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• Get to Know a Candidate (12 of 25): Andre Barnett&ndash;Reform Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Barnett is an American politician and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the information technology (IT) company WiseDome Inc.  Barnett was born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1976. He attended Austin Peay State University and Western Governors University.  A former member of the United States Armed Forces, Barnett served in Sarajevo before being wounded in a helicopter accident.  Following his military service, Barnett became a fitness model in New York. In 2001, he founded WiseDome Incorporated, an IT company that provides information technology and data recovery services. Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA), generally known as the Reform Party USA or the Reform Party, is a political party in the United States, founded in 1995 by Ross Perot. Perot said Americans were disillusioned with the state of politics—as being corrupt and unable to deal with vital issues—and desired a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The party has nominated different candidates over the years, such as founder Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Ralph Nader. The party's most significant victory came when Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. Since then, the party has been torn by infighting and disagreements, which it seeks to overcome. The Reform Party platform includes the following: * Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt * Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of the Political action committee * Enforcement of existing immigration laws and opposition to illegal immigration * Opposition to free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Central America Free Trade Agreement, and a call for withdrawal from the World Trade Organization * Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators * Direct election of the United States President by popular vote * Federal elections held on weekends A noticeable absence from the Reform Party platform has been social issues, including abortion and gay rights. Reform Party representatives had long stated beliefs that their party could bring together people from both sides of these issues, which they consider divisive, to address what they considered to be more vital concerns as expressed in their platform. The idea was to form a large coalition of moderates; that intention was overridden in 2001 by the Buchanan takeover which rewrote the RPUSA Constitution to specifically include platform planks opposed to any form of abortion. The Buchananists, in turn, were overridden by the 2002 Convention which specifically reverted the Constitution to its 1996 version and the party's original stated goals. Barnett has Ballot Access in: FL Learn more about Andre Barnett and Reform Party on Wikipedia.

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• Giving a Zone "More Power"

  - by Brian Leonard

  In addition to the traditional virtualization benefits that Solaris zones offer, applications running in zones are also running in a more secure environment. One way to quantify this is compare the privileges available to the global zone with those of a local zone. For example, there a 82 distinct privileges available to the global zone: bleonard@solaris:~$ ppriv -l | wc -l 82 You can view the descriptions for each of those privileges as follows: bleonard@solaris:~$ ppriv -lv contract_event Allows a process to request critical events without limitation. Allows a process to request reliable delivery of all events on any event queue. contract_identity Allows a process to set the service FMRI value of a process contract template. ... Or for just one or more privileges: bleonard@solaris:~$ ppriv -lv file_dac_read file_dac_write file_dac_read Allows a process to read a file or directory whose permission bits or ACL do not allow the process read permission. file_dac_write Allows a process to write a file or directory whose permission bits or ACL do not allow the process write permission. In order to write files owned by uid 0 in the absence of an effective uid of 0 ALL privileges are required. However, in a non-global zone, only 43 of the 83 privileges are available by default: root@myzone:~# ppriv -l zone | wc -l 43 The missing privileges are: cpc_cpu dtrace_kernel dtrace_proc dtrace_user file_downgrade_sl file_flag_set file_upgrade_sl graphics_access graphics_map net_mac_implicit proc_clock_highres proc_priocntl proc_zone sys_config sys_devices sys_ipc_config sys_linkdir sys_dl_config sys_net_config sys_res_bind sys_res_config sys_smb sys_suser_compat sys_time sys_trans_label virt_manage win_colormap win_config win_dac_read win_dac_write win_devices win_dga win_downgrade_sl win_fontpath win_mac_read win_mac_write win_selection win_upgrade_sl xvm_control However, just like Tim Taylor, it is possible to give your zones more power. For example, a zone by default doesn't have the privileges to support DTrace: root@myzone:~# dtrace -l ID PROVIDER MODULE FUNCTION NAME The DTrace privileges can be added, however, as follows: bleonard@solaris:~$ sudo zonecfg -z myzone Password: zonecfg:myzone> set limitpriv="default,dtrace_proc,dtrace_user" zonecfg:myzone> verify zonecfg:myzone> exit bleonard@solaris:~$ sudo zoneadm -z myzone reboot Now I can run DTrace from within the zone: root@myzone:~# dtrace -l | more ID PROVIDER MODULE FUNCTION NAME 1 dtrace BEGIN 2 dtrace END 3 dtrace ERROR 7115 syscall nosys entry 7116 syscall nosys return ... Note, certain privileges are never allowed to be assigned to a zone. You'll be notified on boot if you attempt to assign a prohibited privilege to a zone: bleonard@solaris:~$ sudo zoneadm -z myzone reboot privilege "dtrace_kernel" is not permitted within the zone's privilege set zoneadm: zone myzone failed to verify Here's a nice listing of all the privileges and their zone status (default, optional, prohibited): Privileges in a Non-Global Zone.

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• Are SQL Injection vulnerabilities in a PHP application acceptable if mod_security is enabled?

  - by Austin Smith

  I've been asked to audit a PHP application. No framework, no router, no model. Pure PHP. Few shared functions. HTML, CSS, and JS all mixed together. I've discovered numerous places where SQL injection would be easily possible. There are other problems with the application (XSS vulnerabilities, rampant inline CSS, code copy-pasted everywhere) but this is the biggest. Sometimes they escape inputs, not using a prepared query or even mysql_real_escape_string(), mind you, but using addslashes(). Often, though, their queries look exactly like this (pasted from their code but with columns and variable names changed): $user = mysql_query("select * from profile where profile_id='".$_REQUEST["profile_id"]."'"); The developers in question claimed that they were unable to hack their application. I tried, and found mod_security to be enabled, resulting in HTTP 406 for some obvious SQL injection attacks. I believe there to be sophisticated workarounds for mod_security, but I don't have time to chase them down. They claim that this is a "conceptual" matter and not a "practical" one since the application can't easily be hacked. Their internal auditor agreed that there were problems, but emphasized the conceptual nature of the issues. They also use this conceptual/practical argument to defend against inline CSS and JS, absence of code organization, XSS vulnerabilities, and massive amounts of repetition. My client (rightly so, perhaps) just wants this to go away so they can launch their product. The site works. You can log in, do what you need to do, and things are visibly functional, if slow. SQL Injection would indeed be hard to do, given mod_security. Further, their talk of "conceptual vs. practical" is rhetorically brilliant, considering that my client doesn't understand web application security. I worry that they've succeeded in making me sound like an angry puritan. In many ways, this is a problem of politics, not technology, but I am at a loss. As a developer, I want to tell them to toss the whole project and start over with a new team, but I face a strong defense from the team that built it and a client who really needs to ship their product. Is my position here too harsh? Even if they fix the SQL Injection and XSS problems can I ever endorse the release of an unmaintainable tangle of spaghetti code?

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• New grad; To overcome complete lack of experience, should I ditch a creative pet project in lieu of one that would demonstrate more applicable skills?

  - by Hart Simha

  I am currently working on a project on github that I think would be a good demonstration of my initiative, creativity and enthusiasm. It is an educational game I am developing in pygame that enables the user to learn to improve their development productivity by using vim, specifically with python, though learning to code faster with vim should be transferable to any language. I think this is something that might have a mass appeal and benefit to a lot of people in a measurable way. -However- I am graduating from college in a month (my degree is computer science with a minor in English), with no experience that is relevant to helping me get any kind of job in the field, and a gpa that doesn't tout my merits. I could pursue a career in game development, but it's not necessarily what I'm most interested in, and see myself applying to startups around the country. To the places I am looking at applying, showing that I have experience with pygame is going to be largely irrelevant, except in demonstration of my ability to code, period. A lot of skills that ARE more marketable, such a data modeling, GIS, mobile application, development, javascript, .net framework, and various web development technologies, are not going to be showcased by this project (on the upside, employers do like to see familiarity with git and python). I'm wondering if I should sink all my free time in the next couple of months into this project, since I'm motivated and interested in it, and if the value of being able to demonstrate ambition and 'good ideas' (for lack of a better term, and in my own opinion) will compensate for the absence of demonstrating more sought-after skills. I am probably at a point where I should either commit fully to this project now, or put it on the backburner in favor of something else, and I am leaning towards continuing with what I am already working on, because I think it's a great idea, and something achievable to me with enough dedication over the next couple months. But the most important thing to me is being able to get a job out of college, which I am exceedingly concerned about as the professional landscape which I am navigating for the first time is a lot more intimidating than I could have anticipated, with almost every job (even short-term contract positions) requiring years of experience which I lack. So in brief, the common denominator to answering the question "How can I overcome experience requirements for a job" seems to be "Show off your own project." I want to know WHICH project I should work on to best increase my chances of getting a job out of college, keeping in mind that I have no experience. I believe this question is applicable to any new grad that lacks demonstrable experience.

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• Changing jobs and leaving a project without a leader (aka, me)

  - by AnonUntilAfterTheEvent

  I'm the lead on a project that has been underway for about a year and a half. Two of us have been working on it. One is the database guy. I'm the javascript/ui guy. Which is to say, essentially no overlap in code knowledge. Here's the thing. Someone is about to offer me a sweet job with a nearly 30% bump in pay. Though I am perfectly happy with my current job and love the project, the new one would be better and I can't imagine saying no. The big problem is that my project is supposed to go into production starting in a few weeks. I will consider the new guys to have disqualified the new job by being bad people who would ruin my life if they won't cooperate and let me start after deployment. Since they seem like decent, ethical people, I don't expect that to be a problem. The current project will be brutalized by my absence. I take some comfort in the fact that I have emphatically requested an understudy for at least six months. That puts a little of the responsibility on the boss's head, but still, it's going to be a really bad thing. What do others of you do when you are a critical to a project when it's time to move on? Do I owe any obligation to stick around even though something better shows up? I know my spouse would object if I found someone else. Does that apply to work? I do have an understudy now, though he's fresh out of college. He's not going to replace me anytime soon. It's a small shop and the boss is going to be crushed. I am traumatized in anticipation of telling him and feel guilty about the practical consequences. I'm looking for some solace and some strategy about how to deal with this transition. Thank you for listening. =========================Subsequent notes ========================= @ChaosPandion, Chance: No, I can't stay to finish the project. I will insist on a compromise where I finish the current sprint (about a month from now) but there is at least a half year, probably a year of solid, full-time, work still to be done. I wouldn't expect the new employer to hold the job that long.

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• Can't get SSH public key authentication to work

  - by Trey Parkman

  My server is running CentOS 5.3. I'm on a Mac running Leopard. I don't know which is responsible for this: I can log on to my server just fine via password authentication. I've gone through all of the steps for setting up PKA (as described at http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-ssh-beyondshell.html), but when I use SSH, it refuses to even attempt publickey verification. Using the command ssh -vvv user@host (where -vvv cranks up verbosity to the maximum level) I get the following relevant output: debug2: key: /Users/me/.ssh/id_dsa (0x123456) debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,gssapi-with-mic,password debug3: start over, passed a different list publickey,gssapi-with-mic,password debug3: preferred keyboard-interactive,password debug3: authmethod_lookup password debug3: remaining preferred: ,password debug3: authmethod_is_enabled password debug1: Next authentication method: password followed by a prompt for my password. If I try to force the issue with ssh -vvv -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey user@host I get debug2: key: /Users/me/.ssh/id_dsa (0x123456) debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,gssapi-with-mic,password debug3: start over, passed a different list publickey,gssapi-with-mic,password debug3: preferred publickey debug3: authmethod_lookup publickey debug3: No more authentication methods to try. So, even though the server says it accepts the publickey authentication method, and my SSH client insists on it, I'm rebutted. (Note the conspicuous absence of an "Offering public key:" line above.) Any suggestions?

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• Removing SCIM input method as default from gnome terminal

  - by Mark

  Hello - I am recently back into the Linux world after about a 10 year absence. While I can find my way around most things, terminals and desktop managers are different than I remember. One of the biggest problems that I am encountering today is that when running a gnome terminal (this is Suse 10.0 enterprise), I'm getting behavior in the window that I don't want. Specifically, when I type, my typing is underlined as if something is trying to spell check my window. Further, it seems as if when running vi or less, my keystrokes are only processed by these apps when I hit 'return'. I.e. if I'm running less and want to go back a page, I'll hit b, but nothing happens until I hit 'return'. I seem to have tracked this down to the 'input method". Right clicking in the Gnome terminal allows me to set my input method to one of a dozen values. It seems that currently, it's set to "SCIM Input Method". If I then select 'default' or 'X Input Method', apps (i.e. things like less, vi, and even the bash shell) behave as I would expect. Can someone tell me a) what is this SCIM input method b) how can I make it so that it is not the default? I've poked around various configuration files in my home directory as well as in /etc, but I can't see to find how this is set. I guess as a final question, can I just get rid of SCIM? Or is that tied into the window manager somehow? I do appreciate any clarifications that I can get. Thanks.

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• How can I recover a Fedora 12 installation that is showing signs of disk errors?

  - by Bob Cross

  I am currently overseas (i.e., very far from my normal library of tools) and my primary machine that would normally act as the data server in the performance test that we're trying to run is failing to boot to Fedora 12 properly. This is a machine that, as of yesterday, was booting fine. However, this morning, very strange portions of the boot process were complaining with messages such as "unexpected 0x0 in rpcbind" and "bad file descriptor" (I don't have the error in front of me - scavenged a windows installation to get onto serverfault). Eventually, the boot hung for a long time at the NFS service and then brought up what looked like the KDE login screen but neither the mouse nor keyboard functioned. In olden days, I would try to get to a point where I could manage to run fsck and pray that the bad sectors would come back into alignment just long enough for me to scrape the critical data off of the machine. However, now that we live in the future, it seems like our options in situations like this should be a little more varied. Is there a way to recover a Fedora 12 installation with bad disk sectors that won't boot properly? For completeness, I am comfortable working with bootable recovery distros-on-CD and such but I don't know which one is likely to work best with modern Fedora. In the absence of guidance, I'm frantically torrenting the Fedora 12 Live CD and DVD, hoping to try rescue mode before tomorrow morning.

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• How do I change the Dropbox directory on a headless GNU/Linux server?

  - by DrTwox

  I have installed Dropbox 2.0.0 via command line on my home server (Ubuntu Server 12.04) to use for off-site automated backups, but I can't change the directory that the Dropbox daemon keeps synced. I've tried the following: The official docs say to use the desktop application, which is not applicable in my situation. However I installed the desktop app on my desktop machine and changed the default folder location, but I can't find where this change is stored in the ~/.dropbox/ directory so I can make the same change on the server. This page (and several others) recommends a Python script to do the job. Looking at the script, it opens a SQLite database called ~/.dropbox/dropbox.db, which does not exist on my Dropbox install, leading me to believe the script is out-of-date. This forum thread suggests manually inserting the required row in the config.db database, which I did, but it made no difference. I checked the same database file on my desktop machine, and it does not have the dropbox_path key, so I'm presuming the information in that thread is also out of date for version 2.0. I have tried to launch the Dropbox GUI configuration wizard over SSH with X11 forwarding, as suggested in one of the answers, but the binary must detect the absence of a local X11 install and it starts a command line daemon instead, which provides no means to change the option I need. I am currently using a symlink, as suggested as an answer, but this is a kludge. I would like to know the correct way to make the change. How do I change the Dropbox directory on a headless GNU/Linux server? Update: I've ditched Dropbox and started using Copy. Their Linux tools and support is far superior to Dropbox. I leave this question here in case someone, someday, can answer it.

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• Acer recovery disks not bootable?

  - by user13743

  We got a new Acer laptop with Vista installed at work. As it's getting ready to go out in the field, we wanted to do a burn-in test on it. We made the recovery DVDs before we ran the test. Part of the burn-in was bonnie++, which does a destructive read/write test of the hard drive. The machine passed with flying colors, but after trying to boot to the recovery DVD to being re-installing the system, the machine began to try PXE boot after a while. After doing some googling, it appears these 'recovery' disks expect a certain recovery partition to exist on the hard drive, and are in fact not bootable at all, and are useless in absence of the recovery partition. Is this the case, and is this "The Way Things Are" with all PC manufacturers and Windows Vista+ nowadays? How do I get my hands on actual bootable DVDs? I've emailed Acer support. I see an option on their site to purchase recovery disks, but I have the suspicion that these are the same non-bootable disks that I burned on the new system. Will Acer provide actual boot disks?

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• Is there any way to force my Linux box to always boot up with a self-assigned IP address?

  - by Jeremy Friesner

  This is perhaps an unusual request: I'm trying to get a Debian Linux box to always give itself a self-assigned IP address (i.e. 169.254.x.y) on boot. In particular, I want it to do that even when there is a DHCP server present on the LAN. That is, it should not request an IP address from the DHCP server. From what I can see in the "man interfaces" text, there is an option for "manual", and an option for "dhcp". Manual assignment won't do, since I need multiple boxes to work on the same LAN without requiring any manual configuration... and "dhcp" does what I want, but only if there is no DHCP server on the LAN. (A requirement is that the functionality of these boxes should not be affected by the presence or absence of a DHCP server). Is there a trick that I can use to get this behavior? EDIT: By "no manual configuration", I mean that I should be able to take this box (headless) to any LAN anywhere, plug in the Ethernet cable, and have it do its thing. I shouldn't have to ssh to the box and edit files to get it working each time it is moved to a different LAN.

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• Is there a monitoring software suite that will alert me if it has received no activity in a time period?

  - by matt b

  This might be a very basic question, but I am not very familiar with the exact features of Nagios versus Munin versus other monitoring tools. Let's say we have a process that needs to run daily for some very important infrastructure reasons. We've had cases where the process did not run or was otherwise down for a number of days before anyone noticed. I'd like to set up a system that will enable me to easily know when the daily run did not take place for some reason. I can set up this process to send an email on every successful run (or every failed run), but I do not trust that the people receiving this email would notice an absence of an "I'm OK" message. What I am envisioning is some type of "tripwire" service which this V.I.P. (very-important-process) can send a status message to each time it runs, whether successfully or not; and if the "tripwire" service has not received any word from the VIP within a configurable amount of time, it can then send an alert to someone. (The difference between what I envision and the first approach I outlined is a service that sends a message only in abnormal conditions, rather than a service that sends messages each day that the status is normal/OK). Can Nagios be set up to send an alert like this, if it has not heard from a certain service/device/process in N days? Is there another tool out there which does have this feature?

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• Backing up a Windos 7 partition from Macbook with no OS X

  - by mattcodes

  I have a 3 year macbook with Windows 7 installed as 40gb and OS X as 40gb (80gb HD). I want to remove OS X as Im at the limit of 40gb on Windows and I have not logged on to Mac OS X since installed Win7 (dont flame me). So I want to delete OS X partition and expand my win partition to 80gb BUT I still would like to be able to regularly (once a week/month) backup my Windows 7 partition - its took a while to setup everything up right - not just docs and programs - so when the hard drive dies I want to be able to restore the partition and boot away, (the daily volatile bits I can pull down from dropbox and project from soure control). With Mac OS X I could use Winclone - and this worked flawless last time the HD failed with XP but with the absence of OS X I will need something else. Im thinking can I use a Linux Live boot CD along with an external USB hard drive. Boot from CD and then dd? the partition to the USB? What linux distro live CD should I use? I say dd as if I know what am taking about (I dont) is this the best way to backup a partition (when it will be restored to same hardware as bootable) ? What command?

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• Apache intermittently aborting requests

  - by Adam Phillips

  I have just been dealing with a problem whereby http requests are being aborted, seemingly at random. On any particular page in the website, when you opened a page, a number of the assets (img, css, etc) failed to load. If you refreshed, the page may work fine, the same set of assets may fail to load or different assets may fail to load. The net tab in firefox was returning 'Aborted' in the HTTP status code column for the failed assets, even tho in the case of images, the image previews were still working. There was nothing in any of the apache logs about the requests that failed, however since it seemed to point to an apache issue, we restarted apache. The first time we tried, it made no difference but about 10 minutes later, in the absence of a better solution we tried again. Bizarrely, the problem disappeared immeadiately. So now the site seems to be running fine again but its rather unsettling, both the intermittent nature of the problem and the lack of an explanation for its resolution. Has anyone seen anything like this before and if so did you find out the reason behind it? Many Thanks

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• No bean named 'springSecurityFilterChain' is defined

  - by michaeljackson4ever

  When configs are loaded, I get the error SEVERE: Exception starting filter springSecurityFilterChain org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No bean named 'springSecurityFilterChain' is defined My sec-config: <http use-expressions="true" access-denied-page="/error/casfailed.html" entry-point-ref="headerAuthenticationEntryPoint"> <intercept-url pattern="/" access="permitAll"/> <!-- <intercept-url pattern="/index.html" access="permitAll"/> --> <intercept-url pattern="/index.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/history.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/absence.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/search.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/employees.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/employee.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/contract.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/myforms.html" access="hasAnyRole('HLO','OPISK')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/vacationmsg.html" access="hasAnyRole('ROLE_USER')"/> <intercept-url pattern="/redirect.jsp" filters="none" /> <intercept-url pattern="/error/**" filters="none" /> <intercept-url pattern="/layout/**" filters="none" /> <intercept-url pattern="/js/**" filters="none" /> <intercept-url pattern="/**" access="isAuthenticated()" /> <!-- session-management invalid-session-url="/absence.html"/ --> <!-- logout logout-success-url="/logout.html"/ --> <custom-filter ref="ssoHeaderAuthenticationFilter" before="CAS_FILTER"/> <!-- CAS_FILTER ??? --> </http> <authentication-manager alias="authenticationManager"> <authentication-provider ref="doNothingAuthenticationProvider"/> </authentication-manager> <beans:bean id="doNothingAuthenticationProvider" class="com.nixu.security.sso.web.DoNothingAuthenticationProvider"/> <beans:bean id="ssoHeaderAuthenticationFilter" class="com.nixu.security.sso.web.HeaderAuthenticationFilter"> <beans:property name="groups"> <beans:map> <beans:entry key="cn=lake,ou=confluence,dc=utu,dc=fi" value="ROLE_ADMIN"/> </beans:map> </beans:property> </beans:bean> <beans:bean id="headerAuthenticationEntryPoint" class="com.nixu.security.sso.web.HeaderAuthenticationEntryPoint"/> And web.xml <context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value> /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml /WEB-INF/sec-config.xml /WEB-INF/idm-config.xml /WEB-INF/ldap-config.xml </param-value> </context-param> <display-name>KeyCard</display-name> <context-param> <param-name>webAppRootKey</param-name> <param-value>KeyCardAppRoot</param-value> </context-param> <context-param> <param-name>log4jConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>/WEB-INF/log4j.properties</param-value> </context-param> <!-- Reads request input using UTF-8 encoding --> <filter> <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name> <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class> <init-param> <param-name>encoding</param-name> <param-value>UTF-8</param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name> <param-value>true</param-value> </init-param> </filter> <filter> <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name> <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.util.Log4jConfigListener</listener-class> </listener> <listener> <!-- this is for session scoped objects --> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class> </listener> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.security.web.session.HttpSessionEventPublisher</listener-class> </listener> <!-- Handles all requests into the application --> <servlet> <servlet-name>KeyCard</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet> <servlet-name>tiles</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.apache.tiles.web.startup.TilesServlet</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name> org.apache.tiles.impl.BasicTilesContainer.DEFINITIONS_CONFIG </param-name> <param-value> /WEB-INF/tilesViewContext.xml </param-value> </init-param> <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>KeyCard</servlet-name> <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <session-config> <session-timeout> 120 </session-timeout> </session-config> <welcome-file-list> <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file> </welcome-file-list> <!-- error-page> <exception-type>java.lang.Exception</exception-type> <location>/WEB-INF/error/error.jsp</location> </error-page --> </web-app> What's wrong?

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• Error Handling Examples(C#)

  “The purpose of reviewing the Error Handling code is to assure that the application fails safely under all possible error conditions, expected and unexpected. No sensitive information is presented to the user when an error occurs.” (OWASP, 2011) No Error Handling The absence of error handling is still a form of error handling. Based on the code in Figure 1, if an error occurred and was not handled within either the ReadXml or BuildRequest methods the error would bubble up to the Search method. Since this method does not handle any acceptations the error will then bubble up the stack trace. If this continues and the error is not handled within the application then the environment in which the application is running will notify the user running the application that an error occurred based on what type of application. Figure 1: No Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); return dt; } Generic Error Handling One simple way to add error handling is to catch all errors by default. If you examine the code in Figure 2, you will see a try-catch block. On April 6th 2010 Louis Lazaris clearly describes a Try Catch statement by defining both the Try and Catch aspects of the statement. “The try portion is where you would put any code that might throw an error. In other words, all significant code should go in the try section. The catch section will also hold code, but that section is not vital to the running of the application. So, if you removed the try-catch statement altogether, the section of code inside the try part would still be the same, but all the code inside the catch would be removed.” (Lazaris, 2010) He also states that all errors that occur in the try section cause it to stops the execution of the try section and redirects all execution to the catch section. The catch section receives an object containing information about the error that occurred so that they system can gracefully handle the error properly. When errors occur they commonly log them in some form. This form could be an email, database entry, web service call, log file, or just an error massage displayed to the user.  Depending on the error sometimes applications can recover, while others force an application to close. Figure 2: Generic Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (Exception ex) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; } Error Specific Error Handling Like the Generic Error Handling, Error Specific error handling allows for the catching of specific known errors that may occur. For example wrapping a try catch statement around a soap web service call would allow the application to handle any error that was generated by the soap web service. Now, if the systems wanted to send a message to the web service provider every time a soap error occurred but did not want to notify them if any other type of error occurred like a network time out issue. This would be varying tedious to accomplish using the General Error Handling methodology. This brings us to the use case for using the Error Specific error handling methodology.  The Error Specific Error handling methodology allows for the TryCatch statement to catch various types of errors depending on the type of error that occurred. In Figure 3, the code attempts to handle DataException differently compared to how it potentially handles all other errors. This allows for specific error handling for each type of known error, and still allows for error handling of any unknown error that my occur during the execution of the TryCatch statement. Figure 5: Error Specific Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (TimeoutException ex) { // Handle Timeout TimeoutException Only } catch (Exception) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; }

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• Silverlight Cream for March 28, 2010 -- #823

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Andy Beaulieu, Bill Reiss, jocelyn, Shawn Wildermuth, Cameron Albert, Shawn Oster, Alex Yakhnin, ondrejsv, Giorgetti Alessandro, Jeff Handley, SilverLaw, deepm, and Kyle McClellan. Shoutouts: If I've listed this before, it's worth another... Introduction to Prototyping with SketchFlow (twelve video series) and on the same page is Creating a Beehive Game with Behaviors in Blend 3 (ten video series) Shawn Oster announced his Slides + Code + Video from ‘An Introduction to Developing Applications for Microsoft Silverlight’ from MIX10 Tim Heuer announced earlier this week: Silverlight Client for Facebook updated for Silverlight 4 RC Nikhil Kothari announced the availability of his MIX10 Talk - Slides and Code András Velvárt backed up his great MIX09 effort with MIX10.Zoomery.com... everything in one DZ effort... thanks András! Andy Beaulieu posted his material for his Code Camp 13 in Waltham: Windows Phone: Silverlight for Casual Games From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MVVM - The Revolution Has Begun Michael Washington did an awesome tutorial on MVVM and Silverlight creating a simple Silverlight File Manager. The post has a link to the tutorial at CodeProject... great tutorial. Windows Phone 7 + Silverlight Performance Andy Beaulieu has a post up we should all bookmark... getting a handle on the graphics performance of our app on WP7. Great examples, and external links. Space Rocks game step 6: Keyboard handling Bill Reiss has a post up about keyboard input for the WP7 game he's building ... this is Episode 6 ... you're working along with him, right? Panoramic Navigation on Windows Phone 7 with No Code! jocelyn at InnovativeSingapore (I found this by way of Shawn's post), has a Panoramic Navigation template out there for WP7 for all of us to grab... great post about it too. My First WP7 Application Shawn Wildermuth has been playing with WP7 development and has his XBOX Game library app up on the emulator... all with source of course Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Game Cameron Albert built a web-based game called 'Shape Attack' and also did it for WP7 to compare the performance... check it out for yourself, but hey, it's game source for the phone... cool :) Changing the Onscreen Keyboard layout in Silverlight for Windows Phone using InputScope Shawn Oster has a cool post on changing the keyboard on WP7 to go along with what you're expecting the user to type... how cool is that?? Deep Zoom on WP7 Check out the quick work Alex Yakhnin made of putting DeepZoom on WP7... all source included. How to: Create a sketchy Siverlight GroupBox in Blend/SketchFlow ondrejsv has the xaml up to take Tim Greenfield's GroupBox control and insert it into SketchFlow. Silverlight / Castle Windsor – implementing a simple logging framework Giorgetti Alessandro posted about CastleWindsor for Silverlight, and a logging system inherited from LevelFilteredLogger in the absence of Log4Net. DomainDataSource in a ViewModel Jeff Handley responds to a common forum post about using DomainDataSource in a ViewModel. Read his comments on AutoLoad and ElementName Bindins. Digital Jugendstil TextEffect (Art Nouveau) - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a cool TagCloud demo and a UserControl he calls Art Nouveau up at the Expression Gallery... not for a business app, I don't think :) Configuring your DomainService for a Windows Phone 7 application deepm discusses RIA Services for WP7 and how to enable a WP7 app to communicate with a DomainService. Writing a Custom Filter or Parameter for DomainDataSource Kyle McClellan by way of Jeff Handley's blog, is discussing how to leverage the custom parameter types you defined in the previous version of RIA Services. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

  - by Daniel Moth

  Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• A temporary disagreement

  - by Tony Davis

  Last month, Phil Factor caused a furore amongst some MVPs with an article that attempted to offer simple advice to developers regarding the use of table variables, versus local and global temporary tables, in their code. Phil makes clear that the table variables do come with some fairly major limitations.no distribution statistics, no parallel query plans for queries that modify table variables.but goes on to suggest that for reasonably small-scale strategic uses, and with a bit of due care and testing, table variables are a "good thing". Not everyone shares his opinion; in fact, I imagine he was rather aghast to learn that there were those felt his article was akin to pulling the pin out of a grenade and tossing it into the database; table variables should be avoided in almost all cases, according to their advice, in favour of temp tables. In other words, a fairly major feature of SQL Server should be more-or-less 'off limits' to developers. The problem with temp tables is that, because they are scoped either in the procedure or the connection, it is easy to allow them to hang around for too long, eating up precious memory and bulking up the shared tempdb database. Unless they are explicitly dropped, global temporary tables, and local temporary tables created within a connection rather than within a stored procedure, will persist until the connection is closed or, with connection pooling, until the connection is reused. It's also quite common with ASP.NET applications to have connection leaks, as Bill Vaughn explains in his chapter in the "SQL Server Deep Dives" book, meaning that the web page exits without closing the connection object, maybe due to an error condition. This will then hang around in the heap for what might be hours before picked up by the garbage collector. Table variables are much safer in this regard, since they are batch-scoped and so are cleaned up automatically once the batch is complete, which also means that they are intuitive to use for the developer because they conform to scoping rules that are closer to those in procedural code. On the surface then, an ideal way to deal with issues related to tempdb memory hogging. So why did Phil qualify his recommendation to use Table Variables? This is another of those cases where, like scalar UDFs and table-valued multi-statement UDFs, developers can sometimes get into trouble with a relatively benign-looking feature, due to way it's been implemented in SQL Server. Once again the biggest problem is how they are handled internally, by the SQL Server query optimizer, which can make very poor choices for JOIN orders and so on, in the absence of statistics, especially when joining to tables with highly-skewed data. The resulting execution plans can be horrible, as will be the resulting performance. If the JOIN is to a large table, that will hurt. Ideally, Microsoft would simply fix this issue so that developers can't get burned in this way; they've been around since SQL Server 2000, so Microsoft has had a bit of time to get it right. As I commented in regard to UDFs, when developers discover issues like with such standard features, the database becomes an alien planet to them, where death lurks around each corner, and they continue to avoid these "killer" features years after the problems have been eventually resolved. In the meantime, what is the right approach? Is it to say "hammers can kill, don't ever use hammers", or is it to try to explain, as Phil's article and follow-up blog post have tried to do, what the feature was intended for, why care must be applied in its use, and so enable developers to make properly-informed decisions, without requiring them to delve deep into the inner workings of SQL Server? Cheers, Tony.

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• AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

  - by Daniel Moth

  Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

  - by user462779

  Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I were more intuitive

  - by pjohnson

  I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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• Three Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Today's blog post comes to us from John Bruswick! This post is an abridged version of John’s white paper in which he discusses three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.   By [email protected], Oracle Principal Sales Consultant Effective social collaboration is actionable, deeply contextual and inherently derives its value from business entities outside of itself. How does an organization begin the journey from traditional, siloed collaboration to natural, business entity based social collaboration? Successful enablement of enterprise social collaboration requires that organizations embrace the following tenets and understand that traditional collaborative functionality has inherent limits - it is innovation and integration in accordance with the following tenets that will provide net-new efficiency benefits. Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric - Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes.  This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants.  In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture. Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving - People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue.  The time to achieve resolution is referred to as "Solve Time".  Users have traditionally been forced to switch or "alt-tab" between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes.  The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving. Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office - Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record.  Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread.  This type of structured action may exist today within your organization's customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities. Excelling in the Unstructured Future We will always have to deal with unstructured collaborative processes within our organizations.  Regardless of the participants and nature of the collaborate process, two things are certain – the origination and end points are generally known and relate to a business entity, perhaps a customer, opportunity, order, shipping location, product or otherwise. Imagine the benefits if an organization's key business systems supported a social fabric, provided continuous context and extended the lifecycle around the collaborative decision making to include output into back office systems of record.   The technical hurdle to embracing optimal social collaboration would fall away, leaving the company with an opportunity to focus on and refine how processes were approached.  Time and resources previously required could then be reallocated to focusing on innovation to support competitive differentiation unique to your business. How can you achieve optimal social collaboration? Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration styles and integrates data from a variety of sources and business applications -- allowing you to achieve optimal social collaboration. Looking to learn more? Read John's white paper, where he discusses in further detail the three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise. 

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• Industry perspectives on managing content

  - by aahluwalia

  Earlier this week I was noodling over a topic for my first blog post. My intention for this blog is to bring a practitioner's perspective on ECM to the community; to share and collaborate on best practices and approaches that address today's business problems. Reviewing my past 14 years of experience with web technologies, I wondered what topic would serve as a good "conversation starter". During this time, I received a call from a friend who was seeking insights on how content management applies to specific industries. She approached me because she vaguely remembered that I had worked in the Health Insurance industry in the recent past. She wanted me to tell her about the specific business needs of this industry. She was in for quite a surprise as she found out that I had spent the better part of a decade managing content within the Health Insurance industry and I discovered a great topic for my first blog post! I offer some insights from Health Insurance and invite my fellow practitioners to share their insights from other industries. What does content management mean to these industries? What can solution providers be aware of when offering solutions to these industries? The United States health care system relies heavily on private health insurance, which is the primary source of coverage for approximately 58% Americans. In the late 19th century, "accident insurance" began to be available, which operated much like modern disability insurance. In the late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs. The first thing a solution provider must be aware of about the Health Insurance industry is that it tends to be transaction intensive. They are the ones who manage and administer our health plans and process our claims when we visit our health care providers. It helps to keep in mind that they are in the business of delivering health insurance and not technology. You may find the mindset conservative in comparison to the IT industry, however, the Health Insurance industry has benefited and will continue to benefit from the efficiency that technology brings to traditionally paper-driven processes. We are all aware of the impact that Healthcare reform bill has had a significant impact on the Health Insurance industry. They are under a great deal of pressure to explore ways to reduce their administrative costs and increase operational efficiency. Overall, administrative costs of health insurance include the insurer's cost to administer the health plan, the costs borne by employers, health-care providers, governments and individual consumers. Inefficiencies plague health insurance, owing largely to the absence of standardized processes across the industry. To achieve this, industry leaders have come together to establish standards and invest in initiatives to help their healthcare provider partners transition to the next generation of healthcare technology. The move to online services and paperless explanation of benefits are some manifestations of technological advancements in health insurance. Several companies have adopted Toyota's LEAN methodology or Six Sigma principles to improve quality, reduce waste and excessive costs, thereby increasing the value of their plan offerings. A growing number of health insurance companies have transformed their business systems in the past decade alone and adopted some form of content management to reduce the costs involved in administering health plans. The key strategy has been to convert paper documents and forms into electronic formats, automate the content development process and securely distribute content to various audiences via diverse marketing channels, including web and mobile. Enterprise content management solutions can enable document capture of claim forms, manage digital assets, integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, build Business Process Management (BPM) processes, define retention and disposition instructions to comply with state and federal regulations and allow eBusiness and Marketing departments to develop and deliver web content to multiple websites, mobile devices and portals. Content can be shared securely within and outside the organization using Information Rights Management.  At the end of the day, solution providers who can translate strategic goals into solutions that maximize process automation, increase ease of use and minimize IT overhead are likely to be successful in today's health insurance environment.

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• Normalisation and 'Anima notitia copia' (Soul of the Database)

  - by Phil Factor

  (A Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk) The other day, I was staring  at the sys.syslanguages  table in SQL Server with slightly-raised eyebrows . I’d just been reading Chris Date’s  interesting book ‘SQL and Relational Theory’. He’d made the point that you’re not necessarily doing relational database operations by using a SQL Database product.  The same general point was recently made by Dino Esposito about ASP.NET MVC.  The use of ASP.NET MVC doesn’t guarantee you a good application design: It merely makes it possible to test it. The way I’d describe the sentiment in both cases is ‘you can hit someone over the head with a frying-pan but you can’t call it cooking’. SQL enables you to create relational databases. However,  even if it smells bad, it is no crime to do hideously un-relational things with a SQL Database just so long as it’s necessary and you can tell the difference; not only that but also only if you’re aware of the risks and implications. Naturally, I’ve never knowingly created a database that Codd would have frowned at, but around the edges are interfaces and data feeds I’ve written  that have caused hissy fits amongst the Normalisation fundamentalists. Part of the problem for those who agonise about such things  is the misinterpretation of Atomicity.  An atomic value is one for which, in the strange virtual universe you are creating in your database, you don’t have any interest in any of its component parts.  If you aren’t interested in the electrons, neutrinos,  muons,  or  taus, then  an atom is ..er.. atomic. In the same way, if you are passed a JSON string or XML, and required to store it in a database, then all you need to do is to ask yourself, in your role as Anima notitia copia (Soul of the database) ‘have I any interest in the contents of this item of information?’.  If the answer is ‘No!’, or ‘nequequam! Then it is an atomic value, however complex it may be.  After all, you would never have the urge to store the pixels of images individually, under the misguided idea that these are the atomic values would you?  I would, of course,  ask the ‘Anima notitia copia’ rather than the application developers, since there may be more than one application, and the applications developers may be designing the application in the absence of full domain knowledge, (‘or by the seat of the pants’ as the technical term used to be). If, on the other hand, the answer is ‘sure, and we want to index the XML column’, then we may be in for some heavy XML-shredding sessions to get to store the ‘atomic’ values and ensure future harmony as the application develops. I went back to looking at the sys.syslanguages table. It has a months column with the months in a delimited list January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December This is an ordered list. Wicked? I seem to remember that this value, like shortmonths and days, is treated as a ‘thing’. It is merely passed off to an external  C++ routine in order to format a date in a particular language, and never accessed directly within the database. As far as the database is concerned, it is an atomic value.  There is more to normalisation than meets the eye.

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