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• JavaOne 2012: Nashorn Edition

  - by $utils.escapeXML($entry.author)

  As with my JavaOne 2012: OpenJDK Edition post a while back (now updated to reflect the schedule of the talks), I find it convenient to have my JavaOne schedule ordered by subjects of interest. Beside OpenJDK in all its flavors, another subject I find very exciting is Nashorn. I blogged about the various material on Nashorn in the past, and we interviewed Jim Laskey, the Project Lead on Project Nashorn in the Java Spotlight podcast. So without further ado, here are the JavaOne 2012 talks and BOFs with Nashorn in their title, or abstract:CON5390 - Nashorn: Optimizing JavaScript and Dynamic Language Execution on the JVM - Monday, Oct 1, 8:30 AM - 9:30 AMThere are many implementations of JavaScript, meant to run either on the JVM or standalone as native code. Both approaches have their respective pros and cons. The Oracle Nashorn JavaScript project is based on the former approach. This presentation goes through the performance work that has gone on in Oracle’s Nashorn JavaScript project to date in order to make JavaScript-to-bytecode generation for execution on the JVM feasible. It shows that the new invoke dynamic bytecode gets us part of the way there but may not quite be enough. What other tricks did the Nashorn project use? The presentation also discusses future directions for increased performance for dynamic languages on the JVM, covering proposed enhancements to both the JVM itself and to the bytecode compiler.CON4082 - Nashorn: JavaScript on the JVM - Monday, Oct 1, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PMThe JavaScript programming language has been experiencing a renaissance of late, driven by the interest in HTML5. Nashorn is a JavaScript engine implemented fully in Java on the JVM. It is based on the Da Vinci Machine (JSR 292) and will be available with JDK 8. This session describes the goals of Project Nashorn, gives a top-level view of how it all works, provides the current status, and demonstrates examples of JavaScript and Java working together.BOF4763 - Meet the Nashorn JavaScript Team - Tuesday, Oct 2, 4:30 PM - 5:15 PMCome to this session to meet the Oracle JavaScript (Project Nashorn) language teamBOF6661 - Nashorn, Node, and Java Persistence - Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:30 PM - 6:15 PMWith Project Nashorn, developers will have a full and modern JavaScript engine available on the JVM. In addition, they will have support for running Node applications with Node.jar. This unique combination of capabilities opens the door for best-of-breed applications combining Node with Java SE and Java EE. In this session, you’ll learn about Node.jar and how it can be combined with Java EE components such as EclipseLink JPA for rich Java persistence. You’ll also hear about all of Node.jar’s mapping, caching, querying, performance, and scaling features.CON10657 - The Polyglot Java VM and Java Middleware - Thursday, Oct 4, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PMIn this session, Red Hat and Oracle discuss the impact of polyglot programming from their own unique perspectives, examining non-Java languages that utilize Oracle’s Java HotSpot VM. You’ll hear a discussion of topics relating to Ruby, Lisp, and Clojure and the intersection of other languages where they may touch upon individual frameworks and projects, and you’ll get perspectives on JavaScript via the Nashorn Project, an upcoming JavaScript engine, developed fully in Java.CON5251 - Putting the Metaobject Protocol to Work: Nashorn’s Java Bindings - Thursday, Oct 4, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PMProject Nashorn is Oracle’s new JavaScript runtime in Java 8. Being a JavaScript runtime running on the JVM, it provides integration with the underlying runtime by enabling JavaScript objects to manipulate Java objects, implement Java interfaces, and extend Java classes. Nashorn is invokedynamic-based, and for its Java integration, it does away with the concept of wrapper objects in favor of direct virtual machine linking to Java objects’ methods provided by a metaobject protocol, providing much higher performance than what could be expected from a scripting runtime. This session looks at the details of the integration, a topic of interest to other language implementers on the JVM and a wider audience of developers who want to understand how Nashorn works.That's 6 sessions tooting the Nashorn this year at JavaOne, up from 2 last year.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists

  - by Argenis

    Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company - and your employer trusts you with keeping them safe. Probably one of the most important of these assets are passwords. As you well know, the can be used anywhere: for service accounts, credentials, proxies, linked servers, DTS/SSIS packages, symmetrical keys, private keys, etc., etc. Have you given some thought to what you're doing to keep these passwords safe? Are you backing them up somewhere? Who else besides you can access them? Good-Ol’ Post-It Notes Under Your Keyboard If you have a password-protected Excel sheet for your passwords, I have bad news for you: Excel's level of encryption is good for your grandma's budget spreadsheet, not for a list of enterprise passwords. I will try to summarize the main point of this best practice in one sentence: You should keep your passwords on an encrypted, access and version-controlled, backed-up, well-known shared location that every DBA on your team is aware of, and maintain copies of this password "database" on your DBA's workstations. Now I have to break down that statement to you: - Encrypted: what’s the point of saving your passwords on a file that any Windows admin with enough privileges can read? - Access controlled: This one is pretty much self-explanatory. - Version controlled: Passwords change (and I’m really hoping you do change them) and version control would allow you to track what a previous password was if the utility you’ve chosen doesn’t handle that for you. - Backed-up: You want a safe copy of the password list to be kept offline, preferably in long term storage, with relative ease of restoring. - Well-known shared location: This is critical for teams: what good is a password list if only one person in the team knows where it is? I have seen multiple examples of this that work well. They all start with an encrypted database. Certainly you could leverage SQL Server's native encryption solutions like cell encryption for this. I have found such implementations to be impractical, for the most part. Enter The World Of Utilities There are a myriad of open source/free software solutions to help you here. One of my favorites is KeePass, which creates encrypted files that can be saved to a network share, Sharepoint, etc. KeePass has UIs for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Other solutions I've used before worth mentioning include PasswordSafe and 1Password, with the latter one being a paid solution – but wildly popular in mobile devices. There are, of course, even more "enterprise-level" solutions available from 3rd party vendors. The truth is that most of the customers that I work with don't need that level of protection of their digital assets, and something like a KeePass database on Sharepoint suits them very well. What are you doing to safeguard your passwords? Leave a comment below, and join the discussion! Cheers, -Argenis

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• Spotlight on an office – Utrecht

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This time in our monthly topic, we have our spotlight on the brand new Oracle office in Utrecht, the Netherlands. About 35km south-east of Schiphol Airport and centrally located in the Netherlands, Oracle moved into the Facet building in March 2011. Facet is much more than an office building, it creates a work environment that relates to the ‘No Limits’ philosophy Oracle has in the Netherlands. “No Limits” means the building belongs to everyone. You choose the best place to work, based on the activities of that moment. To point this out, we currently have 1050 people working for Oracle Netherlands, and 623 workplaces. There is virtually no limit to where you can sit in our shiny new offices; we no longer have 'zoning', where departments own specific areas in the building, Even the Managing Director of Oracle Netherlands, does not have an office and he chooses a different working place every day. So make sure you are prepared when he is sitting next to you one day! If nobody has a fixed workplace, then you would think that finding a colleague could be tricky. Oracle uses CU (‘SeeYou’) which makes all of us easier to locate. Upon entering the building you receive a text stating where the greatest concentration of your buddies is sitting. Our internal messaging service also proves to be very valuable finding your colleagues. The heart of our building is the great RestOrant, with a very busy coffee bar. It offers an informal place for people to meet and is busy all day, not just at lunch time! The O-Bar in the atrium on the ground floor is also a very popular place to meet and drink tea or coffee and gives a breathtaking introduction to the office to any of our first time visitors. For a few minutes of relaxation during the working day, there are table tennis facilities and a Wii room on every floor! So if you are interested in joining Oracle in this Netherlands or anywhere else in EMEA, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for all of our latest vacancies and internships.

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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• Drive

  - by erikanollwebb

  Picking up where we left off, let's summarize.  People have both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and whether reward works depends a bit on what you are rewarding.  Rewards don't decreased intrinsic motivation provided you know what you are getting and why, and when you reward high performance.  But as anyone who has watched the great animation of Dan Pink's TED talk knows, even that doesn't tell the whole story.  Although people may not be less intrinsically motivated by rewards, the impact of rewards on actual performance is a really odd questions.  Larger rewards don't necessarily lead to better performance and in fact, some times lead to worse performance.  Pink argues that people are driven and engaged when they have autonomy, mastery and purpose.  If they can self-direct and can be good at what they do and have a sense of purpose for what they are doing, they show the highest engagement.   (Personally, I would add progress to the list.  My experience is that if you have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose but don't get a feeling that you are making any progress day to day, your level of engagement will drop rapidly.) So Pink is arguing if we could set up work so that people have a sense of purpose in what they do, have some autonomy and the ability to build mastery, you'll have better companies.  And that's probably true in a lot of ways, but there's a problem.  Sometimes, you have things you need to do but maybe you don't really want to do.  Or that you don't really see the point of.  Or that doesn't have a lot of value to you at the end of the day.  Then what does a company do?  Let me give you an example.  I've worked on some customer relationship management (CRM) tools over the years and done user research with sales people to try and understand their world.  And there's a funny thing about sales tools in CRM.  Sometimes what the company wants a sales person to do is at odds with what a sales person thinks is useful to them.  For example, companies would like to know who a sales person talked to at the company and the person level.  They'd like to know what they talked about, when, and whether the deals closed.  Those metrics would help you build a better sales force and understand what works and what does not.  But sales people see that as busy work that doesn't add any value to their ability to sell.  So you have a sales person who has a lot of autonomy, they like to do things that improve their ability to sell and they usually feel a sense of purpose--the group is trying to make a quota!  That quota will help the company succeed!  But then you have tasks that they don't think fit into that equation.  The company would like to know more about what makes them successful and get metrics on what they do and frankly, have a record of what they do in case they leave, but the sales person thinks it's a waste of time to put all that information into a sales application. They have drive, just not for all the things the company would like.   You could punish them for not entering the information, or you could try to reward them for doing it, but you still have an imperfect model of engagement.  Ideally, you'd like them to want to do it.  If they want to do it, if they are motivated to do it, then the company wins.  If *something* about it is rewarding to them, then they are more engaged and more likely to do it.  So the question becomes, how do you create that interest to do something?

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• Moving abroad - Relocation advice

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  Oracle offers graduates from different European countries the opportunity to start their career abroad. Some already have experience with living abroad as they have done an exchange semester or internship in another county, for others it is the first time they will move abroad. Rui started in October 2011 as a Business Development Consultant in Dublin and moved from Portugal to Dublin, Ireland to start his career. For those planning to leave their home country and who desire to work abroad, he will share some tips and tricks in this article. When you’re faced with an opportunity like this, there are lots of things that will come to your mind. Sometimes it can be either very exciting, or even stressful. 1. First of all, try to relax. If you are certain you are moving abroad, all you need to do is some research about the country where you’re going to live, get to know its culture (gastronomy, important dates and events, its economy and effective ways to keep you in touch with your family and friends – such as mobile companies and Internet services), and start to understand the best locations (with good access) you could/should live in are. Don’t forget that initially you can be limited by transport and therefore it is important to explore the ideal places for you. During this time, Oracle provides everything you’ll need (papers, documents, etc.) to cross borders. 2. When you arrive, you understand that you are in a new country, in a new place, where all things (or most) are unknown to you. Before you panic, try to see it as a new challenge where new opportunities will come. Sometimes, it’s not easy I know, but the very best a new place has to give to you, is the opportunity to understand a new culture, get to know other people, other ways of working, and grow both as a person and professionally. So, you have nothing to lose in this kind of experiment. 3. When you arrive at Oracle, there’s a fantastic team that will help you with settling in, HR, Payroll, Relocation, IT. In my case, Oracle helped me with the relocation, they supported me to arrange everything such as helping out with all the paperwork and finding a new apartment. As you can see they will do their best to help you to be successful! 4. Engage with your new co-workers. Going to a place where you don’t know anyone can be tough sometimes but see it as an opportunity to meet people from all over the world and share experiences. Embrace it. 5. Plan ahead, try to get the most information possible and use it. Oracle is a multinational enterprise that will allow you to get to know a new labour market and give you the flexibility you need to understand your view of employment and occupation, giving you the very best opportunities to join different teams and working areas, so that you can work where you fit best. Good luck! If you’re thinking about starting a career abroad, read the following article: http://www.overseasdigest.com/movingtips.htm it can be very useful to you. Interested in starting your career at Oracle like Rui has? Please have a look at https://campus.oracle.com for all of our latest vacancies.

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• What Counts for a DBA: Skill

  - by drsql

  “Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skill sets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit.

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• Collaborative Organizations build Organizational Culture

  “A Collaborative organization builds its culture based on the idea of the family or an athletic team.”(Hoefling, 2001) As I grew up, I participated in many different types of clubs, civic organizations, and sports teams.  Now looking back at the more successful undertakings, I can see three commonalities amongst them. They all shared a defined purpose or goal, defined functional roles, and a shared sense of responsibility to the group. Defined Purpose or Goal In order to unit people to work together, they must share a common goal or have a common purpose. An example of this would be the Lions Club International Foundation. There purpose is to help everyone to lead healthier and more productive lives, nurtures the potential of youth, promotes health, serves the elderly, empowers the disabled and helps victims of disasters. This organization holds localized meetings across the world and works in conjunction with other localized clubs within there organization along with other organizations to promote common goals. If there are no common goals for the group, then there is nothing that binds people to the group, and nothing will be done. Defined Functional Roles In order for an organization to work and function as a team, they must have defined roles and everyone must know how their roles are interdependent on each other. Lets shed light on this subject by looking at a football team’s offense.  Each player has an assigned role to play each time the ball is snapped. The offensive line blocks for the running back or quarterback, the quarterback passes the ball to the wide receiver or hands it off to the running back and the running back and wide receivers run with the ball towards the goal line. Each member of this team shares a common goal of scoring a touchdown, but if each team member does not fulfill their assigned roles the offences will collapse and the team will lose yards. This will provide a set back to the teams goal of scoring a touchdown because they potential are then farther away from the goal line.  In addition, if all the players do not know their roles and how they are part of a larger team then even larger yard losses can occur. Shared Sense of Personal Responsibility to the Group Shared responsibility comes with the shared common goals. Each person in the organization must do their part to promote the common shared goal or purpose based on their abilities. A prime example of this is a wrestling team competing in a match. Points are awarded to the team based on how many wins the team achieves in the meet and of that how many wins where won by decision or by pin. If a wrestler pins his opponent the teams will receive 2 points for the win, but if the wrestler wins by decision, then the team only gets one point for the win. So it is the responsibility of each person on the team to not get pinned if they are unable to win the match. If the team member gets pinned then the other team receives an additional point for the win. References: Hoefling, T. (2001). Working Virtually: Managing People for Successful Virtual Teams and Organizations. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• Editing files without race conditions?

  - by user2569445

  I have a CSV file that needs to be edited by multiple processes at the same time. My question is, how can I do this without introducing race conditions? It's easy to write to the end of the file without race conditions by open(2)ing it in "a" (O_APPEND) mode and simply write to it. Things get more difficult when removing lines from the file. The easiest solution is to read the file into memory, make changes to it, and overwrite it back to the file. If another process writes to it after it is in memory, however, that new data will be lost upon overwriting. To further complicate matters, my platform does not support POSIX record locks, checking for file existence is a race condition waiting to happen, rename(2) replaces the destination file if it exists instead of failing, and editing files in-place leaves empty bytes in it unless the remaining bytes are shifted towards the beginning of the file. My idea for removing a line is this (in pseudocode): filename = "/home/user/somefile"; file = open(filename, "r"); tmp = open(filename+".tmp", "ax") || die("could not create tmp file"); //"a" is O_APPEND, "x" is O_EXCL|O_CREAT while(write(tmp, read(file)); //copy the $file to $file+".new" close(file); //edit tmp file unlink(filename) || die("could not unlink file"); file = open(filename, "wx") || die("another process must have written to the file after we copied it."); //"w" is overwrite, "x" is force file creation while(write(file, read(tmp))); //copy ".tmp" back to the original file unlink(filename+".tmp") || die("could not unlink tmp file"); Or would I be better off with a simple lock file? Appender process: lock = open(filename+".lock", "wx") || die("could not lock file"); file = open(filename, "a"); write(file, "stuff"); close(file); close(lock); unlink(filename+".lock"); Editor process: lock = open(filename+".lock", "wx") || die("could not lock file"); file = open(filename, "rw"); while(contents += read(file)); //edit "contents" write(file, contents); close(file); close(lock); unlink(filename+".lock"); Both of these rely on an additional file that will be left over if a process terminates before unlinking it, causing other processes to refuse to write to the original file. In my opinion, these problems are brought on by the fact that the OS allows multiple writable file descriptors to be opened on the same file at the same time, instead of failing if a writable file descriptor is already open. It seems that O_CREAT|O_EXCL is the closest thing to a real solution for preventing filesystem race conditions, aside from POSIX record locks. Another possible solution is to separate the file into multiple files and directories, so that more granular control can be gained over components (lines, fields) of the file using O_CREAT|O_EXCL. For example, "file/$id/$field" would contain the value of column $field of the line $id. It wouldn't be a CSV file anymore, but it might just work. Yes, I know I should be using a database for this as databases are built to handle these types of problems, but the program is relatively simple and I was hoping to avoid the overhead. So, would any of these patterns work? Is there a better way? Any insight into these kinds of problems would be appreciated.

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• Styling specific columns and rows

  - by hattenn

  I'm trying to style some specific parts of a 5x4 table that I create. It should be like this: Every even numbered row and every odd numbered row should get a different color. Text in the second, third, and fourth columns should be centered. I have this table: <table> <caption>Some caption</caption> <colgroup> <col> <col class="value"> <col class="value"> <col class="value"> </colgroup> <thead> <tr> <th id="year">Year</th> <th>1999</th> <th>2000</th> <th>2001</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr class="oddLine"> <td>Berlin</td> <td>3,3</td> <td>1,9</td> <td>2,3</td> </tr> <tr class="evenLine"> <td>Hamburg</td> <td>1,5</td> <td>1,3</td> <td>2,0</td> </tr> <tr class="oddLine"> <td>München</td> <td>0,6</td> <td>1,1</td> <td>1,0</td> </tr> <tr class="evenLine"> <td>Frankfurt</td> <td>1,3</td> <td>1,6</td> <td>1,9</td> </tr> </tbody> <tfoot> <tr class="oddLine"> <td>Total</td> <td>6,7</td> <td>5,9</td> <td>7,2</td> </tr> </tfoot> </table> And I have this CSS file: table, th, td { border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 5px; } #year { text-align: left; } .oddLine { background-color: #DDDDDD; } .evenLine { background-color: #BBBBBB; } .value { text-align: center; } And this doesn't work. The text in the columns are not centered. What is the problem here? And is there a way to solve it (other than changing the class of all the cells that I want centered)? P.S.: I think there's some interference with .evenLine and .oddLine classes. Because when I put "background: black" in the class "value", it changes the background color of the columns in the first row. The thing is, if I delete those two classes, text-align still doesn't work, but background attribute works perfectly. Argh...

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• WF4 &ndash; Guess the number game!

  - by MarkPearl

  I posted yesterday how really good WF4 was looking. Today I thought I would show some real basics that I was able to figure out. This will be a simple example, I am going to make a flowchart workflow – which will prompt the user to guess the number until they guess the right number. Lets begin… Make a new project and make it a Workflow console Application. Then select the Workflow file and drag a FlowChart (2) to point 3. This will now show a green start circle in the designer form. We are going to work with primitives to start with. We are now going to drag a few objects onto the Workflow, We drag the WriteLine, Assign & Decision items onto the designer. Once they are dragged onto the designer we will want to link them up. The order that they are linked is critical since this will determine the order of the solution. In this case, we want the system to first ask “Guess a number”, then to wait for the user to input some code, and then to display “You got it” if they got it right, and “Try again” if they got it wrong. So we now link the arrows to the objects. This is done by moving the mouse pointer over the start objects and clicking on one of the toggles and then dragging it to the next object and releasing the button over one of the toggles. This will place an arrow from the source object to the target object. Okay… pretty simple stuff – now we just need these primitive objects to do stuff. Lets start with the WriteLine primitive. We place the text in inverted commas in the Text field. Because this field accepts any valid VB expression we could have put variables etc. in there if we wanted to. The next thing we want to do is allow the user to input a number. This brings up an interesting problem, if a user were to type in a number, there would need to be someway to declare a variable to hold that value for the life of the workflow. We can achieve this by declaring a variable. To declare a variable, move your cursor over the variables tab at the bottom of the workflow, and then type the name of the new variable in the “Create Variable” field and set it as shown in the image above. Now that we have a variable, we want to call the Console.Readline method and assign the inputted value from the Console to that variable. The code that cannot be seen is actually this – Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()) We now have a workflow that first prompts the user for a number, then allows the user to type in a number. We are almost done, we just need to make the system react to the value inputted. There are a few ways we could do this, I am going to use the Decision item. So select the Decision object on the designer and then view its properties (F4 for me), and in the condition field place a condition. For simplicity sake I have decided that if the user guesses 10, they will have guessed the number. This is now the completed workflow. Its really easy to understand and shows some really powerful principles for Business applications. You can run the application and see what it does. Imagine writing business solutions that do not worry about the exact flow of objects, but simply allows a business analyst or someone to configure the solution to work exactly as the business rules would dictate. And if the rules changed six months later all they would need to do is re-drag some of the flows. Now I do not know if WF4 will allow for this, but it feels like it is a step in the right direct.

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• Customer Loyalty vs. Customer Engagement: Who Cares?

  - by Jeb Dasteel-Oracle

  Have you read the recent Forbes OracleVoice blog titled Customer Loyalty is Dead. Long Live Engagement!? If you haven’t, take a look. This article prompted lots of conversation in the social realm. Many who read the article voiced their reactions to the headline and now I’m jumping in to add my view. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Customer loyalty is still key. It’s the effect and engagement is the cause. We at least know that to be true for our customers. We are in an age where customers are demanding to be heard. We need them to be actively involved – or engaged – as well. Greater levels of customer engagement, properly targeted, positively correlate with satisfaction. Our data has shown us this over and over. Satisfied customers are more loyal and more willing to vocalize their satisfaction through referencing, and are more likely to purchase again, all of which in turn drives incremental revenue – from the customer doing the referencing AND the customer on the receiving end of that reference. Turning this around completely, if we begin to see the level of a customer’s engagement start to wane, this is an indicator that their satisfaction, loyalty, and future revenue are likely at risk. At Oracle, we’ve put in place many programs to target, encourage, and then track engagement, allowing us to measure engagement as a determinant of loyalty. Some of these programs include our Key Accounts, solution design and architectural, Executive Sponsorship, as well as executive advisory boards. Specific programs allow us to engage specific contacts within specific customer organizations (based on role) and then systematically track their engagement activities over time, along side of tracking customer satisfaction, loyalty, referenceability, and incremental revenue contribution. Continuous measurement of engagement allows us to better understand customer views of what it means to partner with a provider and adjust program participation to better meet the needs of the partnership. We can also track across customer segments, and design new programs that are even more effective than the ones we have in place today. In case you missed any of my previous Forbes articles, I’ve included links below for easy access. Award-Winning Companies Put Customers First The Power of Peer Networks: 5 Reasons to Get (and Stay) Involved Technology At Work: Traveling In Style Customer Central: 8 Strategies for Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business Technology at Work: Five Companies Doing IT Right /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Moving StarterSTS to the (Azure) Cloud

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Quite some people asked me about an Azure version of StarterSTS. While I kinda knew what I had to do to make the move, I couldn’t find the time. Until recently. This blog post briefly documents the necessary changes and design decisions for the next version of StarterSTS which will work both on-premise and on Azure. Provider Fortunately StarterSTS is already based on the idea of “providers”. Authentication, roles and claims generation is based on the standard ASP.NET provider infrastructure. This makes the migration to different data stores less painful. In my case I simply moved the ASP.NET provider database to SQL Azure and still use the standard SQL Server based membership, roles and profile provider. In addition StarterSTS has its own providers to abstract resource access for certificates, relying party registration, client certificate registration and delegation. So I only had to provide new implementations. Signing and SSL keys now go in the Azure certificate store and user mappings (client certificates and delegation settings) have been moved to Azure table storage. The one thing I didn’t anticipate when I originally wrote StarterSTS was the need to also encapsulate configuration. Currently configuration is “locked” to the standard .NET configuration system. The new version will have a pluggable SettingsProvider with versions for .NET configuration as well as Azure service configuration. If you want to externalize these settings into e.g. a database, it is now just a matter of supplying a corresponding provider. Moving between the on-premise and Azure version will be just a matter of using different providers. URL Handling Another thing that’s substantially different on Azure (and load balanced scenarios in general) is the handling of URLs. In farm scenarios, the standard APIs like ASP.NET’s Request.Url return the current (internal) machine name, but you typically need the address of the external facing load balancer. There’s a hotfix for WCF 3.5 (included in v4) that fixes this for WCF metadata. This was accomplished by using the HTTP Host header to generate URLs instead of the local machine name. I now use the same approach for generating WS-Federation metadata as well as information card files. New Features I introduced a cache provider. Since we now have slightly more expensive lookups (e.g. relying party data from table storage), it makes sense to cache certain data in the front end. The default implementation uses the ASP.NET web cache and can be easily extended to use products like memcached or AppFabric Caching. Starting with the relying party provider, I now also provide a read/write interface. This allows building management interfaces on top of this provider. I also include a (very) simple web page that allows working with the relying party provider data. I guess I will use the same approach for other providers in the future as well. I am also doing some work on the tracing and health monitoring area. Especially important for the Azure version. Stay tuned.

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• Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer?

  - by Asian Angel

  Most people have a single monitor for their computers, many have two, and some individuals enjoy “3 monitor plus” goodness. This week we would like to know how many monitors you use with your computer. Photo by DamnedNice. A good majority of people have a single monitor that they use with their computers and that single monitor serves their needs very well. It could be that these individuals do not engage in a heavy amount of work or play on their computers…they just need to do the basics like checking e-mail, using I.M., working with photos, etc. Another possibility is the use of virtual desktop software such as Dexpot, Yodm 3D, or Sysinternals Desktops on Windows systems. Linux systems such as Ubuntu already have that wonderful multi-desktop functionality built in. The wonderful part about virtual desktops is that a single monitor can feel equivalent to a small army of monitors. The ability to separate your open windows into “categories” and spread them out across multiple desktops is definitely nice. With each passing year dual monitor setups are becoming more common. Having twice the screen real-estate visible at the same time can be extremely convenient when you are multi-tasking. Perhaps you like to monitor your system’s stats and an e-mail account on the second monitor while working with software on the first. It certainly beats having windows popping up and down on your screen constantly while keeping on top of everything! Next we have the people who have three or more monitors in use with their computers. This may be a result of the type of work they do, an experiment to see if multiple monitors are right for them, or the cool, geeky factor that comes with having all those monitors. Needless to say these individuals can induce a good amount of envy and/or inspiration in the rest of us when we see their awesome setups. Are you perfectly content with a single monitor? Do you have two or more monitors that you use? If you have two or more monitors are they actually that useful to you? Perhaps you are getting ready even now to add additional monitors to your system. Whatever your situation may be at the moment, let us know your thoughts (and possible multi-monitor plans) in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster World of Warcraft Theme for Windows 7 Ubuntu Font Family Now Available for Download Oh No! WikiLeaks Published Santa Claus’s Naughty List [Video] Remember the Milk Now Supports HTTPS Encryption for the Entire Session

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• MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.2 has been released

  - by fernando

  MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.2, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is the first of two beta releases intended to introduce users to the new features in the release.  This release is feature complete it should be stable enough for users to understand the new features and how we expect them to work.  As is the case with all non-GA releases, it should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6 It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.6 version of MySQL Connector/Net brings the following new features:   * Stored routine debugging   * Entity Framework 4.3 Code First support   * Pluggable authentication (now third parties can plug new authentications mechanisms into the driver).   * Full Visual Studio 2012 support: everything from Server Explorer to Intellisense & the Stored Routine debugger. Stored Procedure Debugging ------------------------------------------- We are very excited to introduce stored procedure debugging into our Visual Studio integration.  It works in a very intuitive manner by simply clicking 'Debug Routine' from Server Explorer. You can debug stored routines, functions & triggers. Some of the new features in this release include:   * Besides normal breakpoints, you can define conditional & pass count breakpoints.   * Now the debugger editor shows colorizing.   * Now you can change the values of locals in a function scope (previously caused deadlock due to functions executing within their own transaction).   * Now you can also debug triggers for 'replace' sql statements.   * In general anything related to locals, watches, breakpoints, stepping & call stack should work in a similar way to the C#'s Visual Studio debugger. Some limitations remains, due to the current debugger architecture:   * Some MySQL functions cannot be debugged currently (get_lock, release_lock, begin, commit, rollback, set transaction level)..   * Only one debug session may be active on a given server. The Debugger is feature complete at this point. We look forward to your feedback. Documentation ------------------------------------- The documentation is still being developed and will be readily available soon (before Beta 2).  You can view current Connector/Net documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net.html You can find our team blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our forums at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support! 

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• Come up with a real-world problem in which only the best solution will do (a problem from Introduction to algorithms) [closed]

  - by Mike

  EDITED (I realized that the question certainly needs a context) The problem 1.1-5 in the book of Thomas Cormen et al Introduction to algorithms is: "Come up with a real-world problem in which only the best solution will do. Then come up with one in which a solution that is “approximately” the best is good enough." I'm interested in its first statement. And (from my understanding) it is asked to name a real-world problem where only the exact solution will work as opposed to a real-world problem where good-enough solution will be ok. So what is the difference between the exact and good enough solution. Consider some physics problem for example the simulation of the fulid flow in the permeable medium. To make this simulation happen some simplyfing assumptions have to be made when deriving a mathematical model. Otherwise the model becomes at least complex and unsolvable. Virtually any particle in the universe has its influence on the fluid flow. But not all particles are equal. Those that form the permeable medium are much more influental than the ones located light years away. Then when the mathematical model needs to be solved an exact solution can rarely be found unless the mathematical model is simple enough (wich probably means the model isn't close to reality). We take an approximate numerical method and after hours of coding and days of verification come up with the program or algorithm which is a solution. And if the model and an algorithm give results close to a real problem by some degree that is good enough soultion. Its worth noting the difference between exact solution algorithm and exact computation result. When considering real-world problems and real-world computation machines I believe all physical problems solutions where any calculations are taken can not be exact because universal physical constants are represented approximately in the computer. Any numbers are represented with the limited precision, at least limited by amount of memory available to computing machine. I can imagine plenty of problems where good-enough, good to some degree solution will work, like train scheduling, automated trading, satellite orbit calculation, health care expert systems. In that cases exact solutions can't be derived due to constraints on computation time, limitations in computer memory or due to the nature of problems. I googled this question and like what this guy suggests: there're kinds of mathematical problems that need exact solutions (little note here: because the question is taken from the book "Introduction to algorithms" the term "solution" means an algorithm or a program, which in this case gives exact answer on each input). But that's probably more of theoretical interest. So I would like to narrow down the question to: What are the real-world practical problems where only the best (exact) solution algorithm or program will do (but not the good-enough solution)? There are problems like breaking of cryptographic ciphers where only exact solution matters in practice and again in practice the process of deciphering without knowing a secret should take reasonable amount of time. Returning to the original question this is the problem where good-enough (fast-enough) solution will do there's no practical need in instant crack though it's desired. So the quality of "best" can be understood in any sense: exact, fastest, requiring least memory, having minimal possible network traffic etc. And still I want this question to be theoretical if possible. In a sense that there may be example of computer X that has limited resource R of amount Y where the best solution to problem P is the one that takes not more than available Y for inputs of size N*Y. But that's the problem of finding solution for P on computer X which is... well, good enough. My final thought that we live in a world where it is required from programming solutions to practical purposes to be good enough. In rare cases really very very good but still not the best ones. Isn't it? :) If it's not can you provide an example? Or can you name any such unsolved problem of practical interest?

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• Using NSpec at various architectural layers

  - by nono

  Having read the quick start at nspec.org, I realized that NSpec might be a useful tool in a scenario which was becoming a bit cumbersome with NUnit alone. I'm adding an OAuth (or, DotNetOpenAuth) to a website and quickly made a mess of writing test methods such as [Test] public void UserIsLoggedInLocallyPriorToInvokingExternalLoginAndExternalLoginSucceedsAndExternalProviderIdIsNotAlreadyAssociatedWithUserAccount() { ... } ... and I wound up with maybe a dozen permutations of this theme, for the user already being logged in locally and not locally, the external login succeeding or failing, etc. Not only were the method names unwieldy, but every test needed a setup that contained parts in common with a different set of other tests. I realized that NSpec's incremental setup capabilities would work great for this, and for a while I was trucking a long wonderfully, with code like act = () => { actionResult = controller.ExternalLoginCallback(returnUrl); }; context["The user is already logged in"] = () => { before = () => identity.Setup(x => x.IsAuthenticated).Returns(true); context["The external login succeeds"] = () => { before = () => oauth.Setup(x => x.VerifyAuthentication(It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(new AuthenticationResult(true, providerName, "provideruserid", "username", new Dictionary<string, string>())); context["External login already exists for current user"] = () => { before = () => authService.Setup(x => x.ExternalLoginExistsForUser(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(true); it["Should add 'login sucessful' alert"] = () => { var alerts = (IList<Alert>)controller.TempData[TempDataKeys.AlertCollection]; alerts[0].Message.should_be_same("Login successful"); alerts[0].AlertType.should_be(AlertType.Success); }; it["Should return a redirect result"] = () => actionResult.should_cast_to<RedirectToRouteResult>(); }; context["External login already exists for another user"] = () => { before = () => authService.Setup(x => x.ExternalLoginExistsForAnyOtherUser(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(true); it["Adds an error alert"] = () => { var alerts = (IList<Alert>)controller.TempData[TempDataKeys.AlertCollection]; alerts[0].Message.should_be_same("The external login you requested is already associated with a different user account"); alerts[0].AlertType.should_be(AlertType.Error); }; it["Should return a redirect result"] = () => actionResult.should_cast_to<RedirectToRouteResult>(); }; This approach seemed to work magnificently until I prepared to write test code for my ApplicationServices layer, to which I delegate viewmodel manipulation from my MVC controllers, and which coordinates the operations of the lower data repository layer: public void CreateUserAccountFromExternalLogin(RegisterExternalLoginModel model) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public void AssociateExternalLoginWithUser(string userName, string provider, string providerUserId) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public string GetLocalUserName(string provider, string providerUserId) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } I have no idea what in the world to name the test class, the test methods, or even if I should perhaps include the testing for this layer into the test class from my large code snippet above, so that a single feature or user action could be tested without regard to architectural layering. I can't find any tutorials or blog posts which cover more than simple examples, so I would appreciate any recommendations or pointing in the right direction. I would even welcome "your question is invalid"-type answers as long as some explanation is provided.

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• Spotlight on Oracle Social Relationship Management. Social Enable Your Enterprise with Oracle SRM.

  - by Pat Ma

  Facebook is now the most popular site on the Internet. People are tweeting more than they send email. Because there are so many people on social media, companies and brands want to be there too. They want to be able to listen to social chatter, engage with customers on social, create great-looking Facebook pages, and roll out social-collaborative work environments within their organization. This is where Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) comes in. Oracle SRM is a product that allows companies to manage their presence with prospects and customers on social channels. Let's talk about two popular use cases with Oracle SRM. Easy Publishing - Companies now have an average of 178 social media accounts - with every product or geography or employee group creating their own social media channel. For example, if you work at an international hotel chain with every single hotel creating their own Facebook page for their location, that chain can have well over 1,000 social media accounts. Managing these channels is a mess - with logging in and out of every account, making sure that all accounts are on brand, and preventing rogue posts from destroying the brand. This is where Oracle SRM comes in. With Oracle Social Relationship Management, you can log into one window and post messages to all 1,000+ social channels at once. You can set up approval flows and have each account generate their own content but that content must be approved before publishing. The benefits of this are easy social media publishing, brand consistency across all channels, and protection of your brand from inappropriate posts. Monitoring and Listening - People are writing and talking about your company right now on social media. 75% of social media users have written a negative post about a brand after a poor customer service experience. Think about all the negative posts you see in your Facebook news feed about delayed flights or being on hold for 45 minutes. There is so much social chatter going on around your brand that it's almost impossible to keep up or comprehend what's going on. That's where Oracle SRM comes in. With Social Relationship Management, a company can monitor and listen to what people are saying about them on social channels. They can drill down into individual posts or get a high level view of trends and mentions. The benefits of this are comprehending what's being said about your brand and its competitors, understanding customers and their intent, and responding to negative posts before they become a PR crisis. Oracle SRM is part of Oracle Cloud. The benefits of cloud deployment for customers are faster deployments, less maintenance, and lower cost of ownership versus on-premise deployments. Oracle SRM also fits into Oracle's vision to social enable your enterprise. With Oracle SRM, social media is not just a marketing channel. Social media is also mechanism for sales, customer support, recruiting, and employee collaboration. For more information about how Oracle SRM can social enable your enterprise, please visit oracle.com/social. For more information about Oracle Cloud, please visit cloud.oracle.com.

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• Don’t string together XML

  - by KyleBurns

  XML has been a pervasive tool in software development for over a decade.  It provides a way to communicate data in a manner that is simple to understand and free of platform dependencies.  Also pervasive in software development is what I consider to be the anti-pattern of using string manipulation to create XML.  This usually starts with a “quick and dirty” approach because you need an XML document and looks like (for all of the examples here, we’ll assume we’re writing the body of a method intended to take a Contact object and return an XML string): return string.Format("<Contact><BusinessName>{0}</BusinessName></Contact>", contact.BusinessName);   In the code example, I created (or at least believe I created) an XML document representing a simple contact object in one line of code with very little overhead.  Work’s done, right?  No it’s not.  You see, what I didn’t realize was that this code would be used in the real world instead of my fantasy world where I own all the data and can prevent any of it containing problematic values.  If I use this code to create a contact record for the business “Sanford & Son”, any XML parser will be incapable of processing the data because the ampersand is special in XML and should have been encoded as &amp;. Following the pattern that I have seen many times over, my next step as a developer is going to be to do what any developer in his right mind would do – instruct the user that ampersands are “bad” and they cannot be used without breaking computers.  This may work in many cases and is often accompanied by logic at the UI layer of applications to block these “bad” characters, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out that other applications allow for them and will want the same.  This often leads to the creation of “cleaner” functions that perform a replace on the strings for every special character that the person writing the function can think of.  The cleaner function will usually grow over time as support requests reveal characters that were missed in the initial cut.  Sooner or later you end up writing your own somewhat functional XML engine. I have never been told by anyone paying me to write code that they would like to buy a somewhat functional XML engine.  My employer/customer’s needs have always been for something that may use XML, but ultimately is functionality that drives business value. I’m not going to build an XML engine. So how can I generate XML that is always well-formed without writing my own engine?  Easy – use one of the ones provided to you for free!  If you’re in a shop that still supports VB6 applications, you can use the DomDocument or MXXMLWriter object (of the two I prefer MXXMLWriter, but I’m not going to fully describe either here).  For .Net Framework applications prior to the 3.5 framework, the code is a little more verbose than I would like, but easy once you understand what pieces are required:             using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())             {                 using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw))                 {                     writer.WriteStartDocument();                     writer.WriteStartElement("Contact");                     writer.WriteElementString("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName);                     writer.WriteEndElement(); // end Contact element                     writer.WriteEndDocument();                     writer.Flush();                     return sw.ToString();                 }             }   Looking at that code, it’s easy to understand why people are drawn to the initial one-liner.  Lucky for us, the 3.5 .Net Framework added the System.Xml.Linq.XElement object.  This object takes away a lot of the complexity present in the XmlTextWriter approach and allows us to generate the document as follows: return new XElement("Contact", new XElement("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName)).ToString();   While it is very common for people to use string manipulation to create XML, I’ve discussed here reasons not to use this method and introduced powerful APIs that are built into the .Net Framework as an alternative.  I’ve given a very simplistic example here to highlight the most basic XML generation task.  For more information on the XmlTextWriter and XElement APIs, check out the MSDN library.

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• The new direction of the gaming industry

  - by raccoon_tim

  Just recently I read a great blog post by David Darling, the founder of Codemasters: http://www.develop-online.net/blog/347/Jurassic-consoles-could-become-extinct. In the blog post he talks about how traditional retail games are experiencing a downfall thanks to the increasing popularity of digital distribution. I personally think of retail games as being relics of the past. It does not really make much sense to still keep distributing boxed games when the same game can be elegantly downloaded and updated over the air through a digital distribution channel. The world is not all rainbows, however. One big issue with mixing digital distribution with boxed retail games is that resellers will not condone you selling your game for 10€ digitally while their selling the same game for 70€. The only way to get around this issue is to move to full digital distribution. This has the added benefit of minimizing piracy as the game can be tightly bound to the service you downloaded the game from. Many players are, however, complaining about not being able to play the games offline. Having games tightly bound to the internet is a problem when games are bought from a retailer as we tend to expect that once we have the product we can use it anywhere because we physically own it. The truth is that we don’t actually own the product. Instead, the typical EULA actually states that we only have a license to use the product. We’re not, for instance, allowed to disassemble the product, which the owner is indeed permitted to do. Digital distribution allows us to provide games as services, instead of selling them as standalone products. This means that for a service to work you have to be connected to the internet but you still have the same rights to use the product. It’s really straightforward; if you downloaded a client from the internet you are expected to have an internet connection so you’re able to connect to the server. A game distributed digitally that is built using a client-server architecture has the added benefit of allowing you to play anywhere as long as you have the client installed and you are able to log in with your user information. Your save games can be backed up and your game can continue anywhere. Another development we’re seeing in the gaming industry is the increasing popularity of free-to-play games. These are games that let you play for free but allow you to boost your gaming experience with real world money. The nature of these games is that players are constantly rewarded with new content and the game can evolve according to their way of playing and their wishes can be incorporated into the product. Free-to-play games can quickly gain a large player basis and monetization is done by providing players valuable things to buy making their gaming experience more fun. I am personally very excited about free-to-play games as it’s possible to start building the game together with your players and there is no need to work on the game for 5 years from start to finish and only then see if it’s actually something the players like. This is a typical problem with big movie-like retail games and recent news about Radical Entertainment practically closing its doors paints a clear picture of what can happen when the risk does not pay off: http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/25874/Prototype-Developer-Radical-Entertainment-Closes/.

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• Alternative ways of setting environment variables through PuTTy?

  - by A T

  Connecting via SSH to a SPARC server but am unable to set environmental variables through the usual PuTTy way, which gives me this error: Server refused to set environment variables I also noticed that export and set techniques don't work from the prompt; the only which works is: $ PATH=/everyones_passwords_in_plain_text/:$PATH How do I automatically run that line on every connect to this server?

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• WMI Rights required to read root\MicrosoftIISv2 in IIS7 with IIS6 compatibility mode

  - by JoeBilly

  I need to manage my IIS7 (Windows Server 2008) remotely with a WMI IIS6 API. So I added the IIS6 WMI Compatibility and IIS6 Metabase Compatibility roles to access the root\MicrosoftIIsv2 namespace. I have a domain account which is not administrator on the remote machine ; with this right, everything is ok. I configured these rights for my domain account to access the root\MicrosoftIIsv2 WMI namespace remotely ; note that these rights work perfectly on a IIS6 and Windows Server 2003 : DCOM : Account in Distributed COM Users Remote & local access to DCOM WMI : Root\CIMV2 (I need access here too) Execute methods, Enable Account, Remote Enable Root\Default (I need access here too) Execute methods, Enable Account, Remote Enable Root\MicrosoftIISv2 Execute methods, Enable Account, Provider Write, Remote Enable IIS Metabase (Metabase Explorer) : LM Full Control (W3SVC inherits these permissions) I tried to give some access on C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv too ; don't know if needed. My issue is : I can't list the IIS WebSites (\root\MicrosoftIISv2:IIsWebServerSetting.Name="W3SVC/*"). I don't get an 'access denied' but nothing is returned. My API and powershell tests can connect and execute queries in the root\MicrosoftIISv2 namespace I can read the IIsComputer class ex: Get-WmiObject IIsComputer -namespace "ROOT\MicrosoftIISv2" -authentication PacketPrivacy | SELECT * I can't read the IIsWebServerSetting, IIsWebServer ... to list the WebSites : the query returns an empty collection ex: Get-WmiObject IIsWebServerSetting -namespace "ROOT\MicrosoftIISv2" -authentication PacketPrivacy | SELECT ServerComment All queries work perfectly if the account is administrator as already said I am using PacketPrivacy authentication FI: I got a Warning Event 5605 with the Administrator right or not, that does not seem to have an impact : The root\MicrosoftIISv2 namespace is marked with the RequiresEncryption flag. Access to this namespace might be denied if the script or application does not have the appropriate authentication level. Change the authentication level to Pkt_Privacy and run the script or application again Ok, I have some more informations, when I use IIS 6 Metabase Explorer with my administrator account I can see the rights are correctly inherited for my non-administrator account. But when I try to connect using my non-administrator account, I can list the LM node, but get an "access denied, failed to get a key's data" when I try to browse the child nodes. I'll check further. I tried to Trace the WMI Activity, and everything seems OK ; this tends to confirm that the problem lies in IIS Rights.

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• Why does Cacti keep waiting for dead poller processes?

  - by Oliver Salzburg

  sorry for the length I am currently setting up a new Debian (6.0.5) server. I put Cacti (0.8.7g) on it yesterday and have been battling with it ever since. Initial issue The initial issue I was observing, was that my graphs weren't updating. So I checked my cacti.log and found this concerning message: POLLER: Poller[0] Maximum runtime of 298 seconds exceeded. Exiting. That can't be good, right? So I went checking and started poller.php myself (via sudo -u www-data php poller.php --force). It will pump out a lot of message (which all look like what I would expect) and then hang for a minute. After that 1 minute, it will loop the following message: Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. This goes on for 4 more minutes until the process is forcefully ended for running longer than 300s. So far so good I went on for a good hour trying to determine what poller might still be running, until I got to the conclusion that there simply is no running poller. Debugging I checked poller.php to see how that warning is issued and why. On line 368, Cacti will retrieve the number of finished processes from the database and use that value to calculate how many processes are still running. So, let's see that value! I added the following debug code into poller.php: print "Finished: " . $finished_processes . " - Started: " . $started_processes . "\n"; Result This will print the following within seconds of starting poller.php: Finished: 0 - Started: 1 Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. Finished: 1 - Started: 1 So the values are being read and are valid. Until we get to the part where it keeps looping: Finished: - Started: 1 Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. Suddenly, the value is gone. Why? Putting var_dump() in there confirms the issue: NULL Finished: - Started: 1 Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. The return value is NULL. How can that be when querying SELECT COUNT()...? (SELECT COUNT() should always return one result row, shouldn't it?) More debugging So I went into lib\database.php and had a look at that db_fetch_cell(). A bit of testing confirmed, that the result set is actually empty. So I added my own database query code in there to see what that would do: $finished_processes = db_fetch_cell("SELECT count(*) FROM poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'"); print "Finished: " . $finished_processes . " - Started: " . $started_processes . "\n"; $mysqli = new mysqli("localhost","cacti","cacti","cacti"); $result = $mysqli->query("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00';"); $row = $result->fetch_assoc(); var_dump( $row ); This will output Finished: - Started: 1 array(1) { ["COUNT(*)"]=> string(1) "2" } Waiting on 1 of 1 pollers. So, the data is there and can be accessed without any problems, just not with the method Cacti is using? Double-check that! I enabled MySQL logging to make sure I'm not imagining things. Sure enough, when the error message is looped, the cacti.log reads as if it was querying like mad: 06/29/2012 08:44:00 PM - CMDPHP: Poller[0] DEVEL: SQL Cell: "SELECT count(*) FROM cacti.poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'" 06/29/2012 08:44:01 PM - CMDPHP: Poller[0] DEVEL: SQL Cell: "SELECT count(*) FROM cacti.poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'" 06/29/2012 08:44:02 PM - CMDPHP: Poller[0] DEVEL: SQL Cell: "SELECT count(*) FROM cacti.poller_time WHERE poller_id=0 AND end_time>'0000-00-00 00:00:00'" But none of these queries are logged my MySQL. Yet, when I add my own database query code, it shows up just fine. What the heck is going on here?

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• wlcomm.exe using maximum cpu sporadically

  - by tm1rbrt

  Every now and then wlcomm.exe will start using all the available CPU. It will keep using it until I kill the process. Google couldn't tell me much about why this is happening. wlcomm.exe is the 'windows live communication platform'. I have to use live messenger at work. How can I stop this happening?

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