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• DOAG 2012 and Educause 2012

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Oracle understands the value of desktop virtualization and how customers have really embraced it as a top tier method to deliver access to applications and data. Just as supporting operating systems other than Windows in the enterprise desktop space started to become necessary perhaps 5-7 years ago, supporting desktop virtualization with VDI, application virtualization, thin clients, and tablet access is becoming necessary today in 2012. Any application strategy needs to have a secure mobile component, and a solution that gives you a holistic strategy across both mobile and fixed-asset (i.e., desktop PCs) devices is crucial to success. This means it's probably useful to learn about desktop virtualization, even if it's not in your typical area of responsibility. A good way to do that is at one of the many trade shows where we exhibit. Here are two examples:  DOAG 2012 Conference + Exhibition The DOAG Conference is fast approaching, starting November 20th in Nuremberg, Germany. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that we attended last year as well. This conference is fantastic for us because we get to speak directly to users of Oracle products. In many cases, those DBAs, IT managers, and other infrastructure folks are looking for ways to deal with the burgeoning BYOD model, as well as ways of streamlining their standard desktop and access technologies. We have a couple of sessions where you can learn a great deal about how Oracle can help with these points. Session Schedule (look under "Infrastruktur & Hardware") The two sessions focused on desktop virtualization are: Oracle VDI Best Practice unter Linux (Oracle VDI Best Practice Under Linux) Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Implementierungen und Praxiserfahrungen (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Implementations and Best Practices) We will also have experts on hand at the booth to answer your questions on using desktop virtualization. If you're at the show, please stop by and say hello to our team there! Educause 2012  Another good example is Educause. We've gone the last few years to show off a slough of education oriented applications and capabilities in the Oracle product portfolio. And every year, we display those applications through Oracle desktop virtualization. This means the demonstration can easily be setup ahead of time and replicated out to however many "demo pods" that we have available. There's no need for our product teams to setup individual laptops for demos -- we can display a standardized Windows desktop virtual machine with their apps all ready to go on a whole bunch of devices like your standard trade show laptop, our Sun Ray Clients, and iPad. Educause 2012 just wrapped, so we're sorry we missed you this year. But there is always next year! Until then, here are a few pictures from this year's show: You can also watch this video to see how Catholic Education Australia uses Oracle Secure Global Desktop to help cope with the ever changing ways that people access their applications.  -Chris 

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• Configuring keyboard input to eliminate unused diacritics

  - by David Cesarino

  I'd like to change the way diacritics work under Xubuntu. My problem My native language is pt-BR and my notebook has an american keyboard. Thus, I use ' and " followed by keys like u and c to achieve things like ú, ç and ü. It all works well. However, in the case of apostrophes and quotes, that creates a problem when I use ' followed by: letters that won't accept the acute accent ( ´ , ACUTE ACCENT -- 0x00B4) at all, like t; and letters that won't accept the acute in pt-BR, like r. In 1, ' with t does absolutely nothing. In 2, ' with r creates r (LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH ACUTE -- 0x0155), which is used, afaik, for some eastern european languages like slovak. It isn't used in portuguese, just like ?, s, z, ?, ?, ?, n and all consonants (portuguese do not take diacritics in consonants). Question That said, is there a way to better support the portuguese-brazilian language using an american keyboard? It is very common here --- I actually prefer the american keyboard to our own, known as “ABNT”. Desired solution I'd like to deactivate unused diacritics, so case 2 would behave just like case 1. Additionally, if possible, I'd like case 1 to behave like it does under Windows. As an example, typing ' followed by t should write 't (acute followed by T) instead of doing nothing. About 2, in my humble opinion, doing nothing is counterproductive. I realize the behavior is reasonable according to logic ("there isn't t-acute, so please tell the computer to typeset apostrophe --- ', SPACE --- instead of acute). But from a human, practical point of view, I think it makes more sense (to me, at least). Additional comments I believe this also applies to spanish, french, italian and other western european latin languages. On the console (Ctrl+Alt+F?), case 1 is not a problem. I don't need to press space as apostrophes are automatically added. However, there, I'm unable to access cedilla (ç). Two completely different behaviors. If it's just a matter of customizing text config files (possibly creating a custom layout or whatever), I'd be glad to share my efforts. I just need guide on the "howto" part. Somehow Google only points me to the "enough" people (those who cope with the situation and think that it works "well enough"). And since I have definitely migrated to Linux/Xubuntu after years, I'd like to leave just as I like it (and I'm sure others as well). For example, if there is some kind of scripting or definition to tell the computer to do what I described, so be it.

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• Is there a pedagogical game engine?

  - by K.G.

  I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

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• How are you coping with Ubuntu's Unity app launcher? (It auto-hides, can't minimize apps)

  - by Bad Learner

  [Firstly, let me tell you that this cannot be subjective in anyway, as I think at least Ubuntu beginners will have these questions boggling in their mind; and yes, this is a question that has a definite answer - - so, I am completely within the rules.] Okay, coming to the point, I see that Ubuntu uses Unity since v10.xx (netbook edition?) and carried the same to v11.04 & v11.10. As someone who's stuck to Windows for all these years, it's somewhat difficult to cope with Ubuntu's Unity, for the following reasons: [1] The Unity app launcher (to the screen's left) auto-hides when a window is maximized. [2]- And once launched, apps cannot be minimized by clicking the app's icon in the launcher. I have to go to the top-left of the screen and click the "_" button. I do know I can fix these issues by installing some configuration tool. But the thing is, if that's how it's meant to work, Canonical/Ubuntu would have designed it that way. But they didn't. Why? w.r.t above points [1], [2]: [1] EDITED: So, does it mean, it's good to work without maximizing the windows? Because if I maximize the window, the app launcher hides. And I need to hover the mouse to the left of the screen, wait a bit (even if it's a sec or even less, I can still feel the lag), and then click on the next app icon in the launcher to switch to it. I do know, I can use Alt+TAB to switch, but I am not sure which window comes next. This, I feel, isn't productive. Also, this makes me feel, Ubuntu is designed for large screens (it's nice on my 1920x1080p screen), because I can have two windows side-by-side or something like that on a large screen. This is not possible on smaller screens. [2]- Being able to minimize an application's window by clicking on its icon in the launcher (just like it works on Windows & probably elsewhere) would have been great, rather than having to go to the top-left and clicking the _ (minimize) button which brings up the app launcher itself (from hiding) most of the time. It's too tiring to have these small issues in the UI. I really would like to know how you are coping with these issues the way they are?

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• What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase?

  - by GordonM

  I'm currently working at a company with 2 other PHP developers aside from me, and 1 junior developer. The senior developer who originally built the system we're all working on has resigned and will only be here for a matter of weeks. The other developer, who is the only other guy who knows anything about the system, is unhappy here and is looking for a new job. I'm very real danger of being left behind as the only experienced developer on this codebase. Since I've joined this company I've tried to push for better coding standards, project documentation, etc and I do think I've made some headway, but the vast majority of the code is simply unmaintainable and uncommented. A lot of this has to do with the need to get things done fast at points in the project before I joined, but now the technical debt is enormous, even with the two developers who do understand the system on board. Without them, it will simply be impossible to do anything with it. The senior developer is working on trying to at least comment all his code before he leaves but I think the codebase is simply too vast to properly document in the remaining time. Besides, when he does comment it still doesn't make things as clear as it could. If the system was better organized and documented I could probably start refactoring it incrementally, but the whole thing is so tightly coupled that it's very difficult to make any changes in one module without having unintended knock-on effects in other modules. Naturally, there's no unit tests either, and I honestly don't think this codebase could possibly be unit tested anyway given how it's implemented. There also never seems to be enough time to get things done even with 3 developers and 1 junior developer. With one developer and one junior, neither of which had significant input into the early design of the system, I don't see how we could possibly get anything done with keeping the current system working, implementing new features as needed and developing a replacement for the current codebase that is better organized. Is there an approach I can take to cope with this situation, or should I be getting my own CV in order as well at this point? If it was just me and the junior designer who would be left I'd go for the latter option almost without question. However, there's a team of front-end developers and content managers as well, and I'm worried what would become of them if I left and put them in a position where there would be no developers at all. The department might just be closed down altogether under such circumstances, and then I'd have their unemployment on my conscience as well!

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• Learning by doing (and programming by trial and error)

  - by AlexBottoni

  How do you learn a new platform/toolkit while producing working code and keeping your codebase clean? When I know what I can do with the underlying platform and toolkit, I usually do this: I create a new branch (with GIT, in my case) I write a few unit tests (with JUnit, for example) I write my code until it passes my tests So far, so good. The problem is that very often I do not know what I can do with the toolkit because it is brand new to me. I work as a consulant so I cannot have my preferred language/platform/toolkit. I have to cope with whatever the customer uses for the task at hand. Most often, I have to deal (often in a hurry) with a large toolkit that I know very little so I'm forced to "learn by doing" (actually, programming by "trial and error") and this makes me anxious. Please note that, at some point in the learning process, usually I already have: read one or more five-stars books followed one or more web tutorials (writing working code a line at a time) created a couple of small experimental projects with my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA, at the moment. I use Eclipse, Netbeans and others, as well.) Despite all my efforts, at this point usually I can just have a coarse understanding of the platform/toolkit I have to use. I cannot yet grasp each and every detail. This means that each and every new feature that involves some data preparation and some non-trivial algorithm is a pain to implement and requires a lot of trial-and-error. Unfortunately, working by trial-and-error is neither safe nor easy. Actually, this is the phase that makes me most anxious: experimenting with a new toolkit while producing working code and keeping my codebase clean. Usually, at this stage I cannot use the Eclipse Scrapbook because the code I have to write is already too large and complex for this small tool. In the same way, I cannot use any more an indipendent small project for my experiments because I need to try the new code in place. I can just write my code in place and rely on GIT for a safe bail-out. This makes me anxious because this kind of intertwined, half-ripe code can rapidly become incredibly hard to manage. How do you face this phase of the development process? How do you learn-by-doing without making a mess of your codebase? Any tips&tricks, best practice or something like that?

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• Developer career feeling like going back in time every new job [closed]

  - by komediant

  Is there a good category for this question? My background is bachelor in ICT and for a hobby I am programming already since I was around twelve I think. Started with QBasic, Pascal, C, Java et cetera. Currently I am working for about eight/nine years. Half academics/medical and half company world. A few years ago I started with frameworks and I began with Grails (underlying Spring/Hibernate), which was a heavenly job, very productive and no hassle. My previous job I developed in pure Spring/Hibernate Java, which was a bit more writing annotations and XML and no conventions like Grails. But still, I did like Spring/Hibernate a lot and the professional setup with a developmentstreet, versioning, Jenkins/Sonar, log4j and a good IDE like IntellIJ. It felt quite 'clear' and organised, although I knew Grails which felt a bit more productive. But...at my current job almost half the code is pure servlet, hard coded JDBC (connections handled by yourself), scriptlets in all JSP pages, no service layer, no versioning, no Maven, HTML in DAO-layer, JAR-hell, no hot swap deployment locally, every change you have to deploy and hope it works fine on the server. All local development needs ugly scriptlet tags to check which environment it is running. Et cetera. Now and then developers work over in the evening - I don't - and still lots of issues are not solved and new projects are waiting. I hear the developers complaining, but somehow they feel like what they have now is "advanced" or they are in a sort of comfore zone. The lead developer seems open for new things, but half of the times he says he can implement MVC-framework features himself instead of using what is already out there. So in short, I currently feel like I miss all the modern framework techniques and that the company is going so slow forward. I just work here for two months now. What I do now is also code some partially ugly stuff, but it goes in completely into my nature and I feel uncomfortable with it. Coding something takes long(er) than estimated and my manager complains about why it takes so long and I feel ashamed for myself needing so much time. Where I was used to just writing a query I now build up whole try catch methods. My manager knows my complaints and the developers do so too. There will come a meeting to line out plans for 2013 on technology and the issues I and the company are facing. I am not looking for another job yet, it's close to wehre I live and the economy is fragile. Does anyone else have had this kind of career, like feeling going backwards witch technology? And how did you cope with it?

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• Networking - intermittent, slow speeds

  - by jack

  Hi all I'm a novice when it comes to networking. I live in a large two storey building that used to be a school and we have an internet connection with BT (british telecoms provider), the connection speed is 12Mb.. Basically our connection is slow and very intermittent and I was wondering if anybody here could provide some help or ideas. There are about 11 people in the building who could be online at any time. We have a router on the ground floor which is bog standard supplied by BT. To provide Broadband access to the 1st and 2nd floors, we used an old switch that the school left, we have a cable running from the router on the first floor to the switch which connects to a wireless router which is configured as a bridge on the 2nd floor supplying broadband access to the 1st and 2nd floors. Additionally we have 3 computers that are connected via the switch through the ethernet sockets left by the school on the ground floor. The router we use on the 2nd floor came in a pack of 2 and cost about £15 (bought by another person). Sometimes the connection is perfectly fine, i.e. early hours of the morning or when everybody is out, we have rang BT who say that the connection cannot cope with the numbers of people online, plus I'm not sure whether each person is streaming etc. Can anybody offer any advice?

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• Small Business HP Virtualisation and iSCSI SAN Options

  - by Robin Day

  We are a small business that hosts our core product on a number of HP servers. Our core production setup is 1x HP DL380, high powered for a SQL Server Database 1x HP DL360, mid powered for our core application server 6x HP DL320, low powered for our front ends We run our training / testing / support systems on a similar setup, the servers are just older and less powerful. Unfortunately this is now causing us issues as the system has grown beyond the capabilities of these older servers. Upgrading these servers would be expensive and we believe that virtualisation is probably the way to go for the future. Locally we run a number of test / dev environments on ESXi using Direct Storoage on a couple of high powered DL360's and these are performing fairly well. We're thinking that instead of replacing all of our test servers that we can implement an iSCSI SAN and one or two high powered hosts. Hopefully looking that when it comes to replace our live servers as well that we can just expand the virual environment to cope. So my question is... Can anyone offer any advice on some suitable options? We have generally always been extremely happy with HP servers, all of our kit is currently HP, therefore our preference would be to stick with HP, however, I'm always happy to hear about other options. I'm hoping that initially a budget of around 15-25k (GBP) would be suitable, this could potentially be increased if I had confidence that the system would pave the way for a cost effective upgrade of our live systems in the future as well. I am new to SAN's and my only real experience is playing with OpenFiler on some old desktops. I think iSCSI should be suitable, but I've not done any research into how SQL server may perform. I've had a browser through HP's sites and see plenty of information about EVA, MSA, LeftHand, etc. However, from looking at all that, I don't see which options would be best and more importantly I don't know exactly what I would need to buy. Any help, links, opinions would be much appreciated. Thanks

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• Blu-ray BD-R: Would you physically store it in a CaseLogic Wallet pocket?

  - by Rob

  I keep several backup copies of my material and files. For my DVDs, one set of copies is kept in a CaseLogic wallet folder pack, so that I can easily move this around when visiting friends, family or for business. This is highly convenient. The other sets are kept in their jewel cases in hard plastic see thru storage boxes. Although CaseLogic wallet material is designed to be abrasion free, their caveat is that external dust will be the cause of any blemishes. If hard dust gets in these pockets, which is inevitable, this will occasionally cause light hair like scratches on the disc surface as the discs are removed and returned for access to their contents. This is of no consequence as the laser and error correction can more than cope with this. I'm aware that the blu-ray spec requires anti-scratch in disc surfaces but was wondering that, given the smaller pits, would dust and light scratches from wallet storage cause more problems with blu-rays than they would with DVDs? I'm using Blu-ray BD-R and BD-R DL write once media.

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• Looking for an application to record audio and video on a linux "embedded" device

  - by Luke404

  I am working with a linux x86 device with limited CPU resources (as a prototype we just use a pentium-m netbook). We'd like to record video from one V4L2 device (we'll probably end up using just USB Video Class devices like all modern webcams) and one audio stream from an ALSA source. The thing will not have screen and keyboard, and obviously no X11 environment. Goals are: do as little work as possible to cope with little cpu resources - for example I'd like to record video in the native MJPEG I get out of the UVC devices encoding audio to MPEG3 Layer-2 (aka mp2) is ok since it let us save a lot of space (compared to raw pcm samples) and does use little cpu power I don't mind loosing some video frames here and there (UVC devices do that) as long as I can get audio and video streams syncronized not require user input to start the thing (a python script takes care of initialization, startup, shutdown, etc...) be able to open the resulting files for postprocessing without too much effort (ie, if mplayer or vlc can play it, it's fine) So far the only app I found that could be started from command line and record V4L2 video + ALSA audio is mencoder but I'm having some difficulties with it. It should be able to do that but I cannot record audio and video together - just one of the two. And if I use two different processes to record to two different files I have no means to get them in sync (audio is more or less always correct, but video framerate will vary over time and it seems to lack timestamps to correctly play it back to the correct time). Long story short, how do you record an unconverted MJPEG stream (from an UVC device) and an audio stream (from an ALSA device, possibly encoding to any standard format) using a command line tool, to a single file (MPEG or any other container), keeping audio and video in sync?

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• Find out when a system went down?

  - by Clinton Blackmore

  I have a Mac OS X 10.5 server, with a RAID set in it, that went down due to a power outage on Thursday, and the machine is not happily booting right now*. It is possible to find out when the machine went down, while not booted off the internal drive? (I'm booted off an external drive, waiting for the RAID sets to initialize.) Normally, I'd run last. The man page doesn't indicate that I can run it against a different startup volume. It looks possible to parse /var/log/utmpx, but I don't think it'd be worthwhile to try to do that from scratch for this one-off problem. * I'm still trying to figure out why it isn't happy, and may ask a follow-up question. Right now I can see that UserNotificationCenter crashed repeatedly early Thursday morning, and that securityd, mdworker, and ARDAgent crash shortly after startup [I think -- I want to verify when the box went up and down]. The login window does not come up right (I think it is crashing or not able to cope with a dead securityd). The box is supposed to be set to go down when the UPS tells it power is out; at the moment, I'm wondering if it went down, and turned back on multiple times! I sure hope not.

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• backup of TFS with DPM 2007 - different backup times

  - by user46516

  I have DPM set up to back up my TFS server every 30 minutes, the reason being it's a way better interface than the quirky SQL backup interface. I also do a full backup nightly using an SQL maintenance job. My thinking is I would use DPM to restore my databases in case of losing my database and the nightly full backup would be a "just in case" the DPM restore doesn't work. I was thinking a little harder about this set up today and started to think about the fact that the DPM backup of the individual databases happens at different 30 min windows.. i.e. one happens at 13h30, another at 13h34 etc. Would this difference in time be a problem when it comes to restoring the TFS server? If I restore the databases and they are from different times, will this create corruption with pointers in one database pointing to missing items in the other database.. do the databases even rely on each other or are they completely interdependant. Lastly, how would SQL (log) backup cope with this?

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• DDoS nulling to some ips and other options?

  - by Prix

  I am looking for some information in regards DDoS in the follow scenario: I have a server that is behind a Cisco Guard and it will be DDoS'ed, I only care about a set list of IPS that by not means are the attackers. Is it possible to null all other ips but this list to actually get any response to my server or in the long run no matter what I do if they have enough DDoS power I will just go down like a flie ? Is there any recommended company out there that can actually cope with a DDoS ? My server will mainly run several clients that will get connected to a external server and all it needs access to is my local MySQL the the private network so I can access it. There will be no other services runnings such as web or ftp etc at least not to the external ips of the server if i ever have to have any of these service they will be on the private network. The MySQL will be available externally only to 1 safe ip not known by anyone but me and internally at localhost + private network. Are there any solutions ?

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• How to reject messages to unknown user in sendmail cooperating with MS-Exchange?

  - by user71061

  Hi! I have an MS Exchange 2003 configured as a mail server for an organization. As this server is located in this organization internal network and I don't want to expose it directly over internet, I have second server - linux box with sendmail - configured as intelligent relay (it accept all messages from internet addressed to @my_domain, and forward it to internal Exchange serwer, and accepts all messages from this internal Exchange server and forward it over internet). This configuration work's fine, but I want to eliminate messages addressed to not exiting users as early as possible. Good solution could be Enabling on Exchange server function of filtering recipients together with "tar pitting", but in my case this dosn't solve problem, because before any message reach my Exchange server (which could eventually reject it), it has to be already accepted by sendmail server, sitting in front of this Exchange server. So, I want to configure my sendmail server in such a way, that during initial SMTP conversation it could query somehow my Exchange server checking whether recipient address is valid or not, and based on result of this query, accept or reject (possibly with some delay) incoming message in a very early phase. In fact, I have already solved this issue by writing my own, simple sendmail milter program which checks recipient address against text file with list of valid addresses. But this solution is not satisfying me any longer, because it requires frequent updates of this file, and due to lack of time/motivation/programming skills, I don't want to cope further with my source code, adding to it functionality of querying my Exchange server. Maybe I can achieve desired effect by configuring any component of already available linux software. Any ideas?

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• How do I do a mail merge that includes images?

  - by Ian Ringrose

  I am trying to find out the practicalities of doing a mail merge when each “record” to be merged on includes some images. I need to: print letters And envelopes Both the letters and the envelopes have: Fixed text Fixed images Text that come from the mail merge record Images that come from the mail merge record I don’t know if all images will be the same size for every record, so a bit of simple “on the fly” automatic formatting may be needed . I need to be able to repeat a single item if I get a problem (e.g when folding the letter). What problems am I likely to have? Is Word 2007 up to this sort of mail merging, or should I be looking at a report writing tool? How do I restart a print run after a printer jam etc? What format should I store the “records” and there images in? E.g Can standard software cope with images that are stored in separate files named after the “CustomerId” that is in the “record” (I can write custom software if needed, but would rather use standard “of-the-shelf” software for the printing, I am planning on custom software for the data creation, so can output in whatever format is needed)

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• Recommend a UK based VPS host equivalent to Dreamhost [closed]

  - by Pez Cuckow

  I appreciate this question could be considered subjective and argumentative so can people make recommendations rather than arguing about the best. I believe the "correct" answer is the one closest to what I am looking for. Basically I live in the UK but have been using the US based Dreamhost for about 6 years now, and my web projects are getting to the scale where the websites need to the UK based to cope with the demand and load. I originally had shared hosting with Dreamhost but upgraded to a VPS a while ago, getting 512mb of RAM, unlimited disk space, bandwidth and domains for $30. Their control panel is a custom easy to use build that they have created in house and offers features very similar to other web panels (as far as I am aware). So basically my question boils down to, is there anywhere that offers an equivalent package? In all honesty as long as I have over 50gb HDD space and unlimited domains it doesn't really matter? Are there any VPS providers you would recommend as reliable? I promise to check every link posted, many thanks for your time!

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• Access an external SSH server through a restrictive proxy [on hold]

  - by Cyrille

  I'm a software developer. I wish to access my computer at home through SSH. For example, I sometime need to access my personal projects source code to check how I handled specific problems. Unfortunately, I currently work under an over-restrictive and anti-productive proxy that waste a hell of a lot of everyone's time (We often have to visit websites from our smartphones or use a web proxy to check very legitimates websites for answers, and don't get me started on other "security" overkill features we have to cope with...). Well, back to the subject, I can access my home computer from my phone (SSH, port 22 and 80 both redirected by router on port 22). It works, but it's quite uncomfortable. From my office computer, this is what I tried so far: export http_proxy=http://user:pass@proxyip:8080 echo "user:pass" > ~/.corkscrew-auth echo "ProxyCommand corkscrew proxyip 8080 %h %p /home/me/.corkscrew-auth" > ~/.ssh/config ssh 82.23.34.56 -l me -p 80 Proxy could not open connnection to 82.23.34.56: Forbidden ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host (same without -p 80) Without corkscrew: ssh: connect to host 82.23.34.56 port 80: Connection timed out ssh: connect to host 82.23.34.56 port 22: Connection timed out Any other idea ?

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• How to resume XMPP groupchat window in Irssi (using bitlbee)?

  - by mcnesium

  I use Bitlbee to chat in XMPP-networks within my IRC-client Irssi. This works great so far, and recently I started using XMPP Multi User Chats as an alternative to IRC-channels. I set up a channel using chat add <account> <[email protected]> in the &bitlbee control window, set chan <room> set autojoin true and entered /join #room in the &bitlbee window to join that groupchat. It then appears as a unique Irssi window in the status bar. This seems to work ok too, but with one exception: Since I idle in the channels 24/7 my irssi has to cope with the every-night-24h-DSL-disconnection by the ISP. After it automatically reconnects, it does kind of rejoin that XMPP-groupchat, but the traffic of the groupchat does not go back to the unique irssi window, but keeps flooding &bitlbee with messages from root telling me about a Groupchat Message from unknown JID <jid>: <message> - which is the traffic of the groupchat. The unique groupchat window is gone after the reconnect, and I will again have to go /join #room in &bitlbee to get it back. Even worse, the window number is unused before I rejoin the groupchat, and if I get a query from any network, the window nests in that unused window spot, so I will first have to remove that query from the spot, and then move the rejoined groupchat to that window number. I want my groupchat window to resume after the reconnect just like every other IRC channel too. How can I get this done? Any ideas?

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• How do I do a mail merge that includes images? (Maybe in Word 2007)

  - by Ian Ringrose

  I am trying to find out the practicalities of doing a mail merge when each “record” to be merged on includes some images. I need to: print letters And envelopes Both the letters and the envelopes have: Fixed text Fixed images Text that come from the mail merge record Images that come from the mail merge record I don’t know if all images will be the same size for every record, so a bit of simple “on the fly” automatic formatting may be needed . I need to be able to repeat a single item if I get a problem (e.g when folding the letter). What problems am I likely to have? Is Word 2007 up to this sort of mail merging, or should I be looking at a report writing tool? How do I restart a print run after a printer jam etc? What format should I store the “records” and there images in? E.g Can standard software cope with images that are stored in separate files named after the “CustomerId” that is in the “record” (I can write custom software if needed, but would rather use standard “of-the-shelf” software for the printing, I am planning on custom software for the data creation, so can output in whatever format is needed)

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• It&rsquo;s ok to throw System.Exception&hellip;

  - by Chris Skardon

  No. No it’s not. It’s not just me saying that, it’s the Microsoft guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229007.aspx  Do not throw System.Exception or System.SystemException. Also – as important: Do not catch System.Exception or System.SystemException in framework code, unless you intend to re-throw.. Throwing: Always, always try to pick the most specific exception type you can, if the parameter you have received in your method is null, throw an ArgumentNullException, value received greater than expected? ArgumentOutOfRangeException. For example: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("theInt", theInt, "theInt needs to be greater than zero."); if (theString == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("theString"); if (theString.Length == 0) throw new ArgumentException("theString needs to have content.", "theString"); } Why do we want to do this? It’s a lot of extra code when compared with a simple: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0 || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(theString)) throw new Exception("The parameters were invalid."); } It all comes down to a couple of things; the catching of the exceptions, and the information you are passing back to the calling code. Catching: Ok, so let’s go with introduction level Exception handling, taught by many-a-university: You do all your work in a try clause, and catch anything wrong in the catch clause. So this tends to give us code like this: try { /* All the shizzle */ } catch { /* Deal with errors */ } But of course, we can improve on that by catching the exception so we can report on it: try { } catch(Exception ex) { /* Log that 'ex' occurred? */ } Now we’re at the point where people tend to go: Brilliant, I’ve got exception handling nailed, what next??? and code gets littered with the catch(Exception ex) nastiness. Why is it nasty? Let’s imagine for a moment our code is throwing an ArgumentNullException which we’re catching in the catch block and logging. Ok, the log entry has been made, so we can debug the code right? We’ve got all the info… What about an OutOfMemoryException – what can we do with that? That’s right, not a lot, chances are you can’t even log it (you are out of memory after all), but you’ve caught it – and as such - have hidden it. So, as part of this, there are two things you can do one, is the rethrow method: try { /* code */ } catch (Exception ex) { //Log throw; } Note, it’s not catch (Exception ex) { throw ex; } as that will wipe all your important stack trace information. This does get your exception to continue, and is the only reason you would catch Exception (anywhere other than a global catch-all) in your code. The other preferred method is to catch the exceptions you can deal with. It may not matter that the string I’m passing in is null, and I can cope with it like this: try{ DoSomething(myString); } catch(ArgumentNullException){} And that’s fine, it means that any exceptions I can’t deal with (OutOfMemory for example) will be propagated out to other code that can deal with it. Of course, this is horribly messy, no one wants try / catch blocks everywhere and that’s why Microsoft added the ‘Try’ methods to the framework, and it’s a strategy we should continue. If I try: int i = (int) "one"; I will get an InvalidCastException which means I need the try / catch block, but I could mitigate this using the ‘TryParse’ method: int i; if(!Int32.TryParse("one", out i)) return; Similarly, in the ‘DoSomething’ example, it might be beneficial to have a ‘TryDoSomething’ that returns a boolean value indicating the success of continuing. Obviously this isn’t practical in every case, so use the ol’ common sense approach. Onwards Yer thanks Chris, I’m looking forward to writing tonnes of new code. Fear not, that is where helpers come into it… (but that’s the next post)

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• Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

  - by Michael Stephenson

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

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• Big Data: Size isn’t everything

  - by Simon Elliston Ball

  Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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• Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

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• How to Set Up Your Enterprise Social Organization

  - by Mike Stiles

  The rush for business organizations to establish, grow, and adopt social was driven out of necessity and inevitability. The result, however, was a sudden, booming social presence creating touch points with customers, partners and influencers, but without any corporate social organization or structure in place to effectively manage it. Even today, many business leaders remain uncertain as to how to corral this social media thing so that it makes sense for their enterprise. Imagine their panic when they hear one of the most beneficial approaches to corporate use of social involves giving up at least some hierarchical control and empowering employees to publicly engage customers. And beyond that, they should also be empowered, regardless of their corporate status, to engage and collaborate internally, spurring “off the grid” innovation. An HBR blog points out that traditionally, enterprise organizations function from the top down, and employees work end-to-end, structured around business processes. But the social enterprise opens up structures that up to now have not exactly been embraced by turf-protecting executives and managers. The blog asks, “What if leaders could create a future where customers, associates and suppliers are no longer seen as objects in the system but as valued sources of innovation, ideas and energy?” What if indeed? The social enterprise activates internal resources without the usual obsession with position. It is the dawn of mass collaboration. That does not, however, mean this mass collaboration has to lead to uncontrolled chaos. In an extended interview with Oracle, Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Oracle SVP Reggie Bradford paint a complete picture of today’s social enterprise, including internal organizational structures Altimeter Group has seen emerge. One sign of a mature social enterprise is the establishing of a social Center of Excellence (CoE), which serves as a hub for high-level social strategy, training and education, research, measurement and accountability, and vendor selection. This CoE is led by a corporate Social Strategist, most likely from a Marketing or Corporate Communications background. Reporting to them are the Community Managers, the front lines of customer interaction and engagement; business unit liaisons that coordinate the enterprise; and social media campaign/product managers, social analysts, and developers. With content rising as the defining factor for social success, Altimeter also sees a Content Strategist position emerging. Across the enterprise, Altimeter has seen 5 organizational patterns. Watching the video will give you the pros and cons of each. Decentralized - Anyone can do anything at any time on any social channel. Centralized – One central groups controls all social communication for the company. Hub and Spoke – A centralized group, but business units can operate their own social under the hub’s guidance and execution. Most enterprises are using this model. Dandelion – Each business unit develops their own social strategy & staff, has its own ability to deploy, and its own ability to engage under the central policies of the CoE. Honeycomb – Every employee can do social, but as opposed to the decentralized model, it’s coordinated and monitored on one platform. The average enterprise has a whopping 178 social accounts, nearly ¼ of which are usually semi-idle and need to be scrapped. The last thing any C-suite needs is to cope with fragmented technologies, solutions and platforms. It’s neither scalable nor strategic. The prepared, effective social enterprise has a technology partner that can quickly and holistically integrate emerging platforms and technologies, such that whatever internal social command structure you’ve set up can continue efficiently executing strategy without skipping a beat. @mikestiles

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