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• Cloning a WebCenter Portal Managed Server

  - by Maiko Rocha

  I had to run some tests on a WebCenter Portal application deployed in a cluster. I've got a development VM with WebCenter PS4 (this also works on PS5) and I was trying to figure out how could I easily add a new managed server to my single-node domain, and make it a cluster. Creating the machine and cluster are a piece of cake, you can do it pretty quick through WLS Console. Now, you'd guess that using the clone option on WLS Console would do the magic of cloning an existing instance, right? Well, it does, but all you get is an "empty" managed server: with no target libraries.  It was a good surprise to find that WebCenter provides a way of cloning an existing WebCenter Portal managed server through a simple WLST command: cloneWebCenterManagedServer  This is a screenshot of my starting point. I want to clone WC_CustomPortal managed server: These are the steps to clone my WC_CustomPortal managed server: 1. In the command line, invoke WLST. It should be on <ORACLE_HOME_for_component>/common/bin/wlst.sh. In my case, it is ./product/Middleware/WebCenterPortal/common/bin/wlst.sh 2. Connect to the Admin Server:  connect ('<wls_admin_username>','<password>','t3://<server>:<port>') 3. Execute the following command: wls:/webcenter/serverConfig> cloneWebCenterManagedServer(baseManagedServer='WC_CustomPortal', newManagedServer='WC_CustomPortal2', newManagedServerPort=8893, verbose=1) I've turned on verbose output on purpose so I could see what the script was doing while executing. This is the output:  [...] Creating the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" MBean type Server with name WC_CustomPortal2 has been created successfully. Targeting the library "oracle.bi.adf.model.slib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.bi.adf.view.slib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.bi.adf.webcenter.slib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.wsm.seedpolicies#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.jsp.next#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.dconfig-infra#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "orai18n-adf#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.adf.dconfigbeans#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.pwdgen#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.jrf.system.filter" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "adf.oracle.domain#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "adf.oracle.businesseditor#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.adf.management#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "adf.oracle.domain.webapp#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "jsf#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "jstl#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "UIX#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "ohw-rcf#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "ohw-uix#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.adf.desktopintegration.model#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.adf.desktopintegration#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.bi.jbips#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.bi.composer#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.skin#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.composer#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.framework.core#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.sdp.client#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.soa.workflow.wc#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.soa.worklist.webapp#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.ucm.ridc.app-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "p13n-app-lib-base#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "p13n-core-web-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "jaxrs-framework-web-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "jersey-web-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "wcps-util-app-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "wcps-services-client-web-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "content-app-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "content-web-lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.framework#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.framework.view#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.forum.dependency#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.jive.dependency#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.spaces.fwk#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the library "oracle.webcenter.activitygraph.lib#[email protected]" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the datasource "mds-CustomPortalDS" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the datasource "WebCenter-CustomPortalDS" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the datasource "Activities-CustomPortalDS" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the application "wsil-wls" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the application "DMS Application#11.1.1.1.0" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the application "ViewHandlerOverride_webapp1#V2.0" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the application "ViewHandlerOverride_application1#V2.0" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "JRF Startup Class" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "JPS Startup Class" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "ODL-Startup" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "Audit Loader Startup Class" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "AWT Application Context Startup Class" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "JMX Framework Startup Class" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "Web Services Startup Class" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "JOC-Startup" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the startup class "DMS-Startup" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the shutdown class "JOC-Shutdown" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Targeting the shutdown class "DMSShutdown" to the Managed Server "WC_CustomPortal2" Validating changes ... Validated the changes successfully [...] And this is the newly created WC_CustomPortal2 managed server showing up on Weblogic console:  Here is the full reference to WebCenter Portal Custom WLST Commands. Special thanks to Todd Vender for pointing this one out! :-)

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• nginx can't load images,css,js

  - by EquinoX

  When I point to a URL in nginx where it has images extension such as: http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/logo_right.png (as example) it gives me the 404 error as it can't find the file, but the file is actually there. What is potentially wrong? UPDATE: Here's the error log that I was able to pull out: 2011/02/27 05:53:29 [error] 18679#0: *225 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/js/mooRainbow/mooRainbow.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/js/mooRainbow/mooRainbow.css HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:53:29 [error] 18679#0: *226 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/print.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/print.css HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:53:29 [error] 18679#0: *228 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/logo_right.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/logo_right.png HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:53:29 [error] 18679#0: *223 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/b_help.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/b_help.png HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:53:29 [error] 18679#0: *227 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/s_warn.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/s_warn.png HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:53:29 [error] 18679#0: *227 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/favicon.ico" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42" 2011/02/27 05:54:39 [error] 18679#0: *237 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/print.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/print.css HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:54:39 [error] 18679#0: *235 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/js/mooRainbow/mooRainbow.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/js/mooRainbow/mooRainbow.css HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:54:39 [error] 18679#0: *238 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/logo_right.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/logo_right.png HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:54:39 [error] 18679#0: *239 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/b_help.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/b_help.png HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:54:39 [error] 18679#0: *233 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/s_warn.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/themes/original/img/s_warn.png HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42", referrer: "http://50.56.81.42/phpMyAdmin/main.php" 2011/02/27 05:54:39 [error] 18679#0: *233 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/phpMyAdmin/favicon.ico" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 70.176.18.156, server: localhost, request: "GET /phpMyAdmin/favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", host: "50.56.81.42" Here's my nginx.conf file, in case I am missing something: #user nobody; worker_processes 1; #error_log logs/error.log; #error_log logs/error.log notice; #error_log logs/error.log info; #pid logs/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; #log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" ' # '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' # '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; #access_log logs/access.log main; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; #keepalive_timeout 0; keepalive_timeout 65; #gzip on; server { listen 80; server_name localhost; #charset koi8-r; #access_log logs/host.access.log main; location / { root html; index index.html index.htm; } #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } location ~ \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|html)$ { expires max; } # proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80 # #location ~ \.php$ { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { root /usr/share/nginx/html; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/nginx/html$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one location ~ /\.ht { deny all; } } # another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration # #server { # listen 8000; # listen somename:8080; # server_name somename alias another.alias; # location / { # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # } #} # HTTPS server # #server { # listen 443; # server_name localhost; # ssl on; # ssl_certificate cert.pem; # ssl_certificate_key cert.key; # ssl_session_timeout 5m; # ssl_protocols SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1; # ssl_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP; # ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; # location / { # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # } #} } What does this mean? It can't pull out the .css, etc....

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• Microsoft Channel 9 Interviews Mei Liang to Introduce Sample Browser Extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2010

  - by Jialiang

  This morning, Microsoft Channel 9 interviewed Mei Liang - Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - to introduce the newest Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio 2012 &2010.   This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including over 700 Windows 8 samples and more than 1000 All-In-One Code Framework customer-driven code samples. Mei shows us not only the extension, but also the standalone version of the Sample Browser.   http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Sample-Browser-Visual-Studio-Extension   Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, working in close partnership with the Visual Studio product team and MSDN Samples Gallery, developed the Sample Browser extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.  As an effort to evolve the code sample use experience and improve developers' productivity, the Sample Browser allows programmers to search, download and open over 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio with just a few simple clicks.  If no existing code sample can meet the needs, developers can even request a code sample easily from Microsoft thanks to the free “Sample Request Service” offered by Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.  Through innovations, the teams hope to put the power of tens of thousands of code samples at developers’ fingertips. In short 3 months, the Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension has been installed by 100K global users.  It is also selected as one of the six most highly regarded and commonly used tools for Visual Studio that will make your programming experience feel like never before.   Got to love the All-In-One Code Framework team! You guys know this is THE go to source for code samples. Get this extension and you'll never need to leave VS2012 (well except for bathroom trips, but that's TMI anyway... ;) Read More... From: Greg Duncan (Author of CoolThingOfTheDay) 9/6/2011 12:00 AM The one software design pattern that I have used in just about every application I’ve written is “cut-and-paste,” so the new “Sample Browser” – read sample as a noun not an adjective – is a great boon to my productivity. Read More... From: Jim O'Neil (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) 9/28/2011 12:00 AM Install: http://aka.ms/samplebrowservsx Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework also offers the standalone version of Sample Browser.   The standalone version is particularly useful to Visual Studio Express edition or Visual Studio 2008 users, who cannot install the Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.   From Grassroots’ Passion for Developers to the Innovation of Sample Browser This Sample Browser has come a very long way improving the code sample use experience.  The history can be traced back to a grass-root innovation three years ago.   In early 2009, a few MSDN forum support engineers observed that lots of developers were struggling to work in Visual Studio without adequate code samples. Programming tasks seem harder than they should be when you only read through the documentation.  Just a couple of lines of sample code could answer a lot of questions.   They had a brilliant idea: What if we produce code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks in forums, social networks and support incidents, and then aggregate all our sample code in a one-stop library to benefit developers?  And what if developers can request code samples directly from Microsoft, free of charge?  This small group of grassroots at Microsoft devoted their nights and weekends to prototyping such a customer-driven code sample library.  This simple idea eventually turned into “Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework”, aka. OneCode.  With the support from more and more passionate developers at Microsoft and the leaders in the Community and Online Support team and Microsoft Commercial Technical Services (CTS), the idea has become a continually growing library with over 1000 customer-driven code samples covering almost all Microsoft development technologies.  These code samples originated from developers’ common pains and needs should be able to help many developers.  However, if developers cannot easily discover the code samples, the effort would still be in vain.  So in early 2010, the team started the idea of Sample Browser to ease the discovery and access of these samples.  In just two months, the first version of Sample Browser was finished and released by a passionate developer.  It was a very simple application, only supporting the basic sample offline search.  Users had to download the whole 100MB sample package containing all samples first, and run the Sample Browser to search locally.   Though developers could not search and download samples on-demand, this simple application laid a solid foundation for the team’s continuous innovations of Sample Browsing experience. In 2011, MSDN Samples Gallery had a big refresh.  The online sample experience was brought to a new level thanks to its PM Steven Wilssens and the gallery team’s effort.  Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Team saw the opportunity to realize the “on-demand” sample search and download feature with the new gallery.  The two teams formed a strong partnership to upload all the customer-driven code samples to MSDN Samples Gallery, and released the new version of Sample Browser to support “on-demand” sample downloading in April, 2011.  Mei Liang, the Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, was interviewed by Channel 9 to demo the Sample Browser.  Customers love the effort and the innovation!!  This can be clearly seen from the user comments in the publishing page.   It was very encouraging to the team of All-In-One Code Framework. The team continues innovating and evolving the Sample Browser.  They found the Visual Studio product team this time, and integrated the Sample Browsing experience into the latest Visual Studio 2012.  The newly released Sample Browser Visual Studio extension makes good use of Visual Studio 2012 IDE such as the new Quick Launch bar, the code editor, the toolbar and menus to offer easy access to thousands of code samples from within the development environment.   The Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Lead - Anthony Cangialosi, the Program Manager - Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, the MSDN Samples Gallery PM – Steven Wilssens, and the Visual Studio Senior Escalation Engineer - Ed Dore shared lots of insightful suggestions with the team.  Thanks to the brilliant cross-group collaboration inside Microsoft, tens of new features including “Local Language Support” and “Favorite Samples”, as well as a face-lifted user interface, were added to further enhance the user experience. Since the new Sample Browser Visual Studio extension was released, it has received over 100 thousand downloads and five-star ratings.  A customer told the team that he officially falls in LOVE with Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.   The Sample Browser Innovation for Developers Never Stops! The teams would never stop improving the Sample Browser for developers’ easier lives.   The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Visual Studio and MSDN Samples Gallery teams are working closely to develop the next version of Sample Browser.  Here are the key functions in development or in discussion.  We hope to learn your feedback of the effort.  You can submit your suggestions to the official Visual Studio UserVoice site.  We look forward to hearing from you! 1) Offline Sample Search This is one of the top feature requests that we have received for Sample Browser.   The Sample Browser will support the offline search mode so that developers can search downloaded code samples when they do not have internet access.  This is particularly useful to developers in Enterprises with strict proxy settings. 2) Code Snippet Support and Visual Studio Editor Integration Today, the Sample Browser supports downloading and opening sample project.   However, when developers are searching for code samples, a better user experience would be to see the code snippets in the search result first.  Developers can quickly decide if the code snippet is relevant.   They can also drag and drop the code snippet into the Visual Studio Editor to solve some simple programming tasks.  If developers want to learn more about the sample, they can then choose to download the sample project and open it in Visual Studio. 3) Enterprise Sample Sharing and Searching Large enterprises have many code samples for their own internal tools and APIs that are not appropriate to be shared publicly in MSDN Samples Gallery.   In that case, today’s Sample Browser and MSDN Samples Gallery cannot help these Enterprise developers.  The idea is to create a Code Sample Repository in TFS, and provide an additional Visual Studio extension for Enterprise developers to quickly share code samples to TFS.  The Sample Browser can be configured to connect to the TFS Code Sample Repository to search for and download code samples.  This would potentially enable the Enterprise developers to be more productive. 4) Windows Store Sample Browser With the upcoming release of Windows RT and Microsoft Surface, developers are facing a completely new world of application platform.   Not like laptop, people would often use Microsoft Surface in commute and in travel.  Internet may not be available.  Today’s Visual Studio cannot be installed and run on Windows RT, however, our enthusiastic developers would hope to spend every minute on code.  They love code!   The idea is to create a Windows Store version of Sample Browser. Search and download samples from the online Samples Gallery when the user has internet access. Browse the sample code files and learn the sample documentation of downloaded samples with or without internet access.   In addition to the "browse” function, the Sample Browser could further support “bookmark”, “learning notes”, “code review”, and “quick social sharing". Make full use of the new touch and Windows Store App UI to give developers a new “relaxing” code browsing and learning experience, anytime, anywhere. With Windows Store Sample Browser, developers can enjoy A new relaxing and enjoyable experience for developers to learn code samples You do not have to sit in front of desk and formally open Visual Studio to read code samples.  Many developers get sub-health due to staying in front of desk for a very long time.  With Windows RT, Microsoft Surface and this Windows Store Sample Browser combining with the online MSDN Samples Gallery, developers can sit in a sofa, relaxingly hold the tablet and enjoy to learn their beloved sample code with detailed documentation. Anytime, anywhere Whether you have internet access or not, whether you are at home, in office, or in commute/airplane, developers can always easily access and browse the sample code. Lightweight and fast Particularly for learning a small sample project, the Windows Store Sample Browser would be more lightweight and faster to open and browse the sample code. Please submit your feedback and suggestion to Visual Studio UserVoice.  We look forward to hearing from you and deliver a better and better sample use experience.  Happy Coding!   Special Thanks to People working behind the latest release of Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension and the great partnerships!

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• Juju Zookeeper & Provisioning Agent Not Deployed

  - by Keith Tobin

  I am using juju with the openstack provider, i expected that when i bootstrap that zookeeper and provisioning agent would get deployed on the bootstrap vm in openstack. This dose not seem to be the case. the bootstrap vm gets deployed but it seems that nothing gets deployed to the VM. See logs below, I may be missing something, also how is it possible to log on the bootstrap vm. Could I manual deploy, if so what do I need to do. Juju Bootstrap commend root@cinder01:/home/cinder# juju -v bootstrap 2012-10-12 03:21:20,976 DEBUG Initializing juju bootstrap runtime 2012-10-12 03:21:20,982 WARNING Verification of xxxxS certificates is disabled for this environment. Set 'ssl-hostname-verification' to ensure secure communication. 2012-10-12 03:21:20,982 DEBUG openstack: using auth-mode 'userpass' with xxxx:xxxxxx.10:35357/v2.0/ 2012-10-12 03:21:21,064 DEBUG openstack: authenticated til u'2012-10-13T08:21:13Z' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,064 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,091 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"flavors": [{"id": "3", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/3", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/3", "rel": "bookmark"}], "name": "m1.medium"}, {"id": "4", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/4", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/4", "rel": "bookmark"}], "name": "m1.large"}, {"id": "1", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/1", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/1", "rel": "bookmark"}], "name": "m1.tiny"}, {"id": "5", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/5", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/5", "rel": "bookmark"}], "name": "m1.xlarge"}, {"id": "2", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/2", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/2", "rel": "bookmark"}], "name": "m1.small"}]}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,091 INFO Bootstrapping environment 'openstack' (origin: ppa type: openstack)... 2012-10-12 03:21:21,091 DEBUG access object-store @ xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/provider-state 2012-10-12 03:21:21,092 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/provider-state' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,165 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{}\n' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,165 DEBUG Verifying writable storage 2012-10-12 03:21:21,165 DEBUG access object-store @ xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/bootstrap-verify 2012-10-12 03:21:21,166 DEBUG openstack: PUT 'xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/bootstrap-verify' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,251 DEBUG openstack: 201 '201 Created\n\n\n\n ' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,251 DEBUG Launching juju bootstrap instance. 2012-10-12 03:21:21,271 DEBUG access object-store @ xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/juju_master_id 2012-10-12 03:21:21,273 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-groups 2012-10-12 03:21:21,273 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-groups' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,321 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"security_groups": [{"rules": [{"from_port": -1, "group": {}, "ip_protocol": "icmp", "to_port": -1, "parent_group_id": 1, "ip_range": {"cidr": "0.0.0.0/0"}, "id": 7}, {"from_port": 22, "group": {}, "ip_protocol": "tcp", "to_port": 22, "parent_group_id": 1, "ip_range": {"cidr": "0.0.0.0/0"}, "id": 38}], "tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "id": 1, "name": "default", "description": "default"}]}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,322 DEBUG Creating juju security group juju-openstack 2012-10-12 03:21:21,322 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-groups' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,401 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"security_group": {"rules": [], "tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "id": 48, "name": "juju-openstack", "description": "juju group for openstack"}}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,401 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-group-rules' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,504 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"security_group_rule": {"from_port": 22, "group": {}, "ip_protocol": "tcp", "to_port": 22, "parent_group_id": 48, "ip_range": {"cidr": "0.0.0.0/0"}, "id": 54}}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,504 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-group-rules' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,647 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"security_group_rule": {"from_port": 1, "group": {"tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "name": "juju-openstack"}, "ip_protocol": "tcp", "to_port": 65535, "parent_group_id": 48, "ip_range": {}, "id": 55}}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,647 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-group-rules' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,791 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"security_group_rule": {"from_port": 1, "group": {"tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "name": "juju-openstack"}, "ip_protocol": "udp", "to_port": 65535, "parent_group_id": 48, "ip_range": {}, "id": 56}}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,792 DEBUG Creating machine security group juju-openstack-0 2012-10-12 03:21:21,792 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-security-groups' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,871 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"security_group": {"rules": [], "tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "id": 49, "name": "juju-openstack-0", "description": "juju group for openstack machine 0"}}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,871 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/detail 2012-10-12 03:21:21,871 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/detail' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,906 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"flavors": [{"vcpus": 2, "disk": 10, "name": "m1.medium", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/3", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/3", "rel": "bookmark"}], "rxtx_factor": 1.0, "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 40, "ram": 4096, "id": "3", "swap": ""}, {"vcpus": 4, "disk": 10, "name": "m1.large", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/4", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/4", "rel": "bookmark"}], "rxtx_factor": 1.0, "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 80, "ram": 8192, "id": "4", "swap": ""}, {"vcpus": 1, "disk": 0, "name": "m1.tiny", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/1", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/1", "rel": "bookmark"}], "rxtx_factor": 1.0, "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 0, "ram": 512, "id": "1", "swap": ""}, {"vcpus": 8, "disk": 10, "name": "m1.xlarge", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/5", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/5", "rel": "bookmark"}], "rxtx_factor": 1.0, "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 160, "ram": 16384, "id": "5", "swap": ""}, {"vcpus": 1, "disk": 10, "name": "m1.small", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/2", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/2", "rel": "bookmark"}], "rxtx_factor": 1.0, "OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral": 20, "ram": 2048, "id": "2", "swap": ""}]}' 2012-10-12 03:21:21,907 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers 2012-10-12 03:21:21,907 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers' 2012-10-12 03:21:22,284 DEBUG openstack: 202 '{"server": {"OS-DCF:diskConfig": "MANUAL", "id": "a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "rel": "bookmark"}], "adminPass": "SuFp48cZzdo4"}}' 2012-10-12 03:21:22,284 DEBUG access object-store @ xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/juju_master_id 2012-10-12 03:21:22,285 DEBUG openstack: PUT 'xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/juju_master_id' 2012-10-12 03:21:22,375 DEBUG openstack: 201 '201 Created\n\n\n\n ' 2012-10-12 03:21:27,379 DEBUG Waited for 5 seconds for networking on server u'a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023' 2012-10-12 03:21:27,380 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023 2012-10-12 03:21:27,380 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023' 2012-10-12 03:21:27,556 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"server": {"OS-EXT-STS:task_state": "networking", "addresses": {"private": [{"version": 4, "addr": "10.0.0.8"}]}, "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "rel": "bookmark"}], "image": {"id": "5bf60467-0136-4471-9818-e13ade75a0a1", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/images/5bf60467-0136-4471-9818-e13ade75a0a1", "rel": "bookmark"}]}, "OS-EXT-STS:vm_state": "building", "OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:instance_name": "instance-00000060", "flavor": {"id": "1", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/1", "rel": "bookmark"}]}, "id": "a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "user_id": "01610f73d0fb4922aefff09f2627e50c", "OS-DCF:diskConfig": "MANUAL", "accessIPv4": "", "accessIPv6": "", "progress": 0, "OS-EXT-STS:power_state": 0, "config_drive": "", "status": "BUILD", "updated": "2012-10-12T08:21:23Z", "hostId": "1cdb25708fb8e464d83a69fe4a024dcd5a80baf24a82ec28f9d9f866", "OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:host": "nova01", "key_name": "", "OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname": null, "name": "juju openstack instance 0", "created": "2012-10-12T08:21:22Z", "tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "metadata": {}}}' 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 2012-10-12 03:21:27,557 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-floating-ips 2012-10-12 03:21:27,557 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/os-floating-ips' 2012-10-12 03:21:27,815 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"floating_ips": [{"instance_id": "a0e0df11-91c0-4801-95b3-62d910d729e9", "ip": "xxxx.35", "fixed_ip": "10.0.0.5", "id": 447, "pool": "nova"}, {"instance_id": "b84f1a42-7192-415e-8650-ebb1aa56e97f", "ip": "xxxx.36", "fixed_ip": "10.0.0.6", "id": 448, "pool": "nova"}, {"instance_id": null, "ip": "xxxx.37", "fixed_ip": null, "id": 449, "pool": "nova"}, {"instance_id": null, "ip": "xxxx.38", "fixed_ip": null, "id": 450, "pool": "nova"}, {"instance_id": null, "ip": "xxxx.39", "fixed_ip": null, "id": 451, "pool": "nova"}, {"instance_id": null, "ip": "xxxx.40", "fixed_ip": null, "id": 452, "pool": "nova"}, {"instance_id": null, "ip": "xxxx.41", "fixed_ip": null, "id": 453, "pool": "nova"}]}' 2012-10-12 03:21:27,815 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023/action 2012-10-12 03:21:27,816 DEBUG openstack: POST 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023/action' 2012-10-12 03:21:28,356 DEBUG openstack: 202 '' 2012-10-12 03:21:28,356 DEBUG access object-store @ xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/provider-state 2012-10-12 03:21:28,357 DEBUG openstack: PUT 'xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/provider-state' 2012-10-12 03:21:28,446 DEBUG openstack: 201 '201 Created\n\n\n\n ' 2012-10-12 03:21:28,446 INFO 'bootstrap' command finished successfully Juju Status Command root@cinder01:/home/cinder# juju -v status 2012-10-12 03:23:28,314 DEBUG Initializing juju status runtime 2012-10-12 03:23:28,320 WARNING Verification of xxxxS certificates is disabled for this environment. Set 'ssl-hostname-verification' to ensure secure communication. 2012-10-12 03:23:28,320 DEBUG openstack: using auth-mode 'userpass' with xxxx:xxxxxx.10:35357/v2.0/ 2012-10-12 03:23:28,320 INFO Connecting to environment... 2012-10-12 03:23:28,403 DEBUG openstack: authenticated til u'2012-10-13T08:23:20Z' 2012-10-12 03:23:28,403 DEBUG access object-store @ xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/provider-state 2012-10-12 03:23:28,403 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xx10.49.113.11:8080/v1/AUTH_d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/juju-hpc-az1-cb/provider-state' 2012-10-12 03:23:35,480 DEBUG openstack: 200 'zookeeper-instances: [a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023]\n' 2012-10-12 03:23:35,480 DEBUG access compute @ xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023 2012-10-12 03:23:35,480 DEBUG openstack: GET 'xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023' 2012-10-12 03:23:35,662 DEBUG openstack: 200 '{"server": {"OS-EXT-STS:task_state": null, "addresses": {"private": [{"version": 4, "addr": "10.0.0.8"}, {"version": 4, "addr": "xxxx.37"}]}, "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/v1.1/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "rel": "self"}, {"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/servers/a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "rel": "bookmark"}], "image": {"id": "5bf60467-0136-4471-9818-e13ade75a0a1", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/images/5bf60467-0136-4471-9818-e13ade75a0a1", "rel": "bookmark"}]}, "OS-EXT-STS:vm_state": "active", "OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:instance_name": "instance-00000060", "flavor": {"id": "1", "links": [{"href": "xxxx:xxxxxx.15:8774/d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d/flavors/1", "rel": "bookmark"}]}, "id": "a598b402-8678-4447-baeb-59255409a023", "user_id": "01610f73d0fb4922aefff09f2627e50c", "OS-DCF:diskConfig": "MANUAL", "accessIPv4": "", "accessIPv6": "", "progress": 0, "OS-EXT-STS:power_state": 1, "config_drive": "", "status": "ACTIVE", "updated": "2012-10-12T08:21:40Z", "hostId": "1cdb25708fb8e464d83a69fe4a024dcd5a80baf24a82ec28f9d9f866", "OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:host": "nova01", "key_name": "", "OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname": null, "name": "juju openstack instance 0", "created": "2012-10-12T08:21:22Z", "tenant_id": "d5f52673953f49e595279e89ddde979d", "metadata": {}}}' 2012-10-12 03:23:35,663 DEBUG Connecting to environment using xxxx.37... 2012-10-12 03:23:35,663 DEBUG Spawning SSH process with remote_user="ubuntu" remote_host="xxxx.37" remote_port="2181" local_port="45859". 2012-10-12 03:23:36,173:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@658: Client environment:zookeeper.version=zookeeper C client 3.3.5 2012-10-12 03:23:36,173:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@662: Client environment:host.name=cinder01 2012-10-12 03:23:36,174:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@669: Client environment:os.name=Linux 2012-10-12 03:23:36,174:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@670: Client environment:os.arch=3.2.0-23-generic 2012-10-12 03:23:36,174:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@671: Client environment:os.version=#36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 10 20:39:51 UTC 2012 2012-10-12 03:23:36,174:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@679: Client environment:user.name=cinder 2012-10-12 03:23:36,174:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@687: Client environment:user.home=/root 2012-10-12 03:23:36,175:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@log_env@699: Client environment:user.dir=/home/cinder 2012-10-12 03:23:36,175:4355(0x7fd581973700):ZOO_INFO@zookeeper_init@727: Initiating client connection, host=localhost:45859 sessionTimeout=10000 watcher=0x7fd57f9146b0 sessionId=0 sessionPasswd= context=0x2c1dab0 flags=0 2012-10-12 03:23:36,175:4355(0x7fd577fff700):ZOO_ERROR@handle_socket_error_msg@1579: Socket [127.0.0.1:45859] zk retcode=-4, errno=111(Connection refused): server refused to accept the client 2012-10-12 03:23:39,512:4355(0x7fd577fff700):ZOO_ERROR@handle_socket_error_msg@1579: Socket [127.0.0.1:45859] zk retcode=-4, errno=111(Connection refused): server refused to accept the client 2012-10-12 03:23:42,848:4355(0x7fd577fff700):ZOO_ERROR@handle_socket_error_msg@1579: Socket [127.0.0.1:45859] zk retcode=-4, errno=111(Connection refused): server refused to accept the client ^Croot@cinder01:/home/cinder#

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• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 2

  - by AjarnMark

  In Part 1, I started talking about using Red-Gate’s newest version of SQL Source Control and how I really like it as a viable method to source control your database development.  It looks like this is going to turn into a little series where I will explain how we have done things in the past, and how life is different with SQL Source Control.  I will also explain some of my philosophy and methodology around deployment with these tools.  But for now, let’s talk about some of the good and the bad of the tool itself. More Kudos and Features I mentioned previously how impressed I was with the responsiveness of Red-Gate’s team.  I have been having an ongoing email conversation with Gyorgy Pocsi, and as I have run into problems or requested things behave a little differently, it has not been more than a day or two before a new Build is ready for me to download and test.  Quite impressive! I’m sure much of the requests I put in were already in the plans, so I can’t really take credit for them, but throughout this conversation, Red-Gate has implemented several features that were not in the first Early Access version.  Those include: Honoring the Fortress configuration option to require Work Item (Bug) IDs on check-ins. Adding the check-in comment text as a comment to the Work Item. Adding the list of checked-in files, along with the Fortress links for automatic History and DIFF view Updating the status of a Work Item on check-in (e.g. setting the item to Complete or, in our case “Dev-Complete”) Support for the Fortress 2.0 API, and not just the Vault Pro 5.1 API.  (See later notes regarding support for Fortress 2.0). These were all features that I felt we really needed to have in-place before I could honestly consider converting my team to using SQL Source Control on a regular basis.  Now that I have those, my only excuse is not wanting to switch boats on the team mid-stream.  So when we wrap up our current release in a few weeks, we will make the jump.  In the meantime, I will continue to bang on it to make sure it is stable.  It passed one test for stability when I did a test load of one of our larger database schemas into Fortress with SQL Source Control.  That database has about 150 tables, 200 User-Defined Functions and nearly 900 Stored Procedures.  The initial load to source control went smoothly and took just a brief amount of time. Warnings Remember that this IS still in pre-release stage and while I have not had any problems after that first hiccup I wrote about last time, you still need to treat it with a healthy respect.  As I understand it, the RTM is targeted for February.  There are a couple more features that I hope make it into the final release version, but if not, they’ll probably be coming soon thereafter.  Those are: A Browse feature to let me lookup the Work Item ID instead of having to remember it or look back in my Item details.  This is just a matter of convenience. I normally have my Work Item list open anyway, so I can easily look it up, but hey, why not make it even easier. A multi-line comment area.  The current space for writing check-in comments is a single-line text box.  I would like to have a multi-line space as I sometimes write lengthy commentary.  But I recognize that it is a struggle to get most developers to put in more than the word “fixed” as their comment, so this meets the need of the majority as-is, and it’s not a show-stopper for us. Merge.  SQL Source Control currently does not have a Merge feature.  If two or more people make changes to the same database object, you will get a warning of the conflict and have to choose which one wins (and then manually edit to include the others’ changes).  I think it unlikely you will run into actual conflicts in Stored Procedures and Functions, but you might with Views or Tables.  This will be nice to have, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.  And I have multiple tools at my disposal to do merges manually, so really not a show-stopper for us. Automation has its limits.  As cool as this automation is, it has its limits and there are some changes that you will be better off scripting yourself.  For example, if you are refactoring table definitions, and want to change a column name, you can write that as a quick sp_rename command and preserve the data within that column.  But because this tool is looking just at a before and after picture, it cannot tell that you just renamed a column.  To the tool, it looks like you dropped one column and added another.  This is not a knock against Red-Gate.  All automated scripting tools have this issue, unless the are actively monitoring your every step to know exactly what you are doing.  This means that when you go to Deploy your changes, SQL Compare will script the change as a column drop and add, or will attempt to rebuild the entire table.  Unfortunately, neither of these approaches will preserve the existing data in that column the way an sp_rename will, and so you are better off scripting that change yourself.  Thankfully, SQL Compare will produce warnings about the potential loss of data before it does the actual synchronization and give you a chance to intercept the script and do it yourself. Also, please note that the current official word is that SQL Source Control supports Vault Professional 5.1 and later.  Vault Professional is the new name for what was previously known as Fortress.  (You can read about the name change on SourceGear’s site.)  The last version of Fortress was 2.x, and the API for Fortress 2.x is different from the API for Vault Pro.  At my company, we are currently running Fortress 2.0, with plans to upgrade to Vault Pro early next year.  Gyorgy was able to come up with a work-around for me to be able to use SQL Source Control with Fortress 2.0, even though it is not officially supported.  If you are using Fortress 2.0 and want to use SQL Source Control, be aware that this is not officially supported, but it is working for us, and you can probably get the work-around instructions from Red-Gate if you’re really, really nice to them. Upcoming Topics Some of the other topics I will likely cover in this series over the next few weeks are: How we used to do source control back in the old days (a few weeks ago) before SQL Source Control was available to Vault users What happens when you restore a database that is linked to source control Handling multiple development branches of source code Concurrent Development practices and handling Conflicts Deployment Tips and Best Practices A recap after using the tool for a while

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• localhost/phpmyadmin pulls blank page

  - by Atul Modi

  When I tried configuring local machine as a Internet Gateway with website development capabilities over it and I installed all required software into it. I also had disable the selinux into it. But PROBLEM is when I do http://localhost/phpMyAdmin or all lower case than the page shows it as a blank page. I am pasting code from httpd.conf file into this as well as from phpMyAdmin.conf file I am using Fedora 16 for this. httpd.conf ServerTokens OS ServerRoot "/etc/httpd" PidFile run/httpd.pid Timeout 60 KeepAlive Off MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 5 StartServers 8 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 20 ServerLimit 256 MaxClients 256 MaxRequestsPerChild 4000 StartServers 4 MaxClients 300 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 Listen 80 LoadModule auth_basic_module modules/mod_auth_basic.so LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so LoadModule authn_file_module modules/mod_authn_file.so LoadModule authn_alias_module modules/mod_authn_alias.so LoadModule authn_anon_module modules/mod_authn_anon.so LoadModule authn_dbm_module modules/mod_authn_dbm.so LoadModule authn_default_module modules/mod_authn_default.so LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so LoadModule authz_user_module modules/mod_authz_user.so LoadModule authz_owner_module modules/mod_authz_owner.so LoadModule authz_groupfile_module modules/mod_authz_groupfile.so LoadModule authz_dbm_module modules/mod_authz_dbm.so LoadModule authz_default_module modules/mod_authz_default.so LoadModule authn_dbd_module modules/mod_authn_dbd.so LoadModule dbd_module modules/mod_dbd.so LoadModule ldap_module modules/mod_ldap.so LoadModule authnz_ldap_module modules/mod_authnz_ldap.so LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so LoadModule logio_module modules/mod_logio.so LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so LoadModule mime_magic_module modules/mod_mime_magic.so LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so LoadModule usertrack_module modules/mod_usertrack.so LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so LoadModule info_module modules/mod_info.so LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so LoadModule speling_module modules/mod_speling.so LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so LoadModule substitute_module modules/mod_substitute.so LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_balancer_module modules/mod_proxy_balancer.so LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so LoadModule cache_module modules/mod_cache.so LoadModule suexec_module modules/mod_suexec.so LoadModule disk_cache_module modules/mod_disk_cache.so LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so LoadModule version_module modules/mod_version.so Include conf.d/*.conf User apache Group apache ServerAdmin root@localhost UseCanonicalName Off DocumentRoot "/var/www/html" Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all UserDir disabled DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php AccessFileName .htaccess Order allow,deny Deny from all Satisfy All TypesConfig /etc/mime.types DefaultType text/plain MIMEMagicFile conf/magic HostnameLookups Off ErrorLog logs/error_log LogLevel warn LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b" common LogFormat "%{Referer}i - %U" referer LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent CustomLog logs/access_log combined ServerSignature On Alias /icons/ "/var/www/icons/" Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all # Location of the WebDAV lock database. DAVLockDB /var/lib/dav/lockdb ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/" AllowOverride None Options None Order allow,deny Allow from all IndexOptions FancyIndexing VersionSort NameWidth=* HTMLTable Charset=UTF-8 AddIconByEncoding (CMP,/icons/compressed.gif) x-compress x-gzip AddIconByType (TXT,/icons/text.gif) text/* AddIconByType (IMG,/icons/image2.gif) image/* AddIconByType (SND,/icons/sound2.gif) audio/* AddIconByType (VID,/icons/movie.gif) video/* AddIcon /icons/binary.gif .bin .exe AddIcon /icons/binhex.gif .hqx AddIcon /icons/tar.gif .tar AddIcon /icons/world2.gif .wrl .wrl.gz .vrml .vrm .iv AddIcon /icons/compressed.gif .Z .z .tgz .gz .zip AddIcon /icons/a.gif .ps .ai .eps AddIcon /icons/layout.gif .html .shtml .htm .pdf AddIcon /icons/text.gif .txt AddIcon /icons/c.gif .c AddIcon /icons/p.gif .pl .py AddIcon /icons/f.gif .for AddIcon /icons/dvi.gif .dvi AddIcon /icons/uuencoded.gif .uu AddIcon /icons/script.gif .conf .sh .shar .csh .ksh .tcl AddIcon /icons/tex.gif .tex AddIcon /icons/bomb.gif core AddIcon /icons/back.gif .. AddIcon /icons/hand.right.gif README AddIcon /icons/folder.gif ^^DIRECTORY^^ AddIcon /icons/blank.gif ^^BLANKICON^^ DefaultIcon /icons/unknown.gif ReadmeName README.html HeaderName HEADER.html IndexIgnore .??* *~ # HEADER README* RCS CVS *,v *,t AddLanguage ca .ca AddLanguage cs .cz .cs AddLanguage da .dk AddLanguage de .de AddLanguage el .el AddLanguage en .en AddLanguage eo .eo AddLanguage es .es AddLanguage et .et AddLanguage fr .fr AddLanguage he .he AddLanguage hr .hr AddLanguage it .it AddLanguage ja .ja AddLanguage ko .ko AddLanguage ltz .ltz AddLanguage nl .nl AddLanguage nn .nn AddLanguage no .no AddLanguage pl .po AddLanguage pt .pt AddLanguage pt-BR .pt-br AddLanguage ru .ru AddLanguage sv .sv AddLanguage zh-CN .zh-cn AddLanguage zh-TW .zh-tw LanguagePriority en ca cs da de el eo es et fr he hr it ja ko ltz nl nn no pl pt pt-BR ru sv zh-CN zh-TW ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 AddType application/x-tar .tgz AddType application/x-httpd-php .php AddType application/x-httpd-php .xml AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .xml AddType application/x-compress .Z AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz AddType application/x-x509-ca-cert .crt AddType application/x-pkcs7-crl .crl AddHandler type-map var AddType text/html .shtml AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml Alias /error/ "/var/www/error/" AllowOverride None Options IncludesNoExec AddOutputFilter Includes html AddHandler type-map var Order allow,deny Allow from all LanguagePriority en ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback ErrorDocument 400 /error/HTTP_BAD_REQUEST.html.var ErrorDocument 401 /error/HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED.html.var ErrorDocument 403 /error/HTTP_FORBIDDEN.html.var ErrorDocument 404 /error/HTTP_NOT_FOUND.html.var ErrorDocument 405 /error/HTTP_METHOD_NOT_ALLOWED.html.var ErrorDocument 408 /error/HTTP_REQUEST_TIME_OUT.html.var ErrorDocument 500 /error/HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR.html.var ErrorDocument 503 /error/HTTP_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE.html.var BrowserMatch "Mozilla/2" nokeepalive BrowserMatch "MSIE 4.0b2;" nokeepalive downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "RealPlayer 4.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "Java/1.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "JDK/1.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "MS FrontPage" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^WebDrive" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.[0123]" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^gnome-vfs/1.0" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^XML Spy" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^Dreamweaver-WebDAV-SCM1" redirect-carefully Order allow,deny Allow from all # phpMyAdmin.conf Alias /phpMyAdmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin Alias /phpmyadmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin Order Allow,Deny Allow from All Allow from 127.0.0.1 Allow from ::1 Order Allow,Deny Allow from All Allow from 127.0.0.1 Allow from ::1 Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from None Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from None Order Deny,Allow Deny from All Allow from None Can anyone help into this area please. Urgent reply will be appreciatable because i am struggling since one and half month for this matter. thank you, Atul

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• T-SQL Tuesday #53-Matt's Making Me Do This!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Hello everyone! It's that time again, time for T-SQL Tuesday, the wonderful blog series started by Adam Machanic (b|t). This month we are hosted by Matt Velic (b|t) who asks the question, "Why So Serious?", in celebration of April Fool's Day. He asks the contributors for their dirty tricks. And for some reason that escapes me, he and Jeff Verheul (b|t) seem to think I might be able to write about those. Shocked, I am! Nah, not really. They're absolutely right, this one is gonna be fun! I took some inspiration from Matt's suggestions, namely Resource Governor and Login Triggers.  I've done some interesting login trigger stuff for a presentation, but nothing yet with Resource Governor. Best way to learn it! One of my oldest pet peeves is abuse of the sa login. Don't get me wrong, I use it too, but typically only as SQL Agent job owner. It's been a while since I've been stuck with it, but back when I started using SQL Server, EVERY application needed sa to function. It was hard-coded and couldn't be changed. (welllllll, that is if you didn't use a hex editor on the EXE file, but who would do such a thing?) My standard warning applies: don't run anything on this page in production. In fact, back up whatever server you're testing this on, including the master database. Snapshotting a VM is a good idea. Also make sure you have other sysadmin level logins on that server. So here's a standard template for a logon trigger to address those pesky sa users: CREATE TRIGGER SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY ON ALL SERVER WITH ENCRYPTION, EXECUTE AS N'sa' AFTER LOGON AS IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()<>N'sa' OR APP_NAME() LIKE N'SQL Agent%' RETURN; -- interesting stuff goes here GO   What can you do for "interesting stuff"? Books Online limits itself to merely rolling back the logon, which will throw an error (and alert the person that the logon trigger fired).  That's a good use for logon triggers, but really not tricky enough for this blog.  Some of my suggestions are below: WAITFOR DELAY '23:59:59';   Or: EXEC sp_MSforeach_db 'EXEC sp_detach_db ''?'';'   Or: EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_job @job_name=N'`', @enabled=1, @start_step_id=1, @notify_level_eventlog=0, @delete_level=3; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobserver @job_name=N'`', @server_name=@@SERVERNAME; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobstep @job_name=N'`', @step_id=1, @step_name=N'`', @command=N'SHUTDOWN;'; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job @job_name=N'`';   Really, I don't want to spoil your own exploration, try it yourself!  The thing I really like about these is it lets me promote the idea that "sa is SLOW, sa is BUGGY, don't use sa!".  Before we get into Resource Governor, make sure to drop or disable that logon trigger. They don't work well in combination. (Had to redo all the following code when SSMS locked up) Resource Governor is a feature that lets you control how many resources a single session can consume. The main goal is to limit the damage from a runaway query. But we're not here to read about its main goal or normal usage! I'm trying to make people stop using sa BECAUSE IT'S SLOW! Here's how RG can do that: USE master; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY() RETURNS sysname WITH SCHEMABINDING, ENCRYPTION AS BEGIN RETURN CASE WHEN ORIGINAL_LOGIN()=N'sa' AND APP_NAME() NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' THEN N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY' ELSE N'default' END END GO CREATE RESOURCE POOL SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( MIN_CPU_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,CAP_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,AFFINITY SCHEDULER = (0) ,MIN_MEMORY_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_MEMORY_PERCENT = 1 -- ,MIN_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 ,MAX_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 -- uncomment for SQL Server 2014 ); CREATE WORKLOAD GROUP SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( IMPORTANCE = LOW ,REQUEST_MAX_MEMORY_GRANT_PERCENT = 1 ,REQUEST_MAX_CPU_TIME_SEC = 1 ,REQUEST_MEMORY_GRANT_TIMEOUT_SEC = 1 ,MAX_DOP = 1 ,GROUP_MAX_REQUESTS = 1 ) USING SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY; ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR WITH (CLASSIFIER_FUNCTION=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY); ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR RECONFIGURE;   From top to bottom: Create a classifier function to determine which pool the session should go to. More info on classifier functions. Create the pool and provide a generous helping of resources for the sa login. Create the workload group and further prioritize those resources for the sa login. Apply the classifier function and reconfigure RG to use it. I have to say this one is a bit sneakier than the logon trigger, least of all you don't get any error messages.  I heartily recommend testing it in Management Studio, and click around the UI a lot, there's some fun behavior there. And DEFINITELY try it on SQL 2014 with the IO settings included!  You'll notice I made allowances for SQL Agent jobs owned by sa, they'll go into the default workload group.  You can add your own overrides to the classifier function if needed. Some interesting ideas I didn't have time for but expect you to get to before me: Set up different pools/workgroups with different settings and randomize which one the classifier chooses Do the same but base it on time of day (Books Online example covers this)... Or, which workstation it connects from. This can be modified for certain special people in your office who either don't listen, or are attracted (and attractive) to you. And if things go wrong you can always use the following from another sysadmin or Dedicated Admin connection: ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR DISABLE;   That will let you go in and either fix (or drop) the pools, workgroups and classifier function. So now that you know these types of things are possible, and if you are tired of your team using sa when they shouldn't, I expect you'll enjoy playing with these quite a bit! Unfortunately, the aforementioned Dedicated Admin Connection kinda poops on the party here.  Books Online for both topics will tell you that the DAC will not fire either feature. So if you have a crafty user who does their research, they can still sneak in with sa and do their bidding without being hampered. Of course, you can still detect their login via various methods, like a server trace, SQL Server Audit, extended events, and enabling "Audit Successful Logins" on the server.  These all have their downsides: traces take resources, extended events and SQL Audit can't fire off actions, and enabling successful logins will bloat your error log very quickly.  SQL Audit is also limited unless you have Enterprise Edition, and Resource Governor is Enterprise-only.  And WORST OF ALL, these features are all available and visible through the SSMS UI, so even a doofus developer or manager could find them. Fortunately there are Event Notifications! Event notifications are becoming one of my favorite features of SQL Server (keep an eye out for more blogs from me about them). They are practically unknown and heinously underutilized.  They are also a great gateway drug to using Service Broker, another great but underutilized feature. Hopefully this will get you to start using them, or at least your enemies in the office will once they read this, and then you'll have to learn them in order to fix things. So here's the setup: USE msdb; GO CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act WITH ENCRYPTION AS DECLARE @x XML, @message nvarchar(max); RECEIVE @x=CAST(message_body AS XML) FROM SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q; IF @x.value('(//LoginName)[1]','sysname')=N'sa' AND @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' BEGIN -- interesting activation procedure stuff goes here END GO CREATE QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q WITH STATUS=ON, RETENTION=OFF, ACTIVATION (PROCEDURE_NAME=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act, MAX_QUEUE_READERS=1, EXECUTE AS OWNER); CREATE SERVICE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s ON QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q([http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification]); CREATE EVENT NOTIFICATION SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_en ON SERVER WITH FAN_IN FOR AUDIT_LOGIN TO SERVICE N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s', N'current database' GO   From top to bottom: Create activation procedure for event notification queue. Create queue to accept messages from event notification, and activate the procedure to process those messages when received. Create service to send messages to that queue. Create event notification on AUDIT_LOGIN events that fire the service. I placed this in msdb as it is an available system database and already has Service Broker enabled by default. You should change this to another database if you can guarantee it won't get dropped. So what to put in place for "interesting activation procedure code"?  Hmmm, so far I haven't addressed Matt's suggestion of writing a lengthy script to send an annoying message: SET @[email protected]('(//HostName)[1]','sysname') + N' tried to log in to server ' + @x.value('(//ServerName)[1]','sysname') + N' as SA at ' + @x.value('(//StartTime)[1]','sysname') + N' using the ' + @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') + N' program. That''s why you''re getting this message and the attached pornography which' + N' is bloating your inbox and violating company policy, among other things. If you know' + N' this person you can go to their desk and hit them, or use the following SQL to end their session: KILL ' + @x.value('(//SPID)[1]','sysname') + N'; Hopefully they''re in the middle of a huge query that they need to finish right away.' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients=N'[email protected]', @subject=N'SA Login Alert', @query_result_width=32767, @body=@message, @query=N'EXEC sp_readerrorlog;', @attach_query_result_as_file=1, @query_attachment_filename=N'UtterlyGrossPorn_SeriouslyDontOpenIt.jpg' I'm not sure I'd call that a lengthy script, but the attachment should get pretty big, and I'm sure the email admins will love storing multiple copies of it.  The nice thing is that this also fires on Dedicated Admin connections! You can even identify DAC connections from the event data returned, I leave that as an exercise for you. You can use that info to change the action taken by the activation procedure, and since it's a stored procedure, it can pretty much do anything! Except KILL the SPID, or SHUTDOWN the server directly.  I'm still working on those.

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• PHP+Apache as forward/reverse proxy: ¿how to process client requests and server responses in PHP?

  - by Lightworker

  Hi! I'm having a lot of troubles with the propper configuration of Apache mod_proxy.so to work as desired... The main idea, is to create a proxy on a local machine in a network wich will have the ability to proces a client request (client connected through this Apache prepared proxy) in PHP. And also, it will have the capacity to process the server responses on PHP too. Those are the 2 funcionalities, and they are independent one from each other. Let me present a little schema of what I need to achive: As you can see here, there're 2 ways: blue one and red one. For the blue one, I basically conected a client (Machine B - cell phone) on my local network (home) and configured it to go thorugh a proxy, wich is the Machine A (personal computer) on the exactly same network. So let's say (not DHCP): Machine A: 192.168.1.40 -- Apache is running on this machine, and configured to listen port 80. Machine B (cell phone): 192.168.1.75 -- configured to go throug a proxy, wich is IP 192.168.1.75 and port 80 (basically, Machine A). After configuring Apache properly, wich is basically to remove the "#" from httpd.conf on the lines for the mod_proxy.so (main worker), mod_proxy_connect.so (SSL, allowCONNECT, ...) and mod_proxy_http.so (needed for handle HTTP request/responses) and having in my case, lines like this: # Implements a proxy/gateway for Apache. Include "conf/extra/httpd-proxy.conf" # Various default settings Include "conf/extra/httpd-default.conf" # Secure (SSL/TLS) connections Include "conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf" wich gives me the ability to configure the file httpd-proxy.conf to prepare the forward proxy or the reverse proxy. So I'm not sure, if what I need it's a forward proxy or a reverse one. For a forward proxy I've done this: <IfModule proxy_module> <IfModule proxy_http_module> # # FORWARD Proxy # #ProxyRequests Off ProxyRequests On ProxyVia On <Proxy *> Order deny,allow # Allow from all Deny from all Allow from 192.168.1 </Proxy> </IfModule> </IfModule> wich basically passes all the packets normally to the server and back to the client. I can trace it perfectly (and testing that works) looking at the "access.log" from Apache. Any request I make with the cell phone, appears then on the Apache log. So it works. But here come the problem: I need to process those client requests. And I need to do it, in PHP. I have read a lot about this. I've read in detail the oficial site from Apache about mod_proxy. And I've searched a lot on forums, but without luck. So I thought about a first aproximation: 1) Forward proxy in Apache, passes all the packets and it's not possible to process them. This seems to be true, so, what about a reverse proxy? So I envisioned something like: ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass http://www.google.com http://www.yahoo.com ProxyPassReverse http://www.google.com http://www.yahoo.com which is just a test, but this should cause on my cell phone that when trying to navigate to Google, I should be going to Yahoo, isn't it? But not. It doesn't work. So you really see, that ALL the examples on Apache reverse proxy, goes like: ProxyPass /foo http://foo.example.com/bar ProxyPassReverse /foo http://foo.example.com/bar wich means, that any kind of request in a local context, will be solved on a remote location. But what I needed is the inverse! It's that when asking for a remote site on my phone, I solve this request on my local server (the Apache one) to process it with a PHP module. So, if it's a forward proxy, I need to pass through PHP first. If it's a reverse proxy, I need to change the "going" direction to my local server one to process first on PHP. Then comes in mind second option: 2) I've seen something like: <Proxy http://example.com/foo/*> SetOutputFilter INCLUDES </Proxy> And I started to search for SetOutputFilter, SetInputFilter, AddOutputFilter and AddInputFilter. But I don't really know how can I use it. Seems to be good, or a solution to me, cause with somethin' like this, I should can add an Input filter to process on PHP the client requests and send back to the client what I programed/want (not the remote server response) wich is the BLUE path on schema, and I should have the ability to add an Output filter wich seems to give me the ability to process the remote server response befor sending it to the client, wich should be the RED path on the schema. Red path, it's just to read server responses and play with em. But nothing more. The Blue path, it's the important one. Cause I will send to the client whatever I want after procesing the requests. I so sorry for this amazingly big post, but I needed to explain it as well as I can. I hope someone will understand my problem, and will help me to solve it! Lot of thanks in advance!! :)

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• Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; TFS Integration (WAWS Part 2)

  - by Shaun

  So this is the fourth blog post about the new features of Windows Azure and the second part of Windows Azure Web Sites. But this is not just focus on the WAWS since the function I’m going to introduce is available in both Windows Azure Web Sites and Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. hosted service). In the previous post I talked about the Windows Azure Web Sites and how to use its gallery to build a WordPress personal blog without coding. Besides the gallery we can create an empty web site and upload our website from vary approaches. And one of the highlighted feature here is that, we can make our web site integrated with a source control service, such as TFS and Git, so that it will be deployed automatically once a new commit or build available.   Create New Empty Web Site In the developer portal when creating a new web site, we can select QUICK CREATE item. This will create an empty web site with only one shared instance without any database associated. Let’s specify the URL, region and subscription and click OK. After a few seconds our website will be ready. And now we can click the BROWSE button to open this empty website. As you can see there is a welcome page available in my website even thought I didn’t upload or deploy anything. This means even though the website will be charged even before anything was deployed, similar as the cloud service (hosted service). It is because once we created a website, Windows Azure platform had arranged a hosting process (w3wp.exe) in the group of virtual machines.   Create Project in TFS Preview Service and Setup Link Currently the Windows Azure Web Sites can integrate with TFS and Git as its deployment source, and it only support the Microsoft TFS Preview Service for now. I will not deep into how to use the TFS preview service in this post but once we click into the website we had just created and then clicked the “Set up TFS publishing”, there will be a dialog helping us to connect to this service. If you don’t have an account you can click the link shown below to request one. Assuming we have already had an account of TFS service then we need to create a new project firstly. Go to your TFS service website and create a new project, giving the project name, description and the process template. Then, back to the developer portal and clicked the “Set up TFS publishing” link. In the popping up window I will provide my TFS service URL and click the “Authorize now” link. Click “Accept” button to allow my windows azure to connect to my TFS service. Then it will be back to the developer portal and list all projects in my account. Just select the one I had just created and click OK. Then our website is linking to the TFS project I specified and finally it will show similar like this below. This means the web site had been linked to the TFS successfully.   Work with TFS Preview Service in VS2010 In the figure above there are some links to guide us how to connect to the TFS server through Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 RC. If you are using Visual Studio 2012 RC, you don’t need any extension. But if you are using Visual Studio 2010 you must have SP1 and KB2581206 installed. To connect to my TFS service just open the Visual Studio and in the Team Explorer, we can add a new TFS server and paste the URL of my TFS service from the developer portal. And select the project I had just created, then it will be listed in my Team Explorer. Now let’s start to build our website. Since the website we are going to build will be deployed to WAWS, it’s NOT a cloud service, NOT a web role. So in this case we need to create a normal ASP.NET web application. For example, an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application. Next, right click on the solution and select “Add Solution to Source Control”, select the project I had just created. Then check my code in. Once the check-in finished we can see that there is a build running in the TFS server. And if we back to the developer portal, we will see in our web site deployment page there’s a deployment running. In fact, once we linked our web site to our TFS then it will create a new build definition in our TFS project. It will be triggered by each check-in and deploy to the web site we linked automatically. So that when our code had been compiled it will be published to our web site from our TFS server. Once the build and deployment finished we can see it’s now active on our developer portal. Now we can see the web site that created from my Visual Studio and deployed by my TFS.   Continue Deployment through VS and TFS A big benefit when using TFS publishing is the continue deployment. Now if I changed some code in my Visual Studio, for example update some text on the home page and check in my changes, then it will trigger an new build and deploy to my WAWS automatically. And even more, if we wanted to rollback to a previous version we can just select an existing deployment listed in the portal and click REDEPLOY at the bottom.   Q&A: Can Web Site use Storage work with a Worker Role? Stacy asked a question in my previous post, which was “can a web site use Windows Azure Storage and furthermore working with a worker role”. Since the web site is deployed on the windows azure virtual machines in data center, it must be able to use all windows azure features such as the storage, SQL databases, CDN, etc.. But since when using web site we normally have a standard ASP.NET web application, PHP website or NodeJS, the windows azure SDK was not referenced by default. But we can add them by ourselves. In our sample project let’s right click on my MVC project and clicked the “Manage NuGet packages”. And in the dialog I will search windows azure packages and select the “Windows Azure Storage” to install. Then we will have the assemblies to access windows azure storage such as tables, queues and blobs. Since I have a storage account already, let’s have a quick demo, just to list all blobs in a container. The code would be like this. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using Microsoft.WindowsAzure; 7: using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient; 8:  9: namespace WAASTFSDemo.Controllers 10: { 11: public class HomeController : Controller 12: { 13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to Windows Azure!"; 16:  17: var credentials = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey("[STORAGE_ACCOUNT]", "[STORAGE_KEY]"); 18: var account = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, false); 19: var client = account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 20: var container = client.GetContainerReference("shared"); 21: ViewBag.Blobs = container.ListBlobs().Select(b => b.Uri.AbsoluteUri); 22:  23: return View(); 24: } 25:  26: public ActionResult About() 27: { 28: return View(); 29: } 30: } 31: } 1: @{ 2: ViewBag.Title = "Home Page"; 3: } 4:  5: <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2> 6: <p> 7: To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. 8: </p> 9: <div> 10: <ul> 11: @foreach (var blob in ViewBag.Blobs) 12: { 13: <li>@blob</li> 14: } 15: </ul> 16: </div> And then just check in the code, it will be deployed to my web site. Finally we can see the blobs in my storage.   This is just an example but it proves that web sites can connect to storage, table, blob and queue as well. So the answer to Stacy should be “yes”. The web site can use queue storage to work with worker role.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to integrate with TFS from Windows Azure Web Sites. You can see our website can be built, uploaded and deployed automatically by TFS service. All we need to do is to provide the TFS name and select the project. Not only the Windows Azure Web Site, in this upgrade the Windows Azure Cloud Services (hosted service) can be published through TFS as well. Very similar as what we have shown below. But currently, only Microsoft TFS Service Preview can be integrated with Windows Azure. But I think in the future we can link the TFS in our enterprise and some 3rd party TFS such as CodePlex to Windows Azure.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Networking in VirtualBox

  - by Fat Bloke

  Networking in VirtualBox is extremely powerful, but can also be a bit daunting, so here's a quick overview of the different ways you can setup networking in VirtualBox, with a few pointers as to which configurations should be used and when. VirtualBox allows you to configure up to 8 virtual NICs (Network Interface Controllers) for each guest vm (although only 4 are exposed in the GUI) and for each of these NICs you can configure: Which virtualized NIC-type is exposed to the Guest. Examples include: Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (82545EM),  AMD PCNet FAST III (Am79C973, the default) or  a Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net). How the NIC operates with respect to your Host's physical networking. The main modes are: Network Address Translation (NAT) Bridged networking Internal networking Host-only networking NAT with Port-forwarding The choice of NIC-type comes down to whether the guest has drivers for that NIC.  VirtualBox, suggests a NIC based on the guest OS-type that you specify during creation of the vm, and you rarely need to modify this. But the choice of networking mode depends on how you want to use your vm (client or server) and whether you want other machines on your network to see it. So let's look at each mode in a bit more detail... Network Address Translation (NAT) This is the default mode for new vm's and works great in most situations when the Guest is a "client" type of vm. (i.e. most network connections are outbound). Here's how it works: When the guest OS boots,  it typically uses DHCP to get an IP address. VirtualBox will field this DHCP request and tell the guest OS its assigned IP address and the gateway address for routing outbound connections. In this mode, every vm is assigned the same IP address (10.0.2.15) because each vm thinks they are on their own isolated network. And when they send their traffic via the gateway (10.0.2.2) VirtualBox rewrites the packets to make them appear as though they originated from the Host, rather than the Guest (running inside the Host). This means that the Guest will work even as the Host moves from network to network (e.g. laptop moving between locations), and from wireless to wired connections too. However, how does another computer initiate a connection into a Guest?  e.g. connecting to a web server running in the Guest. This is not (normally) possible using NAT mode as there is no route into the Guest OS. So for vm's running servers we need a different networking mode.... Bridged Networking Bridged Networking is used when you want your vm to be a full network citizen, i.e. to be an equal to your host machine on the network. In this mode, a virtual NIC is "bridged" to a physical NIC on your host, like this: The effect of this is that each VM has access to the physical network in the same way as your host. It can access any service on the network such as external DHCP services, name lookup services, and routing information just as the host does. Logically, the network looks like this: The downside of this mode is that if you run many vm's you can quickly run out of IP addresses or your network administrator gets fed up with you asking for statically assigned IP addresses. Secondly, if your host has multiple physical NICs (e.g. Wireless and Wired) you must reconfigure the bridge when your host jumps networks.  Hmm, so what if you want to run servers in vm's but don't want to involve your network administrator? Maybe one of the next 2 modes is for you... Internal Networking When you configure one or more vm's to sit on an Internal network, VirtualBox ensures that all traffic on that network stays within the host and is only visible to vm's on that virtual network. Configuration looks like this: The internal network ( in this example "intnet" ) is a totally isolated network and so is very "quiet". This is good for testing when you need a separate, clean network, and you can create sophisticated internal networks with vm's that provide their own services to the internal network. (e.g. Active Directory, DHCP, etc). Note that not even the Host is a member of the internal network, but this mode allows vm's to function even when the Host is not connected to a network (e.g. on a plane). Note that in this mode, VirtualBox provides no "convenience" services such as DHCP, so your machines must be statically configured or one of the vm's needs to provide a DHCP/Name service. Multiple internal networks are possible and you can configure vm's to have multiple NICs to sit across internal and other network modes and thereby provide routes if needed. But all this sounds tricky. What if you want an Internal Network that the host participates on with VirtualBox providing IP addresses to the Guests? Ah, then for this, you might want to consider Host-only Networking... Host-only Networking Host-only Networking is like Internal Networking in that you indicate which network the Guest sits on, in this case, "vboxnet0": All vm's sitting on this "vboxnet0" network will see each other, and additionally, the host can see these vm's too. However, other external machines cannot see Guests on this network, hence the name "Host-only". Logically, the network looks like this: This looks very similar to Internal Networking but the host is now on "vboxnet0" and can provide DHCP services. To configure how a Host-only network behaves, look in the VirtualBox Manager...Preferences...Network dialog: Port-Forwarding with NAT Networking Now you may think that we've provided enough modes here to handle every eventuality but here's just one more... What if you cart around a mobile-demo or dev environment on, say, a laptop and you have one or more vm's that you need other machines to connect into? And you are continually hopping onto different (customer?) networks. In this scenario: NAT - won't work because external machines need to connect in. Bridged - possibly an option, but does your customer want you eating IP addresses and can your software cope with changing networks? Internal - we need the vm(s) to be visible on the network, so this is no good. Host-only - same problem as above, we want external machines to connect in to the vm's. Enter Port-forwarding to save the day! Configure your vm's to use NAT networking; Add Port Forwarding rules; External machines connect to "host":"port number" and connections are forwarded by VirtualBox to the guest:port number specified. For example, if your vm runs a web server on port 80, you could set up rules like this:  ...which reads: "any connections on port 8080 on the Host will be forwarded onto this vm's port 80".  This provides a mobile demo system which won't need re-configuring every time you open your laptop lid. Summary VirtualBox has a very powerful set of options allowing you to set up almost any configuration your heart desires. For more information, check out the VirtualBox User Manual on Virtual Networking. -FB 

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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• MSCC: Purpose and benefits of Version Control Systems (VCS)

  Unfortunately, there was no monthly meetup during May. Which means that it was even more important and interesting to go forward with a great topic for this month. Earlier this year I already spoke to Nayar Joolfoo about doing a presentation on version control systems (VCS), and he gladly agreed since then. It was just about finding the right date for the action. Furthermore, it was also a great coincidence that Avinash Meetoo announced on social media networks that Knowledge 7 is about to have a new training on "Effective git" - which correlates to a book title Avinash is currently working on - all the best with your approach on this and reach out to our MSCC craftsmen for recessions. Once again a big Thank you to Orange Ebene Accelerator on providing the venue for us, and the MSCC members involved on securing the time slot for our event. Unfortunately, it's kind of tough to get an early confirmation for our meetups these days. I'll keep you posted on that one as there are some interesting and exciting options coming up soon. Okay, let's talk about the meeting and version control systems again. As usual, I'm going to put my first impression of the meetup: "Absolutely great topic, questions and discussions on version control systems, like git or VSO. I was also highly pleased by the number of first timers and female IT geeks. Hopefully, we will be able to keep this trend for future get-togethers." And I really have to emphasise the amount of fresh blood coming to our gathering. Also, during the initial phase it was surprising to see that exactly those first-timers, most of them students at various campuses here on the island, had absolutely no idea about version control systems. More about further down... Reactions of other attendees If I counted correctly, we had a total of 17 attendees this month, and I'd like to give you feedback from some of them: "Inspiring. Helped me understand more about GIT." -- Sean on event comments "Joined the meetup today with literally no idea what is a version control system. I have several reasons why I should be starting to use VCS as from NOW in my projects. Thanks Nayar, Jochen and other participants :)" -- Yudish on event comments "Was present today and I'm very satisfied.I was not aware if there was a such tool like git available. Thanks to those who contributed for this meetup.It was great. Learned a lot from this meetup!!" -- Leonardo on event comments "Seriously, I can see how it’s going to ease my task and help me save time. Gone are the issues with files backups.  And since I’ll be doing my dissertation this year, using Git would help me a lot for my backups and I’m grateful to Nayar for the great explanation." -- Swan-Iyah on MSCC meetup : Version Controls Hopefully, I'll be able to get some other sources - personal blogs preferred - on our meeting. Geeks, thank you so much for those encouraging comments. It's really great to experience that we, all members of the MSCC, are doing the right thing to get more IT information out, and to help each other to improve and evolve in our professional careers. Our agenda of the day Honestly, we had a bumpy start... First, I was battling a little bit with the movable room divider in order to maximize the space. I mean, we had 24 RSVPs and usually there might additional people coming along. Then, for what ever reason, we were facing power outages - actually twice in short periods. Not too good for the projector after all, but hey it went smooth for the rest of the time being. And last but not least... our first speaker Nayar got stuck somewhere on the road. ;-) Anyway, not a real show-stopper and we used the time until Nayar's arrival to introduce ourselves a little bit. It is always important for me to get to know the "newbies" a little bit, and as a result we had lots of students of university - first year, second year and recent graduates - among them. Surprisingly, none of them was ever in contact with version control systems at all. I mean, this is a shocking discovery! Similar to the ability of touch-typing I'd say that being able to use (and master) any kind of version control system is compulsory in any job in the IT industry. Seriously, I'm wondering what is being taught during the classes on the campus. All of them have to work on semester assessments or final projects, even in small teams of 2-4 people. That's the perfect occasion to get started with VCS. Already in this phase, we had great input from more experienced VCS users, like Sean, Avinash and myself. git - a modern approach to VCS - Nayar What a tour! Nayar gave us the full round of git from start to finish, even touching some more advanced techniques. First, he started to explain about the importance of version control systems as an essential tool for software developers, even working alone on a project, and the ability to have a kind of "time machine" that allows you to inspect and revert to a previous version of source code at any time. Then he showed how easy it is to install git on an Ubuntu based system but also mentioned that git is literally available for any operating system, like Windows, Mac OS X and of course other Linux distributions. Next, he showed us how to set the initial configuration values of user name and email address which simplifies the daily usage of the git client while working with your repositories. Then he initialised and added a new repository for some local development of a blogging software. All commands were done using the command line interface (CLI) so that they can be repeated on any system as reference. The syntax and the procedure is always the same, and Nayar clearly mentioned this to the attendees. Now, having a git repository in place it was about time to work on some "important" changes on the blogging software - just for the sake of demonstrating the ease of use and power of git. One interesting question came very early: "How many commands do we have to learn? It looks quite difficult at the moment" - Well, rest assured that during daily development circles you will need less than 10 git commands on a regular base: git add, commit, push, pull, checkout, and merge And Nayar demo'd all of them. Much to the delight of everyone he also showed gitk which is the git repository browser. It's an UI tool to display changes in a repository or a selected set of commits. This includes visualizing the commit graph, showing information related to each commit, and the files in the trees of each revision. Using gitk to display and browse information of a local git repository And last but not least, we took advantage of the internet connectivity and reached out to various online portals offering git hosting for free. Nayar showed us how to push the local repository into a remote system on github. Showing the web-based git browser and history handling, and then also explained and demo'd on how to connect to existing online repositories in order to get access to either your own source code or other people's open source projects. Next to github, we also spoke about bitbucket and gitlab as potential online platforms for your projects. Have a look at the conditions and details about their free service packages and what you can get additionally as a paying customer. Usually, you already get a lot of services for up to five users for free but there might be other important aspects that might have an impact on your decision. Anyways, moving git-based repositories between systems is a piece of cake, and changing online platforms is possible at any stage of your development. Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Jochen Well, Nayar literally covered all elements of working with git during his session, including the use of external online platforms. So, what would be the advantage of talking about Visual Studio Online (VSO)? First of all, VSO is "just another" online platform for hosting and managing git repositories on remote systems, equivalent to github, bitbucket, or any other web site. At the moment (of writing), Microsoft also provides a free package of up to five users / developers on a git repository but there is more in that package. Of course, it is related to software development on the Windows systems and the bonds are tightened towards the use of Visual Studio but out of experience you are absolutely not restricted to that. Connecting a Linux or Mac OS X machine with a git client or an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Xcode works as smooth as expected. So, why should one opt in for VSO? Well, one of the main aspects that I would like to mention here is that VSO integrates the Application Life Cycle Methodology (ALM) of Microsoft in their platform. Meaning that you get agile project management with Backlogs, Sprints, Burn-down charts as well as the ability to track tasks, bug reports and work items next to collaborative team chats. It's the whole package of agile development you'll get. And, something I mentioned briefly during the begin of our meeting, VSO gives you the possibility of an automated continuous integrated (CI) process which builds and can run tests of your source code after each commit of changes. Having a proper CI strategy is also part of the Clean Code Developer practices - on Level Green actually -, and not only simplifies your life as a software developer but also reduces the sources of potential errors. Seamless integration and automated deployment between Microsoft Azure Web Sites and git repository But my favourite feature is the seamless continuous deployment to Microsoft Azure. Especially, while working on web projects it's absolutely astounishing that as soon as you commit your chances it just takes a couple of seconds until your modifications are deployed and available on your Azure-hosted web sites. Upcoming Events and networking Due to the adjusted times, everybody was kind of hungry and we didn't follow up on networking or upcoming events - very unfortunate to my opinion and this will have an impact on future planning of our meetups. Because I rather would like to see more conversations during and at the end of our meetings than everyone just packing their laptops, bags and accessories and rush off to grab some food. I was hoping to get some information regarding this year's Code Challenge - supposedly to be organised during July? Maybe someone could leave a comment on that - but I couldn't get any updates. Well, I'll keep digging... In case that you would like to get more into git and how to use it effectively, please check out Knowledge 7's upcoming course on "Effective git". Thanks Avinash for your vital input into today's conversation and I'm looking forward to get a grip on your book title very soon. My resume of the day Do not work in IT without any kind of version control system! Seriously, without a VCS in place you're doing it wrong. It's like driving a car without seat belts attached or riding your bike without safety helmet. You don't do that! End of discussion. ;-) Nowadays, having access to free (as in cost) tools to install on your machine and numerous online platforms to host your source code for free for up to five users it's a no-brainer to get yourself familiar with VCS. Today's sessions gave a good overview on how to start using git and how to connect to various remote services like github or VSO.

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• 10 Reasons Why Java is the Top Embedded Platform

  - by Roger Brinkley

  With the release of Oracle ME Embedded 3.2 and Oracle Java Embedded Suite, Java is now ready to fully move into the embedded developer space, what many have called the "Internet of Things". Here are 10 reasons why Java is the top embedded platform. 1. Decouples software development from hardware development cycle Development is typically split between both hardware and software in a traditional design flow . This leads to complicated co-design and requires prototype hardware to be built. This parallel and interdependent hardware / software design process typically leads to two or more re-development phases. With Embedded Java, all specific work is carried out in software, with the (processor) hardware implementation fully decoupled. This with eliminate or at least reduces the need for re-spins of software or hardware and the original development efforts can be carried forward directly into product development and validation. 2. Development and testing can be done (mostly) using standard desktop systems through emulation Because the software and hardware are decoupled it now becomes easier to test the software long before it reaches the hardware through hardware emulation. Emulation is the ability of a program in an electronic device to imitate another program or device. In the past Java tools like the Java ME SDK and the SunSPOTs Solarium provided developers with emulation for a complete set of mobile telelphones and SunSpots. This often included network interaction or in the case of SunSPOTs radio communication. What emulation does is speed up the development cycle by refining the software development process without the need of hardware. The software is fixed, redefined, and refactored without the timely expense of hardware testing. With tools like the Java ME 3.2 SDK, Embedded Java applications can be be quickly developed on Windows based platforms. In the end of course developers should do a full set of testing on the hardware as incompatibilities between emulators and hardware will exist, but the amount of time to do this should be significantly reduced. 3. Highly productive language, APIs, runtime, and tools mean quick time to market Charles Nutter probably said it best in twitter blog when he tweeted, "Every time I see a piece of C code I need to port, my heart dies a little. Then I port it to 1/4 as much Java, and feel better." The Java environment is a very complex combination of a Java Virtual Machine, the Java Language, and it's robust APIs. Combine that with the Java ME SDK for small devices or just Netbeans for the larger devices and you have a development environment where development time is reduced significantly meaning the product can be shipped sooner. Of course this is assuming that the engineers don't get slap happy adding new features given the extra time they'll have.  4. Create high-performance, portable, secure, robust, cross-platform applications easily The latest JIT compilers for the Oracle JVM approach the speed of C/C++ code, and in some memory allocation intensive circumstances, exceed it. And specifically for the embedded devices both ME Embedded and SE Embedded have been optimized for the smaller footprints.  In portability Java uses Bytecode to make the language platform independent. This creates a write once run anywhere environment that allows you to develop on one platform and execute on others and avoids a platform vendor lock in. For security, Java achieves protection by confining a Java program to a Java execution environment and not allowing it to access other parts of computer.  In variety of systems the program must execute reliably to be robust. Finally, Oracle Java ME Embedded is a cross-industry and cross-platform product optimized in release version 3.2 for chipsets based on the ARM architectures. Similarly Oracle Java SE Embedded works on a variety of ARM V5, V6, and V7, X86 and Power Architecture Linux. 5. Java isolates your apps from language and platform variations (e.g. C/C++, kernel, libc differences) This has been a key factor in Java from day one. Developers write to Java and don't have to worry about underlying differences in the platform variations. Those platform variations are being managed by the JVM. Gone are the C/C++ problems like memory corruptions, stack overflows, and other such bugs which are extremely difficult to isolate. Of course this doesn't imply that you won't be able to get away from native code completely. There could be some situations where you have to write native code in either assembler or C/C++. But those instances should be limited. 6. Most popular embedded processors supported allowing design flexibility Java SE Embedded is now available on ARM V5, V6, and V7 along with Linux on X86 and Power Architecture platforms. Java ME Embedded is available on system based on ARM architecture SOCs with low memory footprints and a device emulation environment for x86/Windows desktop computers, integrated with the Java ME SDK 3.2. A standard binary of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 for ARM KEIL development boards based on ARM Cortex M-3/4 (KEIL MCBSTM32F200 using ST Micro SOC STM32F207IG) will soon be available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). 7. Support for key embedded features (low footprint, power mgmt., low latency, etc) All embedded devices by there very nature are constrained in some way. Economics may dictate a device with a less RAM and ROM. The CPU needs can dictate a less powerful device. Power consumption is another major resource in some embedded devices as connecting to consistent power source not always desirable or possible. For others they have to constantly on. Often many of these systems are headless (in the embedded space it's almost always Halloween).  For memory resources ,Java ME Embedded can run in environment as low as 130KB RAM/350KB ROM for a minimal, customized configuration up to 700KB RAM/1500KB ROM for the full, standard configuration. Java SE Embedded is designed for environments starting at 32MB RAM/39MB  ROM. Key functionality of embedded devices such as auto-start and recovery, flexible networking are fully supported. And while Java SE Embedded has been optimized for mid-range to high-end embedded systems, Java ME Embedded is a Java runtime stack optimized for small embedded systems. It provides a robust and flexible application platform with dedicated embedded functionality for always-on, headless (no graphics/UI), and connected devices. 8. Leverage huge Java developer ecosystem (expertise, existing code) There are over 9 million developers in world that work on Java, and while not all of them work on embedded systems, their wealth of expertise in developing applications is immense. In short, getting a java developer to work on a embedded system is pretty easy, you probably have a java developer living in your subdivsion.  Then of course there is the wealth of existing code. The Java Embedded Community on Java.net is central gathering place for embedded Java developers. Conferences like Embedded Java @ JavaOne and the a variety of hardware vendor conferences like Freescale Technlogy Forums offer an excellent opportunity for those interested in embedded systems. 9. Easily create end-to-end solutions integrated with Java back-end services In the "Internet of Things" things aren't on an island doing an single task. For instance and embedded drink dispenser doesn't just dispense a beverage, but could collect money from a credit card and also send information about current sales. Similarly, an embedded house power monitoring system doesn't just manage the power usage in a house, but can also send that data back to the power company. In both cases it isn't about the individual thing, but monitoring a collection of  things. How much power did your block, subdivsion, area of town, town, county, state, nation, world use? How many Dr Peppers were purchased from thing1, thing2, thingN? The point is that all this information can be collected and transferred securely  (and believe me that is key issue that Java fully supports) to back end services for further analysis. And what better back in service exists than a Java back in service. It's interesting to note that on larger embedded platforms that support the Java Embedded Suite some of the analysis might be done on the embedded device itself as JES has a glassfish server and Java Database as part of the installation. The result is an end to end Java solution. 10. Solutions from constrained devices to server-class systems Just take a look at some of the embedded Java systems that have already been developed and you'll see a vast range of solutions. Livescribe pen, Kindle, each and every Blu-Ray player, Cisco's Advanced VOIP phone, KronosInTouch smart time clock, EnergyICT smart metering, EDF's automated meter management, Ricoh Printers, and Stanford's automated car  are just a few of the list of embedded Java implementation that continues to grow. Conclusion Now if your a Java Developer you probably look at some of the 10 reasons and say "duh", but for the embedded developers this is should be an eye opening list. And with the release of ME Embedded 3.2 and the Java Embedded Suite the embedded developers life is now a whole lot easier. For the Java developer your employment opportunities are about to increase. For both it's a great time to start developing Java for the "Internet of Things".

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 07, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 07, 2010New ProjectsBibleBrowser: BibleBrowserBibleMaps: BibleMapsChristianLibrary: ChristianLibraryCLB Podcast Module: DotNetNuke Module used to allow DNN to host one or more podcasts within a portal.Coletivo InVitro: Nova versão do Site do ColetivoCustomer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.EasyTFS: A very lightweight, quick, web-based search application for Team Foundation Server. EasyTfs searches as you type, providing real-time search resul...FSCommunity: abcGeocache Downloader: GeocacheDownloader helps you download geocache information in an organised way, making easier to copy the information to your device. The applicati...Grabouille: Grabouille aims to be an incubation project for Microsoft best patterns & practices and also a container for last .Net technologies. The goal is, i...Klaverjas: Test application for testing different new technologies in .NET (WCF, DataServices, C# stuff, Entity...etc.)Livecity: Social network. Alpha 0.1MarxSupples: testMOSS 2007 - Excel Services: This helps you understand MOSS 2007 - Excel Services and how to use the same in .NETmy site: a personal web siteNazTek.Extension.Clr35: Contains a set of CLR 3.5 extensions and utility APInetDumbster: netDumbster is a .Net Fake SMTP Server clone of the popular Dumbster (http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/) netDumbster is based on the API of nDumbs...Object-Oriented Optimization Toolbox (OOOT): A library (.dll) of various linear, nonlinear, and stochastic numerical optimization techniques. While some of these are older than 50 years, they ...OMap - Object to Object Mapper: OMap is a simple object to object mapper. It could be used for scenarios like mapping your data from domain objects into data transfer objects.PDF Renderer for BlackBerry.: Render and view PDF files on BlackBerry using a modified version of Sun's PDF Renderer.Pomodoro Tool: Pomodoro Tool is a timer for http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ . It's a timer and task tracker with a text task editing interface.ReadingPlan: ReadingPlanRil#: .net library to use the public Readitlater.com public APISCSM Incident SLA Management: This project provides an extension to System Center Service Manager to provide more granular control over incident service level agreement (SLA) ma...SEAH - Sistema Especialista de Agravante de Hipertensão: O SEAH tem como propósito alertar o indivíduo em relação ao seu agravante de hipertensão arterial e a órgãos competentes, entidades de ensino, pesq...StudyGuide: StudyGuideTest Project (ignore): This is used to demonstrate CodePlex at meetings. Please ignore this project.YCC: YCC is an open source c compiler which compatible with ANSI standard.The project is currently an origin start.We will work it for finally useable a...New ReleasesAlbum photo de club - Club's Photos Album: App - version 0.5: Modifications : - Ajout des favoris - Ajout de l'update automatique /*/ - Add favorites - Add automatic updateBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher 1.0.1.5: Boxee Launcher finds the BOXEE executable using a registry key that BOXEE creates. The new version of BOXEE changed the location. Boxee Launcher ha...CBM-Command: 2010-05-06: Release Notes - 2010-05-06New Features Creating Directories Deleting Files and Directories Renaming Files and Directories Changes 40 columns i...Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Customer Care Accelerator for Dynamics CRM R1: The Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM focuses on delivering contact center enabling functionality, such as the ability to ...D-AMPS: D-AMPS 0.9.2: Add .bat files for command-line running Bug fixed (core engine) Section 6, 8, 9 modifications Sources (Fortran) for core engineDynamicJson: Release 1.1.0.0: Add - foreach support Add - Dynamic Shortcut of IsDefined,Delete,Deserialize Fix - Deserialize Delete - LengthEasyTFS: EasyTfs 1.0 Beta 1: A very lightweight, quick, web-based search application for Team Foundation Server. EasyTfs searches as you type, providing real-time search resul...Event Scavenger: Add installer for Admin tool: Added installer for Admin tool. Removed exe's for admin and viewer from zip file - were replaced by the msi installers.Expression Blend Samples: PathListBoxUtils for Expression Blend 4 RC: Initial release of the PathListBoxUtils samples.HackingSilverlight Code Browser: HackingSilverlight Code Browser: Out with the old and in with the new... the HackingSilverlight Code Browser is a reference tool for code snippets so that I can not have to remembe...Hammock for REST: Hammock v1.0.3: v1.0.3 ChangesFixes for OAuth escaping and API usage Added FollowRedirects feature to RestClient/RestRequest v1.0.2 Changes.NET 4.0 and Client P...ImmlPad: ImmlPad Beta 1.1.1: Changes in this release: Added more intelligent right-click menu's to allow opening an IMML document with a specific Player version Fixed issue w...LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.8: Improved error message dumping + moved OAuth parameters from www.* to api.* In case of unexpected errors, check "Application Data\LinkedIn for Wind...Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Installer: Alpha release of Live-Exchange Calendar SyncMAPILab Explorer for SharePoint: MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint ver 2.1.0: 1) Get settings form old versions 2) Rules added to display enumerable object items. 3) Bug fixed with remove persisted object How to install:Do...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi May 6, 2010: This release enables output .prj files to also show the ESRI names for the PRJCS, GEOCS, and the DATUM. It also fixes a bug that was preventing th...MOSS 2007 - Excel Services: Calculator using Excel Services: Simple calculator using Excel ServicesMvcMaps - Unified Bing/Google Mapping API for ASP.NET MVC: MvcMaps Preview 1 for ASP.NET 4.0 and VS'2010: There was a change in ASP.NET 4.0 that broke the release, so a small modification needed to be made to the reflection code. This release fixes that...NazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Binary Cab: Binary cab fileNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Source Cab: Source codePDF Renderer for BlackBerry.: PDF Renderer 0.1 for BlackBerry: This library requires a BlackBerry Signing Key in order to compile for use on a BlackBerry device. Signing keys can be obtained at BlackBerry Code ...Pomodoro Tool: PomodoroTool Clickonce installer: PomodoroTool Clickonce installerPOS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object: POS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object 1002: New version (1.0.0.2) which should support 64 bit platforms (see ReadMe.txt included with source for details). Source code only.QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.4: What's New in QuestTracker 0.4 - - You can now drag and drop the quests on the left pane to rearrange or move quests from one group to another. - D...RDA Collaboration Team Projects: Property Bag Cmdlet: This cmdlet allows to retrieve, insert and update property bag values at farm, web app, site and web scope. The same operations can be in code usi...Ril#: Rilsharp 1.0: The first version of the Ril# (Readitlater sharp) library.Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.47911 (.NET 4-TFS 2010): What is new in this release? Migrated to .NET Framework 4 RTM; Compiled against TFS 2010 RTM Client DLLs; Smoother animations with easing funct...SCSM Incident SLA Management: SCSM Incident SLA Management Version 0.1: This is the first release of the SCSM SLA Management solution. It is an 'alpha' release and has only been tested by the developers on the project....StackOverflow Desktop Client in C# and WPF: StackOverflow Client 0.4: Shows a popup that displays all the new questions and allows you to navigate between them. Fixed a bug that showed incorrect views and answers in t...Transcriber: Transcriber V0.1: Pre-release, usable but very rough.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30506.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio CSLA Extension for ADO.NET Entity Framework: CslaExtension Beta1: Requirements Visual Studio 2010 CSLA 4.0. Beta 1 Installation Download VSIX file and double click to install. Open Visual Studio -> Tools -> Exte...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryAJAX Control FrameworkIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterRawrpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightBlogEngine.NETTweetSharpNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleTinyProject

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• techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

  - by Adam M.

  I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Metro: Introduction to the WinJS ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to provide a quick introduction to the ListView control – just the bare minimum that you need to know to start using the control. When building Metro style applications using JavaScript, the ListView control is the primary control that you use for displaying lists of items. For example, if you are building a product catalog app, then you can use the ListView control to display the list of products. The ListView control supports several advanced features that I plan to discuss in future blog entries. For example, you can group the items in a ListView, you can create master/details views with a ListView, and you can efficiently work with large sets of items with a ListView. In this blog entry, we’ll keep things simple and focus on displaying a list of products. There are three things that you need to do in order to display a list of items with a ListView: Create a data source Create an Item Template Declare the ListView Creating the ListView Data Source The first step is to create (or retrieve) the data that you want to display with the ListView. In most scenarios, you will want to bind a ListView to a WinJS.Binding.List object. The nice thing about the WinJS.Binding.List object is that it enables you to take a standard JavaScript array and convert the array into something that can be bound to the ListView. It doesn’t matter where the JavaScript array comes from. It could be a static array that you declare or you could retrieve the array as the result of an Ajax call to a remote server. The following JavaScript file – named products.js – contains a list of products which can be bound to a ListView. (function () { "use strict"; var products = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { name: "Milk", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Oranges", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Wine", price: 8.55 }, { name: "Apples", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Steak", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Eggs", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Mushrooms", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Yogurt", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Soup", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Cereal", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Pepsi", price: 1.99 } ]); WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { products: products }); })(); The products variable represents a WinJS.Binding.List object. This object is initialized with a plain-old JavaScript array which represents an array of products. To avoid polluting the global namespace, the code above uses the module pattern and exposes the products using a namespace. The list of products is exposed to the world as ListViewDemos.products. To learn more about the module pattern and namespaces in WinJS, see my earlier blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/22/metro-namespaces-and-modules.aspx Creating the ListView Item Template The ListView control does not know how to render anything. It doesn’t know how you want each list item to appear. To get the ListView control to render something useful, you must create an Item Template. Here’s what our template for rendering an individual product looks like: <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> This template displays the product name and price from the data source. Normally, you will declare your template in the same file as you declare the ListView control. In our case, both the template and ListView are declared in the default.html file. To learn more about templates, see my earlier blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/27/metro-using-templates.aspx Declaring the ListView The final step is to declare the ListView control in a page. Here’s the markup for declaring a ListView: <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate') }"> </div> You declare a ListView by adding the data-win-control to an HTML DIV tag. The data-win-options attribute is used to set two properties of the ListView. The ListView is associated with its data source with the itemDataSource property. Notice that the data source is ListViewDemos.products.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.products. You need to associate the ListView with the dataSoure property. The ListView is associated with its item template with the help of the itemTemplate property. The ID of the item template — #productTemplate – is used to select the template from the page. Here’s what the complete version of the default.html page looks like: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewDemos</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- ListViewDemos references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script src="/js/products.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .product { width: 200px; height: 100px; border: white solid 1px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate') }"> </div> </body> </html> Notice that the page above includes a reference to the products.js file: <script src=”/js/products.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> The page above also contains a Template control which contains the ListView item template. Finally, the page includes the declaration of the ListView control. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe the minimal set of steps which you must complete to use the WinJS ListView control to display a simple list of items. You learned how to create a data source, declare an item template, and declare a ListView control.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 05, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 05, 2010New Projects2010微软精英大挑战Heritage of Dragon项目: 我们来自上海市同济大学，兴趣相投，集聚于此共同构建一个开放的网络平台。致力于运用构建在云端基于地图的服务，使用文字、图片、视频、互动动画等形式来展示全国各地的传统手工艺。并且充分发挥网络的优势，通过开放协作的维基平台人人都可以参与到内容的添加修改与完善中来。目的在于记录、展示、挖掘、传承中国古...AutoArchive: Auto archive your "my documents" to a remote machine. I'm writing this so my wife can put things in "my documents" and it'll automaticly archive i...BigDoor .NET Client: A .NET client for the BigDoor Media API. The API enables secured virtual transactions with support for any number of currencies, transactions, awar...bubujie: Dreamweaver LibraryGeckoGit: GeckoGit is a combination of TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN, but for Git repositories, and built on the GitSharp library.Global: global, config, mail, http, rest, xml, serialization, helper, path, ioIndustrial Dashboard Connected Grid webpart: This Sharepoint 2007/10 webpart provides a simple way to display grid based reports populated with data that comes from a SQL Server stored procedu...IpControls: "IpControls" contains IPv4 and IPv6 text boxes, both as Windows Forms and WPF version. The IPv6 control automatically detects the older hybrid for...LiteME: LiteME is short for LiteMapleStoryEmulator... it is v75, open-source, and still going through it's alpha stages. It is still in development!Meditel PHP Class: Une classe PHP qui vous permet de d'envoyer des SMS vers tous les numeros Meditel en utilisant leservice des SMS gratuits depuis le site Meditel.maMoneySafe: Help people.Mouse Zoom - Visual Studio Extension: Mouse Zoom is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that will cause the mouse zoom functionality to zoom at the mouse's cursor instead of at the top of th...Multi-Language Words Memorizer: This .net application is designed for learning words and help foreign language learners by lots of automatic features. After you select a list of ...Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms: Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms manages movement and data passing between aspx Pages in a unit testable manner. There is no Client-side logic, so ...NazTek.Extension.Clr4: CLR 4.0 extensions and utility APIOpalis Community Releases: Sample workflows, objects, code and other items related to System Center's Opalis Integration Server, published by the Opalis team.Power Video Player: Power Video Player is a slim feature-rich video/dvd player that meets everyday needs in video playback on PC with a bunch of advanced features on b...SchemeEditor: <WPF> <.NET> <Editor> <Silverlight> <Scheme> <Graphics> <simulink> <schematic>StyleCop+: StyleCop+ is a plug-in that extends original StyleCop features.timemanager2010: Just another work time managerTweetTunes: Updates Twitter with current song playing in iTunes - if your Twitter account is linked to Facebook - it will update that too The twittervb2 down...WCF Discovery Library: WCF Discovery Library is a small collection of utilities that makes it easy to add WCF 4.0 Discovery features into your projects.New ReleasesAjaxControlToolkit additional extenders: ControlToolkitExtended: this build contains web example with BreadCrumbsAnyCAD: AnyCAD Free Beta1: AnyCAD Free Beta1Baccarat: Single player practice baccarat: This is a simple baccarat game for Windows Mobile. It is single player and is only a practice version, which will help users familiarize themselve...BigDoor .NET Client: BigDoor .NET 2.0 Client (Alpha): Our first iteration of the .NET client. Please fork and or ask to be added if you want to make any contributions.CBM-Command: 2010-05-04: Release NotesNew Features Panel navigation now complete. Scroll up and down through directories using the up and down cursor keys. Switch between...Directory Linker: Directory Linker 2.1: This release introduces XP support, more information about all features can be found at http://www.humblecoder.co.uk/?p=141Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.015: added high low quizGoogle AJAX Search Services for jQuery: jquery.gss-0.1.3.js: First official release - use at your own discretion. Thanks, AndrewIndustrial Dashboard Connected Grid webpart: Filtered Industrial Grid: Filtered Industrial Grid web part for SharePoint 2007/2010, First Release.jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services: SPServices 0.5.5: IMPORTANT NOTE: This release is in an alpha state. You should only download it if you know what you are getting and are interested in testing it f...Meditel PHP Class: Meditel PHP Class: Zipped File : Example : exemplemeditel.php PHP Class : meditel.class.phpMulti-Language Words Memorizer: Memorizer 1.0: First release.mwNSPECT: mwNSPECT Plugin DLL: mwNSPECT Mapwindow plugin dll. Place in your MapWindow or BASINS plugins directory. Presently only for testing form functionality (not including...mwNSPECT: mwNSPECT Simple Installer: Simplistic mwNSPECT Mapwindow plugin installer using Inno setup. Installs all the files you'll need for NSPECT into the C:\NSPECT folder and insta...MyWSAT - ASP.NET Membership Administration Tool: MyWSAT v3.5.3: MyWSAT 3.5.3 Update Notes - May 4th 2010 1.) Added the user search box and a-z navigation menu to all relevant user gridviews. 2.) Added a membersh...Object/Relational Mapper & Code Generator in Net 2.0 for Relational & XML Schema: 2.7: Upgraded UI-generation templates for special case of associative tables (2-column primary keys). Minor bugfix with template-editor.Open NFSe: Open NFSe 2.0: Versao para Belo Horizonte utilizando Windows Services.Power Video Player: PVP 1.1.3776: v1.1.3776 This is mainly a rebuild of version 1.1 under Ms-PL license and is the 1st version available at CodePlex.PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT: PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT-3.1: The following error has been corrected: PCG ERROR: srcproj -- 3933 PCG ERROR: srcproj -- 2943 PCG ERROR: devproj -- 1474 PCG ERROR: mainprj -- 128...Rehost Image: 1.3.9: Fixed locations saving for mac and linux platforms.Robot Shootans: Robot Shootans 0.5.1 (Windows): This is the first public release of this game. Instructions on how to play are included in the game itself Known issues: Changing control style wh...SchemeEditor: SchemeEditor Beta: First release. Wait for documentation & update for some new functionSharePoint Rsync List: SharePoint Rsync 0.9.0.0: Initial release of sprsync. Comments, questions, feedback, and code enhancements are welcome!Software Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+01: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+01 UNSUPPORTED, UNTESTED ALPHA RELEASE Code may disappear. This is just a preview of code that was in progress. Code is s...Software Localization Tool: SharpSLT 1.0.1: Minor release: bug fixes slight changes in the UIStyleCop+: StyleCop+ 0.6: Several important improvements made for Advanced Naming Rules: - Added new entities for fields and constants - Added new entities for methods (incl...turing machine simulator: First version of turing machine: Overview: First version of turing simulator with example script (transaction function). Files: SimulatorGui.exe - main GUI of simulator TuringMach...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30504.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVocabulary Training Center: Basic Edition 1.1: A release with medium large changes: New functionality: Multiple-choice questions added Grammatical questions added Evaluation changed accordin...Web Service Software Factory: Web Service Software Factory 2010 RC: To use the Web Service Software Factory 2010, you need the following software installed on your computer: • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Ultima...Web Service Software Factory: WSSF2010 Guide: This is the help and guidance for Web Service Software Factory 2010Windows Phone 7 Panorama control: panorama control v0.6 + samples: IMPORTANT NOTE: Please read the following bug + suggested workaround. I'll fix this in a new release shortly. Panorama Control source code + sampl...WPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library 0.2 Release: Drag & Drop Took away the ItemType and DataTemplate requirements Added functions for inheritors to be able to provide custom logic to handle movi...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionDotNetNuke® Community EditionASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryAJAX Control FrameworkHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceRawrBlogEngine.NETTinyProjectNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleAll-In-One Code Framework

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• tfs 2010 RC Agile Process template update New Task progress report

  Maybe my next post will just be about why I am so excited and impressed with the out of the box templates.  But, for this first blog with my new focus, I thought I would just walk through the process I went through to create a task progress report (to enhance the out of the box Agile template). So, I started with the MSF for Agile Development 5.0 RC template.  After reviewing the template, I came away pretty excited about many of the new reports.  I am especially excited about the reporting services reports.  The big advantage I see here is that these are querying the Warehouse directly instead of the Analysis Services Cube which means that they are much closer to real-time which I find very important for reports like Burndown and task status.  One report that I focused on right away was the User Story Progress Report.  An overview is shown below: This report is very useful, but a lot of our internal managers really prefer to manage at the task level and either dont have stories in TFS or would like to view this type of report for tasks in addition to the User Stories.  So, what did I do? Step 1: Download the Agile Template In VS 2010 RC, open Process Template Manager from Team->Team Project Collection Settings.  Download the MSF for Agile Development template to your local file system.  A project template is a folder of xml files.  There is a ProcessTemplate.xml in the root and then a bunch of directories for things like Work Item Definitions and Queries, Reports, Shared Documents and Source Control Settings.  Step 2: Copy the folder My plan here is to make a new template with all of my modifications.  You can also just enhance update the MSF template.  However, I think it is cleaner when you start making modifications to make your own template.  So, copy the folder and name it with your new template name. Step 3: Change Template Name Open ProcessTemplate.xml and change the <name> of the template. Step 4: Copy the rdl of the Report you want to use a starting point In my case, I copied Stories Progress.rdl and named the file Task Progress Breakdown.rdl.  I reviewed the requirements for the new report with some of the users here and came up with this plan.  Should show tasks and be expandable to show subtasks.  Should add Assigned To and Estimated Finish Date as 2 extra columns. Step 5: Walkthrough the existing report to understand how it works The main thing that I do here is try to get the sql to run in SQL Management Studio.  So, I can walkthrough the process of building up the data for the report. After analyzing this particular report I found a couple of very useful things.  One, this report is already built to display subtasks if I just flip the IncludeTasks flag to 1.  So, if you are using Stories and have tasks assigned to each story.  This might give you everything you want.  For my purposes, I did make that change to the Stories Progress report as I find it to be a more useful report to be able to see the tasks that comprise each story.  But, I still wanted a task only version with the additional fields. Step 6: Update the report definition I tend to work on rdl in visual studio directly as xml.  Especially when I am just altering an existing report, I find it easier than trying to deal with the BI Studio designer.  For my report I made the following changes. Updated Fields Removed Stack Rank and Replaced with Priority since we dont use Stack Rank Added FinishDate and AssignedTo Changed the root deliverable SQL to pull @tasks instead of @deliverablecategory and added a join CurrentWorkItemView for FinishDate and Assigned to SELECT cwi.[System_Id] AS ID FROM [CurrentWorkItemView] cwi             WHERE cwi.[System_WorkItemType] IN (@Task)             AND cwi.[ProjectNodeGUID] = @ProjectGuid SELECT lh.SourceWorkItemID AS ID FROM FactWorkItemLinkHistory lh             INNER JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] cwi ON lh.TargetWorkItemID = cwi.[System_Id]             WHERE lh.WorkItemLinkTypeSK = @ParentWorkItemLinkTypeSK                 AND lh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126)                 AND lh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK                 AND cwi.[System_WorkItemType] NOT IN (@DeliverableCategory) Added AssignedTo and FinishDate columns to the @Rollups table Added two columns to the table used for column headers <Tablix Name="ProgressTable">         <TablixBody>           <TablixColumns>             <TablixColumn>               <Width>2.7625in</Width>             </TablixColumn>             <TablixColumn>               <Width>0.5125in</Width>             </TablixColumn>             <TablixColumn>               <Width>3.4625in</Width>             </TablixColumn>             <TablixColumn>               <Width>0.7625in</Width>             </TablixColumn>             <TablixColumn>               <Width>1.25in</Width>             </TablixColumn>             <TablixColumn>               <Width>1.25in</Width>             </TablixColumn>           </TablixColumns> Added Cells for the two new headers Added Cells to the data table to include the two new values (Assigned to & Finish Date) Changed a bunch of widths that would change the format of the report to display landscape and have room for the two additional columns Set the Value of the IncludeTasks Parameter to 1 <ReportParameter Name="IncludeTasks">       <DataType>Integer</DataType>       <DefaultValue>         <Values>           <Value>=1</Value>         </Values>       </DefaultValue>       <Prompt>IncludeTasks</Prompt>       <Hidden>true</Hidden>     </ReportParameter> Change a few descriptions on how the report should be used This is the resulting report I have attached the final rdl. Step 7: Update ReportTasks.xml Last step before the template is ready for use is to update the reportTasks.xml file in the reports folder.  This file defines the reports that are available in the template.           <report name="Task Progress Breakdown" filename="Reports\Task Progress Breakdown.rdl" folder="Project Management" cacheExpiration="30">             <parameters>               <parameter name="ExplicitProject" value="" />             </parameters>             <datasources>               <reference name="/Tfs2010ReportDS" dsname="TfsReportDS" />             </datasources>           </report> Step 8: Upload the template Open the process Template Manager just like Step 1.  And upload the new template. Thats it.  One other note, if you want to add this report to existing team project you will have to go into reportmanager (the reporting services portal) and upload the rdl to that projects directory.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• C#: My World Clock

  - by Bruce Eitman

  [Placeholder:  I will post the entire project soon] I have been working on cleaning my office of 8 years of stuff from several engineers working on many projects.  It turns out that we have a few extra single board computers with displays, so at the end of the day last Friday I though why not create a little application to display the time, you know, a clock.  How difficult could that be?  It turns out that it is quite simple – until I decided to gold plate the project by adding time displays for our offices around the world. I decided to use C#, which actually made creating the main clock quite easy.   The application was simply a text box and a timer.  I set the timer to fire a couple of times a second, and when it does use a DateTime object to get the current time and retrieve a string to display. And I could have been done, but of course that gold plating came up.   Seems simple enough, simply offset the time from the local time to the location that I want the time for and display it.    Sure enough, I had the time displayed for UK, Italy, Kansas City, Japan and China in no time at all. But it is October, and for those of us still stuck with Daylight Savings Time, we know that the clocks are about to change.   My first attempt was to simply check to see if the local time was DST or Standard time, then change the offset for China.  China doesn’t have Daylight Savings Time. If you know anything about the time changes around the world, you already know that my plan is flawed – in a big way.   It turns out that the transitions in and out of DST take place at different times around the world.   If you didn’t know that, do a quick search for “Daylight Savings” and you will find many WEB sites dedicated to tracking the time changes dates, and times. Now the real challenge of this application; how do I programmatically find out when the time changes occur and handle them correctly?  After a considerable amount of research it turns out that the solution is to read the data from the registry and parse it to figure out when the time changes occur. Reading Time Change Information from the Registry Reading the data from the registry is simple, using the data is a little more complicated.  First, reading from the registry can be done like:             byte[] binarydata = (byte[])Registry.GetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Time Zones\\Eastern Standard Time", "TZI", null);   Where I have hardcoded the registry key for example purposes, but in the end I will use some variables.   We now have a binary blob with the data, but it needs to be converted to use the real data.   To start we will need a couple of structs to hold the data and make it usable.   We will need a SYSTEMTIME and REG_TZI_FORMAT.   You may have expected that we would need a TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION struct, but we don’t.   The data is stored in the registry as a REG_TZI_FORMAT, which excludes some of the values found in TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION.     struct SYSTEMTIME     {         internal short wYear;         internal short wMonth;         internal short wDayOfWeek;         internal short wDay;         internal short wHour;         internal short wMinute;         internal short wSecond;         internal short wMilliseconds;     }       struct REG_TZI_FORMAT     {         internal long Bias;         internal long StdBias;         internal long DSTBias;         internal SYSTEMTIME StandardStart;         internal SYSTEMTIME DSTStart;     }   Now we need to convert the binary blob to a REG_TZI_FORMAT.   To do that I created the following helper functions:         private void BinaryToSystemTime(ref SYSTEMTIME ST, byte[] binary, int offset)         {             ST.wYear = (short)(binary[offset + 0] + (binary[offset + 1] << 8));             ST.wMonth = (short)(binary[offset + 2] + (binary[offset + 3] << 8));             ST.wDayOfWeek = (short)(binary[offset + 4] + (binary[offset + 5] << 8));             ST.wDay = (short)(binary[offset + 6] + (binary[offset + 7] << 8));             ST.wHour = (short)(binary[offset + 8] + (binary[offset + 9] << 8));             ST.wMinute = (short)(binary[offset + 10] + (binary[offset + 11] << 8));             ST.wSecond = (short)(binary[offset + 12] + (binary[offset + 13] << 8));             ST.wMilliseconds = (short)(binary[offset + 14] + (binary[offset + 15] << 8));         }             private REG_TZI_FORMAT ConvertFromBinary(byte[] binarydata)         {             REG_TZI_FORMAT RTZ = new REG_TZI_FORMAT();               RTZ.Bias = binarydata[0] + (binarydata[1] << 8) + (binarydata[2] << 16) + (binarydata[3] << 24);             RTZ.StdBias = binarydata[4] + (binarydata[5] << 8) + (binarydata[6] << 16) + (binarydata[7] << 24);             RTZ.DSTBias = binarydata[8] + (binarydata[9] << 8) + (binarydata[10] << 16) + (binarydata[11] << 24);             BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.StandardStart, binarydata, 4 + 4 + 4);             BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.DSTStart, binarydata, 4 + 16 + 4 + 4);               return RTZ;         }   I am the first to admit that there may be a better way to get the settings from the registry and into the REG_TXI_FORMAT, but I am not a great C# programmer which I have said before on this blog.   So sometimes I chose brute force over elegant. Now that we have the Bias information and the start date information, we can start to make sense of it.   The bias is an offset, in minutes, from local time (if already in local time for the time zone in question) to get to UTC – or as Microsoft defines it: UTC = local time + bias.  Standard bias is an offset to adjust for standard time, which I think is usually zero.   And DST bias is and offset to adjust for daylight savings time. Since we don’t have the local time for a time zone other than the one that the computer is set to, what we first need to do is convert local time to UTC, which is simple enough using:                 DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime(); Then, since we have UTC we need to do a little math to alter the formula to: local time = UTC – bias.  In other words, we need to subtract the bias minutes. I am ahead of myself though, the standard and DST start dates really aren’t dates.   Instead they indicate the month, day of week and week number of the time change.   The dDay member of SYSTEM time will be set to the week number of the date change indicating that the change happens on the first, second… day of week of the month.  So we need to convert them to dates so that we can determine which bias to use, and when to change to a different bias.   To do that, I wrote the following function:         private DateTime SystemTimeToDateTimeStart(SYSTEMTIME Time, int Year)         {             DayOfWeek[] Days = { DayOfWeek.Sunday, DayOfWeek.Monday, DayOfWeek.Tuesday, DayOfWeek.Wednesday, DayOfWeek.Thursday, DayOfWeek.Friday, DayOfWeek.Saturday };             DateTime InfoTime = new DateTime(Year, Time.wMonth, Time.wDay == 1 ? 1 : ((Time.wDay - 1) * 7) + 1, Time.wHour, Time.wMinute, Time.wSecond, DateTimeKind.Utc);             DateTime BestGuess = InfoTime;             while (BestGuess.DayOfWeek != Days[Time.wDayOfWeek])             {                 BestGuess = BestGuess.AddDays(1);             }             return BestGuess;         }   SystemTimeToDateTimeStart gets two parameters; a SYSTEMTIME and a year.   The reason is that we will try this year and next year because we are interested in start dates that are in the future, not the past.  The function starts by getting a new Datetime with the first possible date and then looking for the correct date. Using the start dates, we can then determine the correct bias to use, and the next date that time will change:             NextTimeChange = StandardChange;             CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias + TimezoneSettings.DSTBias;             if (DSTChange.Year != 1 && StandardChange.Year != 1)             {                 if (DSTChange.CompareTo(StandardChange) < 0)                 {                     NextTimeChange = DSTChange;                     CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.StdBias + TimezoneSettings.Bias;                 }             }             else             {                 // I don't like this, but it turns out that China Standard Time                 // has a DSTBias of -60 on every Windows system that I tested.                 // So, if no DST transitions, then just use the Bias without                 // any offset                 CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias;             }   Note that some time zones do not change time, in which case the years will remain set to 1.   Further, I found that the registry settings are actually wrong in that the DST Bias is set to -60 for China even though there is not DST in China, so I ignore the standard and DST bias for those time zones. There is one thing that I have not solved, and don’t plan to solve.  If the time zone for this computer changes, this application will not update the clock using the new time zone.  I tell  you this because you may need to deal with it – I do not because I won’t let the user get to the control panel applet to change the timezone. Copyright © 2012 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

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• Windows 8.1 Will Start Encrypting Hard Drives By Default: Everything You Need to Know

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Windows 8.1 will automatically encrypt the storage on modern Windows PCs. This will help protect your files in case someone steals your laptop and tries to get at them, but it has important ramifications for data recovery. Previously, “BitLocker” was available on Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows, while “Device Encryption” was available on Windows RT and Windows Phone. Device encryption is included with all editions of Windows 8.1 — and it’s on by default. When Your Hard Drive Will Be Encrypted Windows 8.1 includes “Pervasive Device Encryption.” This works a bit differently from the standard BitLocker feature that has been included in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows for the past few versions. Before Windows 8.1 automatically enables Device Encryption, the following must be true: The Windows device “must support connected standby and meet the Windows Hardware Certification Kit (HCK) requirements for TPM and SecureBoot on ConnectedStandby systems.”  (Source) Older Windows PCs won’t support this feature, while new Windows 8.1 devices you pick up will have this feature enabled by default. When Windows 8.1 installs cleanly and the computer is prepared, device encryption is “initialized” on the system drive and other internal drives. Windows uses a clear key at this point, which is removed later when the recovery key is successfully backed up. The PC’s user must log in with a Microsoft account with administrator privileges or join the PC to a domain. If a Microsoft account is used, a recovery key will be backed up to Microsoft’s servers and encryption will be enabled. If a domain account is used, a recovery key will be backed up to Active Directory Domain Services and encryption will be enabled. If you have an older Windows computer that you’ve upgraded to Windows 8.1, it may not support Device Encryption. If you log in with a local user account, Device Encryption won’t be enabled. If you upgrade your Windows 8 device to Windows 8.1, you’ll need to enable device encryption, as it’s off by default when upgrading. Recovering An Encrypted Hard Drive Device encryption means that a thief can’t just pick up your laptop, insert a Linux live CD or Windows installer disc, and boot the alternate operating system to view your files without knowing your Windows password. It means that no one can just pull the hard drive from your device, connect the hard drive to another computer, and view the files. We’ve previously explained that your Windows password doesn’t actually secure your files. With Windows 8.1, average Windows users will finally be protected with encryption by default. However, there’s a problem — if you forget your password and are unable to log in, you’d also be unable to recover your files. This is likely why encryption is only enabled when a user logs in with a Microsoft account (or connects to a domain). Microsoft holds a recovery key, so you can gain access to your files by going through a recovery process. As long as you’re able to authenticate using your Microsoft account credentials — for example, by receiving an SMS message on the cell phone number connected to your Microsoft account — you’ll be able to recover your encrypted data. With Windows 8.1, it’s more important than ever to configure your Microsoft account’s security settings and recovery methods so you’ll be able to recover your files if you ever get locked out of your Microsoft account. Microsoft does hold the recovery key and would be capable of providing it to law enforcement if it was requested, which is certainly a legitimate concern in the age of PRISM. However, this encryption still provides protection from thieves picking up your hard drive and digging through your personal or business files. If you’re worried about a government or a determined thief who’s capable of gaining access to your Microsoft account, you’ll want to encrypt your hard drive with software that doesn’t upload a copy of your recovery key to the Internet, such as TrueCrypt. How to Disable Device Encryption There should be no real reason to disable device encryption. If nothing else, it’s a useful feature that will hopefully protect sensitive data in the real world where people — and even businesses — don’t enable encryption on their own. As encryption is only enabled on devices with the appropriate hardware and will be enabled by default, Microsoft has hopefully ensured that users won’t see noticeable slow-downs in performance. Encryption adds some overhead, but the overhead can hopefully be handled by dedicated hardware. If you’d like to enable a different encryption solution or just disable encryption entirely, you can control this yourself. To do so, open the PC settings app — swipe in from the right edge of the screen or press Windows Key + C, click the Settings icon, and select Change PC settings. Navigate to PC and devices -> PC info. At the bottom of the PC info pane, you’ll see a Device Encryption section. Select Turn Off if you want to disable device encryption, or select Turn On if you want to enable it — users upgrading from Windows 8 will have to enable it manually in this way. Note that Device Encryption can’t be disabled on Windows RT devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface RT and Surface 2. If you don’t see the Device Encryption section in this window, you’re likely using an older device that doesn’t meet the requirements and thus doesn’t support Device Encryption. For example, our Windows 8.1 virtual machine doesn’t offer Device Encryption configuration options. This is the new normal for Windows PCs, tablets, and devices in general. Where files on typical PCs were once ripe for easy access by thieves, Windows PCs are now encrypted by default and recovery keys are sent to Microsoft’s servers for safe keeping. This last part may be a bit creepy, but it’s easy to imagine average users forgetting their passwords — they’d be very upset if they lost all their files because they had to reset their passwords. It’s also an improvement over Windows PCs being completely unprotected by default.     

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• In Which We Demystify A Few Docupresentment Settings And Learn the Ethos of the Author

  - by Andy Little

  It's no secret that Docupresentment (part of the Oracle Documaker suite) is powerful tool for integrating on-demand and interactive applications for publishing with the Oracle Documaker framework.  It's also no secret there are are many details with respect to the configuration of Docupresentment that can elude even the most erudite of of techies.  To be sure, Docupresentment will work for you right out of the box, and in most cases will suit your needs without toying with a configuration file.  But, where's the adventure in that?   With this inaugural post to That's The Way, I'm going to introduce myself, and what my aim is with this blog.  If you didn't figure it out already by checking out my profile, my name is Andy and I've been with Oracle (nee Skywire Software nee Docucorp nee Formmaker) since the formative years of 1998.  Strangely, it doesn't seem that long ago, but it's certainly a lifetime in the age of technology.  I recall running a BBS from my parent's basement on a 1200 baud modem, and the trepidation and sweaty-palmed excitement of upgrading to the power and speed of 2400 baud!  Fine, I'll admit that perhaps I'm inflating the experience a bit, but I was kid!  This is the stuff of War Games and King's Quest I and the demise of TI-99 4/A.  Exciting times.  So fast-forward a bit and I'm 12 years into a career in the world of document automation and publishing working for the best (IMHO) software company on the planet.  With That's The Way I hope to shed a little light and peek under the covers of some of the more interesting aspects of implementations involving the tech space within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit (IGBU), which includes Oracle Documaker, Rating & Underwriting, and Policy Administration to name a few.  I may delve off course a bit, and you'll likely get a dose of humor (at least in my mind) but I hope you'll glean at least a tidbit of usefulness with each post.  Feel free to comment as I'm a fairly conversant guy and happy to talk -- it's stopping the talking that's the hard part... So, back to our regularly-scheduled post, already in progress.  By this time you've visited Oracle's E-Delivery site and acquired your properly-licensed version of Oracle Documaker.  Wait -- you didn't find it?  Understandable -- navigating the voluminous download library within Oracle can be a daunting task.  It's pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times.  Login to the e-delivery site, and accept the license terms and restrictions.  Then, you’ll be able to select the Oracle Insurance Applications product pack and your appropriate platform. Click Go and you’ll see a list of applicable products, and you’ll click on Oracle Documaker Media Pack (as I went to press with this article the version is 11.4): Finally, click the Download button next to Docupresentment (again, version at press time is 2.2 p5). This should give you a ZIP file that contains the installation packages for the Docupresentment Server and Client, cryptically named IDSServer22P05W32.exe and IDSClient22P05W32.exe. At this time, I’d like to take a little detour and explain that the world of Oracle, like most technical companies, is rife with acronyms.  One of the reasons Skywire Software was a appealing to Oracle was our use of many acronyms, including the occasional use of multiple acronyms with the same meaning.  I apologize in advance and will try to point these out along the way.  Here’s your first sticky note to go along with that: IDS = Internet Document Server = Docupresentment Once you’ve completed the installation, you’ll have a shiny new Docupresentment server and client, and if you installed the default location it will be living in c:\docserv. Unix users, I’m one of you!  You’ll find it by default in  ~/docupresentment/docserv.  Forging onward with the meat of this post is learning about some special configuration options.  By now you’ve read the documentation included with the download (specifically ids_book.pdf) which goes into some detail of the rubric of the configuration file and in fact there’s even a handy utility that provides an interface to the configuration file (see Running IDSConfig in the documentation).  But who wants to deal with a configuration utility when we have the tools and technology to edit the file <gasp> by hand! I shall now proceed with the standard Information Technology Under the Hood Disclaimer: Please remember to back up any files before you make changes.  I am not responsible for any havoc you may wreak! Go to your installation directory, and locate your docserv.xml file.  Open it in your favorite XML editor.  I happen to be fond of Notepad++ with the XML Tools plugin.  Almost immediately you will behold the splendor of the configuration file.  Just take a moment and let that sink in.  Ok – moving on.  If you reviewed the documentation you know that inside the root <configuration> node there are multiple <section> nodes, each containing a specific group of settings.  Let’s take a look at <section name=”DocumentServer”>: There are a few entries I’d like to discuss.  First, <entry name=”StartCommand”>. This should be pretty self-explanatory; it’s the name of the executable that’s run when you fire up Docupresentment.  Immediately following that is <entry name=”StartArguments”> and as you might imagine these are the arguments passed to the executable.  A few things to point out: The –Dids.configuration=docserv.xml parameter specifies the name of your configuration file. The –Dlogging.configuration=logconf.xml parameter specifies the name of your logging configuration file (this uses log4j so bone up on that before you delve here). The -Djava.endorsed.dirs=lib/endorsed parameter specifies the path where 3rd party Java libraries can be located for use with Docupresentment.  More on that in another post. The <entry name=”Instances”> allows you to specify the number of instances of Docupresentment that will be started.  By default this is two, and generally two instances per CPU is adequate, however you will always need to perform load testing to determine the sweet spot based on your hardware and types of transactions.  You may have many, many more instances than 2. Time for a sidebar on instances.  An instance is nothing more than a separate process of Docupresentment.  The Docupresentment service that you fire up with docserver.bat or docserver.sh actually starts a watchdog process, which is then responsible for starting up the actual Docupresentment processes.  Each of these act independently from one another, so if one crashes, it does not affect any others.  In the case of a crashed process, the watchdog will start up another instance so the number of configured instances are always running.  Bottom line: instance = Docupresentment process. And now, finally, to the settings which gave me pause on an not-too-long-ago implementation!  Docupresentment includes a feature that watches configuration files (such as docserv.xml and logconf.xml) and will automatically restart its instances to load the changes.  You can configure the time that Docupresentment waits to check these files using the setting <entry name=”FileWatchTimeMillis”>.  By default the number is 12000ms, or 12 seconds.  You can save yourself a few CPU cycles by extending this time, or by disabling  the check altogether by setting the value to 0.  This may or may not be appropriate for your environment; if you have 100% uptime requirements then you probably don’t want to bring down an entire set of processes just to accept a new configuration value, so it’s best to leave this somewhere between 12 seconds to a few minutes.  Another point to keep in mind: if you are using Documaker real-time processing under Docupresentment the Master Resource Library (MRL) files and INI options are cached, and if you need to affect a change, you’ll have to “restart” Docupresentment.  Touching the docserv.xml file is an easy way to do this (other methods including using the RSS request, but that’s another post). The next item up: <entry name=”FilePurgeTimeSeconds”>.  You may already know that the Docupresentment system can generate many temporary files based on certain request types that are processed through the system.  What you may not know is how those files are cleaned up.  There are many rules in Docupresentment that cause the creation of temporary files.  When these files are created, Docupresentment writes an entry into a properties file called the file cache.  This file contains the name, creation date, and expiration time of each temporary file created by each instance of Docupresentment.  Periodically Docupresentment will check the file cache to determine if there are files that are past the expiration time, not unlike that block of cheese festering away in the back of my refrigerator.  However, unlike my ‘fridge cleaning tendencies, Docupresentment is quick to remove files that are past their expiration time.  You, my friend, have the power to control how often Docupresentment inspects the file cache.  Simply set the value for <entry name=”FilePurgeTimeSeconds”> to the number of seconds appropriate for your requirements and you’re set.  Note that file purging happens on a separate thread from normal request processing, so this shouldn’t interfere with response times unless the CPU happens to be really taxed at the point of cache processing.  Finally, after all of this, we get to the final setting I’m going to address in this post: <entry name=”FilePurgeList”>.  The default is “filecache.properties”.  This establishes the root name for the Docupresentment file cache that I mentioned previously.  Docupresentment creates a separate cache file for each instance based on this setting.  If you have two instances, you’ll see two files created: filecache.properties.1 and filecache.properties.2.  Feel free to open these up and check them out. I hope you’ve enjoyed this first foray into the configuration file of Docupresentment.  If you did enjoy it, feel free to drop a comment, I welcome feedback.  If you have ideas for other posts you’d like to see, please do let me know.  You can reach me at [email protected]. ‘Til next time! ###

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• Commit in SQL

  - by PRajkumar

  SQL Transaction Control Language Commands (TCL)                                           (COMMIT) Commit Transaction As a SQL language we use transaction control language very frequently. Committing a transaction means making permanent the changes performed by the SQL statements within the transaction. A transaction is a sequence of SQL statements that Oracle Database treats as a single unit. This statement also erases all save points in the transaction and releases transaction locks. Oracle Database issues an implicit COMMIT before and after any data definition language (DDL) statement. Oracle recommends that you explicitly end every transaction in your application programs with a COMMIT or ROLLBACK statement, including the last transaction, before disconnecting from Oracle Database. If you do not explicitly commit the transaction and the program terminates abnormally, then the last uncommitted transaction is automatically rolled back.   Until you commit a transaction: ·         You can see any changes you have made during the transaction by querying the modified tables, but other users cannot see the changes. After you commit the transaction, the changes are visible to other users' statements that execute after the commit ·         You can roll back (undo) any changes made during the transaction with the ROLLBACK statement   Note: Most of the people think that when we type commit data or changes of what you have made has been written to data files, but this is wrong when you type commit it means that you are saying that your job has been completed and respective verification will be done by oracle engine that means it checks whether your transaction achieved consistency when it finds ok it sends a commit message to the user from log buffer but not from data buffer, so after writing data in log buffer it insists data buffer to write data in to data files, this is how it works.   Before a transaction that modifies data is committed, the following has occurred: ·         Oracle has generated undo information. The undo information contains the old data values changed by the SQL statements of the transaction ·         Oracle has generated redo log entries in the redo log buffer of the System Global Area (SGA). The redo log record contains the change to the data block and the change to the rollback block. These changes may go to disk before a transaction is committed ·         The changes have been made to the database buffers of the SGA. These changes may go to disk before a transaction is committed   Note:   The data changes for a committed transaction, stored in the database buffers of the SGA, are not necessarily written immediately to the data files by the database writer (DBWn) background process. This writing takes place when it is most efficient for the database to do so. It can happen before the transaction commits or, alternatively, it can happen some times after the transaction commits.   When a transaction is committed, the following occurs: 1.      The internal transaction table for the associated undo table space records that the transaction has committed, and the corresponding unique system change number (SCN) of the transaction is assigned and recorded in the table 2.      The log writer process (LGWR) writes redo log entries in the SGA's redo log buffers to the redo log file. It also writes the transaction's SCN to the redo log file. This atomic event constitutes the commit of the transaction 3.      Oracle releases locks held on rows and tables 4.      Oracle marks the transaction complete   Note:   The default behavior is for LGWR to write redo to the online redo log files synchronously and for transactions to wait for the redo to go to disk before returning a commit to the user. However, for lower transaction commit latency application developers can specify that redo be written asynchronously and that transaction do not need to wait for the redo to be on disk.   The syntax of Commit Statement is   COMMIT [WORK] [COMMENT ‘your comment’]; ·         WORK is optional. The WORK keyword is supported for compliance with standard SQL. The statements COMMIT and COMMIT WORK are equivalent. Examples Committing an Insert INSERT INTO table_name VALUES (val1, val2); COMMIT WORK; ·         COMMENT Comment is also optional. This clause is supported for backward compatibility. Oracle recommends that you used named transactions instead of commit comments. Specify a comment to be associated with the current transaction. The 'text' is a quoted literal of up to 255 bytes that Oracle Database stores in the data dictionary view DBA_2PC_PENDING along with the transaction ID if a distributed transaction becomes in doubt. This comment can help you diagnose the failure of a distributed transaction. Examples The following statement commits the current transaction and associates a comment with it: COMMIT     COMMENT 'In-doubt transaction Code 36, Call (415) 555-2637'; ·         WRITE Clause Use this clause to specify the priority with which the redo information generated by the commit operation is written to the redo log. This clause can improve performance by reducing latency, thus eliminating the wait for an I/O to the redo log. Use this clause to improve response time in environments with stringent response time requirements where the following conditions apply: The volume of update transactions is large, requiring that the redo log be written to disk frequently. The application can tolerate the loss of an asynchronously committed transaction. The latency contributed by waiting for the redo log write to occur contributes significantly to overall response time. You can specify the WAIT | NOWAIT and IMMEDIATE | BATCH clauses in any order. Examples To commit the same insert operation and instruct the database to buffer the change to the redo log, without initiating disk I/O, use the following COMMIT statement: COMMIT WRITE BATCH; Note: If you omit this clause, then the behavior of the commit operation is controlled by the COMMIT_WRITE initialization parameter, if it has been set. The default value of the parameter is the same as the default for this clause. Therefore, if the parameter has not been set and you omit this clause, then commit records are written to disk before control is returned to the user. WAIT | NOWAIT Use these clauses to specify when control returns to the user. The WAIT parameter ensures that the commit will return only after the corresponding redo is persistent in the online redo log. Whether in BATCH or IMMEDIATE mode, when the client receives a successful return from this COMMIT statement, the transaction has been committed to durable media. A crash occurring after a successful write to the log can prevent the success message from returning to the client. In this case the client cannot tell whether or not the transaction committed. The NOWAIT parameter causes the commit to return to the client whether or not the write to the redo log has completed. This behavior can increase transaction throughput. With the WAIT parameter, if the commit message is received, then you can be sure that no data has been lost. Caution: With NOWAIT, a crash occurring after the commit message is received, but before the redo log record(s) are written, can falsely indicate to a transaction that its changes are persistent. If you omit this clause, then the transaction commits with the WAIT behavior. IMMEDIATE | BATCH Use these clauses to specify when the redo is written to the log. The IMMEDIATE parameter causes the log writer process (LGWR) to write the transaction's redo information to the log. This operation option forces a disk I/O, so it can reduce transaction throughput. The BATCH parameter causes the redo to be buffered to the redo log, along with other concurrently executing transactions. When sufficient redo information is collected, a disk write of the redo log is initiated. This behavior is called "group commit", as redo for multiple transactions is written to the log in a single I/O operation. If you omit this clause, then the transaction commits with the IMMEDIATE behavior. ·         FORCE Clause Use this clause to manually commit an in-doubt distributed transaction or a corrupt transaction. ·         In a distributed database system, the FORCE string [, integer] clause lets you manually commit an in-doubt distributed transaction. The transaction is identified by the 'string' containing its local or global transaction ID. To find the IDs of such transactions, query the data dictionary view DBA_2PC_PENDING. You can use integer to specifically assign the transaction a system change number (SCN). If you omit integer, then the transaction is committed using the current SCN. ·         The FORCE CORRUPT_XID 'string' clause lets you manually commit a single corrupt transaction, where string is the ID of the corrupt transaction. Query the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST data dictionary view to find the transaction IDs of corrupt transactions. You must have DBA privileges to view the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST and to specify this clause. ·         Specify FORCE CORRUPT_XID_ALL to manually commit all corrupt transactions. You must have DBA privileges to specify this clause. Examples Forcing an in doubt transaction. Example The following statement manually commits a hypothetical in-doubt distributed transaction. Query the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST data dictionary view to find the transaction IDs of corrupt transactions. You must have DBA privileges to view the V$CORRUPT_XID_LIST and to issue this statement. COMMIT FORCE '22.57.53';

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• Adding RSS to tags in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  A year ago, I wrote a scary post about RSS in Orchard. RSS was one of the first features we implemented in our CMS, and it has stood the test of time rather well, but the post was explaining things at a level that was probably too abstract whereas my readers were expecting something a little more practical. Well, this post is going to correct this by showing how I built a module that adds RSS feeds for each tag on the site. Hopefully it will show that it's not very complicated in practice, and also that the infrastructure is pretty well thought out. In order to provide RSS, we need to do two things: generate the XML for the feed, and inject the address of that feed into the existing tag listing page, in order to make the feed discoverable. Let's start with the discoverability part. One might be tempted to replace the controller or the view that are responsible for the listing of the items under a tag. Fortunately, there is no need to do any of that, and we can be a lot less obtrusive. Instead, we can implement a filter: public class TagRssFilter : FilterProvider, IResultFilter .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } On this filter, we can implement the OnResultExecuting method and simply check whether the current request is targeting the list of items under a tag. If that is the case, we can just register our new feed: public void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext) { var routeValues = filterContext.RouteData.Values; if (routeValues["area"] as string == "Orchard.Tags" && routeValues["controller"] as string == "Home" && routeValues["action"] as string == "Search") { var tag = routeValues["tagName"] as string; if (! string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(tag)) { var workContext = _wca.GetContext(); _feedManager.Register( workContext.CurrentSite + " – " + tag, "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "tag", tag } } ); } } } The registration of the new feed is just specifying the title of the feed, its format (RSS) and the parameters that it will need (the tag). _wca and _feedManager are just instances of IWorkContextAccessor and IFeedManager that Orchard injected for us. That is all that's needed to get the following tag to be added to the head of our page, without touching an existing controller or view: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="VuLu - Science" href="/rss?tag=Science"/> Nifty. Of course, if we navigate to the URL of that feed, we'll get a 404. This is because no implementation of IFeedQueryProvider knows about the tag parameter yet. Let's build one that does: public class TagFeedQuery : IFeedQueryProvider, IFeedQuery IFeedQueryProvider has one method, Match, that we can implement to take over any feed request that has a tag parameter: public FeedQueryMatch Match(FeedContext context) { var tagName = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("tag"); if (tagName == null) return null; return new FeedQueryMatch { FeedQuery = this, Priority = -5 }; } This is just saying that if there is a tag parameter, we will handle it. All that remains to be done is the actual building of the feed now that we have accepted to handle it. This is done by implementing the Execute method of the IFeedQuery interface: public void Execute(FeedContext context) { var tagValue = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("tag"); if (tagValue == null) return; var tagName = (string)tagValue.ConvertTo(typeof (string)); var tag = _tagService.GetTagByName(tagName); if (tag == null) return; var site = _services.WorkContext.CurrentSite; var link = new XElement("link"); context.Response.Element.SetElementValue("title", site.SiteName + " - " + tagName); context.Response.Element.Add(link); context.Response.Element.SetElementValue("description", site.SiteName + " - " + tagName); context.Response.Contextualize(requestContext => link.Add(GetTagUrl(tagName, requestContext))); var items = _tagService.GetTaggedContentItems(tag.Id, 0, 20); foreach (var item in items) { context.Builder.AddItem(context, item.ContentItem); } } This code is resolving the tag content item from its name and then gets content items tagged with it, using the tag services provided by the Orchard.Tags module. Then we add those items to the feed. And that is it. To summarize, we handled the request unobtrusively in order to inject the feed's link, then handled requests for feeds with a tag parameter and generated the list of items for that tag. It remains fairly simple and still it is able to handle arbitrary content types. That makes me quite happy about our little piece of over-engineered code from last year. The full code for this can be found in the Vandelay.TagCloud module: http://orchardproject.net/gallery/List/Modules/ Orchard.Module.Vandelay.TagCloud/1.2

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