had to reconfigure the EM database control.  I first deconfigured it using the command: emca -deconfig dbcontrol db -repos drop This drops the repository and removes any existing registered dbcontrols. I then re-configured it using the following command: emca -config dbcontrol db -repos create This creates the EM repository and then configures and starts dbcontrol. Now my database machine is ready so I can close it down and take a snapshot. Disabling the Database on the FMW Machine I set up the database to start automatically by creating a service called “dbora”.  On the FMW machine I do not need the database running so I can prevent it auto-starting by running the following command: chkconfig –del dbora Note that because I am using a snapshot it is not a waste of disk space to have the DB installed but not used.  As long as I don’t run it, it won’t cost me anything. I can now close the FMW machine down and take a snapshot. Creating a New Domain The FMW machine is now ready to create a new domain.  When creating the domain I can point it at the second machine which is running the database.  I can potentially run these machines on two separate physical machines as long as I have the original virtual machine available to both of the physical machines. Gotchas in Snapshotting VirtualBox does not support the concept of linked machines in a network like some virtualization technologies so when creating a snapshot it is a good idea to shut both VMs down and then take a snapshot on both of them.  This is because we want to keep the database in sync with the middleware.  One way to make sure that this happens would be to place all the domain configuration files on the database server via an NFS share, this would mean that all we would need to snapshot would be the database machine because that would hold all the state and configuration. The Sky’s the Limit We have covered a simple case of having just two machines.  I have a more complicated configuration in which two machine run a RAC database off the same base OS image, and two more machines run a SOA cluster based on the same OS image.  Just remember what machine holds state and what are the consequences of taking a snapshot.

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• Minidlna Directory Issues

  - by Somnambulist

  I've done my searching and can't find an answer to THIS specific issue. I have my minidlna set up and running - but it's not really done properly. First off, when I open the server on my bluray player, all of my movies are listed twice - when they are certainly not saved on my external twice. Second, when I open the server - rather than reading "Movies" "TV" "Music", etc - It just mashes all of my movies, tv, and some other folders all together with no real organization. I never had this problem when I had my Windows set up, so I know it's something configured improperly more-so than my external drive giving me gruff. Here's my minidlna.conf file: # This is the configuration file for the MiniDLNA daemon, a DLNA/UPnP-AV media # server. # # Unless otherwise noted, the commented out options show their default value. # # On Debian, you can also refer to the minidlna.conf(5) man page for # documentation about this file. media_dir=/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You # This option can be specified more than once if you want multiple directories # scanned. # # If you want to restrict a media_dir to a specific content type, you can # prepend the directory name with a letter representing the type (A, P or V), # followed by a comma, as so: # * "A" for audio (eg. media_dir=A,/var/lib/minidlna/music) # * "P" for pictures (eg. media_dir=P,/var/lib/minidlna/pictures) # * "V" for video (eg. media_dir=V,/var/lib/minidlna/videos) # # WARNING: After changing this option, you need to rebuild the database. Either # run minidlna with the '-R' option, or delete the 'files.db' file # from the db_dir directory (see below). # On Debian, you can run, as root, 'service minidlna force-reload' instead. #media_dir=/var/lib/minidlna media_dir=V,/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies media_dir=V,/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/TV media_dir=P,/home/somnambulist/Pictures # Path to the directory that should hold the database and album art cache. db_dir=/home/somnambulist/serverart # Path to the directory that should hold the log file. log_dir=/home/somnambulist/serverlog # Minimum level of importance of messages to be logged. # Must be one of "off", "fatal", "error", "warn", "info" or "debug". # "off" turns of logging entirely, "fatal" is the highest level of importance # and "debug" the lowest. #log_level=warn # Use a different container as the root of the directory tree presented to # clients. The possible values are: # * "." - standard container # * "B" - "Browse Directory" # * "M" - "Music" # * "P" - "Pictures" # * "V" - "Video" # if you specify "B" and client device is audio-only then "Music/Folders" will be used as root root_container=B # Network interface(s) to bind to (e.g. eth0), comma delimited. #network_interface= # IPv4 address to listen on (e.g. 192.0.2.1). #listening_ip= # Port number for HTTP traffic (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer). port=8200 # URL presented to clients. # The default is the IP address of the server on port 80. #presentation_url=http://example.com:80 # Name that the DLNA server presents to clients. friendly_name=Somnambulist Media Server # Serial number the server reports to clients. serial=12345678 # Model name the server reports to clients. #model_name=Windows Media Connect compatible (MiniDLNA) # Model number the server reports to clients. model_number=1 # Automatic discovery of new files in the media_dir directory. #inotify=yes # List of file names to look for when searching for album art. Names should be # delimited with a forward slash ("/"). album_art_names=Cover.jpg/cover.jpg/AlbumArtSmall.jpg/albumartsmall.jpg/AlbumArt.jpg/albumart.jpg/Album.jpg/album.jpg/Folder.jpg/folder.jpg/Thumb.jpg/thumb.jpg # Strictly adhere to DLNA standards. # This allows server-side downscaling of very large JPEG images, which may # decrease JPEG serving performance on (at least) Sony DLNA products. #strict_dlna=no # Support for streaming .jpg and .mp3 files to a TiVo supporting HMO. #enable_tivo=no # Notify interval, in seconds. #notify_interval=895 # Path to the MiniSSDPd socket, for MiniSSDPd support. #minissdpdsocket=/run/minissdpd.sock` And here's the error I get in terminal when I run: sudo service minidlna restart sudo service minidlna force-reload Force restart error: Restarting DLNA/UPnP-AV media server minidlna [2013/08/12 21:19:27] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies" not accessible! [Permission denied] [2013/08/12 21:19:27] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/TV" not accessible! [Permission denied] Force-reload error: Restarting DLNA/UPnP-AV media server minidlna [2013/08/12 21:19:46] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies" not accessible! [Permission denied] [2013/08/12 21:19:46] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/TV" not accessible! [Permission denied] rm: cannot remove ‘/home/somnambulist/serverart/files.db’: Permission denied rm: cannot remove ‘/home/somnambulist/serverart/art_cache/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies/Slumdog Millionaire/Slumdog.Millionaire.Cover.jpg’: Permission denied rm: cannot remove ‘/home/somnambulist/serverart/art_cache/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies/Zack and Miri Make a Porno/ZackAndMiriMakeAPornoCover.jpg’: Permission denied [2013/08/12 21:19:46] minidlna.c:744: warn: Failed to clean old file cache. [ OK ] I've spent hours on this at this point, read through various files - and even had a friend who is relatively Ubuntu-savvy try to help me via chat - no such luck. Thanks in advance for any help.

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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