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• Check Your Spelling, Grammar, and Style in Firefox and Chrome

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you tired of making simple writing mistakes that get past your browser’s spell-check?  Here’s how you can get advanced grammar check and more in Firefox and Chrome with After the Deadline. Microsoft Word has spoiled us with grammar, syntax, and spell checking, but the default spell check in Firefox and Chrome still only does basic checks.  Even webapps like Google Docs don’t check more than basic spelling errors.  However, WordPress.com is an exception; it offers advanced spelling, grammar, and syntax checking with its After the Deadline proofing system.  This helps you keep from making embarrassing mistakes on your blog posts, and now, thanks to a couple free browser plugins, it can help you keep from making these mistakes in any website or webapp. After the Deadline in Google Chrome Add the After the Deadline extension (link below) to Chrome as usual. As soon as it’s installed, you’re ready to start improving your online writing.  To check spelling, grammar, and more, click the ABC button that you’ll now see at the bottom of most text boxes online. After a quick scan, grammar mistakes are highlighted in green, complex expressions and other syntax problems are highlighted in blue, and spelling mistakes are highlighted in red as would be expected.  Click on an underlined word to choose one of its recommended changes or ignore the suggestion. Or, if you want more explanation about what was wrong with that word or phrase, click Explain for more info. And, if you forget to run an After the Deadline scan before submitting a text entry, it will automatically check to make sure you still want to submit it.  Click Cancel to go back and check your writing first.   To change the After the Deadline settings, click its icon in the toolbar and select View Options.  Additionally, if you want to disable it on the site you’re on, you can click Disable on this site directly from the popup. From the settings page, you can choose extra things to check for such as double negatives and redundant phrases, as well as add sites and words to ignore. After the Deadline in Firefox Add the After the Deadline add-on to Firefox (link below) as normal. After the Deadline basically the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.  Select the ABC icon in the lower right corner of textboxes to check them for problems, and After the Deadline will underline the problems as it did in Chrome.  To view a suggested change in Firefox, right-click on the underlined word and select the recommended change or ignore the suggestion. And, if you forget to check, you’ll see a friendly reminder asking if you’re sure you want to submit your text like it is. You can access the After the Deadline settings in Firefox from the menu bar.  Click Tools, then select AtD Preferences.  In Firefox, the settings are in a options dialog with three tabs, but it includes the same options as the Chrome settings page.  Here you can make After the Deadline as correction-happy as you like.   Conclusion The web has increasingly become an interactive place, and seldom does a day go by that we aren’t entering text in forms and comments that may stay online forever.  Even our insignificant tweets are being archived in the Library of Congress.  After the Deadline can help you make sure that your permanent internet record is as grammatically correct as possible.  Even though it doesn’t catch every problem, and even misses some spelling mistakes, it’s still a great help. Links Download the After the Deadline extension for Google Chrome Download the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Disable Favicons in FirefoxStupid Geek Tricks: Duplicate a Tab with a Shortcut Key in Chrome or FirefoxHow to Disable the New Geolocation Feature in Google ChromeStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeStop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in Chrome 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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• Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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• SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

  - by pinaldave

  Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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• concurrency::accelerator

  - by Daniel Moth

  Overview An accelerator represents a "target" on which C++ AMP code can execute and where data can reside. Typically (but not necessarily) an accelerator is a GPU device. Accelerators are represented in C++ AMP as objects of the accelerator class. For many scenarios, you do not need to obtain an accelerator object, since the runtime has a notion of a default accelerator, which is what it thinks is the best one in the system. Examples where you need to deal with accelerator objects are if you need to pick your own accelerator (based on your specific criteria), or if you need to use more than one accelerators from your app. Construction and operator usage You can query and obtain a std::vector of all the accelerators on your system, which the runtime discovers on startup. Beyond enumerating accelerators, you can also create one directly by passing to the constructor a system-wide unique path to a device if you know it (i.e. the “Device Instance Path” property for the device in Device Manager), e.g. accelerator acc(L"PCI\\VEN_1002&DEV_6898&SUBSYS_0B001002etc"); There are some predefined strings (for predefined accelerators) that you can pass to the accelerator constructor (and there are corresponding constants for those on the accelerator class itself, so you don’t have to hardcode them every time). Examples are the following: accelerator::default_accelerator represents the default accelerator that the C++ AMP runtime picks for you if you don’t pick one (the heuristics of how it picks one will be covered in a future post). Example: accelerator acc; accelerator::direct3d_ref represents the reference rasterizer emulator that simulates a direct3d device on the CPU (in a very slow manner). This emulator is available on systems with Visual Studio installed and is useful for debugging. More on debugging in general in future posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_ref); accelerator::direct3d_warp represents a target that I will cover in future blog posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_warp); accelerator::cpu_accelerator represents the CPU. In this first release the only use of this accelerator is for using the staging arrays technique that I'll cover separately. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::cpu_accelerator); You can also create an accelerator by shallow copying another accelerator instance (via the corresponding constructor) or simply assigning it to another accelerator instance (via the operator overloading of =). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying device. Querying accelerator characteristics Given an accelerator object, you can access its description, version, device path, size of dedicated memory in KB, whether it is some kind of emulator, whether it has a display attached, whether it supports double precision, and whether it was created with the debugging layer enabled for extensive error reporting. Below is example code that accesses some of the properties; in your real code you'd probably be checking one or more of them in order to pick an accelerator (or check that the default one is good enough for your specific workload): void inspect_accelerator(concurrency::accelerator acc) { std::wcout << "New accelerator: " << acc.description << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_debug = " << acc.is_debug << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_emulated = " << acc.is_emulated << std::endl; std::wcout << "dedicated_memory = " << acc.dedicated_memory << std::endl; std::wcout << "device_path = " << acc.device_path << std::endl; std::wcout << "has_display = " << acc.has_display << std::endl; std::wcout << "version = " << (acc.version >> 16) << '.' << (acc.version & 0xFFFF) << std::endl; } accelerator_view In my next blog post I'll cover a related class: accelerator_view. Suffice to say here that each accelerator may have from 1..n related accelerator_view objects. You can get the accelerator_view from an accelerator via the default_view property, or create new ones by invoking the create_view method that creates an accelerator_view object for you (by also accepting a queuing_mode enum value of deferred or immediate that we'll also explore in the next blog post). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• The Oracle Retail Week Awards - in review

  - by user801960

  The Oracle Retail Week Awards 2012 were another great success, building on the legacy of previous award ceremonies. Over 1,600 of the UK's top retailers gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel and many of Europe's top retail leaders attended the prestigious Oracle Retail VIP Reception in the Grosvenor House Hotel's Red Bar. Over the years the Oracle Retail Week Awards have become a rallying point for the morale of the retail industry, and each nominated retailer served as a demonstration that the industry is fighting fit. It was an honour to speak to so many figureheads of UK - and global - retail. All of us at Oracle Retail would like to congratulate both the winners and the nominees for the awards. Retail is a cornerstone of the economy and it was inspiring to see so many outstanding demonstrations of innovation and dedication in the entries. Winners 2012   The Market Force Customer Service Initiative of the Year Winner: Dixons Retail: Knowhow Highly Commended: Hughes Electrical: Digital Switchover     The Deloitte Employer of the Year Winner: Morrisons     Growing Retailer of the Year Winner: Hallett Retail - The Concessions People Highly Commended: Blue Inc     The TCC Marketing/Advertising Campaign of the Year Winner: Sainsbury's: Feed your Family for £50     The Brandbank Multichannel Retailer of the Year Winner: Debenhams Highly Commended: Halfords     The Ashton Partnership Product Innovation of the Year Winner: Argos: Chad Valley Highly Commended: Halfords: Private label bikes     The RR Donnelley Pure-play Online Retailer of the Year Winner: Wiggle     The Hitachi Consulting Responsible Retailer of the Year Winner: B&Q: One Planet Home     The CA Technologies Retail Technology Initiative of the Year Winner: Oasis: Argyll Street flagship launch with iPad PoS     The Premier Tax Free Speciality Retailer of the Year Winner: Holland & Barrett     Store Design of the Year Winner: Next Home and Garden, Shoreham, Sussex Highly Commended: Dixons Retail, Black concept store, Birmingham Bullring     Store Manager of the Year Winner: Ian Allcock, Homebase, Aylesford Highly Commended: Darren Parfitt, Boots UK, Melton Mowbray Health Centre     The Wates Retail Destination of the Year Winner: Westfield, Stratford     The AlixPartners Emerging Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Catriona Marshall, HobbyCraft, Chief Executive     The Wipro Retail International Retailer of the Year Winner: Apple     The Clarity Search Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher     The Oracle Retailer of the Year Winner: Burberry     Outstanding Contribution to Retail Winner: Lord Harris of Peckham     Oracle Retail and "Your Experience Platform" Technology is the key to providing that differentiated retail experience. More specifically, it is what we at Oracle call ‘the experience platform’ - a set of integrated, cross-channel business technology solutions, selected and operated by a retail business and IT team, and deployed in accordance with that organisation’s individual strategy and processes. This business systems architecture simultaneously: Connects customer interactions across all channels and touchpoints, and every customer lifecycle phase to provide a differentiated customer experience that meets consumers’ needs and expectations. Delivers actionable insight that enables smarter decisions in planning, forecasting, merchandising, supply chain management, marketing, etc; Optimises operations to align every aspect of the retail business to gain efficiencies and economies, to align KPIs to eliminate strategic conflicts, and at the same time be working in support of customer priorities.   Working in unison, these three goals not only help retailers to successfully navigate the challenges of today but also to focus on delivering that personalised customer experience based on differentiated products, pricing, services and interactions that will help you to gain market share and grow sales.  

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• Demystified - BI in SharePoint 2010

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Frequently, my clients ask me if there is a good guide on deciphering the seemingly daunting choice of products from Microsoft when it comes to business intelligence offerings in a SharePoint 2010 world. These are all described in detail in my book, but here is a one (well maybe two) page executive overview. Microsoft Excel: Yes, Microsoft Excel! Your favorite and most commonly used in the world database. No it isn’t a database in technical pure definitions, but this is the most commonly used ‘database’ in the world. You will find many business users craft up very compelling excel sheets with tonnes of logic inside them. Good for: Quick Ad-Hoc reports. Excel 64 bit allows the possibility of very large datasheets (Also see 32 bit vs 64 bit Office, and PowerPivot Add-In below). Audience: End business user can build such solutions. Related technologies: PowerPivot, Excel Services Microsoft Excel with PowerPivot Add-In: The powerpivot add-in is an extension to Excel that adds support for large-scale data. Think of this as Excel with the ability to deal with very large amounts of data. It has an in-memory data store as an option for Analysis services. Good for: Ad-hoc reporting and logic with very large amounts of data. Audience: End business user can build such solutions. Related technologies: Excel, and Excel Services Excel Services: Excel Services is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 shared service that brings the power of Excel to SharePoint Server by providing server-side calculation and browser-based rendering of Excel workbooks. Thus, excel sheets can be created by end users, and published to SharePoint server – which are then rendered right through the browser in read-only or parameterized-read-only modes. They can also be accessed by other software via SOAP or REST based APIs. Good for: Sharing excel sheets with a larger number of people, while maintaining control/version control etc. Sharing logic embedded in excel sheets with other software across the organization via REST/SOAP interfaces Audience: End business users can build such solutions once your tech staff has setup excel services on a SharePoint server instance. Programmers can write software consuming functionality/complex formulae contained in your sheets. Related technologies: PerformancePoint Services, Excel, and PowerPivot. Visio Services: Visio Services is a shared service on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 platform that allows users to share and view Visio diagrams that may or may not have data connected to them. Connected data can update these diagrams allowing a visual/graphical view into the data. The diagrams are viewable through the browser. They are rendered in silverlight, but will automatically down-convert to .png formats. Good for: Showing data as diagrams, live updating. Comes with a developer story. Audience: End business users can build such solutions once your tech staff has setup visio services on a SharePoint server instance. Developers can enhance the visualizations Related Technologies: Visio Services can be used to render workflow visualizations in SP2010 Reporting Services: SQL Server reporting services can integrate with SharePoint, allowing you to store reports and data sources in SharePoint document libraries, and render these reports and associated functionality such as subscriptions through a SharePoint site. In SharePoint 2010, you can also write reports against SharePoint lists (access services uses this technique). Good for: Showing complex reports running in a industry standard data store, such as SQL server. Audience: This is definitely developer land. Don’t expect end users to craft up reports, unless a report model has previously been published. Related Technologies: PerformancePoint Services PerformancePoint Services: PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 is now fully integrated with SharePoint, and comes with features that can either be used in the BI center site definition, or on their own as activated features in existing site collections. PerformancePoint services allows you to build reports and dashboards that target a variety of back-end datasources including: SQL Server reporting services, SQL Server analysis services, SharePoint lists, excel services, simple tables, etc. Using these you have the ability to create dashboards, scorecards/kpis, and simple reports. You can also create reports targeting hierarchical multidimensional data sources. The visual decomposition tree is a new report type that lets you quickly breakdown multi-dimensional data. Good for: Mostly everything :), except your wallet – it’s not free! But this is the most comprehensive offering. If you have SharePoint server, forget everything and go with performance point. Audience: Developers need to setup the back-end sources, manageability story. DBAs need to setup datawarehouses with cubes. Moderately sophisticated business users, or developers can craft up reports using dashboard designer which is a click-once App that deploys with PerformancePoint Related Technologies: Excel services, reporting services, etc.   Other relevant technologies to know about: Business Connectivity Services: Allows for consumption of external data in SharePoint as columns or external lists. This can be paired with one or more of the above BI offerings allowing insight into such data. Access Services: Allows the representation/publishing of an access database as a SharePoint 2010 site, leveraging many SharePoint features. Reporting services is used by Access services. Secure Store Service: The SP2010 Secure store service is a replacement for the SP2007 single sign on feature. This acts as a credential policeman providing credentials to various applications running with SharePoint. BCS, PerformancePoint Services, Excel Services, and many other apps use the SSS (Secure Store Service) for credential control. Comment on the article ....

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• Screen (command-line program) bug?

  - by VioletCrime

  fired up my Minecraft server again after about a year off. My server used to run 11.04, which has since been upgraded to 12.04; I lost my management scripts in the upgrade (thought I'd backed up the user's home directory), but whatever, I enjoy developing stuff like that anyways. However, this time around, I'm running into issues. I start the Minecraft server using a detached screen, however the script is unable to 'stuff' commands into the screen instance until I attach to the screen then detach again? Once I do that, I can stuff anything I want into the server's terminal using the -X option, until I stop/start the server again, then I have to reattach and detach in order to restore functionality? Here's the manager script: #!/bin/bash #Name of the screen housing the server (set with the -S flag at startup) SCREENNAME=minecraft1 #Name of the folder housing the Minecraft world FOLDERNAME=world1 startServer (){ if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Cannot start Minecraft server; it is already running!" else screen -dmS $SCREENNAME java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar sleep 2 if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Minecraft server started; happy mining!" else echo "ERROR: Minecraft server failed to start!" fi fi; } stopServer (){ if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Server is running. Giving a 1-minute warning." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Shutting down (halt) in one minute." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 45 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Shutting down (halt) in 15 seconds." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 15 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/stop" screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' else echo "Server is not running; nothing to stop." fi; } stopServerNow (){ if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Server is running. Giving a 5-second warning." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN! 5 seconds to halt." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 5 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/stop" screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' else echo "Server is not running; nothing to stop." fi; } restartServer (){ if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Server is running. Giving a 1-minute warning." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Shutting down (restart) in one minute." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 45 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Shutting down (restart) in 15 seconds." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 15 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/stop" screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 2 startServer else echo "Cannot restart server: it isn't running." fi; } #In order for this function to work, a directory 'backup/$FOLDERNAME' must exist in the same #directory that '$FOLDERNAME' resides backupWorld (){ if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Server is running. Giving a 1-minute warning." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Shutting down (backup) in one minute." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Server should be down for no more than a few seconds." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 45 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/say Shutting down for backup in 15 seconds." screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' sleep 15 screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff "/stop" screen -S $SCREENNAME -X stuff $'\015' fi sleep 2 if screen -list | grep $SCREENNAME > /dev/null then echo "Server is still running? Error." else cd .. tar -czvf backup0.tar.gz $FOLDERNAME mv backup0.tar.gz backup/$FOLDERNAME cd backup/$FOLDERNAME rm backup10.tar.gz mv backup9.tar.gz backup10.tar.gz mv backup8.tar.gz backup9.tar.gz mv backup7.tar.gz backup8.tar.gz mv backup6.tar.gz backup7.tar.gz mv backup5.tar.gz backup6.tar.gz mv backup4.tar.gz backup5.tar.gz mv backup3.tar.gz backup4.tar.gz mv backup2.tar.gz backup3.tar.gz mv backup1.tar.gz backup2.tar.gz mv backup0.tar.gz backup1.tar.gz cd ../../$FOLDERNAME screen -dmS $SCREENNAME java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar; sleep 2 if screen -list | grep "$SCREENNAME" > /dev/null then echo "Minecraft server restarted; happy mining!" else echo "ERROR: Minecraft server failed to start!" fi fi; } printCommands (){ echo echo "$0 usage:" echo echo "Start : Starts the server on a detached screen." echo "Stop : Stop the server; includes a 1-minute warning." echo "StopNOW : Stops the server with only a 5-second warning." echo "Restart : Stops the server and starts the server again." echo "Backup : Stops the server (1 min), backs up the world, and restarts." echo "Help : Display this message." } #Forces case-insensitive string comparisons shopt -s nocasematch #Primary 'Switch' if [[ $1 = "start" ]] then startServer elif [[ $1 = "stop" ]] then stopServer elif [[ $1 = "stopnow" ]] then stopServerNow elif [[ $1 = "backup" ]] then backupWorld elif [[ $1 = "restart" ]] then restartServer else printCommands fi

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• Amanda Todd&ndash;What Parents Can Learn From Her Story

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Amanda Todd was a bullied teenager who committed suicide this week. Her story has become headline news due in part to her You Tube video she posted telling her story:   The story is heartbreaking for so many reasons, but I wanted to talk about what we as parents can learn from this. Being the dad to two girls, one that’s 10, I’m very aware of the dangers that the internet holds. When I saw her story, one thing jumped out at me – unmonitored internet access at an early age. My daughter (then 9) came home from a friends place once and asked if she could be in a YouTube video with her friend. Apparently this friend was allowed to do whatever she wanted on the internet, including posting goofy videos. This set off warning bells and we ensured our daughter realized the dangers and that she was not to ever post videos of herself. In looking at Amanda’s story, the access to unmonitored internet time along with just being a young girl and being flattered by an online predator were the key events that ultimately led to her suicide. Yes, the reaction of her classmates and “friends” was horrible as well, I’m not diluting that. But our youth don’t fully understand yet that what they do on the internet today will follow them potentially forever. And the people they meet online aren’t necessarily who they claim to be. So what can we as parents learn from Amanda’s story? Parents Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Being Internet Police Our job as parents is in part to protect our kids and keep them safe, even if they don’t like our measures. This includes monitoring, supervising, and restricting their internet activities. In our house we have a family computer in the living room that the kids can watch videos and surf the web. It’s in plain view of everyone, so you can’t hide what you’re looking at. If our daughter goes to a friend’s place, we ask about what they did and what they played. If the computer comes up, we ask about what they did on it. Luckily our daughter is very up front and honest in telling us things, so we have very open discussions. Parents Need to Be Honest About the Dangers of the Internet I’m sure every generation says that “kids grow up so fast these days”, but in our case the internet really does push our kids to be exposed to things they otherwise wouldn’t experience. One wrong word in a Google search, a click of a link in a spam email, or just general curiosity can expose a child to things they aren’t ready for or should never be exposed to (and I’m not just talking about adult material – have you seen some of the graphic pictures from war zones posted on news sites recently?). Our stance as parents has been to be open about discussing the dangers with our kids before they encounter any content – be proactive instead of reactionary. Part of this is alerting them to the monsters that lurk on the internet as well. As kids explore the world wide web, they’re eventually going to encounter some chat room or some Facebook friend invite or other personal connection with someone. More than ever kids need to be educated on the dangers of engaging with people online and sharing personal information. You can think of it as an evolved discussion that our parents had with us about using the phone: “Don’t say ‘I’m home alone’, don’t say when mom or dad get home, don’t tell them any information, etc.” Parents Need to Talk Self Worth at Home Katie makes the point better than I ever could (one bad word towards the end): Our children need to understand their value beyond what the latest issue of TigerBeat says, or the media who continues flaunting physical attributes over intelligence and character, or a society that puts focus on status and wealth. They also have to realize that just because someone pays you a compliment, that doesn’t mean you should ignore personal boundaries and limits. What does this have to do with the internet? Well, in days past if you wanted to be social you had to go out somewhere. Now you can video chat with any number of people from the comfort of wherever your laptop happens to be – and not just text but full HD video with sound! While innocent children head online in the hopes of meeting cool people, predators with bad intentions are heading online too. As much as we try to monitor their online activity and be honest about the dangers of the internet, the human side of our kids isn’t something we can control. But we can try to influence them to see themselves as not needing to search out the acceptance of complete strangers online. Way easier said than done, but ensuring self-worth is something discussed, encouraged, and celebrated is a step in the right direction. Parental Wake Up Call This post is not a critique of Amanda’s parents. The reality is that cyber bullying/abuse is happening every day, and there are millions of parents that have no clue its happening to their children. Amanda’s story is a wake up call that our children’s online activities may be putting them in danger. My heart goes out to the parents of this girl. As a father of daughters, I can’t imagine what I would do if I found my daughter having to hide in a ditch to avoid a mob or call 911 to report my daughter had attempted suicide by drinking bleach or deal with a child turning to drugs/alcohol/cutting to cope. It would be horrendous if we as parents didn’t re-evaluate our family internet policies in light of this event. And in the end, Amanda’s video was meant to bring attention to her plight and encourage others going through the same thing. We may not be kids, but we can still honour her memory by helping safeguard our children.

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• Is Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Best For Transportable Storage?

  - by rickramsey

  Those of us in tape storage engineering take a lot of pride in what we do, but understand that tape is the right answer to a storage problem only some of the time. And, unfortunately for a storage medium with such a long history, it has built up a few preconceived notions that are no longer valid. When I hear customers debate whether to implement tape vs. disk, one of the common strikes against tape is its perceived lack of usability. If you could go back a few generations of corporate acquisitions, you would discover that StorageTek engineers recognized this problem and started developing a solution where a tape drive could look just like a memory stick to a user. The goal was to not have to care about where files were on the cartridge, but to simply see the list of files that were on the tape, and click on them to open them up. Eventually, our friends in tape over at IBM built upon our work at StorageTek and Sun Microsystems and released the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) feature for the current LTO5 generation of tape drives as an open specification. LTFS is really a wonderful feature and we’re proud to have taken part in its beginnings and, as you’ll soon read, its future. Today we offer LTFS-Open Edition, which is free for you to use in your in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 environment - not only on your LTO5 drives, but also on your Oracle StorageTek T10000C drives. You can download it free from Oracle and try it out. LTFS does exactly what its forefathers imagined. Now you can see immediately which files are on a cartridge. LTFS does this by splitting a cartridge into two partitions. The first holds all of the necessary metadata to create a directory structure for you to easily view the contents of the cartridge. The second partition holds all of the files themselves. When tape media is loaded onto a drive, a complete file system image is presented to the user. Adding files to a cartridge can be as simple as a drag-and-drop just as you do today on your laptop when transferring files from your hard drive to a thumb drive or with standard POSIX file operations. You may be thinking all of this sounds nice, but asking, “when will I actually use it?” As I mentioned at the beginning, tape is not the right solution all of the time. However, if you ever need to physically move data between locations, tape storage with LTFS should be your most cost-effective and reliable answer. I will give you a few use cases examples of when LTFS can be utilized. Media and Entertainment (M&E), Oil and Gas (O&G), and other industries have a strong need for their storage to be transportable. For example, an O&G company hunting for new oil deposits in remote locations takes very large underground seismic images which need to be shipped back to a central data center. M&E operations conduct similar activities when shooting video for productions. M&E companies also often transfers files to third-parties for editing and other activities. These companies have three highly flawed options for transporting data: electronic transfer, disk storage transport, or tape storage transport. The first option, electronic transfer, is impractical because of the expense of the bandwidth required to transfer multi-terabyte files reliably and efficiently. If there’s one place that has bandwidth, it’s your local post office so many companies revert to physically shipping storage media. Typically, M&E companies rely on transporting disk storage between sites even though it, too, is expensive. Tape storage should be the preferred format because as IDC points out, “Tape is more suitable for physical transportation of large amounts of data as it is less vulnerable to mechanical damage during transportation compared with disk" (See note 1, below). However, tape storage has not been used in the past because of the restrictions created by proprietary formats. A tape may only be readable if both the sender and receiver have the same proprietary application used to write the file. In addition, the workflows may be slowed by the need to read the entire tape cartridge during recall. LTFS solves both of these problems, clearing the way for tape to become the standard platform for transferring large files. LTFS is open and, as long as you’ve downloaded the free reader from our website or that of anyone in the LTO consortium, you can read the data. So if a movie studio ships a scene to a third-party partner to add, for example, sounds effects or a music score, it doesn’t have to care what technology the third-party has. If it’s written back to an LTFS-formatted tape cartridge, it can be read. Some tape vendors like to claim LTFS is a “standard,” but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a specification at this point, not a standard. That said, we’re already seeing application vendors create functionality to write in an LTFS format based on the specification. And it’s my belief that both customers and the tape storage industry will see the most benefit if we all follow the same path. As such, we have volunteered to lead the way in making LTFS a standard first with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and eventually through to standard bodies such as American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Expect to hear good news soon about our efforts. So, if storage transportability is one of your requirements, I recommend giving LTFS a look. It makes tape much more user-friendly and it’s free, which allows tape to maintain all of its cost advantages over disk! Note 1 - IDC Report. April, 2011. “IDC’s Archival Storage Solutions Taxonomy, 2011” - Brian Zents Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Performing a clean database creation using msbuild

  - by Robert May

  So I’m taking a break from writing about other Agile stuff for a post. :)  I’m still going to get back to the other subjects, but this is fun too. Something I’ve done quite a bit of is MSBuild and CI work.  I’m experimenting with ways to improve what I’ve done in the past, particularly around database CI. Today, I developed a mechanism for starting from scratch with your database.  By scratch, I mean blowing away the existing database and creating it again from a single command line call.  I’m a firm believer that developers should be able to get to a known clean state at the database level with a single command and that they should be operating off of their own isolated database to improve productivity.  These scripts will help that. Here’s how I did it.  First, we have to disconnect users.  I did so using the help of a script from sql server central.  Note that I’m using sqlcmd variable replacement. -- kills all the users in a particular database -- dlhatheway/3M, 11-Jun-2000 declare @arg_dbname sysname declare @a_spid smallint declare @msg varchar(255) declare @a_dbid int set @arg_dbname = '$(DatabaseName)' select @a_dbid = sdb.dbid from master..sysdatabases sdb where sdb.name = @arg_dbname declare db_users insensitive cursor for select sp.spid from master..sysprocesses sp where sp.dbid = @a_dbid open db_users fetch next from db_users into @a_spid while @@fetch_status = 0 begin select @msg = 'kill '+convert(char(5),@a_spid) print @msg execute (@msg) fetch next from db_users into @a_spid end close db_users deallocate db_users GO Once all users are booted from the database, we can commence with recreating the database.  I generated the script that is used to create a database from SQL Server management studio, so I’m only going to show the bits that weren’t generated that are important.  There are a bunch of Alter Database statements that aren’t shown. First, I had to find the default location of the database files in the install, since they can be in many different locations.  I used Method 1 from a technet blog and then modified it a bit to do what I needed to do.  I ended up using dynamic SQL because for the life of me, I couldn’t get the “Filename” property to not return an error when I used anything besides a string.  I’m dropping the database first, if it exists.  Here’s the code:   IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM [master].[sys].[databases] WHERE [name] = N'$(DatabaseName)') BEGIN drop database $(DatabaseName) END; go IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM [master].[sys].[databases] WHERE [name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath') BEGIN DROP DATABASE zzTempDBForDefaultPath END; -- Create temp database. Because no options are given, the default data and --- log path locations are used CREATE DATABASE zzTempDBForDefaultPath; DECLARE @Default_Data_Path VARCHAR(512), @Default_Log_Path VARCHAR(512); --Get the default data path SELECT @Default_Data_Path = ( SELECT LEFT(physical_name,LEN(physical_name)-CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(physical_name))+1) FROM sys.master_files mf INNER JOIN sys.[databases] d ON mf.[database_id] = d.[database_id] WHERE d.[name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath' AND type = 0); --Get the default Log path SELECT @Default_Log_Path = ( SELECT LEFT(physical_name,LEN(physical_name)-CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(physical_name))+1) FROM sys.master_files mf INNER JOIN sys.[databases] d ON mf.[database_id] = d.[database_id] WHERE d.[name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath' AND type = 1); --Clean up. IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM [master].[sys].[databases] WHERE [name] = 'zzTempDBForDefaultPath') BEGIN DROP DATABASE zzTempDBForDefaultPath END; DECLARE @SQL nvarchar(max) SET @SQL= 'CREATE DATABASE $(DatabaseName) ON PRIMARY ( NAME = N''$(DatabaseName)'', FILENAME = N''' + @Default_Data_Path + N'$(DatabaseName)' + '.mdf' + ''', SIZE = 2048KB , FILEGROWTH = 1024KB ) LOG ON ( NAME = N''$(DatabaseName)Log'', FILENAME = N''' + @Default_Log_Path + N'$(DatabaseName)' + '.ldf' + ''', SIZE = 1024KB , FILEGROWTH = 10%) ' exec (@SQL) GO And with that, your database is created.  You can run these scripts on any server and on any database name.  To do that, I created an MSBuild script that looks like this: <Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="4.0"> <PropertyGroup> <DatabaseName>MyDatabase</DatabaseName> <Server>localhost</Server> <SqlCmd>sqlcmd -v DatabaseName=$(DatabaseName) -S $(Server) -i </SqlCmd> <ScriptDirectory>.\Scripts</ScriptDirectory> </PropertyGroup> <Target Name ="Rebuild"> <ItemGroup> <ScriptFiles Include="$(ScriptDirectory)\*.sql"/> </ItemGroup> <Exec Command="$(SqlCmd) &quot;%(ScriptFiles.Identity)&quot;" ContinueOnError="false"/> </Target> </Project> Note that the Scripts directory is underneath the directory where I’m running the msbuild command and is relative to that directory.  Note also that the target is using batching to run each script in the scripts subdirectory, one after the other.  Each script is passed to the sqlcmd command line execution using the .Identity property on the itemgroup that is created.  This target file is saved in the file “Database.target”. To make this work, you’ll need msbuild in your path, and then run the following command: msbuild database.target /target:Rebuild Once you’ve got your virgin database setup, you’d then need to use a tool like dbdeploy.net to determine that it was a virgin database, build a change script based on the change scripts, and then you’d want another sqlcmd call to update the database with the appropriate scripts.  I’m doing that next, so I’ll post a blog update when I’ve got it working. Technorati Tags: MSBuild,Agile,CI,Database

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• SQLAuthority News – #TechEdIn – TechEd India 2012 Memories and Photos

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 was held in Bangalore last March 21 to 23, 2012. Just like every year, this event is bigger, grander and inspiring. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 Family Event Every single year, TechEd is a special affair for my entire family.  Four months before the start of TechEd, I usually start to build the mental image of the event. I start to think  about various things. For the most part, what excites me most is presenting a session and meeting friends. Seriously, I start thinking about presenting my session 4 months earlier than the event!  I work on my presentation day and night. I want to make sure that what I present is accurate and that I have experienced it firsthand. My wife and my daughter also contribute to my efforts. For us, TechEd is a family event, and the two of them feel equally responsible as well. They give up their family time so I can bring out the best content for the Community. Pinal, Shaivi and Nupur at TechEd India 2012 Guinea Pigs (My Experiment Victims) I do not rehearse my session, ever. However, I test my demo almost every single day till the last moment that I have to present it already. I sometimes go over the demo more than 2-3 times a day even though the event is more than a month away. I have two “guinea pigs”: 1) Nupur Dave and 2) Vinod Kumar. When I am at home, I present my demos to my wife Nupur. At times I feel that people often backup their demo, but in my case, I have backup demo presenters. In the office during lunch time, I present the demos to Vinod. I am sure he can walk my demos easily with eyes closed. Pinal and Vinod at TechEd India 2012 My Sessions I’ve been determined to present my sessions in a real and practical manner. I prefer to present the subject that I myself would be eager to attend to and sit through if I were an audience. Just keeping that principle in mind, I have created two sessions this year. SQL Server Misconception and Resolution Pinal and Vinod at TechEd India 2012 We believe all kinds of stuff – that the earth is flat, or that the forbidden fruit is apple, or that the big bang theory explains the origin of the universe, and so many other things. Just like these, we have plenty of misconceptions in SQL Server as well. I have had this dream of co-presenting a session with Vinod Kumar for the past 3 years. I have been asking him every year if we could present a session together, but we never got it to work out, until this year came. Fortunately, we got a chance to stand on the same stage and present a single subject.  I believe that Vinod Kumar and I have an excellent synergy when we are working together. We know each other’s strengths and weakness. We know when the other person will speak and when he will keep quiet. The reason behind this synergy is that we have worked on 2 Video Learning Courses (SQL Server Indexes and SQL Server Questions and Answers) and authored 1 book (SQL Server Questions and Answers) together. Crowd Outside Session Hall This session was inspired from the “Laurel and Hardy” show so we performed a role-playing of those famous characters. We had an excellent time at the stage and, for sure, the audience had a wonderful time, too. We had an extremely large audience for this session and had a great time interacting with them. Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 I wanted to approach this session at level 400 and I was very determined to do so. The biggest challenge I had was that this was a total of 60 minutes of session and the audience profile was very generic. I had to present at level 100 as well at 400. I worked hard to tune up these demos. I wanted to make sure that my messages would land perfectly to the minds of the attendees, and when they walk out of the session, they could use the knowledge I shared on their servers. After the session, I felt an extreme satisfaction as I received lots of positive feedback at the event. At one point, so many people rushed towards me that I was a bit scared that the stage might break and someone would get injured. Fortunately, nothing like that happened and I was able to shake hands with everybody. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 Crowd rushing to Pinal at TechEd India 2012 Networking This is one of the primary reasons many of us visit the annual TechEd event. I had a fantastic time meeting SQL Server enthusiasts. Well, it was a terrific time meeting old friends, user group members, MVPs and SQL Enthusiasts. I have taken many photographs with lots of people, but I have received a very few back. If you are reading this blog and have a photo of us at the event, would you please send it to me so I could keep it in my memory lane? SQL Track Speaker: Jacob and Pinal at TechEd India 2012 SQL Community: Pinal, Tejas, Nakul, Jacob, Balmukund, Manas, Sudeepta, Sahal at TechEd India 2012 Star Speakers: Amit and Balmukund at TechEd India 2012 TechED Rockstars: Nakul, Tejas and Pinal at TechEd India 2012 I guess TechEd is a mix of family affair and culture for me! Hamara TechEd (Our TechEd) Please tell me which photo you like the most! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is Hadoop – Day 6 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is NoSQL. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – Hadoop. What is Hadoop? Apache Hadoop is an open-source, free and Java based software framework offers a powerful distributed platform to store and manage Big Data. It is licensed under an Apache V2 license. It runs applications on large clusters of commodity hardware and it processes thousands of terabytes of data on thousands of the nodes. Hadoop is inspired from Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. The major advantage of Hadoop framework is that it provides reliability and high availability. What are the core components of Hadoop? There are two major components of the Hadoop framework and both fo them does two of the important task for it. Hadoop MapReduce is the method to split a larger data problem into smaller chunk and distribute it to many different commodity servers. Each server have their own set of resources and they have processed them locally. Once the commodity server has processed the data they send it back collectively to main server. This is effectively a process where we process large data effectively and efficiently. (We will understand this in tomorrow’s blog post). Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a virtual file system. There is a big difference between any other file system and Hadoop. When we move a file on HDFS, it is automatically split into many small pieces. These small chunks of the file are replicated and stored on other servers (usually 3) for the fault tolerance or high availability. (We will understand this in the day after tomorrow’s blog post). Besides above two core components Hadoop project also contains following modules as well. Hadoop Common: Common utilities for the other Hadoop modules Hadoop Yarn: A framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management There are a few other projects (like Pig, Hive) related to above Hadoop as well which we will gradually explore in later blog posts. A Multi-node Hadoop Cluster Architecture Now let us quickly see the architecture of the a multi-node Hadoop cluster. A small Hadoop cluster includes a single master node and multiple worker or slave node. As discussed earlier, the entire cluster contains two layers. One of the layer of MapReduce Layer and another is of HDFC Layer. Each of these layer have its own relevant component. The master node consists of a JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode and DataNode. A slave or worker node consists of a DataNode and TaskTracker. It is also possible that slave node or worker node is only data or compute node. The matter of the fact that is the key feature of the Hadoop. In this introductory blog post we will stop here while describing the architecture of Hadoop. In a future blog post of this 31 day series we will explore various components of Hadoop Architecture in Detail. Why Use Hadoop? There are many advantages of using Hadoop. Let me quickly list them over here: Robust and Scalable – We can add new nodes as needed as well modify them. Affordable and Cost Effective – We do not need any special hardware for running Hadoop. We can just use commodity server. Adaptive and Flexible – Hadoop is built keeping in mind that it will handle structured and unstructured data. Highly Available and Fault Tolerant – When a node fails, the Hadoop framework automatically fails over to another node. Why Hadoop is named as Hadoop? In year 2005 Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella while working at Yahoo. Doug Cutting named Hadoop after his son’s toy elephant. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – MapReduce. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• How to nest transactions nicely - &quot;begin transaction&quot; vs &quot;save transaction&quot; and SQL Server

  - by Brian Biales

  Do you write stored procedures that might be used by others?  And those others may or may not have already started a transaction?  And your SP does several things, but if any of them fail, you have to undo them all and return with a code indicating it failed? Well, I have written such code, and it wasn’t working right until I finally figured out how to handle the case when we are already in a transaction, as well as the case where the caller did not start a transaction.  When a problem occurred, my “ROLLBACK TRANSACTION” would roll back not just my nested transaction, but the caller’s transaction as well.  So when I tested the procedure stand-alone, it seemed to work fine, but when others used it, it would cause a problem if it had to rollback.  When something went wrong in my procedure, their entire transaction was rolled back.  This was not appreciated. Now, I knew one could "nest" transactions, but the technical documentation was very confusing.  And I still have not found the approach below documented anywhere.  So here is a very brief description of how I got it to work, I hope you find this helpful. My example is a stored procedure that must figure out on its own if the caller has started a transaction or not.  This can be done in SQL Server by checking the @@TRANCOUNT value.  If no BEGIN TRANSACTION has occurred yet, this will have a value of 0.  Any number greater than zero means that a transaction is in progress.  If there is no current transaction, my SP begins a transaction. But if a transaction is already in progress, my SP uses SAVE TRANSACTION and gives it a name.  SAVE TRANSACTION creates a “save point”.  Note that creating a save point has no effect on @@TRANCOUNT.  So my SP starts with something like this: DECLARE @startingTranCount int SET @startingTranCount = @@TRANCOUNT IF @startingTranCount > 0 SAVE TRANSACTION mySavePointName ELSE BEGIN TRANSACTION -- … Then, when ready to commit the changes, you only need to commit if we started the transaction ourselves: IF @startingTranCount = 0 COMMIT TRANSACTION And finally, to roll back just your changes so far: -- Roll back changes... IF @startingTranCount > 0 ROLLBACK TRANSACTION MySavePointName ELSE ROLLBACK TRANSACTION Here is some code that you can try that will demonstrate how the save points work inside a transaction. This sample code creates a temporary table, then executes selects and updates, documenting what is going on, then deletes the temporary table. if running in SQL Management Studio, set Query Results to: Text for best readability of the results. -- Create a temporary table to test with, we'll drop it at the end. CREATE TABLE #ATable( [Column_A] [varchar](5) NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO SET NOCOUNT ON -- Ensure just one row - delete all rows, add one DELETE #ATable -- Insert just one row INSERT INTO #ATable VALUES('000') SELECT 'Before TRANSACTION starts, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SELECT @@trancount AS CurrentTrancount --insert into a values ('abc') UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = 'abc' SELECT 'UPDATED without a TRANSACTION, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable BEGIN TRANSACTION SELECT 'BEGIN TRANSACTION, trancount is now ' AS Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = '123' SELECT 'Row updated inside TRANSACTION, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SAVE TRANSACTION MySavepoint SELECT 'Save point MySavepoint created, transaction count now:' as Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = '456' SELECT 'Updated after MySavepoint created, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SAVE TRANSACTION point2 SELECT 'Save point point2 created, transaction count now:' as Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount UPDATE #ATable SET Column_A = '789' SELECT 'Updated after point2 savepoint created, value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable ROLLBACK TRANSACTION point2 SELECT 'Just rolled back savepoint "point2", value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable ROLLBACK TRANSACTION MySavepoint SELECT 'Just rolled back savepoint "MySavepoint", value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable SELECT 'Both save points were rolled back, transaction count still:' as Note, @@TRANCOUNT AS TranCount ROLLBACK TRANSACTION SELECT 'Just rolled back the entire transaction..., value in table is: ' AS Note, * FROM #ATable DROP TABLE #ATable The output should look like this: Note                                           Column_A ---------------------------------------------- -------- Before TRANSACTION starts, value in table is:  000 CurrentTrancount ---------------- 0 Note                                               Column_A -------------------------------------------------- -------- UPDATED without a TRANSACTION, value in table is:  abc Note                                 TranCount ------------------------------------ ----------- BEGIN TRANSACTION, trancount is now  1 Note                                                Column_A --------------------------------------------------- -------- Row updated inside TRANSACTION, value in table is:  123 Note                                                   TranCount ------------------------------------------------------ ----------- Save point MySavepoint created, transaction count now: 1 Note                                                   Column_A ------------------------------------------------------ -------- Updated after MySavepoint created, value in table is:  456 Note                                              TranCount ------------------------------------------------- ----------- Save point point2 created, transaction count now: 1 Note                                                        Column_A ----------------------------------------------------------- -------- Updated after point2 savepoint created, value in table is:  789 Note                                                     Column_A -------------------------------------------------------- -------- Just rolled back savepoint "point2", value in table is:  456 Note                                                          Column_A ------------------------------------------------------------- -------- Just rolled back savepoint "MySavepoint", value in table is:  123 Note                                                        TranCount ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------- Both save points were rolled back, transaction count still: 1 Note                                                            Column_A --------------------------------------------------------------- -------- Just rolled back the entire transaction..., value in table is:  abc

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• Answers to “What source control system do you use?” (and some winners)

  - by jamiet

  About a month ago I posed a question here on my blog SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff) in which I asked SQL Server developers to answer the following questions: Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? Why did you make those particular software choices? Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? I had some really great responses (I highly recommend going and reading them). I promised that the five best, most thought-provoking, responses (as determined by me) would win one of five pairs of licenses for Red Gate SQL Source Control and Red Gate SQL Connect; here are the five that I chose (note that if you responded but did not leave a means of getting in touch then you weren’t considered for one of the prizes – sorry): In general, I don't think the management overhead and licensing cost associated with TFS is worthwhile if all you're doing is using source control. To get value from TFS, at a minimum you need to be using team build, and possibly other stuff as well, such as the sharepoint integration. If that's all you need, then svn with Tortoise would be my first choice. If you want to add build automation later, you can do this with cruisecontrol (is it still called that?), JetBrains, etc. For a long time I thought that Redgate's claims about "bridging the SSMS-VS divide" were a load of hot air, since in my experience anyone who knew what they were doing was using Visual Studio, in particular SSDT and its predecessors. However, on a recent client I was putting in source control for the first time, and I discovered that the "divide" really does exist. That client has ended up using svn with Redgate SQL Source Control, with no build automation, but with scope to add it in the future. Gavin Campbell I think putting the DB under source control is a great idea.  I have issues with the earlier versions of SQL Source Control in that it provides little help in versioning the DB. I think the latest version merges SQL Compare and SQL Source Control together.  Which is how it should have been all along. Sure I have the DB scripts in SVN, but I can't automate DB builds and changes without more tools.  Frankly I'm surprised databases don't have some sort of versioning built into them. Nick Portelli Source control has been immensely useful and saved me from a lot of rework on more than one occasion.  I have learned that you have to be extremely careful checking in data.  Our system is internal only so during the system production run once a week, if there is a problem that I can fix easily(for example, a control table points to a file in the wrong environment), I'll do it directly in production so the run can continue as soon as possible since we have a specified time window.  We do full test runs to minimize this but it has come up once or twice.  We use Red-Gate source control to "push" from the test environment to the production environment.  There have been a couple of occasions where the test environment with the wrong setting was pushed back over the production environment because the change was made only in production.  Gotta keep an eye on that. Alan Dykes Goodness is it manual.  And can be extremely painful at times.  Not only are we running thin, we are constrained on the tools we can get ($$ must mean free).  Certainly no excuse, and a great opportunity to improve my skills by learning new things.  But...  Getting buy in a on a proven process or methodology is hard, takes time, and diverts us from development.  If SQL Source Control is easy to use and proven oh boy could you get some serious fans around here!  Seriously though, as the "accidental dba" of this shop any new ideas / easy to implement tools can make a world of difference in productivity and most importantly accuracy.  Manual = bad. :) John Hennesey (who left his email address) The one thing I would love to know more about is the unique challenges of working with databases as source code - you can store scripts, but are they written as deployment scripts with all the logic about how to apply them to an existing DB? Where is that baseline DB? Where's the data? How does a team share the data and the code? It's a real challenge. Merrill Aldrich Congratulations to the five of you. Red Gate will be in touch with you soon about your free licenses. Thank you to all those that responded. And again, go and check out all the responses – those above are only small proportion from what is a very interesting comment thread. @Jamiet

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• Cant get lm-sensors to load ATI Radeon temp or fan

  - by woody

  New to Linux and having minor issues :/ . I followed this guide initially but did not recieve the proper output and did not show my ATI Radeon HD 5000 temp or fan speed. Then used this guide, same problems exhibited. No issues installing and no errors. I think its not reading i2c for some reason. The proprietary driver is installed and functioning correctly according fglrxinfo. I can use aticonfig commands and view both temp and fan. Any ideas on how to get it working under 'sensors'? When i run 'sudo sensors-detect' this is my ouput # sensors-detect revision 5984 (2011-07-10 21:22:53 +0200) # System: LENOVO IdeaPad Y560 (laptop) # Board: Lenovo KL3 This program will help you determine which kernel modules you need to load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safe and recommended to accept the default answers to all questions, unless you know what you're doing. Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors. Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): y Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595... No VIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors... No VIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors... No AMD K8 thermal sensors... No AMD Family 10h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 11h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 12h and 14h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h power sensors... No Intel digital thermal sensor... Success! (driver `coretemp') Intel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor... No VIA C7 thermal sensor... No VIA Nano thermal sensor... No Some Super I/O chips contain embedded sensors. We have to write to standard I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe. Do you want to scan for Super I/O sensors? (YES/no): y Probing for Super-I/O at 0x2e/0x2f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... Yes Found unknown chip with ID 0x8502 Probing for Super-I/O at 0x4e/0x4f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... No Trying family `SMSC'... No Trying family `VIA/Winbond/Nuvoton/Fintek'... No Trying family `ITE'... No Some hardware monitoring chips are accessible through the ISA I/O ports. We have to write to arbitrary I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe though. Yes, you do have ISA I/O ports even if you do not have any ISA slots! Do you want to scan the ISA I/O ports? (YES/no): y Probing for `National Semiconductor LM78' at 0x290... No Probing for `National Semiconductor LM79' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83781D' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83782D' at 0x290... No Lastly, we can probe the I2C/SMBus adapters for connected hardware monitoring devices. This is the most risky part, and while it works reasonably well on most systems, it has been reported to cause trouble on some systems. Do you want to probe the I2C/SMBus adapters now? (YES/no): y Using driver `i2c-i801' for device 0000:00:1f.3: Intel 3400/5 Series (PCH) Now follows a summary of the probes I have just done. Just press ENTER to continue: Driver `coretemp': * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9) To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules: #----cut here---- # Chip drivers coretemp #----cut here---- If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones! Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO) My output for 'sensors' is: acpitz-virtual-0 Adapter: Virtual device temp1: +58.0°C (crit = +100.0°C) coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 0: +56.0°C (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 1: +57.0°C (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 2: +58.0°C (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) Core 3: +57.0°C (high = +84.0°C, crit = +100.0°C) and my '/etc/modules' is: # /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time. # # This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded # at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored. lp rtc # Generated by sensors-detect on Fri Nov 30 23:24:31 2012 # Chip drivers coretemp

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• NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

  - by Mat Keep

  The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

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• HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database

  - by Jane Story

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When working with a Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Standard Costing application, there can often be a requirement to check data or allocated results using reporting tools e.g Smartview. To do this, you are retrieving data directly from the Essbase databases related to your HPCM model. For information, running reports is covered in Chapter 9 of the HPCM User documentation. The aim of this blog is to provide a quick guide to finding this data for reporting in the HPCM generated Essbase database in v11.1.2.2.x of HPCM. In order to retrieve data from an HPCM generated Essbase database, it is important to understand each of the following dimensions in the Essbase database and where data is located within them: Measures dimension – identifies Measures AllocationType dimension – identifies Direct Allocation Data or Genealogy Allocation data Point Of View (POV) dimensions – there must be at least one, maximum of four. Business dimensions: Stage Business dimensions – these will be identified by the Stage prefix. Intra-Stage dimension – these will be identified by the _Intra suffix. Essbase outlines and reporting is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s02.html For additional details on reporting measures, please review this section of the documentation:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/apas03.html Reporting requirements in HPCM quite often start with identifying non balanced items in the Stage Balancing report. The following documentation link provides help with identifying some of the items within the Stage Balancing report:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/generatestagebalancing.html The following are some types of data upon which you may want to report: Stage Data: Direct Input Assigned Input Data Assigned Output Data Idle Cost/Revenue Unassigned Cost/Revenue Over Driven Cost/Revenue Direct Allocation Data Genealogy Allocation Data Stage Data Stage Data consists of: Direct Input i.e. input data, the starting point of your allocation e.g. in Stage 1 Assigned Input Data i.e. the cost/revenue received from a prior stage (i.e. stage 2 and higher). Assigned Output Data i.e. for each stage, the data that will be assigned forward is assigned post stage data. Reporting on this data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s03.html Dimension Selection Measures Direct Input: CostInput RevenueInput Assigned Input (from previous stages): CostReceivedPriorStage RevenueReceivedPriorStage Assigned Output (to subsequent stages): CostAssignedPostStage RevenueAssignedPostStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the stage business dimensions for the stage you wish to see the Stage data for. All other Dimensions NoMember Idle/Unassigned/OverDriven To view Idle, Unassigned or Overdriven Costs/Revenue, first select which stage for which you want to view this data. If multiple Stages have unassigned/idle, resolve the earliest first and re-run the calculation as differences in early stages will create unassigned/idle in later stages. Dimension Selection Measures Idle: IdleCost IdleRevenue Unassigned: UnAssignedCost UnAssignedRevenue Overdriven: OverDrivenCost OverDrivenRevenue AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/ Idle/OverDriven Cost All the Stage Business dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/Idle/Overdriven. Zoom in on each dimension to find the individual members to find which members have Unassigned/Idle/OverDriven data. All other Dimensions NoMember Direct Allocation Data Direct allocation data shows the data received by a destination intersection from a source intersection where a direct assignment(s) exists. Reporting on direct allocation data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s04.html You would select the following to report direct allocation data Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the SOURCE stage business dimensions and the DESTINATION stage business dimensions for the direct allocations for the stage you wish to report on. All other Dimensions NoMember Genealogy Allocation Data Genealogy allocation data shows the indirect data relationships between stages. Genealogy calculations run in the HPCM Reporting database only. Reporting on genealogy data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s05.html Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType GenealogyAllocation (IndirectAllocation in 11.1.2.1 and prior versions) POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any stage business dimension members from the STARTING stage in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the INTERMEDIATE stage(s) in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the ENDING stage in Genealogy All other Dimensions NoMember Notes If you still don’t see data after checking the above, please check the following Check the calculation has been run. Here are couple of indicators that might help them with that. Note the size of essbase cube before and after calculations ensure that a calculation was run against the database you are examing. Export the essbase data to a text file to confirm that some data exists. Examine the date and time on task area to see when, if any, calculations were run and what choices were used (e.g. Genealogy choices) If data does not exist in places where they are expecting, it could be that No calculations/genealogy were run No calculations were successfully run The model/data at feeder location were either absent or incompatible, resulting in no allocation e.g no driver data. Smartview Invocation from HPCM From version 11.1.2.2.350 of HPCM (this version will be GA shortly), it is possible to directly invoke Smartview from HPCM. There is guided navigation before the Smartview invocation and it is then possible to see the selected value(s) in SmartView. Click to Download HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database (Right click or option-click the link and choose "Save As..." to download this pdf file)

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• Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

  And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014   Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

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• Trace File Source Adapter

  The Trace File Source adapter is a useful addition to your SSIS toolbox.  It allows you to read 2005 and 2008 profiler traces stored as .trc files and read them into the Data Flow.  From there you can perform filtering and analysis using the power of SSIS. There is no need for a SQL Server connection this just uses the trace file. Example Usages Cache warming for SQL Server Analysis Services Reading the flight recorder Find out the longest running queries on a server Analyze statements for CPU, memory by user or some other criteria you choose Properties The Trace File Source adapter has two properties, both of which combine to control the source trace file that is read at runtime. SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 trace files are supported for both the Database Engine (SQL Server) and Analysis Services. The properties are managed by the Editor form or can be set directly from the Properties Grid in Visual Studio. Property Type Description AccessMode Enumeration This property determines how the Filename property is interpreted. The values available are: DirectInput Variable Filename String This property holds the path for trace file to load (*.trc). The value is either a full path, or the name of a variable which contains the full path to the trace file, depending on the AccessMode property. Trace Column Definition Hopefully the majority of you can skip this section entirely, but if you encounter some problems processing a trace file this may explain it and allow you to fix the problem. The component is built upon the trace management API provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately API methods that expose the schema of a trace file have known issues and are unreliable, put simply the data often differs from what was specified. To overcome these limitations the component uses  some simple XML files. These files enable the trace column data types and sizing attributes to be overridden. For example SQL Server Profiler or TMO generated structures define EventClass as an integer, but the real value is a string. TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml  - SQL Server Database Engine Trace Columns TraceDataColumnsAS.xml    - SQL Server Analysis Services Trace Columns The files can be found in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents folder, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml" If at runtime the component encounters a type conversion or sizing error it is most likely due to a discrepancy between the column definition as reported by the API and the actual value encountered. Whilst most common issues have already been fixed through these files we have implemented specific exception traps to direct you to the files to enable you to fix any further issues due to different usage or data scenarios that we have not tested. An example error that you can fix through these files is shown below. Buffer exception writing value to column 'Column Name'. The string value is 999 characters in length, the column is only 111. Columns can be overridden by the TraceDataColumns XML files in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml". Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trace File Source transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Please note that the Microsoft Trace classes used in the component are not supported on 64-bit platforms. To use the Trace File Source on a 64-bit host you need to ensure you have the 32-bit (x86) tools available, and the way you execute your package is setup to use them, please see the help topic 64-bit Considerations for Integration Services for more details. Downloads Trace Sources for SQL Server 2005 -- Trace Sources for SQL Server 2008 Version History SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.382 - SQL Sever 2008 public release. (9 Apr 2009) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.0.321 - SQL Server 2005 public release. (18 Nov 2008) -- Screenshots

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• problem occur during installation of moses scripts

  - by lenny99

  we got error when compile moses-script. process of it as follows: minakshi@minakshi-Vostro-3500:~/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts$ make release # Compile the parts make all make[1]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts' # Building memscore may fail e.g. if boost is not available. # We ignore this because traditional scoring will still work and memscore isn't used by default. cd training/memscore ; \ ./configure && make \ || ( echo "WARNING: Building memscore failed."; \ echo 'training/memscore/memscore' >> ../../release-exclude ) checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking for gawk... no checking for mawk... mawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking for g++... g++ checking whether the C++ compiler works... yes checking for C++ compiler default output file name... a.out checking for suffix of executables... checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes checking whether g++ accepts -g... yes checking for style of include used by make... GNU checking dependency style of g++... gcc3 checking for gcc... gcc checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3 checking for boostlib >= 1.31.0... yes checking for cos in -lm... yes checking for gzopen in -lz... yes checking for cblas_dgemm in -lgslcblas... no checking for gsl_blas_dgemm in -lgsl... no checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... g++ -E checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /bin/grep checking for egrep... /bin/grep -E checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking for sys/types.h... yes checking for sys/stat.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for memory.h... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking n_gram.h usability... no checking n_gram.h presence... no checking for n_gram.h... no checking for size_t... yes checking for ptrdiff_t... yes configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating Makefile config.status: creating config.h config.status: config.h is unchanged config.status: executing depfiles commands make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' make all-am make[3]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' touch release-exclude # No files excluded by default pwd=`pwd`; \ for subdir in cmert-0.5 phrase-extract symal mbr lexical-reordering; do \ make -C training/$subdir || exit 1; \ echo "### Compiler $subdir"; \ cd $pwd; \ done make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/cmert-0.5' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/cmert-0.5' ### Compiler cmert-0.5 make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/phrase-extract' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/phrase-extract' ### Compiler phrase-extract make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/symal' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/symal' ### Compiler symal make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/mbr' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/mbr' ### Compiler mbr make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/lexical-reordering' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/lexical-reordering' ### Compiler lexical-reordering ## All files that need compilation were compiled make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts' /bin/sh: ./check-dependencies.pl: not found make: *** [release] Error 127 We don't know why this error occurs? check-dependencies.pl file existed in scripts folder ...

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• The illusion of Competence

  - by tony_lombardo

  Working as a contractor opened my eyes to the developer food chain.  Even though I had similar experiences earlier in my career, the challenges seemed much more vivid this time through.  I thought I’d share a couple of experiences with you, and the lessons that can be taken from them. Lesson 1: Beware of the “funnel” guy.  The funnel guy is the one who wants you to funnel all thoughts, ideas and code changes through him.  He may say it’s because he wants to avoid conflicts in source control, but the real reason is likely that he wants to hide your contributions.  Here’s an example.  When I finally got access to the code on one of my projects, I was told by the developer that I had to funnel all of my changes through him.  There were 4 of us coding on the project, but only 2 of us working on the UI.  The other 2 were working on a separate application, but part of the overall project.  So I figured, I’ll check it into SVN, he reviews and accepts then merges in.  Not even close.  I didn’t even have checkin rights to SVN, I had to email my changes to the developer so he could check those changes in.  Lesson 2: If you point out flaws in code to someone supposedly ‘higher’ than you in the developer chain, they’re going to get defensive.  My first task on this project was to review the code, familiarize myself with it.  So of course, that’s what I did.  And in familiarizing myself with it, I saw so many bad practices and code smells that I immediately started coming up with solutions to fix it.  Of course, when I reviewed these changes with the developer (guy who originally wrote the code), he smiled and nodded and said, we can’t make those changes now, it’s too destabilizing.  I recommended we create a new branch and start working on refactoring, but branching was a new concept for this guy and he was worried we would somehow break SVN. How about some concrete examples? I started out by recommending we remove NUnit dependency and tests from the application project, and create a separate Unit testing project.  This was met with a little bit of resistance because - “How do I access the private methods?”  As it turned out there weren’t really any private methods that weren’t exposed by public methods, so I quickly calmed this fear. Win 1 Loss 0 Next, I recommended that all of the File IO access be wrapped in Using clauses, or at least properly wrapped in try catch finally.  This recommendation was accepted.. but never implemented. Win 2  Loss 1 Next recommendation was to refactor the command pattern implementation.  The command pattern was implemented, but it wasn’t really necessary for the application.  More over, the fact that we had 100 different command classes, each with it’s own specific command parameters class, made maintenance a huge hassle.  The same code repeated over and over and over.  This recommendation was declined, the code was too fragile and this change would destabilize it.  I couldn’t disagree, though it was the commands themselves in many cases that were fragile. Win 2 Loss 2 Next recommendation was to aid performance (and responsiveness) of the application by using asynchronous service calls.  This on was accepted. Win 2 Loss 3 If you’re paying any attention, you’re wondering why the async service calls was scored as a loss.. Let me explain.  The service call was made using the async pattern.  Followed by a thread.sleep  <facepalm>. Now it’s easy to be harsh on this kind of code, especially if you’re an experienced developer.  But I understood how most of this happened.  One junior guy, working as hard as he can to build his first real world application, with little or no guidance from anyone else.  He had his pattern book and theory of programming to help him, but no real world experience.  He didn’t know how difficult it would be to trace the crashes to the coding issues above, but he will one day.  The part that amazed me was the management position that “this guy should be a team lead, because he’s worked so hard”.  I’m all for rewarding hard work, but when you reward someone by promoting them past the point of their competence, you’re setting yourself and them up for failure.  And that’s lesson 3.  Just because you’ve got a hard worker, doesn’t mean he should be leading a development project.  If you’re a junior guy busting your ass, keep at it.  I encourage you to try new things, but most importantly to learn from your mistakes.  And correct your mistakes.  And if someone else looks at your code and shows you a laundry list of things that should be done differently, don’t take it personally – they’re really trying to help you.  And if you’re a senior guy, working with a junior guy, it’s your duty to point out the flaws in the code.  Even if it does make you the bad guy.  And while I’ve used “guy” above, I mean both men and women.  And in some cases mutant dinosaurs. 

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• Welcome to Jackstown

  - by fatherjack

  I live in a small town, the population count isn't that great but let me introduce you to some of the population. We'll start with Martin the Doc, he fixes up anything that gets poorly, so much so that he could be classed as the doctor, the vet and even the garage mechanic. He's got a reputation that he can fix anything and that hasn't been proved wrong yet. He's great friends with Brian (who gets called "Brains") the teacher who seems to have a sound understanding of any topic you care to pass his way. If he isn't sure he tells you and then goes to find out and comes back with a full answer real quick. Its good to have that sort of research capability close at hand. Brains is also great at encouraging anyone who needs a bit of support to get them up to speed and working on their jobs. Steve sees Brains regularly, that's because he is the librarian, he keeps all sorts of reading material and nowadays there's even video to watch about any topic you like. Steve keeps scouring all sorts of places to get the content that's needed and he keeps it in good order so that what ever is needed can be found quickly. He also has to make sure that old stuff gets marked as probably out of date so that anyone reading it wont get mislead. Over the road from him is Greg, he's the town crier. We don't have a newspaper here so Greg keeps us all informed of what's going on "out of town" - what new stuff we might make use of and what wont work in a small place like this. If we are interested he goes ahead and gets people in to demonstrate their products  and tell us about the details. Greg is pretty good at getting us discounts too. Now Greg's brother Ian works for the mayors office in the "waste management department" nowadays its all about the recycling but he still has to make sure that the stuff that cant be used any more gets disposed of properly. It depends on the type of waste he's dealing with that decides how it need to be treated and he has to know a lot about the different methods and when to use which ones. There are two people that keep the peace in town, Brent is the detective, investigating wrong doings and applying justice where necessary and Bart is the diplomat who smooths things over when any people have a dispute or disagreement. Brent is meticulous in his investigations and fair in the way he handles any situation he finds. Discretion is his byword. There's a rumour that Bart used to work for the United Nations but what ever his history there is no denying his ability to get apparently irreconcilable parties working together to their combined benefit. Someone who works closely with Bart is Brad, he is the translator in town. He has several languages that he can converse in but he can also explain things from someone's point of view or  and make it understandable to someone else. To keep things on the straight and narrow from a legal perspective is Ben the solicitor, making sure we all abide by the rules.Two people who make for an interesting evening's conversation if you get them together are Aaron and Grant, Aaron is the local planning inspector and Grant is an inventor of some reputation. Anything being constructed around here needs Aarons agreement. He's quite flexible in his rules though; if you can justify what you want to do with solid logic but he wont stand for any development going on without his inclusion. That gets a demolition notice and there's no argument. Grant as I mentioned is the inventor in town, if something can be improved or created then Grant is your man. He mainly works on his own but isnt averse to getting specific advice and assistance from specialist from out of town if they can help him finish his creations.There aren't too many people left for you to meet in the town, there's Rob, he's an ex professional sportsman. He played Hockey, Football, Cricket, you name it. He was in his element as goal keeper / wicket keeper and that shows in his personal life. He just goes about his business and people often don't even know that he's helped them. Really low profile, doesn't get any glory but saves people from lots of problems, even disasters on occasion. There goes Neil, he's a bit of an odd person, some people say he's gifted with special clairvoyant powers, personally I think he's got his ear to the ground and knows where to find out the important news as soon as its made public. Anyone getting a visit from Neil is best off to follow his advice though, he's usually spot on and you wont be caught by surprise if you follow his recommendations – wherever it comes from.Poor old Andrew is the last person to introduce you to. Andrew doesn't show himself too often but when he does it seems that people find a reason to blame him for their problems, whether he had anything to do with their predicament or not. In all honesty, without fail, and to his great credit, he takes it in good grace and never retaliates or gets annoyed when he's out and about.  It pays off too as its very often the case that those who were blaming him recently suddenly find they need his help and they readily forget the issues pretty rapidly.And then there's me, what do I do in town? Well, I'm just a DBA with a lot of hats. (Jackstown Pop. 1)

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• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

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• I have a problem with a AE1200 Cisco/Linksys Wireless-N USB adapter having stopped working after I ran the update manager in Ubuntu 12.04

  - by user69670

  Here is the problem, I use a Cisco/Linksys AE1200 wireless network adapter to connect my desktop to a public wifi internet connection. I use ndiswrapper to use the windows driver and it had been working fine for me untill I ran the update manager overnight a few days ago. When I woke up it was asking for the normal computer restart to implement the changes but after rebooting the computer, the wireless adapter did not work, the status light on the adapter did not light up even though ubuntu recognizes it is there and according to ndiswrapper the drivers are loaded and the hardware is present. the grep command is being a bitch for some unknown reason today so this will be long sorry Output from "lspci": 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Host Bridge (rev 01) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge 00:12.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA 00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI0) 00:13.1 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI1) 00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI2) 00:13.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI3) 00:13.4 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI4) 00:13.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB Controller (EHCI) 00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 13) 00:14.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 IDE 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge 00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200] 02:02.0 Communication controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. HSF 56k Data/Fax Modem 02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs CA0106 Soundblaster 02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) Output from "lsusb": Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 009: ID 13b1:0039 Linksys AE1200 802.11bgn Wireless Adapter [Broadcom BCM43235] Bus 003 Device 002: ID 045e:0053 Microsoft Corp. Optical Mouse Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1043:8006 iCreate Technologies Corp. Flash Disk 32-256 MB Output from "ifconfig": eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:21:b6:af:7c UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:20 Base address:0xb400 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:13232 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:13232 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1084624 (1.0 MB) TX bytes:1084624 (1.0 MB) Output from "iwconfig": lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. Output from "lsmod": Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 12617 1 nls_cp437 12751 1 vfat 17308 1 fat 55605 1 vfat uas 17828 0 usb_storage 39646 1 nls_utf8 12493 1 udf 84366 1 crc_itu_t 12627 1 udf snd_ca0106 39279 2 snd_ac97_codec 106082 1 snd_ca0106 ac97_bus 12642 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm 80845 2 snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec rfcomm 38139 0 snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25424 2 snd_ca0106,snd_seq_midi bnep 17830 2 parport_pc 32114 0 bluetooth 158438 10 rfcomm,bnep ppdev 12849 0 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 51567 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 28931 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 62064 11 snd_ca0106, snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawj9fe snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device soundcore 14635 1 snd snd_page_alloc 14108 2 snd_ca0106,snd_pcm sp5100_tco 13495 0 i2c_piix4 13093 0 radeon 733693 3 ttm 65344 1 radeon drm_kms_helper 45466 1 radeon drm 197692 5 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13199 1 radeon mac_hid 13077 0 shpchp 32325 0 ati_agp 13242 0 lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp usbhid 41906 0 hid 77367 1 usbhid 8139too 23283 0 8139cp 26759 0 pata_atiixp 12999 1 Output from "sudo lshw -C network": *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:02:05.0 logical name: eth0 version: 10 serial: 00:19:21:b6:af:7c size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 10 0bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=8139too driverversion=0.9.28 duplex=half latency=64 link=no maxlatency=64 mingnt=32 multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:20 ioport:b400(size=256) memory:ff5fdc00-ff5fdcff Output from "iwlist scan": lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. Output from "lsb_release -d": Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Output from "uname -mr": 3.2.0-24-generic-pae i686 Output from "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart": * Running /etc/init.d/networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces * Reconfiguring network interfaces... [ OK ]

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