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• Ubuntu 12.04 Bootloader failed to install

  - by Chris

  Sorry about the excessively long question, but I figured giving more information would be better. I recently bought a new desktop for myself, running Windows 7. It has two hard drives, and I wanted to install Ubuntu on a small partition on the second hard drive. I created 25GB "free space" in Windows and ran a LiveCD install. I wanted to select the install options myself but accidentally selected "Install alongside Windows 7," but it seemed to pick up the free space and installed itself there as I wanted it to. However, I was told that the bootloader installation had failed. I chose to "Cancel installation," leaving my computer unable to boot. I wiped my computer and reinstalled Windows. After that, I tried installing Ubuntu through Windows using WUBI, once using files from my LiveCD and once downloading everything again. Both times the install succeeded, but both times when I restarted and tried to load Ubuntu, it gave me an error - wubildr.mbr was corrupt or missing. I checked in Windows - it was indeed present on the C:\ drive. I went back to the LiveCD installation, this time going the custom options route. I assigned 16GB to an Ext4 journaling file system and 10GB to a swap file. I got the same bootloader error as before. Being prompted to select a different partition to install the bootloader to, I first tried the partition Ubuntu was installed on. A window came up saying that the install had succeeded, but a second window gave me the same error and choices as before. I went through every single option it gave me, including the Windows partition and the hard drives themselves (dev/sda, dev/sdb). Same result. I then chose to not install a bootloader. Windows still works fine, and I assume Ubuntu has installed but is unbootable. Knowing that my computer could potentially brick itself again - and, this time around, with a lot of data to lose and hassle to go through if I mess it up - I really don't want to do anything without some advice. So I'll ask this: a) Why did the bootloader fail to install? Can I fix the error and install Ubuntu fresh? b) Is there any way to get around the error, install the bootloader, and point it towards an existing installation of Ubuntu? c) Is there a quicker and easier solution I might have missed? EDIT: Thanks for the tip, AthloX. After testing the liveCD in Virtualbox with no installation problems, I looked around for some alternate bootloaders but had no success. I attempted another install, which installed the bootloader and Ubuntu just fine but bricked Windows 7. I wiped both hard disks clean, including some "System Reserved" partitions I hadn't noticed before, before re-installing Windows 7 on one hard drive and immediately afterwards installing Ubuntu on the other. Now the computer boots into Windows, but I can pop into the BIOS at startup to boot into Ubunbtu via it's bootloader, and I'm guessing it'll only take a bit of poking at the BIOS to swap the load order. Many thanks!

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• Is SugarCRM really adequate for custom development (or adequate at all)? [closed]

  - by dukeofgaming

  Have you used SugarCRM for custom development successfully?, if so, have you done it programmatically or through the Module Builder? Were you successful? If not, why? I used SugarCRM for a project about two years ago, I ran into errors from the very installation, having to hack the actual installation file to deploy the software in the server and other erros that I can't recall now. Two years after, I'm picking it up for a project once again. I'm feeling like I should have developed the whole thing from scratch myself. Some examples: I couldn't install it in the server (again). I had to install it locally, then copy the files and database over to the server and manually edit the config file. Constantly getting deployment errors from the module builder. One reason is SugarCRM keeps creating a record in the upgrade_history table for a file that does not exist, I keep deleting such record and it keeps coming back corrupt. I get other deployment errors, but have not figured them out. then I have to rollback all files and database to try again. I deleted a custom module with relationships, the relationships stayed in the other modules and cannot be deleted anymore, PHP warnings all over the place. Quick create for custom modules does not appear, hack needed. Its whole cache directory is a joke, permanent data/files are stored there. The module builder interface disappears required fields. Edit the wrong thing, module builder won't deploy again, then pray Quick Repair and/or Rebuild Relationships do the trick. My impression of SugarCRM now is that, regardless of its pretty exterior and apparent functionality, it is a very low quality piece of software. This even scared me more: http://amplicate.com/hate/sugarcrm; a quote: I wis this info had been available when I tried to implement it 2 years ago... I searched high and low and the only info I found was positive. Yes, it's a piece of crap. The community edition was full of bugs... nothing worked. Essentially I got fired for implementing it. I'm glad though, because now I work for myself, am much happier and make more money... so, I should really thank SugarCRM for sucking so much I guess! I figured that perhaps some of you have had similar experiences, and have either sticked with SugarCRM or moved on to another solution. I'm very interested in knowing what your resolutions were -or your current situations are- to make up my own mind, since the project I'm working on is long term and I'm feeling SugarCRM will be more an obstacle than an aid. After further failed attempts to continue using this software I continued to stumble upon dead-ends when using the module editor, I could only recover from this errors by using version control. We are now moving on to a custom implementation using Symfony; perhaps if we were using it with its out-of-the-box modules we would have sticked with it.

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• Stay on Schedule in Chrome with DayHiker

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you keep your schedule and tasks in Google Calendar?  Here’s a handy extension for Google Chrome that can keep you on top of your appointments without having to open Google Calendar in another tab. Integrate Google Calendar with Chrome DayHiker is a handy extension for Google Chrome that can help you stay on schedule in your browser.  Desktop applications typically can keep you notified easier with popups or alerts, but webapps require you to visit them to view your information.  DayHiker takes the best of both, and can make your Google Calendar work more like a desktop application. To get started, open the DayHiker page from the Chrome Extensions Gallery (link below), and click Install.  Confirm you wish to install it at the prompt. Now you’ll have a new extension button in your Chrome toolbar.  Click the calendar icon to view your Google Calendar.  You’ll need to be signed into your Google account for your calendar to display; click the key icon to select your account if it doesn’t show your appointments automatically. If you’re signed into multiple Google accounts, such as your public Gmail and a Google Apps account, you can select the calendar you wish and click Continue. Now you can quickly see your upcoming appointments.  Simply hover over the icon to see your upcoming events.  Or, just glance at it to see if there are any appointments coming up, as the indicator icon will change colors to show how long you have until your next appointment. Click the icon to see more information about your appointments. Or, click the Add link to add a new appointment.  If you need to edit the appointment details, click Edit Details and the appointment will open in Google Calendar for you to edit. You can also view and manage your tasks in Google Calendar.  Click the checkmark icon, and then add or check-off tasks directly from the extension pane. You can also set an alarm clock in DayHiker.  Click the green circle icon, and then enter the time for the alarm to go off.  Strangely it will only chime if the extension pane is left open, so if you click anywhere else in the browser or even switch to another program it will not chime.   If you’d like to customize DayHiker’s settings, right-click on it and select Options, or select Options in the Chrome Extensions page.  Here you can customize your badges and the DayHiker icon, or enter a custom domain for your Google Apps Pro calendar.   Conclusion If you rely on Google Calendar to stay on top of your schedule, DayHiker can help you stay scheduled and know what’s coming up.  We wish DayHiker supported multiple calendars so we could combine our Google Apps calendars with our personal Google Calendar, but even still, it is a very useful tool.  Whether you’re a tightly scheduled person or just like to jot down to-dos and keep track of them, this extension will help you do this efficiently with familiar Google tools. Link Download DayHiker from the Chrome Extensions Gallery Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Configure Disk Defragmenter Schedule in Windows 7 or VistaSchedule Updates for Windows Media CenterOpen Multiple Sites Without Reopening the Menus in FirefoxFind a Website’s Actual Location with Chrome FlagsSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single Click 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 Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good

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• News you can use, PeopleTools gems at OpenWorld 2012

  - by PeopleTools Strategy

  Here are some of the sessions which may not have caught your eyes during your scheduling of events you would like to attend at this year's Open World! CON9183 PeopleSoft Technology Roadmap Jeff Robbins Mon, Oct 1 4:45 PM Moscone West, Room 3002/4 Jeff's session is always very well attended. Come to hear, and see, what's going to be delivered in the new release and get some thoughts on where PeopleTools and the industry is heading. CON9186 Delivering a Ground-Breaking User Interface with PeopleTools Matt Haavisto Steve Elcock Wed, Oct 3 3:30 PM Moscone West, Room 3009 This session will be wonderfully engaging for participants.  As part of our demonstration, audience members will be able to interact live and real-time with our demo using their smart phones and tablets as if you are users of the system. CON9188 A Great User Experience via PeopleSoft Applications Portal Matt Haavisto Jim Marion Pramod Agrawal Mon, Oct 1 12:15 PM Moscone West, Room 3009 This session covers not only the PeopleSoft Portal, but new features like Workcenters and Dashboards, and how they all work together to form the PeopleSoft ecosystem. CON9192 Implementing a PeopleSoft Maintenance Strategy with My Update Manager Mike Thompson Mike Krajicek Tue, Oct 2 1:15 PM Moscone West, Room 3009 The LCM development team will show Oracle's My Update Manager for PeopleSoft and how it drastically simplifies deciding what updates are required for your specific environment. CON9193 Understanding PeopleSoft Maintenance Tools & How They Fit Together Mike Krajicek Wed, Oct 3 10:15 AM Moscone West, Room 3002/4 Learn about the portfolio of maintenance tools including some of the latest enhancements such as Oracle's My Update Manager for PeopleSoft, Application Data Sets, and the PeopleSoft Test Framework, and see what they can do for you. CON9200 PeopleTools Product Team Panel Discussion Jeff Robbins Willie Suh Virad Gupta Ravi Shankar Mike Krajicek Wed, Oct 3 5:00 PM Moscone West, Room 3009 Attend this session to engage in an open discussion with key members of Oracle's PeopleTools senior management team. You will be able to ask questions, hear their thoughts, and gain their insight into the PeopleTools product direction. CON9205 Securing Your PeopleSoft Integration Infrastructure Greg Kelly Keith Collins Tue, Oct 2 10:15 AM Moscone West, Room 3011 This session, with the senior integration developer, will outline Oracle's best practices for securing your integration infrastructure so that you know your web services and REST services are as secure as the rest of your PeopleSoft environment. CON9210 Performance Tuning for the PeopleSoft Administrator Tim Bower David Kurtz Mon, Oct 1 10:45 AM Moscone West, Room 3009 Meet long time technical consultants with deep knowledge of system tuning, Tim Bower of the Center of Excellence and David Kurtz, author of "PeopleSoft for the Oracle DBA". System administrators new to tuning a PeopleSoft environment as well as seasoned experts will come away with new techniques that will help them improve the performance of their PeopleSoft system. CON9055 Advanced Management of Oracle PeopleSoft with Oracle Enterprise Manager Greg Kelly Milten Garia Greg Bouras Thurs Oct 4 12:45 PM Moscone West, Room 3009 This promises to be a really interesting session as Milten Garia from CSU discusses lessons learned during the implementation of Oracle's Enterprise Manager with the PeopleSoft plug-in across a multi campus environment. There are some surprising things about Solaris 10 and the Bourne shell. Some creative work by the Unix administrators so the well tried scripts and system replication processes were largely unaffected. CON8932 New Functional PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line of Business User Jeff Robbins Tues, Oct 2 5:00 PM Moscone West, Room 3007 Using PeopleTools 8.5x capabilities like: related content, embedded help, pivot grids, hover-over, and more, Jeff will discuss how these can deliver business value and innovation which will positively impact your business without the high costs associated with upgrading your PeopleSoft applications. Check out a more detailed list here. We look forward to meeting you all there!

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• Multidimensional Thinking–24 Hours of Pass: Celebrating Women in Technology

  - by smisner

  It’s Day 1 of #24HOP and it’s been great to participate in this event with so many women from all over the world in one long training-fest. The SQL community has been abuzz on Twitter with running commentary which is fun to watch while listening to the current speaker. If you missed the fun today because you’re busy with all that work you’ve got to do – don’t despair. All sessions are recorded and will be available soon. Keep an eye on the 24 Hours of Pass page for details. And the fun’s not over today. Rather than run 24 hours consecutively, #24HOP is now broken down into 12-hours over two days, so check out the schedule to see if there’s a session that interests you and fits your schedule. I’m pleased to announce that my business colleague Erika Bakse ( Blog | Twitter) will be presenting on Day 2 – her debut presentation for a PASS event. (And I’m also pleased to say she’s my daughter!) Multidimensional Thinking: The Presentation My contribution to this lineup of terrific speakers was Multidimensional Thinking. Here’s the abstract: “Whether you’re developing Analysis Services cubes or creating PowerPivot workbooks, you need to get into a multidimensional frame of mind to produce a model that best enables users to answer their business questions on their own. Many database professionals struggle initially with multidimensional models because the data modeling process is much different than the one they use to produce traditional, third normal form databases. In this session, I’ll introduce you to the terminology of multidimensional modeling and step through the process of translating business requirements into a viable model.” If you watched the presentation and want a copy of the slides, you can download a copy here. And you’re welcome to download the slides even if you didn’t watch the presentation, but they’ll make more sense if you did! Kimball All the Way There’s only so much I can cover in the time allotted, but I hope that I succeeded in my attempt to build a foundation that prepares you for starting out in business intelligence. One of my favorite resources that will get into much more detail about all kinds of scenarios (well beyond the basics!) is The Data Warehouse Toolkit (Second Edition) by Ralph Kimball. Anything from Kimball or the Kimball Group is worth reading. Kimball material might take reading and re-reading a few times before it makes sense. From my own experience, I found that I actually had to just build my first data warehouse using dimensional modeling on faith that I was going the right direction because it just didn’t click with me initially. I’ve had years of practice since then and I can say it does get easier with practice. The most important thing, in my opinion, is that you simply must prototype a lot and solicit user feedback, because ultimately the model needs to make sense to them. They will definitely make sure you get it right! Schema Generation One question came up after the presentation about whether we use SQL Server Management Studio or Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to build the tables for the dimensional model. My answer? It really doesn’t matter how you create the tables. Use whatever method that you’re comfortable with. But just so happens that it IS possible to set up your design in BIDS as part of an Analysis Services project and to have BIDS generate the relational schema for you. I did a Webcast last year called Building a Data Mart with Integration Services that demonstrated how to do this. Yes, the subject was Integration Services, but as part of that presentation, I showed how to leverage Analysis Services to build the tables, and then I showed how to use Integration Services to load those tables. I blogged about this presentation in September 2010 and included downloads of the project that I used. In the blog post, I explained that I missed a step in the demonstration. Oops. Just as an FYI, there were two more Webcasts to finish the story begun with the data – Accelerating Answers with Analysis Services and Delivering Information with Reporting Services. If you want to just cut to the chase and learn how to use Analysis Services to build the tables, you can see the Using the Schema Generation Wizard topic in Books Online.

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• My Take on Hadoop World 2011

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  I’m sure some of you have read pieces about Hadoop World and I did see some headlines which were somewhat, shall we say, interesting? I thought the keynote by Larry Feinsmith of JP Morgan Chase & Co was one of the highlights of the conference for me. The reason was very simple, he addressed some real use cases outside of internet and ad platforms. The following are my notes, since the keynote was recorded I presume you can go and look at Hadoopworld.com at some point… On the use cases that were mentioned: ETL – how can I do complex data transformation at scale Doing Basel III liquidity analysis Private banking – transaction filtering to feed [relational] data marts Common Data Platform – a place to keep data that is (or will be) valuable some day, to someone, somewhere 360 Degree view of customers – become pro-active and look at events across lines of business. For example make sure the mortgage folks know about direct deposits being stopped into an account and ensure the bank is pro-active to service the customer Treasury and Security – Global Payment Hub [I think this is really consolidation of data to cross reference activity across business and geographies] Data Mining Bypass data engineering [I interpret this as running a lot of a large data set rather than on samples] Fraud prevention – work on event triggers, say a number of failed log-ins to the website. When they occur grab web logs, firewall logs and rules and start to figure out who is trying to log in. Is this me, who forget his password, or is it someone in some other country trying to guess passwords Trade quality analysis – do a batch analysis or all trades done and run them through an analysis or comparison pipeline One of the key requests – if you can say it like that – was for vendors and entrepreneurs to make sure that new tools work with existing tools. JPMC has a large footprint of BI Tools and Big Data reporting and tools should work with those tools, rather than be separate. Security and Entitlement – how to protect data within a large cluster from unwanted snooping was another topic that came up. I thought his Elephant ears graph was interesting (couldn’t actually read the points on it, but the concept certainly made some sense) and it was interesting – when asked to show hands – how the audience did not (!) think that RDBMS and Hadoop technology would overlap completely within a few years. Another interesting session was the session from Disney discussing how Disney is building a DaaS (Data as a Service) platform and how Hadoop processing capabilities are mixed with Database technologies. I thought this one of the best sessions I have seen in a long time. It discussed real use case, where problems existed, how they were solved and how Disney planned some of it. The planning focused on three things/phases: Determine the Strategy – Design a platform and evangelize this within the organization Focus on the people – Hire key people, grow and train the staff (and do not overload what you have with new things on top of their day-to-day job), leverage a partner with experience Work on Execution of the strategy – Implement the platform Hadoop next to the other technologies and work toward the DaaS platform This kind of fitted with some of the Linked-In comments, best summarized in “Think Platform – Think Hadoop”. In other words [my interpretation], step back and engineer a platform (like DaaS in the Disney example), then layer the rest of the solutions on top of this platform. One general observation, I got the impression that we have knowledge gaps left and right. On the one hand are people looking for more information and details on the Hadoop tools and languages. On the other I got the impression that the capabilities of today’s relational databases are underestimated. Mostly in terms of data volumes and parallel processing capabilities or things like commodity hardware scale-out models. All in all I liked this conference, it was great to chat with a wide range of people on Oracle big data, on big data, on use cases and all sorts of other stuff. Just hope they get a set of bigger rooms next time… and yes, I hope I’m going to be back next year!

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• PHP and Ruby: how to leverage both? and, is it worth it?

  - by dukeofgaming

  As you might have noticed from the title, this is not a "PHP or Ruby", or a "PHP vs. Ruby" question. This is a question on how to leverage PHP + Ruby in the same business. I myself am a PHP developer, I love the language because of its convenience and I specially love the ecosystem of resources that surround it: Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Symfony2, Doctrine2, etc. However, the language itself can be a little disappointing sometimes. OTOH, Ruby looks like a very beautiful language and —from studying it superficially in several aspects— I could say it is leaner than Python as a language per se. However, from what I've seen there is pretty much only RoR making noise, and I don't like RoR so much (mainly because its model layer). As Co-CEO and CTO at my company I'm trying to think outside of the box since I want to start to focus on the human side of technology and see if its sane to use both PHP and Ruby. Here are some random thoughts: Ruby folk seem to be generally better suited programmers than PHP folk (in terms of averages), I know the previous statement is somewhat baloney because very good and well architected PHP can be written, but I'd say the Ruby programmer culture is better than PHP's. The thing about Ruby is that it seems better suited for rapid development, I don't really know if this is only the case for RoR, but I do know that there are certain practices (perhaps not so good) like monkey patching that let business needs be satified quicker. From a marketing point of view (yep, sometimes you need to leverage the marketing BS for the sake of your company) Ruby seems better while PHP carries some stigmas. PHP 5.4 is bringing traits, and that is better/cleaner than mixins. That could really make PHP as lean as Ruby —or more— for certain stuff. Now, concretely, my questions: Would a PHP programmer want to learn Ruby?, I know I do, but conversely, would a Ruby programmer want to learn PHP?. What kinds of projects or situations would be better suited for Ruby that are not suited for PHP?. What is the actual ecosystem of Ruby?, aside from RoR, I have not seen other hyped technologies/frameworks (I've seen RSpec, but I confess being a total noob on what BDD really consists of and its implications). Supposing there are a certain type of projects ideal for Ruby, would there be a moment that its better to move it to PHP?. I know PHP can handle lots of stuff, but I've read that Ruby has its limitations when scaling (or is that RoR?, or is that baloney for both?). Finally and most importantly, would it be sane to maintain projects in two languages?, or is that just stupid. As I said, it looks like Ruby is leaner on the short term and that can make a project happen and succeed, but I'm not so sure about that on the long run. I'm looking for insights mainly from people that know well the strengths and weaknesses of the languages —preferably both of them— and Ruby's ecosystem in real practice, meaning: frameworks and applications like the ones I quoted from PHP's ecosystem. Best regards and thanks for your time.

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• What Counts For a DBA: Ego

  - by Louis Davidson

  Leaving aside, for a second, Freud’s psychoanalytical definitions, the term “ego” generally refers to a person’s sense of self, and their self-esteem. In casual usage, however, it usually appears in the adjectival form, “egotistical” (most often followed by “jerk”). You don’t need to be a jerk to be a DBA; humility is important. However, ego is important too. A good DBA needs a certain degree of self-esteem…a belief and pride in what he or she can do better than anyone else can. The ideal DBA needs to be humble enough to admit when they are wrong but egotistical enough to know when they are right, and to stand up for that knowledge and make their voice heard. In most organizations, the DBA team is seriously outnumbered by headstrong developers and clock driven managers, and “great” DBAs will often be outnumbered by…well…the not so great. In order to be heard in this environment, a DBA will not only need to be very skilled, but will also need a healthy dose of ego. As Freud might have put it, the unconscious desire of the DBA (the id) is for iron-fist control over their databases, and code that runs in them. However, the ego moderates this desire, seeking to “satisfy the id in realistic ways that, in the long term, bring benefit rather than grief“. In other words, the ego understands the need to exert a measure of control and self-belief, but also to tolerate and play nicely with developers and other DBAs. The trick, naturally, is learning how to be heard when it is important, but also to make everyone around you welcome that input, even when you have to be bold to make the “I know what I am talking about, and you…well…not so much” decisions. Consider a baseball team, bottom of the ninth inning of the championship game, man on first and down one run. Almost anyone on that team will have the ability to hit a home run, but only one or two will have the iron belief that they can pull it off in this critical, end-game situation. The player you need in this situation is the one who has passionately gone the extra mile preparing for just this moment, is bursting at the seams with self-confidence, and can look the coach in the eye and state, boldly, “Put me in, I am your best bet“. Likewise, on those occasions when high customer demand coincides with copious system errors, and panic is bubbling just beneath the surface, you don’t need the minimally qualified support person, armed with the “reboot and hope” technique (though that sometimes works!). You need the DBA who steps up and says, “Put me in” and has the skill and tenacity to back up those words and to fix the pinpoint and fix the problem, whatever it takes, while keeping customers and managers happy. Of course, the egotistical DBA will happily spend hours telling you how great they are at their job, and how brilliantly they put out a previous fire, and this is no guarantee that they can deliver. However, if an otherwise-humble DBA looks you in the eye and says, “I can do it”, then hear them out. Sometimes, this burst of ego will be exactly what’s required.

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• Java in Flux: Utopia or Deuteranopia?

  - by Tori Wieldt

  What a difference a year makes, indeed. Steve Harris, Senior VP, App Server Dev, Oracle and Adam Messinger, VP, Fusion Middleware Group, Oracle presented an informative keynote at the TheServerSide Java Symposium today. With a title "Java in Flux: Utopia or Deuteranopia?" you know things are going to be interesting (see Aeon Flux if you don't get the title reference).What a YearThey started with a little background, explaining that the reactions to Oracle's acquisition of Sun (and therefore Java) one year ago varied greatly, from "Freak Out!" to "Don't Panic." From the Oracle perspective, being the steward of and key contributor to Java requires a lot of sausage making.  They admitted to Oracle's fair share of Homer Simpson-esque "D'oh" moments in the past year, which was complicated by Oracle's communication style.   "Oracle has a tradition has a saying a few things and sticking by then, in contrast to Sun who was much more open," Adam explained. "We laid out the Java roadmap and are executing on it, and we hope that speaks to our commitment."Java SEAdam talked about having a long term perspective on the Java language (20+ years), letting ideas mature in more experimental languages, then bringing them into Java. Current priorities include: JVM convergence (getting the best features of JRockit into Hotspot); support of parallel/multi-core programming, and of course, all the improvements in JDK7. The JDK7 Developer Preview is underway (please download now and report bugs!). The Oracle development team is also working on Lambda and modularity (Jigsaw) for SE 8. Less certain, but also under discussion are improvements for Java SE 9. Adam is thinking of it as a "back to basics" release. He mentioned reworking JNI, improving data integration and improved device support.Java EE To provide context about Java EE, Steve said Java EE was great at getting businesses on the internet. The success of Java EE resulted in an incredible expansion of the middleware marketplace for developers and vendors.  But with success, came more. Java EE kept piling on capabilities, but that created excess baggage.  Doing simple things was no longer so simple. That's where Java community is so valuable: "When Java EE was too complex and heavyweight, many people were happy to tell us what we were doing wrong and popularize solutions," Steve explained. Because of that feedback, the Java EE teams focused on making things simple again: POJOs and annotations, and leveraging changes in Java SE.  Steve said that "innovation doesn't happen in expert groups, it happens on the ground where developers are solving problems," and platform stewards need to pay attention and take advantage of changes that are taking place.Enter the Cloud "Developers are restless, they want cloud functionality from their own IT dept" Steve explained. With the cloud, the scope of problem has expanded to include the data center itself, with multiple tenants. To move forward, existing APIs in Java EE need to be updated to be tenant-aware, service-enabled, and EE needs to support various styles of deployment. The goal is to get all that done in Java EE 8.Adam questioned Steve about timing and schedule. "Yes, the schedule is aggressive, but it'll work" Steve said. Then Adam asked about modularization. If Java SE 8 comes out at the end of 2012, when can Java EE deliver modularization? Steve suggested that key stakeholders can come with up some pre-SE 8 agreement on how to expose the metadata about modules. He then alluded to Mark Reinhold and John Duimovich's keynote at EclipseCON next week. Stay tuned.Evil Master PlanIn conclusion, Adam finally admitted to Oracle's Evil Master Plan: 1) Invest in and improve Java SE and EE 2) Collaborate with the community 3) Broaden the marketplace for Java development. Bwaaaaaaaaahahaha! <rubs hands together>Key LinksJDK7 Developer Preview  http://jdk7.java.net/preview/Oracle Technology Network http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.htmlTheServerSide Java Symposium  http://javasymposium.techtarget.com/"Utopia or Deuteranopia?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_Flux

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• Why SQL Developer Rocks for the Advanced User Too

  - by thatjeffsmith

  While SQL Developer may be ‘perfect for Oracle beginners,’ that doesn’t preclude advanced and intermediate users from getting their fair share of toys! I’ve been working with Oracle since the 7.3.4 days, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that the WAY an ‘old timer’ uses a tool like SQL Developer is radically different than the ‘beginner.’ If you’ve been reluctant to use SQL Developer because it’s a GUI, give me a few minutes to try to convince you it’s worth a second (or third) look. 1. Help when you want it, and only when you want it One of the biggest gripes any user has with a piece of software is when said software can’t get out of it’s own way. When you’re typing in a word processor, sometimes you can do without the grammar and spelling checks, the offer to auto-complete your words, and all of the additional mark-up. This drives folks to programs like Notepad++ and vi. You can disable the code insight feature so you can type unmolested by SQL Developer’s attempt to auto-complete your object names. Now, if you happen to come across a long or hard to spell object name, you can still invoke the feature on demand using Ctrl+Spacebar Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) 2. Automatic File Tracking SQL*Minus is nice. Vi is cool. Notepad++ has a lot of features I like. But not too many editors offer automatic logging of changes to your files without having to setup a source control system. I was doing some work on my login.sql. I’m not doing anything crazy, but seeing what I had done in previous iterations was helpful. Now imagine how nice it would be to have this available for your l,000+ line scripts! Track your scripts as they change, no setup required! 3. Extend the Functionality Know SQL and XML? Wish SQL Developer did JUST a little bit more? Build your own extensions. You can have custom context menus and object pages in just a few minutes. This is an example of lazy developers writing code that write code. 4. Get Your Money’s Worth You’ve licensed Enterprise Edition. You got your Diagnostic and Tuning packs. Now start using them! Not everyone has access to Enterprise Manager, especially developers. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need help with troubleshooting and optimizing poorly performing SQL statements. ASH, AWR, Real-Time SQL Monitoring and the SQL Tuning Advisor are built into the Reports and Worksheet. Yes you could make the package calls, but that’s a whole lot of typing, and I’d rather just get to the results. 5. Profile, Debug, & Unit Testing PLSQL An Interactive Development Environment (IDE) built by the same folks that own the programming language (Hello – Oracle PLSQL!) should be complete. It should ‘hug’ the developer and empower them to churn out programs that work, run fast, and are easy to maintain. Write it, test it, debug it, and tune it. When you’re running your programs and you just want to see the data that’s returned, that shouldn’t require any special settings or workaround to make it happen either. Magic! And a whole lot more… I could go on and talk about the support for things like DataPump, RMAN, and DBMS_SCHEDULER, but you’re experts and you’re plenty busy. If you think SQL Developer is falling short somewhere, I want you to let us know about it.

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• Ubuntu Server 12 not spawning a serial ttyS0 when running on Xen

  - by segfaultreloaded

  I have this problem on more than one host, so the specific hardware is not an issue. Bare metal Ubuntu 12 is not creating a login process on the only serial port, in the default configuration. The serial port works correctly with the firmware. It works correctly with Grub2. I have even connected the serial line to 2 different external client boxes, so the problem is neither the hardware nor the remote client. When finally booted, the system fails to create the login process. root@xenpro3:~# ps ax | grep tty 1229 tty4 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty4 1233 tty5 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty5 1239 tty2 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty2 1241 tty3 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty3 1245 tty6 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty6 1403 tty1 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1 1996 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep --color=auto tty root@xenpro3:~# dmesg | grep tty [ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-30-generic root=/dev/mapper/xenpro3-root ro console=ttyS0,115200n8 [ 0.000000] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-30-generic root=/dev/mapper/xenpro3-root ro console=ttyS0,115200n8 [ 0.000000] console [ttyS0] enabled [ 2.160986] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A [ 2.203396] serial8250: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A [ 2.263296] 00:08: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A [ 2.323102] 00:09: ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A root@xenpro3:~# uname -a Linux xenpro3 3.2.0-30-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 24 16:52:48 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux root@xenpro3:~# I have tried putting a ttyS0.conf file in /etc/initab, which solves the problem bare metal but I still cannot get the serial port to work when booting Ubuntu on top of Xen, as domain 0. My serial line output looks like this, when booting Xen /dev/ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A * Exporting directories for NFS kernel daemon... [ OK ] * Starting NFS kernel daemon [ OK ] SSL tunnels disabled, see /etc/default/stunnel4 [ 18.654627] XENBUS: Unable to read cpu state [ 18.659631] XENBUS: Unable to read cpu state [ 18.664398] XENBUS: Unable to read cpu state [ 18.669248] XENBUS: Unable to read cpu state * Starting Xen daemons [ OK ] mountall: Disconnected from Plymouth At this point, the serial line is no longer connected to a process. Xen itself is running just fine. Dmesg gives me a long list of [ 120.236841] init: ttyS0 main process ended, respawning [ 120.239717] ttyS0: LSR safety check engaged! [ 130.240265] init: ttyS0 main process (1631) terminated with status 1 [ 130.240294] init: ttyS0 main process ended, respawning [ 130.242970] ttyS0: LSR safety check engaged! which is no surprise because I see root@xenpro3:~# ls -l /dev/ttyS? crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 64 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS0 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 65 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS1 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 66 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS2 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 67 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS3 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 68 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS4 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 69 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS5 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 70 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS6 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 71 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS7 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 72 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS8 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 73 Nov 7 14:04 /dev/ttyS9 If I manually change the group of /dev/ttyS0 to dialout, it gets changed back. I have made no changes to the default udev rules, so I cannot see where this problem is coming from. Sincerely, John

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• Application Performance: The Best of the Web

  - by Michaela Murray

  Wisdom A deep understanding and realization […] resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions. It is also the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action. - Wikipedia We’re writing a book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it. We know that there’s a huge amount of web developer wisdom that never gets shared, and we want to find those golden nuggets of knowledge and experience, and make sure everyone can learn from them. Right now, we want to find out about your top tips, hard-won lessons, and sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing application performance problems. If you work with .NET and SQL, even better – a lot of application performance relies on the interaction with the database, so we want to hear from you! “How Do You Want Me To Be Involved?” Right! Details! We want you, our most excellent readers, to email us with the Best Advice you would give to other developers for getting the best performance out of their applications. It doesn’t matter if your advice is for newbies or veterans, .NET or SQL – so long as it’s about application performance, we want to hear from you. (And if you think that there’s developer wisdom out there that “everyone knows”, a) I’m willing to bet you could find someone who doesn’t know about it, and b) it probably bears repeating anyway!) “I’m Interested. What Can You Do For Me?” Excellent question. For starters, there’s a chance to win a Microsoft Surface (the tablet, not the table-top). Once all the ASP.NET Wisdom has been collected, tallied, and labelled, it will then be weighed and measured by a team of expert judges (whose identities are still a closely-guarded secret).  The top tip in both SQL & .NET categories will each win their author their very own MS Surface. But that’s not all! We can also give you… immortality! More details? Ok. We’ll be collecting all of the tips sent in by our readers (and we can’t wait to learn from you all,) and with the help of our Simple-Talk editors, we will publish and distribute your combined and documented knowledge as a free, community-created, professionally typeset eBook. You will naturally be credited by name / pseudonym / twitter handle / GitHub username / StackOverflow profile / Whatever, as the clearly ingenious author of hot performance tips. The Not-Very-Fine Print Here’s the breakdown: We want to bring together the best application performance knowledge from ASP.NET developers. Closing date for submissions will be 9am GMT, December 4th. Submissions should be made by email – [email protected] Submissions will be judged by a panel of expert judges (who will be revealed soon). The top submission in both the SQL & .NET categories will each win a Microsoft Surface. ALL the tips which make it through the judging process will be polished by Simple-Talk editors, and turned into a professionally typeset eBook, which will be freely available, and promoted alongside the ANTS Performance Profiler tool. Anyone whose entry makes it into the book will be clearly and profusely credited in the method of their choice (or can remain anonymous.) The really REALLY short version Share what you know about ASP.NET application performance for a chance to win a Microsoft Surface, and then get your name credited in a slick eBook with top-notch production values. For more details, see above. We can’t wait to learn from you!

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• Why Your ERP System Isn't Ready for the Next Evolution of the Enterprise

  - by ken.pulverman

    ERP has been the backbone of enterprise software.  The data held in your ERP system is core of most companies.  Efficiencies gained through the accounting and resource allocation through ERP software have literally saved companies trillions of dollars. Not only does everything seem to be fine with your ERP system, you haven't had to touch it in years.  Why aren't you ready for what comes next? Well judging by the growth rates in the space (Oracle posted only a 3% growth rate, while SAP showed a 12% decline) there hasn't been much modernization going on, just a little replacement activity. If you are like most companies, your ERP system is connected to a proprietary middleware solution that only effectively talks with a handful of other systems you might have acquired from the same vendor.   Connecting your legacy system through proprietary middleware is expensive and brittle and if you are like most companies, you were only willing to pay an SI so much before you said "enough."  So your ERP is working.  It's humming along.  You might not be able to get Order to Promise information when you take orders in your call center, but there are work arounds that work just fine. So what's the problem? The problem is that you built your business around your ERP core, and now there is such pressure to innovate your business processes to keep up that you need a whole new slew of modern apps and you need ERP data to be accessible from everywhere.   Every time you change a sales territory or a comp plan or change a benefits provider your ERP system, literally the economic brain of your business, needs to know what's going on.  And this giant need to access and provide information to your ERP is only growing. What makes matters even more challenging is that apps today come in every flavor under the Sun™.   SaaS, cloud, managed, hybrid, outsourced, composite....and they all have different integration protocols. The only easy way to get ahead of all this is to modernize the way you connect and run your applications.  Unlike the middleware solutions of yesteryear, modern middleware is effectively the operating system of the enterprise.  In the same way that you rely on Apple, Microsoft, and Google to find a video driver for your 23" monitor or to ensure the Word or Keynote runs, modern middleware takes care of intra-application connectivity and process execution.  It effectively allows you to take ERP out of the middle while ensuring connectivity to your vital data for anything you want to do.  The diagram below reflects that change.    In this model, the hegemony of ERP is over.  It too has to become a stealthy modern app to help you quickly adapt to business changes while managing vital information.  And through modern middleware it will connect to everything.  So yes ERP as we've know it is dead, but long live ERP as a connected application member of the modern enterprise. I want to Thank Andrew Zoldan, Group Vice President Oracle Manufacturing Industries Business Unit for introducing me to how some of his biggest customers have benefited by modernizing their applications infrastructure and making ERP a connected application. by John Burke, Group Vice President, Applications Business Unit

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• 256 Worker Role 3D Rendering Demo is now a Lab on my Azure Course

  - by Alan Smith

  Ever since I came up with the crazy idea of creating an Azure application that would spin up 256 worker roles (please vote if you like it ) to render a 3D animation created using the Kinect depth camera I have been trying to think of something useful to do with it. I have also been busy working on developing training materials for a Windows Azure course that I will be delivering through a training partner in Stockholm, and for customers wanting to learn Windows Azure. I hit on the idea of combining the render demo and a course lab and creating a lab where the students would create and deploy their own mini render farms, which would participate in a single render job, consisting of 2,000 frames. The architecture of the solution is shown below. As students would be creating and deploying their own applications, I thought it would be fun to introduce some competitiveness into the lab. In the 256 worker role demo I capture the rendering statistics for each role, so it was fairly simple to include the students name in these statistics. This allowed the process monitor application to capture the number of frames each student had rendered and display a high-score table. When I demoed the application I deployed one instance that started rendering a frame every few minutes, and the challenge for the students was to deploy and scale their applications, and then overtake my single role instance by the end of the lab time. I had the process monitor running on the projector during the lab so the class could see the progress of their deployments, and how they were performing against my implementation and their classmates. When I tested the lab for the first time in Oslo last week it was a great success, the students were keen to be the first to build and deploy their solution and then watch the frames appear. As the students mostly had MSDN suspicions they were able to scale to the full 20 worker role instances and before long we had over 100 worker roles working on the animation. There were, however, a few issues who the couple of issues caused by the competitive nature of the lab. The first student to scale the application to 20 instances would render the most frames and win; there was no way for others to catch up. Also, as they were competing against each other, there was no incentive to help others on the course get their application up and running. I have now re-written the lab to divide the student into teams that will compete to render the most frames. This means that if one developer on the team can deploy and scale quickly, the other team still has a chance to catch up. It also means that if a student finishes quickly and puts their team in the lead they will have an incentive to help the other developers on their team get up and running. As I was using “Sharks with Lasers” for a lot of my demos, and reserved the sharkswithfreakinlasers namespaces for some of the Azure services (well somebody had to do it), the students came up with some creative alternatives, like “Camels with Cannons” and “Honey Badgers with Homing Missiles”. That gave me the idea for the teams having to choose a creative name involving animals and weapons. The team rendering architecture diagram is shown below.   Render Challenge Rules In order to ensure fair play a number of rules are imposed on the lab. ·         The class will be divided into teams, each team choses a name. ·         The team name must consist of a ferocious animal combined with a hazardous weapon. ·         Teams can allocate as many worker roles as they can muster to the render job. ·         Frame processing statistics and rendered frames will be vigilantly monitored; any cheating, tampering, and other foul play will result in penalties. The screenshot below shows an example of the team render farm in action, Badgers with Bombs have taken a lead over Camels with Cannons, and both are  leaving the Sharks with Lasers standing. If you are interested in attending a scheduled delivery of my Windows Azure or Windows Azure Service bus courses, or would like on-site training, more details are here.

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• Silverlight Cream for February 17, 2011 -- #1048

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Oren Gal, Andrea Boschin(-2-), Kevin Hoffman, Rudi Grobler(-2-, -3-), Michael Crump, Yochay Kiriaty, Peter Kuhn, Loek van den Ouweland, Jeremy Likness, Jesse Liberty, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Multiple page printing in Silverlight4 - Part 2 - preview before printing" Oren Gal WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling" Jeremy Likness XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 4 - Animation (frame-based)" Peter Kuhn From SilverlightCream.com: Multiple page printing in Silverlight4 - Part 2 - preview before printing Oren Gal has part 2 of his Printing with Silverlight 4 series up, and this time he's putting up a preview... how cool is that? Inject ApplicationServices with MEF reloaded: supporting recomposition Andrea Boschin revisited his Inject ApplicationServices with MEF post because of feedback, and took it from the realm of an interesting example to a useful solution. Windows Phone 7 - Part #5: Panorama and Pivot controls Andrea Boschin also has part 5 of his WP7 series up at SilverlightShow... want a good demo of both the panorama and the pivot controls... here it is all in one tutorial WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Introduction to C# This should be good.. a 12-part series on SilverlightShow by Kevin Hoffman on porting your iPhone/Android app to WP7... this first part an intro to C# Balls of Steel Rudi Grobler discusses the upcoming (?) release of 'Duke Nukem Forever', and has a 'soundboard' for WP7 to celebrate the event... get your Duke Nukem on with these sounds! Moonlight 4 (Preview) is here Rudi Grobler also has a post up about the release of Moonlight by Novel for Silverlight 4!... explanation and links on his post. WP7 Podcasts Rudi Grobler highlights two WP7 Podcasts that are putting out good material... check them out if you haven't already. Having Fun with Coding4Fun’s Windows Phone 7 Controls Michael Crump takes a look at his WP7 app and uses the Coding4Fun project toolset while doing so... getting the tools, setting them up, and consuming them. Windows Phone Silverlight Application Faster Load Time Yochay Kiriaty has a good long discussion up about how to get faster load time out of your WP7 apps... good useful external links throughout. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 4 - Animation (frame-based) Peter Kuhn's part 4 of his XNA for Silverlight devs is up at Silverlightshow and is a great tutorial on frame-based animation. Windows Phone SoundEffect clipping Loek van den Ouweland has some good information about soudn clips on WP7... the solutions aren't always code solutions.... good to know info. Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling Jeremy Likness is discussing Tombstoning via MVVM and Sterling... read on how Sterling gives you a leg up on the Tombstone express. Video: Reactive Phone Programming For Windows Phone 7 Fitting in nicely with his podcast on Reactive Programming, Jesse Liberty releases a video on Reactive Programming for WP7. Talking about Data Binding in WP7 | Coding4fun TextBoxBinding helper in depth WindowsPhoneGeek's latest post walks through WP7 databinding in detail with lots of good external links, then follows up with a discussion of the Coding4Fun Binding Helpers 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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• Bash completion doesn't work, or is ignoring what I've typed; but works for commands

  - by Neil Traft

  Bash completion seems to be ignoring what I've typed (it tries to complete, but acts as if there's nothing under the cursor). I know I saw it work on this machine earlier today, but I'm not sure what has changed. Some examples: cd shows all directories under my current folder: $ cd co<tab><tab> cmake/ config/ doc/ examples/ include/ programs/ sandbox/ src/ .svn/ tests/ Commands like ls and less show all files and directories under my current folder: $ ls co<tab><tab> cmake/ config/ .cproject Doxyfile.in include/ programs/ README.txt src/ tests/ CMakeLists.txt COPYING.txt doc/ examples/ mainpage.dox .project sandbox/ .svn/ Even when I try to complete things from a different folder, it gives me only the results for my current folder (telling me that it is completely ignoring what I've typed): $ cd ~/D<tab><tab> cmake/ config/ doc/ examples/ include/ programs/ sandbox/ src/ .svn/ tests/ But it seems to be working fine for commands and variables: $ if<tab><tab> if ifconfig ifdown ifnames ifquery ifup $ echo $P<tab><tab> $PATH $PIPESTATUS $PPID $PS1 $PS2 $PS4 $PWD $PYTHONPATH I do have this bit in my .bashrc, and I have confirmed that my .bashrc is indeed getting sourced: if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then . /etc/bash_completion fi I've even tried manually executing that file, but it doesn't fix the problem: $ . /etc/bash_completion There was even one point in time where it was working for ls, but was not working for cd ... but I can't replicate that result now. Update: I also just discovered that I have terminals open from earlier that still work. I ran source .bashrc in one of them and afterwards completion was broken. Here is my .bashrc: # ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells. # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc) # for examples # # Modified by Neil Traft #source ~/.profile # Allow globs to expand hidden files shopt -s dotglob nullglob # If not running interactively, don't do anything [ -z "$PS1" ] && return # don't put duplicate lines or lines starting with space in the history. # See bash(1) for more options HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth # append to the history file, don't overwrite it shopt -s histappend # for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1) HISTSIZE=1000 HISTFILESIZE=2000 # check the window size after each command and, if necessary, # update the values of LINES and COLUMNS. shopt -s checkwinsize # If set, the pattern "**" used in a pathname expansion context will # match all files and zero or more directories and subdirectories. #shopt -s globstar # make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1) [ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)" # set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below) if [ -z "$debian_chroot" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot) fi # Color the prompt export PS1="\[$(tput setaf 2)\]\u@\h:\[$(tput setaf 5)\]\W\[$(tput setaf 2)\] $\[$(tput sgr0)\] " # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='dir --color=auto' #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto' alias grep='grep --color=auto' alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto' alias egrep='egrep --color=auto' fi # Add an "alert" alias for long running commands. Use like so: # sleep 10; alert alias alert='notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//'\'')"' # Alias definitions. # You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like # ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly. # See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package. if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi # enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable # this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile # sources /etc/bash.bashrc). if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then . /etc/bash_completion fi

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• Java EE 6 Pocket Guide from O'Reilly - Now Available in Paperback and Kindle Edition

  - by arungupta

  Hot off the press ... Java EE 6 Pocket Guide from 'OReilly Media is now available in Paperback and Kindle Edition. Here are the book details: Release Date: Sep 21, 2012 Language: English Pages: 208 Print ISBN: 978-1-4493-3668-4 | ISBN 10:1-4493-3668-X Ebook ISBN:978-1-4493-3667-7 | ISBN 10:1-4493-3667-1 The book provides a comprehensive summary of the Java EE 6 platform. Main features of different technologies from the platform are explained and accompanied by tons of samples. A chapter is dedicated to Managed Beans, Servlets, Java Persistence API, Enterprise JavaBeans, Contexts and Dependency Injection, JavaServer Faces, SOAP-Based Web Services, RESTful Web Services, Java Message Service, and Bean Validation in that format. Many thanks to Markus Eisele, John Yeary, and Bert Ertman for reviewing and providing valuable comments. This book was not possible without their extensive feedback! This book was mostly written by compiling my blogs, material from 2-day workshops, and several hands-on workshops around the world. The interactions with users of different technologies and whiteboard discussions with different specification leads helped me understand the technology better. Many thanks to them for helping me be a better user! The long international flights during my travel around the world proved extremely useful for authoring the content. No phone, no email, no IM, food served on the table, power outlet = a perfect recipe for authoring ;-) Markus wrote a detailed review of the book. He was one of the manuscript reviewers of the book as well and provided valuable guidance. Some excerpts from his blog: It covers the basics you need to know of Java EE 6 and gives good examples of all relevant parts. ... This is a pocket guide which is comprehensively written. I could follow all examples and it was a good read overall. No complicated constructs and clear writing. ... GO GET IT! It is the only book you probably will need about Java EE 6! It is comprehensive, wonderfully written and covers everything you need in your daily work. It is not a complete reference but provides a great shortcut to the things you need to know. To me it is a good beginners guide and also works as a companion for advanced users. Here is the first tweet feedback ... Jeff West was super prompt to place the first pre-order of my book, pretty much the hour it was announced. Thank you Jeff! @mike_neck posted the very first tweet about the book, thanks for that! The book is now available in Paperback and Kindle Edition from the following websites: O'Reilly Media (Ebook, Print & Ebook, Print) Amazon.com (Kindle Edition and Paperback) Barnes and Noble Overstock (1% off Amazon) Buy.com Booktopia.com Tower Books Angus & Robertson Shopping.com Here is how I can use your help: Help spread the word about the book If you bought a Paperback or downloaded Kindle Edition, then post your review here. If you have not bought, then you can buy it at amazon.com and multiple other websites mentioned above. If you are coming to JavaOne, you'll have an opportunity to get a free copy at O'Reilly's booth on Monday (October 1) from 2-3pm. And you can always buy it from the JavaOne Bookstore. I hope you enjoy reading it and learn something new from it or hone your existing skills. As always, looking forward to your feedback!

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• Silverlight Cream for January 12, 2011 -- #1025

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Amyo Kabir, Rob Eisenberg, Doug Rathbone, John Papa, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Mike Taulty, Peter Kuhn, Laurent Bugnion, Vangos Pterneas, and Senthil Kumar. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Popup sample" Amyo Kabir WP7: "Navigation in a #WP7 application with MVVM Light" Laurent Bugnion XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care?" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Mohamed Mosallem posted a video of an Expression Blend demo he gave recently: Expression Blend Demo Rob Eisenberg posted the winners of the Caliburn.Micro Contest he was running .. and a nice bunch of swag too! Announcing the Caliburn.Micro Contest Winners! Dan Moyer is a LightSwitch enthusiast and writes Why I Believe Visual Studio LightSwitch will be a Win... good well-thought-out and written take on Lightswitch. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Popup sample Amyo Kabir has a post up that is short on description but long on demo and the code is available... put this in the 'a picture is worth 1,000 words category' :) Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 7 - All About Conventions The 7th episode of Rob Eisenberg's tutorial series on Caliburn.Micro is up. This episode about some of the conventions that you get out-of-the-box with Caliburn.Micro, what it'll do for you, and how you can modify the behavior of the convention to suit your own taste/style. Two little tips for working with Silverlight chart DateTime Axes Doug Rathbone has been working with the Toolkit Charts for WP7 and finding it difficult to get the info he needs, and now that he's worked it out... he's sharing... particularly information about DateTimeAxis. Silverlight TV 56: WCF RIA Services and Azure The first Silverlight TV of 2011 was John Papa discussing WCF RIA Services and Azure with Saurabh Plant. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 14 As usual, Jeff Blankenburg is a couple ahead of me... his Issue 14 is about some panorama trickery... like navigating to a specific place in one, or preventing wrapping. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 15 In Jeff Blankenburg's latest WP7 post, he's sharing some interesting insight into Trial Mode and app sales... from the standpoint of someone selling apps. Blend Bits 20–Group Into Mike Taulty has Part 20 of his Blend Bits series up. This one is demonstrating grouping, and what all can be accomplished (or not) with grouping in Blend. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 - Why should I care? Peter Kuhn has the beginning of a series on WP7 and XNA up at SilverlightShow... this looks to be a good intro and way to get your head wrapped around XNA on the phone. Navigation in a #WP7 application with MVVM Light Laurent Bugnion discusses WP7 navigation via MVVM Light, resolving many of the communication/navigation complexities you can get involved in without a tool like his. Motion detection in Silverlight Vangos Pterneas has a followup postto the one on facial detection... this one is on Motion Detection in Silverlight. If you've got a webcam hooked up, you can give a demo app a dance via a link he has in the post. Adding ApplicationBar in Windows Phone 7 using Expression Blend Senthil Kumar follows up a post about using VS to add an application bar to a WP7 app with this one using Expression Blend 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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• Why Your ERP System Isn't Ready for the Next Evolution of the Enterprise

  - by [email protected]

  By ken.pulverman on March 24, 2010 8:51 AM ERP has been the backbone of enterprise software. The data held in your ERP system is core of most companies. Efficiencies gained through the accounting and resource allocation through ERP software have literally saved companies trillions of dollars. Not only does everything seem to be fine with your ERP system, you haven't had to touch it in years. Why aren't you ready for what comes next? Well judging by the growth rates in the space (Oracle posted only a 3% growth rate, while SAP showed a 12% decline) there hasn't been much modernization going on, just a little replacement activity. If you are like most companies, your ERP system is connected to a proprietary middleware solution that only effectively talks with a handful of other systems you might have acquired from the same vendor. Connecting your legacy system through proprietary middleware is expensive and brittle and if you are like most companies, you were only willing to pay an SI so much before you said "enough." So your ERP is working. It's humming along. You might not be able to get Order to Promise information when you take orders in your call center, but there are work arounds that work just fine. So what's the problem? The problem is that you built your business around your ERP core, and now there is such pressure to innovate your business processes to keep up that you need a whole new slew of modern apps and you need ERP data to be accessible from everywhere. Every time you change a sales territory or a comp plan or change a benefits provider your ERP system, literally the economic brain of your business, needs to know what's going on. And this giant need to access and provide information to your ERP is only growing. What makes matters even more challenging is that apps today come in every flavor under the Sun™. SaaS, cloud, managed, hybrid, outsourced, composite....and they all have different integration protocols. The only easy way to get ahead of all this is to modernize the way you connect and run your applications. Unlike the middleware solutions of yesteryear, modern middleware is effectively the operating system of the enterprise. In the same way that you rely on Apple, Microsoft, and Google to find a video driver for your 23" monitor or to ensure that Word or Keynote runs, modern middleware takes care of intra-application connectivity and process execution. It effectively allows you to take ERP out of the middle while ensuring connectivity to your vital data for anything you want to do. The diagram below reflects that change. In this model, the hegemony of ERP is over. It too has to become a stealthy modern app to help you quickly adapt to business changes while managing vital information. And through modern middleware it will connect to everything. So yes ERP as we've know it is dead, but long live ERP as a connected application member of the modern enterprise. I want to Thank Andrew Zoldan, Group Vice President Oracle Manufacturing Industries Business Unit for introducing me to how some of his biggest customers have benefited by modernizing their applications infrastructure and making ERP a connected application. by John Burke, Group Vice President, Applications Business Unit

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• Do your filesystems have un-owned files ?

  - by darrenm

  As part of our work for integrated compliance reporting in Solaris we plan to provide a check for determining if the system has "un-owned files", ie those which are owned by a uid that does not exist in our configured nameservice.  Tests such as this already exist in the Solaris CIS Benchmark (9.24 Find Un-owned Files and Directories) and other security benchmarks. The obvious method of doing this would be using find(1) with the -nouser flag.  However that requires we bring into memory the metadata for every single file and directory in every local file system we have mounted.  That is probaby not an acceptable thing to do on a production system that has a large amount of storage and it is potentially going to take a long time. Just as I went to bed last night an idea for a much faster way of listing file systems that have un-owned files came to me. I've now implemented it and I'm happy to report it works very well and peforms many orders of magnatude better than using find(1) ever will.   ZFS (since pool version 15) has per user space accounting and quotas.  We can report very quickly and without actually reading any files at all how much space any given user id is using on a ZFS filesystem.  Using that information we can implement a check to very quickly list which filesystems contain un-owned files. First a few caveats because the output data won't be exactly the same as what you get with find but it answers the same basic question.  This only works for ZFS and it will only tell you which filesystems have files owned by unknown users not the actual files.  If you really want to know what the files are (ie to give them an owner) you still have to run find(1).  However it has the huge advantage that it doesn't use find(1) so it won't be dragging the metadata for every single file and directory on the system into memory. It also has the advantage that it can check filesystems that are not mounted currently (which find(1) can't do). It ran in about 4 seconds on a system with 300 ZFS datasets from 2 pools totalling about 3.2T of allocated space, and that includes the uid lookups and output. #!/bin/sh for fs in $(zfs list -H -o name -t filesystem -r rpool) ; do unknowns="" for uid in $(zfs userspace -Hipn -o name,used $fs | cut -f1); do if [ -z "$(getent passwd $uid)" ]; then unknowns="$unknowns$uid " fi done if [ ! -z "$unknowns" ]; then mountpoint=$(zfs list -H -o mountpoint $fs) mounted=$(zfs list -H -o mounted $fs) echo "ZFS File system $fs mounted ($mounted) on $mountpoint \c" echo "has files owned by unknown user ids: $unknowns"; fi done Sample output: ZFS File system rpool/ROOT/solaris-30/var mounted (no) on /var has files owned by unknown user ids: 6435 33667 101 ZFS File system rpool/ROOT/solaris-32/var mounted (yes) on /var has files owned by unknown user ids: 6435 33667ZFS File system builds/bob mounted (yes) on /builds/bob has files owned by unknown user ids: 101 Note that the above might not actually appear exactly like that in any future Solaris product or feature, it is provided just as an example of what you can do with ZFS user space accounting to answer questions like the above.

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• SQL SERVER – Performance Tuning Resolution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by MidnightDBAs. Taking resolutions is such an interesting subject. I think just like records, these are broken way more often. I find this is the funniest thing as we all take resolutions every year but not every year, we can manage to keep them. Well, does it mean we should not take resolutions? In fact I support resolutions. Every year, I take a resolution that I will strive reduce my body weight and I usually manage to keep eating healthy till the end of January. When February begins, I begin to loose focus from my goal and as March starts, the “As usual” eating habits begin. Looking at the positive side, what would happen if every year I do not eat healthy in January, I think that might cause terrible consequences to my health in the long run. So keeping resolutions is a good practise and following them to the extent one can is commendable. Let us come back to the world of SQL Server. What is my resolution for year 2011 for SQL Server? There are many, I am going to list three of very important resolutions that I have taken this new year over here. To understand SQL Server Performance Tuning at a deeper Level I think I am already half way through. I have been being very much busy during any given month doing hands-on performance tuning for at least 12 days on an average. That means, I am doing this activity for almost doing 2 weeks a month. I believe that I have a good understanding of the subject. Note that the word that I have used is “good,” and not “best.” There are often cases when I am stumped, and I have no clue of what to do next. Then, I usually go for my “trial and error” method - whichever method works, I make sure to keep a note on my blog. My goal is that I should never ever go for the trial and error method again to achieve the same solution. I should know the solution right away when I see the problem. I do understand that Performance Tuning can be a strange animal at times and one cannot guess the right step every time. However, aiming a high goal never hurts and I am going to learn more and more in this focused area. Going further from Basic BI understanding I do fairly decent with BI concepts. I know the nbasics of SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, PowerPivot and SharePoint (and few other things MDS, StreamInsight, etc). However, I still consider myself as a beginner. I do not have hands-on experience like many other BI Gurus around. I think I want to take my learning further in this direction. I do not want to be a BI expert as the first step but the goal is to move ahead from basic level towards an advanced level. I am going to start presenting in User Group Sessions and other places on this subject. When I have to prepare new subject for presentations, I think I force myself to learn more. I am committed to learn a bit more in this direction. Learning new features SQL Server 2011 Denali This is new thing from “Microsoft” for all the SQL Geeks. I am eagerly waiting for final product later this year and I am planning to learn it well. I think if I follow my above two goals, I think this goal will be automatically covered. I am eager and excited for this new offering from Microsoft. I guess, these are my resolutions; may be next year about the same time, I must revisit this post and see how much successful I am in following my goal. On a lighter note, I am particularly fan of following cartoon strip (Courtesy: Calvin and Hobbes). I think when we cannot resolve our resolutions, we tend to act like Calvin. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – Getting Ready to Learn SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  If you have read my earlier blog post you must be aware of how I am always eager to learn new things. I have signed up for three days learning course at Koenig Solutions for End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence. You may wonder why I sign up for the course on SQL Server when it seems that I know a lot about it. Well, the belief is incorrect that I know a lot. I think there are plenty of things which I have been dreaming to learn. Why am I learning SQL Server? First of all – I do not know everything and second it is always a good idea to learn more. No matter how old we get or how much we think we know – there are always details which we can learn and refresh few concepts. Learning is never ending process philosophically but it is true as well in reality. SQL Server 2012 is already released earlier this year and there are plenty of enhancements released. Recently I was going over the list of the all the new feature and enhancement and I realized that there few things about SQL Server 2008 R2 I never got a chance to have a hand’s on experience and we have entered into the era of SQL Server 2012. I feel a bit bad about it and I decided to make it a priority for me to learn all the missing experiences. Quick Action – Registration The very same day I called up my friend who owns Koenig Solution and expressed my concern and requested his help. During my early career when I was a SQL Server Trainer, we had some good synergy between us and now they are very successful offshore training company by having a physical location in Delhi,  Goa, Dahradun, Shimla, Goa and Bangalore. I quickly visited their Bangalore Center and paid my fees for learning SQL Server Business Intelligence course. Very next second I got call from my friend suggesting that I learn this course from Delhi instead of Bangalore. As per him I should travel to Delhi and learn the course how other students are learning “Away from Home”. This made sense as I stay in Bangalore and if I return home after a long day of learning, I will be not able to practice for the next day as there will be “sweet distraction” of the family. Well I opted for Delhi. What Registration Fees Included I learned from registration processes that the following were included in the fees. 3 meals every day (hearty breakfast, lunch from premium restaurants and home cooked like dinner) Airport pick up and drop Hotel Stay Internet at hotel and at learning institute Unlimited coffee and snacks at learning institute Printed Learning Material Certification Fees (if applicable) Learning material … And of course classroom training I thought registration process was over when I paid fees. Well, I was in for a very nice surprise. Registration Experience – Bliss! Within few hours I received emails from Center Manager of Delhi with all the necessary details I need to know about my learning experience. The email contained following information in detail and it blew me away. Details of the pick up from airport – driver information Details of Delhi and important information List of all the important people and emergency contact details Internet connection details Detail of the trainer and all the training details and lots of other relevant information Well so far everything looks great. Tomorrow I will reach to Delhi and I will share how things go on. Any suggestion for things to do in Delhi? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• maintaining a growing, diverse codebase with continuous integration

  - by Nate

  I am in need of some help with philosophy and design of a continuous integration setup. Our current CI setup uses buildbot. When I started out designing it, I inherited (well, not strictly, as I was involved in its design a year earlier) a bespoke CI builder that was tailored to run the entire build at once, overnight. After a while, we decided that this was insufficient, and started exploring different CI frameworks, eventually choosing buildbot. One of my goals in transitioning to buildbot (besides getting to enjoy all the whiz-bang extras) was to overcome some of the inadequacies of our bespoke nightly builder. Humor me for a moment, and let me explain what I have inherited. The codebase for my company is almost 150 unique c++ Windows applications, each of which has dependencies on one or more of a dozen internal libraries (and many on 3rd party libraries as well). Some of these libraries are interdependent, and have depending applications that (while they have nothing to do with each other) have to be built with the same build of that library. Half of these applications and libraries are considered "legacy" and unportable, and must be built with several distinct configurations of the IBM compiler (for which I have written unique subclasses of Compile), and the other half are built with visual studio. The code for each compiler is stored in two separate Visual SourceSafe repositories (which I am simply handling using a bunch of ShellCommands, as there is no support for VSS). Our original nightly builder simply took down the source for everything, and built stuff in a certain order. There was no way to build only a single application, or pick a revision, or to group things. It would launched virtual machines to build a number of the applications. It wasn't very robust, it wasn't distributable. It wasn't terribly extensible. I wanted to be able to overcame all of these limitations in buildbot. The way I did this originally was to create entries for each of the applications we wanted to build (all 150ish of them), then create triggered schedulers that could build various applications as groups, and then subsume those groups under an overall nightly build scheduler. These could run on dedicated slaves (no more virtual machine chicanery), and if I wanted I could simply add new slaves. Now, if we want to do a full build out of schedule, it's one click, but we can also build just one application should we so desire. There are four weaknesses of this approach, however. One is our source tree's complex web of dependencies. In order to simplify config maintenace, all builders are generated from a large dictionary. The dependencies are retrieved and built in a not-terribly robust fashion (namely, keying off of certain things in my build-target dictionary). The second is that each build has between 15 and 21 build steps, which is hard to browse and look at in the web interface, and since there are around 150 columns, takes forever to load (think from 30 seconds to multiple minutes). Thirdly, we no longer have autodiscovery of build targets (although, as much as one of my coworkers harps on me about this, I don't see what it got us in the first place). Finally, aformentioned coworker likes to constantly bring up the fact that we can no longer perform a full build on our local machine (though I never saw what that got us, either, considering that it took three times as long as the distributed build; I think he is just paranoically phobic of ever breaking the build). Now, moving to new development, we are starting to use g++ and subversion (not porting the old repository, mind you - just for the new stuff). Also, we are starting to do more unit testing ("more" might give the wrong picture... it's more like any), and integration testing (using python). I'm having a hard time figuring out how to fit these into my existing configuration. So, where have I gone wrong philosophically here? How can I best proceed forward (with buildbot - it's the only piece of the puzzle I have license to work on) so that my configuration is actually maintainable? How do I address some of my design's weaknesses? What really works in terms of CI strategies for large, (possibly over-)complex codebases?

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• T-SQL in Chicago – the LobsterPot teams with DataEducation

  - by Rob Farley

  In May, I’ll be in the US. I have board meetings for PASS at the SQLRally event in Dallas, and then I’m going to be spending a bit of time in Chicago. The big news is that while I’m in Chicago (May 14-16), I’m going to teach my “Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting: Building Effectiveness” course. This is a course that I’ve been teaching since the 2005 days, and have modified over time for 2008 and 2012. It’s very much my most popular course, and I love teaching it. Let me tell you why. For years, I wrote queries and thought I was good at it. I was a developer. I’d written a lot of C (and other, more fun languages like Prolog and Lisp) at university, and then got into the ‘real world’ and coded in VB, PL/SQL, and so on through to C#, and saw SQL (whichever database system it was) as just a way of getting the data back. I could write a query to return just about whatever data I wanted, and that was good. I was better at it than the people around me, and that helped. (It didn’t help my progression into management, then it just became a frustration, but for the most part, it was good to know that I was good at this particular thing.) But then I discovered the other side of querying – the execution plan. I started to learn about the translation from what I’d written into the plan, and this impacted my query-writing significantly. I look back at the queries I wrote before I understood this, and shudder. I wrote queries that were correct, but often a long way from effective. I’d done query tuning, but had largely done it without considering the plan, just inferring what indexes would help. This is not a performance-tuning course. It’s focused on the T-SQL that you read and write. But performance is a significant and recurring theme. Effective T-SQL has to be about performance – it’s the biggest way that a query becomes effective. There are other aspects too though – such as using constructs better. For example – I can write code that modifies data nicely, but if I haven’t learned about the MERGE statement and the way that it can impact things, I’m missing a few tricks. If you’re going to do this course, a good place to be is the situation I was in a few years before I wrote this course. You’re probably comfortable with writing T-SQL queries. You know how to make a SELECT statement do what you need it to, but feel there has to be a better way. You can write JOINs easily, and understand how to use LEFT JOIN to make sure you don’t filter out rows from the first table, but you’re coding blind. The first module I cover is on Query Execution. Take a look at the Course Outline at Data Education’s website. The first part of the first module is on the components of a SELECT statement (where I make you think harder about GROUP BY than you probably have before), but then we jump straight into Execution Plans. Some stuff on indexes is in there too, as is simplification and SARGability. Some of this is stuff that you may have heard me present on at conferences, but here you have me for three days straight. I’m sure you can imagine that we revisit these topics throughout the rest of the course as well, and you’d be right. In the second and third modules we look at a bunch of other aspects, including some of the T-SQL constructs that lots of people don’t know, and various other things that can help your T-SQL be, well, more effective. I’ve had quite a lot of people do this course and be itching to get back to work even on the first day. That’s not a comment about the jokes I tell, but because people want to look at the queries they run. LobsterPot Solutions is thrilled to be partnering with Data Education to bring this training to Chicago. Visit their website to register for the course. @rob_farley

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• The Latest News About SAP

  - by jmorourke

  Like many professionals, I get a lot of my news from Google e-mail alerts that I’ve set up to keep track of key industry trends and competitive news.  In the past few weeks, I’ve been getting a number of news alerts about SAP.  Below are a few recent examples: Warm weather cuts short US maple sugaring season – by Toby Talbot, AP MILWAUKEE – Temperatures in Wisconsin had already hit the high 60s when Gretchen Grape and her family began tapping their 850 maple trees. They had waited for the state's ceremonial tapping to kick off the maple sugaring season. It was moved up five days, but that didn't make much difference. For Grape, the typically month-long season ended nine days later. The SAP had stopped flowing in a record-setting heat wave, and the 5-quart collection bags that in a good year fill in a day were still half-empty. Instead of their usual 300 gallons of syrup, her family had about 40. Maple syrup producers across the North have had their season cut short by unusually warm weather. While those with expensive, modern vacuum systems say they've been able to suck a decent amount of sap from their trees, producers like Grape, who still rely on traditional taps and buckets, have seen their year ruined. "It's frustrating," said the 69-year-old retiree from Holcombe, Wis. "You put in the same amount of work, equipment, investment, and then all of a sudden, boom, you have no SAP." Home & Garden: Too-Early Spring Means Sugaring Woes  - by Georgeanne Davis for The Free Press Over this past weekend, forsythia and daffodils were blooming in the southern parts of the state as temperatures climbed to 85 degrees, and trees began budding out, putting an end to this year's maple syrup production even as the state celebrated Maine Maple Sunday. Maple sugaring needs cold nights and warm days to induce SAP flows. Once the trees begin budding, SAP can still flow, but the SAP is bitter and has an off taste. Many farmers and dairymen count on sugaring for extra income, so the abbreviated season is a real financial loss for them, akin to the shortened shrimping season's effect on Maine lobstermen. SAP season comes to a sugary Sunday finale – Kennebec Journal, March 26th, 2012 Rebecca Manthey stood out in the rain at the entrance of Old Fort Western keeping watch over a cast iron kettle of boiling SAP hooked to a tripod over a wood fire.  Manthey and the rest of the Old Fort Western staff -- decked out in 18th-century attire -- joined sugar houses across the state in observance of Maine Maple Sunday. The annual event is sponsored by the Department of Agriculture and the Maine Maple Producers Association.  She said the rain hadn't kept people from coming to enjoy all the events at the fort surrounding the production of Maple syrup.  "In the 18th century, you would be boiling SAP in the woods, so I would be in the woods," Manthey explained to the families who circled around her. "People spent weeks and weeks in the woods. You don't want to cook it to fast or it would burn. When it looks like the right consistency then you send it (into the kitchen) to be made into sugar." Manthey said she enjoyed portraying an 18th-century woman, even in the rain, which didn't seem to bother visitors either. There was a steady stream of families touring the fort and enjoying the maple syrup demonstrations. I hope you enjoy these updates on SAP – Happy April Fool’s Day!

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