blogs - Page 108 - Developer IT

Silent Partner

- by [email protected]

The Team Behind the Man Behind the Mask As a continuing sponsor of the blockbuster Iron Man franchise, Oracle has been quietly preparing for the explosive sequel blasting its way into theaters this May. Through a series of advertising campaigns, immersive online experiences, and contests, Oracle plans to highlight its backstage efforts to help Marvel Entertainment hone its newfound superpowers. By driving the performance of critical systems, Oracle technologies are helping Marvel transform itself from mild-mannered comic book publisher to film industry power broker. You can learn more about this dynamic duo, and get free movie memorabilia, by visiting our Iron Man 2 showcase site.

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SRs @ Oracle: How do I License Thee?

- by [email protected]

With the release of the new Sun Ray product last week comes the advent of a different software licensing model. Where Sun had initially taken the approach of '1 desktop device = one license', we later changed things to be '1 concurrent connection to the server software = one license', and while there were ways to tell how many connections there were at a time, it wasn't the easiest thing to do. And, when should you measure concurrency? At your busiest time, of course... but when might that be? 9:00 Monday morning this week might yield a different result than 9:00 Monday morning last week.In the acquisition of this desktop virtualization product suite Oracle has changed things to be, in typical Oracle fashion, simpler. There are now two choices for customers around licensing: Named User licenses and Per Device licenses.Here's how they work, and some examples:The Rules1) A Sun Ray device, and PC running the Desktop Access Client (DAC), are both considered unique devices.OR, 2) Any user running a session on either a Sun Ray or an DAC is still just one user.So, you have a choice of path to go down.Some Examples:Here are 6 use cases I can think of right now that will help you choose the Oracle server software licensing model that is right for your business:Case 1If I have 100 Sun Rays for 100 users, and 20 of them use DAC at home that is 100 user licenses.If I have 100 Sun Rays for 100 users, and 20 of them use DAC at home that is 120 device licenses.Two cases using the same metrics - different licensing models and therefore different results.Case 2If I have 100 Sun Rays for 200 users, and 20 of them use DAC at home that is 200 user licenses.If I have 100 Sun Rays for 200 users, and 20 of them use DAC at home that is 120 device licenses.Same metrics - very different results.Case 3If I have 100 Sun Rays for 50 users, and 20 of them use DAC at home that is 50 user licenses.If I have 100 Sun Rays for 50 users, and 20 of them use DAC at home that is 120 device licenses.Same metrics - but again - very different results.Based on the way your business operates you should be able to see which of the two licensing models is most advantageous to you.Got questions? I'll try to help.(Thanks to Brad Lackey for the clarifications!)

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Frederick .NET User Group May 2010 Meeting

- by John Blumenauer

FredNUG is pleased to announce our May speaker will be Kevin Griffin. Kevin has been speaking at several community events this spring and we’re pleased he’s stopping by FredNUG to present at our May meeting. On May 18th, we’ll start with pizza and social networking at 6:30 PM. Then, starting at 7 PM, Kevin Griffin will present “Awesomize Your Windows Apps.” The scheduled agenda is: 6:30 PM - 7:00 PM - Pizza/Social Networking/Announcements 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM - Main Topic: Awesomize Your Windows Apps with Kevin Griffin Main Topic Description: Awesomize Your Windows Apps With the release of Windows 7, many developers might be looking to take advantage of the features Windows 7 offers. This presentation offers attendees a broad overview of the Windows API Code Pack, which is a managed library for .NET developers to use for accessing some of the underlying functionality of Windows that was typically reserved for Interop fans. Topics and demos include Windows 7 taskbar functionality, Task dialogs, Libraries support, and more. Speaker Bio: Kevin Griffin is a .NET Developer for Antech Systems, located in Chesapeake, VA. He's an ASPInsider and the leader of the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group. Additionally, he serves as an INETA mentor for the state of Virginia. Often, he can be found speaking at or attending other local user group meetings or code camps. He enjoys working with new technology, and consistently works on being a better developer and building the best software he can. Follow Kevin on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/1kevgriff Read Kevin's Blog: http://www.kevgriffin.com 8:30 PM - 8:45 PM – RAFFLE! Please join us and get involved in our .NET developers community!

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 28, 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

Oracle BPM and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) | Dan Atwood Oracle ACE Dan Atwood shares an excerpt from "Oracle BPM and ADF (Part 1)," part of Avio Consulting's new self-paced online Oracle BPM Developer Workshop training. BPEL and Fire-and-Forget Web Services | Lonneke Dikmans Oracle ACE Director Lonneke Dikmans shares two use cases to illustrate the use of fire-and-forget web services. Backup and Recovery of an Exalogic vServer via rsync | Donald "On Exalogic a vServer will consist of a number of resources from the underlying machine," says the man known only as Donald. "These resources include compute power, networking and storage. In order to recover a vServer from a failure in the underlying rack all of these components have to be thoughts about. This article only discusses the backup and recovery strategies that apply to the storage system of a vServer." Making Architecture Matter | Harald Wesenberg and Einar Landre "As Architects, we want our architecture to matter. We want projects to implement our grand designs, one little step at a time, with each piece fitting perfectly into the big puzzle that is software architecture," say authors Harald Wesenberg and Einar Landre. "But reality is a bit trickier." Thought for the Day "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." — Leslie Lamport Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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Thoughts on the new JavaFX by Jim Connors

- by Jacob Lehrbaum

First, a brief editorial if I may. The upcoming JavaFX 2.0 platform has been getting overwhelmingly positive reaction from the community so far. While the public sentiment seems to be cautiously optimistic, I've heard nothing but positive reactions from everyone that I've spoken to about the platform. In fact, many of the early adopters of JavaFX have told us directly that they are very encouraged about the direction the platform is taking.One such early adopter is Oracle's own Jim Connors. As his day job, Jim is a principal sales consultant (basically an engineer that supports Oracle's sales efforts) in the New York area. However, Jim also co-wrote a book with Jim Clarke and Eric Bruno on JavaFX and has spoken and conducted training sessions at events like the New York Java Developer Day, the Java Road Trip, and other events.In his thoughtful editorial, Jim discusses some of the reasons why he believes the new directions Oracle is taking JavaFX make sense, including:Better developer toolsLower barriers to adoption -> better accessibility to existing Java developersImproved performanceMore flexibility (ability to use other dynamic languages, etc)To read more about Jim's thoughts on the new JavaFX, check out his blog. Or if you want to learn more about the JavaFX platform, pick up a copy of his book. And if you still want to use JavaFX Script, you can check out Project Visage

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Easy and Rapid Deployment of Application Workloads with Oracle VM

- by Antoinette O'Sullivan

Oracle VM is designed for easy and rapid deployment of application workloads. In addition to allowing for rapid deployment of an entire application stack, Oracle VM now gives administrators more fine-grained control of the application payloads inside the virtual machine. To get started on Oracle VM Server for x86 or Oracle VM Server fo SPARC, what better solution than to take the corresponding training course. You can take this training from your own desk, by choosing from a selection of live-virtual events already on the schedule on the Oracle University Portal. Alternatively, you can travel to an education center to take these courses. Below is a selection of in-class events already on the schedule for each course: Oracle VM Administration: Oracle VM Server for x86 Location Date Delivery Language Paris, France 11 December 2013 French Rome, Italy 22 April 2014 Italian Budapest, Hungary 4 November 2013 Hungarian Riga, Latvia 3 February 2014 Latvian Oslo, Norway 9 December 2013 English Warsaw, Poland 12 February 2014 Polish Ljubjana, Slovenia 25 November 2013 Slovenian Barcelona, Spain 29 October 2013 Spanish Istanbul, Turkey 23 December 2013 Turkish Cairo, Egypt 1 December 2013 Arabic Johannesburg, South Africa 9 December 2013 English Melbourne, Australia 12 February 2014 English Sydney, Australia 25 November 2013 English Singapore 27 November 2013 English Montreal, Canada 18 February 2014 English Ottawa, Canada 18 February 2014 English Toronto, Canada 18 February 2014 English Phoenix, AZ, United States 18 February 2014 English Sacramento, CA, United States 18 February 2014 English San Francisco, CA, United States 18 February 2014 English San Jose, CA, United States 18 February 2014 English Denver, CO, United States 22 January 2014 English Roseville, MN, United States 10 February 2014 English Edison, NJ, United States 18 February 2014 English King of Prussia, PA, United States 18 February 2014 English Reston, VA, United States 26 March 2014 English Oracle VM Server for SPARC: Installation and Configuration Location Date Delivery Language Prague, Czech Republic 2 December 2013 Czech Paris, France 9 December 2013 French Utrecht, Netherlands 9 December 2013 Dutch Madrid, Spain 28 November 2013 Spanish Dubai, United Arab Emirates 5 February 2014 English Melbourne, Australia 31 October 2013 English Sydney, Australia 10 February 2014 English Tokyo, Japan 6 February 2014 Japanese Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 23 December 2013 English Auckland, New Zealand 21 November 2013 English Singapore 7 November 2013 English Toronto, Canada 25 November 2013 English Sacramento, CA, United States 2 December 2013 English San Francisco, CA, United States 2 December 2013 English San Jose, CA, United States 2 December 2013 English Caracas, Venezuela 5 November 2013 Spanish

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Back Up to Tape the Way You Shop For Groceries

- by rickramsey

Imagine if this was how you shopped for groceries: From the end of the aisle sprint to the point where you reach the ketchup. Pull a bottle from the shelf and yell at the top of your lungs, “Got it!” Sprint back to the end of the aisle. Start again and sprint down the same aisle to the mustard, pull a bottle from the shelf and again yell for the whole store to hear, “Got it!” Sprint back to the end of the aisle. Repeat this procedure for every item you need in the aisle. Proceed to the next aisle and follow the same steps for the list of items you need from that aisle. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Not only is it horribly inefficient, it’s exhausting and can lead to wear out failures on your grocery cart, or worse, yourself. This is essentially how NetApp and some other applications write NDMP backups to tape. In the analogy, the ketchup and mustard are the files to be written, yelling “Got it!” is the equivalent of a sync mark at the end of a file, and the sprint back to the end of an aisle is the process most commonly called a “backhitch” where the drive has to back up on a tape to start writing again. Writing to tape in this way results in very slow tape drive performance and imposes unnecessary wear on the tape drive and the media, especially when writing small files. The good news is not all tape drives behave this way when writing small files. Unlike midrange LTO drives, Oracle’s StorageTek T10000D tape drive is designed to handle this scenario efficiently. The difference between the two drive types is that the T10000D drive gives you the ability to write files in a NetApp NDMP backup environment the way you would normally shop for groceries. With grocery shopping, you essentially stream through aisles picking up items as you go, and then after checking out, yell, “Got it!”, though you might do that last step silently. With the T10000D, it has a feature called the Tape Application Accelerator, which prevents the drive from having to stop after each file is written to notify NetApp or another application that the write was successful. When enabled in the T10000D tape drive, Tape Application Accelerator causes the tape drive to respond to tape mark and file sync commands differently than when disabled: A tape mark received by the tape drive is treated as a buffered tape mark. A file sync received by the tape drive is treated as a no op command. Since buffered tape marks and no op commands do not cause the tape drive to empty the contents of its buffer to tape and backhitch, the data is written to tape in significantly less time. Oracle has emulated NetApp environments with a number of different file sizes and found the following when comparing the T10000D with the Tape Application Accelerator enabled versus LTO6 tape drives. Notice how the T10000D is not only monumentally faster, but also remarkably consistent? In addition, the writing of the 50 GB of files is done without a single backhitch. The LTO6 drive, meanwhile, will perform as many as 3,800 backhitches! At the end of writing the entire set of files, the T10000D tape drive reports back to the application, in this case NetApp, that the write was successful via a tape mark. So if the Tape Application Accelerator dramatically improves performance and reliability, why wouldn’t you always have it enabled? The reason is because tape drive buffers are meant to be just temporary data repositories so in the event of a power loss, there could be data loss in certain environments for the files that resided in the buffer. Fortunately, we do have best practices depending on your environment to avoid this from happening. I highly recommend reading Maximizing Tape Performance with StorageTek T10000 Tape Drives (pdf) to decide which best practice is right for you. The white paper also digs deeper into the benefits of the Tape Application Accelerator. The white paper is free, and after downloading it you can decide for yourself whether you want to yell “Got it!” out loud or just silently to yourself. Customer Advisory Panel One final link: Oracle has started up a Customer Advisory Panel program to collect feedback from customers on their current experiences with Oracle products, as well as desires for future product development. If you would like to participate in the program, go to this link at oracle.com. photo taken on Idaho's Sacajewea Historic Biway by Rick Ramsey - Brian Zents Follow OTN on Blog | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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Connection Pooling is Busted

- by MightyZot

A few weeks ago we started getting complaints about performance in an application that has performed very well for many years. The application is a n-tier application that uses ADODB with the SQLOLEDB provider to talk to a SQL Server database. Our object model is written in such a way that each public method validates security before performing requested actions, so there is a significant number of queries executed to get information about file cabinets, retrieve images, create workflows, etc. (PaperWise is a document management and workflow system.) A common factor for these customers is that they have remote offices connected via MPLS networks. Naturally, the first thing we looked at was the query performance in SQL Profiler. All of the queries were executing within expected timeframes, most of them were so fast that the duration in SQL Profiler was zero. After getting nowhere with SQL Profiler, the situation was escalated to me. I decided to take a peek with Process Monitor. Procmon revealed some “gaps” in the TCP/IP traffic. There were notable delays between send and receive pairs. The send and receive pairs themselves were quite snappy, but quite often there was a notable delay between a receive and the next send. You might expect some delay because, presumably, the application is doing some thinking in-between the pairs. But, comparing the procmon data at the remote locations with the procmon data for workstations on the local network showed that the remote workstations were significantly delayed. Procmon also showed a high number of disconnects. Wireshark traces showed that connections to the database were taking between 75ms and 150ms. Not only that, but connections to a file share containing images were taking 2 seconds! So, I asked about a trust. Sure enough there was a trust between two domains and the file share was on the second domain. Joining a remote workstation to the domain hosting the share containing images alleviated the time delay in accessing the file share. Removing the trust had no affect on the connections to the database. Microsoft Network Monitor includes filters that parse TDS packets. TDS is the protocol that SQL Server uses to communicate. There is a certificate exchange and some SSL that occurs during authentication. All of this was evident in the network traffic. After staring at the network traffic for a while, and examining packets, I decided to call it a night. On the way home that night, something about the traffic kept nagging at me. Then it dawned on me…at the beginning of the dance of packets between the client and the server all was well. Connection pooling was working and I could see multiple queries getting executed on the same connection and ethereal port. After a particular query, connecting to two different servers, I noticed that ADODB and SQLOLEDB started making repeated connections to the database on different ethereal ports. SQL Server would execute a single query and respond on a port, then open a new port and execute the next query. Connection pooling appeared to be broken. The next morning I wrote a test to confirm my hypothesis. Turns out that the sequence causing the connection nastiness goes something like this: Make a connection to the database. Open a result set that returns enough records to require multiple roundtrips to the server. For each result, query for some other data in the database (this will open a new implicit connection.) Close the inner result set and repeat for every item in the original result set. Close the original connection. Provided that the first result set returns enough data to require multiple roundtrips to the server, ADODB and SQLOLEDB will start making new connections to the database for each query executed in the loop. Originally, I thought this might be due to Microsoft’s denial of service (ddos) attack protection. After turning those features off to no avail, I eventually thought to switch my queries to client-side cursors instead of server-side cursors. Server-side cursors are the default, by the way. Voila! After switching to client-side cursors, the disconnects were gone and the above sequence yielded two connections as expected. While the real problem is the amount of time it takes to make connections over these MPLS networks (100ms on average), switching to client-side cursors made the problem go away. Believe it or not, this is actually documented by Microsoft, and rather difficult to find. (At least it was while we were trying to troubleshoot the problem!) So, if you’re noticing performance issues on slower networks, or networks with slower switching, take a look at the traffic in a tool like Microsoft Network Monitor. If you notice a high number of disconnects, and you’re using fire-hose or server-side cursors, then try switching to client-side cursors and you may see the problem go away. Most likely, Microsoft believes this to be appropriate behavior, because ADODB can’t guarantee that all of the data has been retrieved when you execute the inner queries. I’m not convinced, though, because the problem remains even after replacing all of the implicit connections with explicit connections and closing those connections in-between each of the inner queries. In that case, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why ADODB can’t use a single connection from the connection pool to make the additional queries, bringing the total number of connections to two. Instead ADO appears to make an assumption about the state of the connection. I’ve reported the behavior to Microsoft and am awaiting to hear from the appropriate team, so that I can demonstrate the problem. Maybe they can explain to us why this is appropriate behavior. :)

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Good Scoop: The PeopleSoft/IBM Backstory

- by Brian Dayton

Sometimes you're searching for something online and you find an unrelated, bonus nugget. Last week I stumbled across an interesting blog post from Chris Heller of a PeopleSoft consulting shop in San Ramon, CA called Grey Sparling. I don't know these guys. But Chris, who apparently used to work on the PeopleTools team, wrote a great article on a pre-acquisition, would-be deal between IBM and PeopleSoft that would have standardized PeopleSoft on IBM technology. The behind-the-scenes perspective is interesting. His commentary on the challenges that the company and PeopleSoft customers would have encountered if the deal had gone through was also interesting: · "No common ownership. It's hard enough to get large groups of people to work together when they work for the same company, but with two separate companies it is much, much harder. Even within Oracle, progress on Fusion applications was slow until Thomas Kurian took over Fusion applications in addition to Fusion middleware." · "No customer buy-in. PeopleSoft customers weren't asking for a conversion to WebSphere, so the fact that doing that could have helped PeopleSoft stay independent wouldn't have meant much to them, especially since the cost of moving to whatever a "PeopleSoft built on WebSphere" would have been significant." · "No executive buy-in. This is related to the previous point, but it's worth calling out separately. If Oracle had walked away and the deal with IBM had gone through, and PeopleSoft customers got put through the wringer as part of WebSphere move, all of the PeopleSoft project teams would be put in the awkward position of explaining to their management why these additional costs and headaches were happening. Essentially they would need to "sell" the partnership internally to their own management team. That's not a fun conversation to have." I'm not surprised that something like this was in the works. But I did find the inside scoop and Heller's perspective on the challenges particularly interesting. Especially the advantages of aligning development of applications and infrastructure development under one roof. Here's a link to the whole blog entry.

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Letölthetoek a HOUG 2010 Konferencia eloadásai

- by Fekete Zoltán

2010. március 22-24. között zajlott le a HOUG Konferencia 2010. Már letölthetoek az eloadás anyagok a http://www.houg.hu/ oldalról az Archívum-ra, majd a HOUG 2010-re kattintva. A konferencián készült fényképek még nem kerültek fel, de reménykedjünk, hogy kisvártatva elénk tárulnak. :) Az Üzleti intelligencia és adattárház szekció (Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse) eloadásai itt érheto el. Jó mazsolázást kívánok!

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WP7 – Oh, You Wanted to Develop On Your New Phone? That’ll Cost Ya!

- by D'Arcy Lussier

Had an interesting Twitter convo today about WP7 development. Question was raised on how to use a WP7 device as the deployment target from within VS.NET. Thinking that this would be an *obvious* question, I replied that you need to set the right value in one of the drop lists in the IDE… I did this, hooked up my device, then tried to run my app, just as a final test that it was as easy as I thought it would be. It wasn’t. So first, your phone can’t be locked, so make sure you unlock it. Also, don’t kill the Zune software when you notice it automagically started – its needed for VS.NET to deploy to your device. Finally, you need to register your device for development. Aiden Caine has a great article on what you need to do for this, but in a nutshell you need to launch the Windows Phone Developer Registration program found in the Windows Phone Developer Tools folder. Now, here’s the catch to all of this: You must have a Windows Phone AppHub account. As in paid account. That’s right – to do development on your actual device, you need to have a $99 ($120 in Canada) AppHub developer membership. Now, I get this – if Microsoft didn’t put this restriction, then they’d be back in Mobile 6.x land where anyone could install whatever app to whoever, whenever, and without any standards being upheld. This is the same thing that Apple does with their marketplace, its not something unprecedented. But, it is something that will be new to the majority of Microsoft developers that have lived without application restrictions for years. Now, if you’re in the US then you have the opportunity to get a rebate on that $99 fee from Microsoft if you publish two apps successfully. You can get more details on this offer here.

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Is Nick Clegg a man or a mouse?

- by BizTalk Visionary

Well we got the hung election so many of us wanted! I believe it really is time for electoral change. Why? Consider: the ConMen under Cameroon have polled 36% of the great British voting public – well those that got to vote!! That means 64% of us don’t want him as PM. So what gives him the right to govern? Well an ancient voting system ideal for two party politics. But for the last 30 years we’ve had multi-party politics and going forward we may see 4 or 5 parties stepping up. We have to set in place a system that makes this work! So what does that mean today: Nick has a golden chance to push forward the case and in fact the absolute right for the change. He needs to keep this in mind when he discusses coalition with both Labour and the ConMen. So the mouse approach: Decides it is only fair to side with the ‘biggest’ vote and team up with the ConMen. Chances of electoral change? Big fat zero. Chance of achieving any of his other targets. Big fat zero. Why? Simple (as the Meer Kat would say). Cameroon needs to become PM by hook or crook. Once PM he holds the whip hand. Labour will dump Brown and head off into Leadership race land, Clegg will be knocking on number 10, having meaningless meetings and seeing no reward. Finally while Labour is at 6‘s and 7’s the ‘new’ PM will call a new election, gain the majority they need and dump luckless Nick!! So the man approach: Team up with Labour. As one of the conditions – Brown to go. Run referendum for PR. Get PR through then force Labour to have new election under PR. Nick now hero and should be in a much better place following a PR election!! The man bit is standing up to the media attack for supporting Labour. Come Nick – be a man for a better Britain!!

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Is Nick Clegg a man or a mouse?

- by BizTalk Visionary

Well we got the hung election so many of us wanted! I believe it really is time for electoral change. Why? Consider: the ConMen under Cameroon have polled 36% of the great British voting public – well those that got to vote!! That means 64% of us don’t want him as PM. So what gives him the right to govern? Well an ancient voting system ideal for two party politics. But for the last 30 years we’ve had multi-party politics and going forward we may see 4 or 5 parties stepping up. We have to set in place a system that makes this work! So what does that mean today: Nick has a golden chance to push forward the case and in fact the absolute right for the change. He needs to keep this in mind when he discusses coalition with both Labour and the ConMen. So the mouse approach: Decides it is only fair to side with the ‘biggest’ vote and team up with the ConMen. Chances of electoral change? Big fat zero. Chance of achieving any of his other targets. Big fat zero. Why? Simple (as the Meer Kat would say). Cameroon needs to become PM by hook or crook. Once PM he holds the whip hand. Labour will dump Brown and head off into Leadership race land, Glegg will be knocking on number 10, having meaningless meetings and seeing no reward. Finally while Labour is at 6‘s and 7’s the ‘new’ PM will call a new election, gain the majority they need and dump luckless Nick!! So the man approach: Team up with Labour. As one of the conditions – Brown to go. Run referendum for PR. Get PR through then force Labour to have new election under PR. Nick now hero and should be in a much better place following a PR election!! The man bit is standing up to the media attack for supporting Labour. Come Nick – be a man for a better Britain!!

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Your Job Search Should be More Than Just a New Year's Resolution

- by david.talamelli

I love the beginning of a new year, it is a great chance to refocus and either re-evaluate goals you are working to or even set new ones. I don't have any statistics to measure this but I am sure that one of the more popular new year's resolutions in the general workforce is to either get a new job or work to further develop one's career. I think this is a good idea, in today's competitive work force people should have a plan of what they want to do, what role they are after and how to get there. One common mistake I think many people make though is that a career plan shouldn't be a once a year thought. When people finish with the holiday season with their new year's resolution to find a new job fresh in their mind, you can see the enthusiasm and motivation a person has to make something happen. Emails are sent, calls are made, applications are made, networking is happening, etc..... Finding the right role that you are after however can be difficult, while it would be great if that dream role was available just at the time you happened to be looking for it - in reality this is not always the case. Job Seekers need to keep reminding themselves that while sometimes that dream job they are after is available at the same time they are looking, that also a Job search can be a difficult and long process. Many people who set out with the best of intentions in January to find a new job can soon lose interest in a job search if they do not immediately find a role. Just like the Christmas decorations are put away and the photos from New Year's are stored away - a Job Seeker's motivation may slowly decrease until that person finds themselves 12 months later in the same situation in same role and looking for that new opportunity again. Rather than just "going for it" and looking for a role in the month of January, a person's job search or career plan should be an ongoing activity and thought process that is constantly updated and evaluated over the course of the year. It can be hard to stay motivated over an extended period of time, especially when you are newly motivated and ready for that new role and the results are not immediate. Rather than letting your job search fall down the priority list and into the "too hard basket" a few ideas that may keep your enthusiasm fresh Update your resume every 6 months, even if you are not looking for a job - it is easy to forget what you have accomplished if you don't keep your details updated. Also it is good to be prepared and have a resume ready to go in case you do get an unexpected phone call for that 'dream job' you have been hoping for. Work out what you want out of your next role before you begin your job search - rather than aimlessly searching job ads or talking to people - think of the organisations or type of role you would like before you search. If you know what you are looking for it will be much easier to work out how to get there than if you do not know what you want. Don't expect immediate results once you decide to look for another job, things don't always fall into place. Timing and delivery can be important pieces of being selected for a role, companies don't hire every role in January. Have an open mind - people you meet or talk to may not result in immediate results for your job search but every connection may help you get a bit closer to what you are after . These actions will not guarantee a positive result, but in today's competitive work force every little of extra preparation and planning helps. All the best for 2011 and I hope your career plan whatever it may be is a success.

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Upcoming EMEA, APAC & US Events with MySQL in 2014

- by Lenka Kasparova

As an update to the previous announcement from Mar 25, 2014 please find below the updated list of events where MySQL Community team is attending and/or supporting. This time you can find not only EMEA & APAC ones but also conferences & events we are covering in the US & Canada. You are invited to meet our engineers at the events below. EMEA NEW!! BGOUG, Sandanski, Bulgaria, June 13, 2014 Georgi Kodinov will attend and speak at this local Oracle User Group event. Feel free to come. PHP Tour Lyon, Lyon, France, June 23-24, 2014 MySQL team is going to be part of this show as well, we are not going to have a booth here but very active networking by our french MySQL team around the event. Come to meet us and talk to us! NEW!! Converge Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, August 15-16, 2014 MySQL Community Manager, David Stokes attends with MySQL talk. NEW!! CakeFest, Madrid, Spain, August 21-24, 2014 A talk on "Scaling Your MySQL instances AND keeping your Sanity" will be given by the MySQL Community Manager, David Stokes. Froscon 2014, St.Augustin, Germany, August 23-24, 2014 Please visit our booth as well as watch the Froscon website for the schedule updates. NEW!! SymfonyLive, UK, London, September 25-26, 2014 MySQL Community Magers, David Stokes & Morgan Tocker submitted MySQL talks for this show. Schedule will be announced later on. DrupalCon Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 29-Oct 3, 2014 Meet us at our booth at DrupalCon Amsterdam. For the schedule please watch the DrupalCon website. All Your Base, Oxford UK, October 17, 2014 Come to visit our MySQL booth and talk to our MySQL experts. NEW!! WebTechCon / IPC, Munich Germany, October 26-29, 2014 NEW!! DOAG, Nuremberg, Germany, November 18-20, 2014 There will be a full day of MySQL talks and one full day of MySQL workshop & sessions with live demo. This event is simply hard to miss! NEW!! Forum PHP Paris, France, November 21-22, 2014 More details: TBD NEW!! UK OUG, Liverpool, UK, December 8-10, 2014 MySQL will be part of the Oracle booth and we hope to get more space for MySQL talks. USA NEW!! Texas Linux Fest, Austin, Texas, US, June 13-14, 2014 NEW!! SouthEast Linux Fest, Charlotte, US, June 20-22, 2014 NEW!! Debian Conference 2014, Portland, OR, US, August 23-31, 2014 NEW!! FossetCon, Orlando, US, September 11-13, 2014 NEW!! Oracle Open World, San Francisco, US, September 29-October 3, 2014 NEW!! MySQL Central @ Open/World, San Francisco, US, September 29-October 3, 2014 NEW!! PyTexas 2014, Dallas, TX, US, October 3-5, 2014 NEW!! All Things Open (replacing POSSCON), Raleigh, NC, October 23-24, 2014 NEW!! Ohio LinuxFest 2014, Columbus, Ohio, US, October 24-25, 2014 NEW!! ZendCon PHP, Santa Clara, US, October 27-30, 2014 NEW!! Kuali Days 2014, Indianapolis, US, November 10-13, 2014 NEW!! Live 360, Orlando, FL, US, November 17-20, 2014 APAC OpenSourceConference Japan, Hokkaido, June 13-14, 2014 MySQL is represented by Ryusuke Kajiyama with the talk on "MySQL Technology Updates". NEW!! db tech showcase, Osaka Japan, June 18-20, 2014 Three MySQL talks are scheduled for this show, "MySQL for Oracle DBA" & "MySQL Technology Updates" by Ryusuke Kajiyama. The last talk will be on MySQL Fabric by Yoshiaki Yamasaki. NEW!! PyCon Singapore, Singapore, June 18-20, 2014 Ryusuke Kajiyama will be talking about "Sharding and scale-out using Python-based MySQL Fabric". NEW!! COSCUP, Taipei, Taiwan, July 19-20, 2014 We are going to run a technical session on MySQL Workbench & one talk on how to make MySQL better MySQL. NEW!! PyCon New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, September 13-14, 2014 MySQL talks were submitted as well as one talk by Solaris Modernization team on Python & Solaris, watch the website for schedule updates. NEW!! PyCon Japan, Tokyo Japan, September 13-15, 2014 MySQL will be a MySQL session speaker, no schedule is announced yet. Ruby Kaigi, Tokyo, Japan, September 18-20, 2014 Another event MySQL supports and attends in APAC region. Ruby Kaigi is the international Ruby Conference in Japan, Tokyo. Ruby started in Japan, so Ruby Kaigi has excellent speakers and developers! MySQL team is going to be present at this conference with MySQL talks and active networking around the venue. NEW!! PyCon India, Bangalore, India, September 26-28, 2014 A MySQL talk on "MySQL Utilities scaling MySQL with Python" has been submitted, please watch the PyCon website for the schedule updates. NEW!! OpenSourceConference Japan, Tokyo, October 18-19, 2014 NEW!! OpenSource India, Bengaluru, India, November 7-8, 2014 NEW!! OpenSourceConference Japan, Fukuoka, November 14-15, 2014 You can check the MySQL wikis for updates on the conferences we are attending. Next time I hope to have more details for each event above (especially for the US ones).

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How to make your File Adapter pick only one file at a time from a location

- by anirudh.pucha(at)oracle.com

In SOA 11g, you use File adapter to read files from the given location.With this read operation it picks all the files at time.You want to configure File Adapters that it should pick one file at time from the given location with given polling interval.Solution :You set the "SingleThreadModel" and "MaxRaiseSize" properties for your file adapter. Edit the adapter's jca file and add the following properties:property name="SingleThreadModel" value="true"property name="MaxRaiseSize" value="1"You can set these properties also through jdeveloper, by opening composite.xml, selecting the adapter and then changing the properties through the properties panel.

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SQL Developer Data Modeler v3.3 Early Adopter: Collaborative Design via Excel?

- by thatjeffsmith

As you may have heard last week, we have a new version of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler now available as an Early Adopter release. Version 3.3 has quite a few new features and I’ll be previewing them here. Today’s topic is our new Excel integration. It builds off of last week’s lesson: Search, so you may want to go read that first. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes a team to build a data model. You have your techie folks, your business folks, your in-betweeners, and your database geeks. Who gets to define how customers are represented and stored in your database? That data lives forever, so you better get it right from the beginning, or you’ll be living in a hacker’s paradise for years to come. Lots of good rantings, ravings, and advice on this topic in general on Karen Lopez’s (@datachick) blog. But let’s say you are the primary modeler on a project. You dutifully interview the business folks for their requirements. You sit down and start to model and think you’re pretty close. Now you need someone to confirm your assumptions and provide some feedback. Do you send your model over? Take a screenshot and blow it up on a whiteboard? Export to HTML and let them take a magic marker to their monitors? Or maybe you bite the bullet and install your modeling software on their desktops and take the hours or days required to train them up on how to use the the tool. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just mark up their corrections in Excel and let you suck the updates back in? This is what we have started to build in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Let’s say you have a new table called ‘UT_STARTUPS.’ It looks a little something like this: A table in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler What I would like to do is have my team or co-worker review how I have defined those columns. Perhaps TIMESTAMP is overkill or maybe the column names themselves aren’t up to snuff. What I am going to do is now search for all the columns in my table, then export that to Excel. So do a search for UT_STARTUPS. Search, filter, then Report With the filter set to ‘Columns,’ if I do a report I’ll be only getting the columns that are resolving to my search term. So as long as my table name is unique in the model, I should get what I’m looking for. Here’s what I see when I click on the Report button: XLS or XLSX, either format is just fine I want to decide how the Column data is exported to Excel though, so I’m going to create a report template that I can use going forward. So click the ‘Manage’ button and setup a new template. I’m going to call mine ‘CollaborativeDevelopment.’ The templates allow me to define what properties are included in the reports. Once this is set, I’ll have the XLS file generated, and get to work Now let the Excel junkies do their stuff Note that not ALL of the report properties are update-able (yes, I made up a new word there) via Excel. We’ll have the full list of properties documented going forward, but in my Excel sheet, note that I can’t change the table name or the data types for the columns. I’m going to update some column names and supply ‘nice’ comments so the database users know what’s what. Here’s my input for the designer/architect/database dude: Be kind, please rew…use comments. Save the file, email it back to your modeler. Update the model from Excel That’s right, it’s a right mouse click from your model in the tree If everything goes right, you’ll see a nice confirmation message: It’s alive! Another to-do item on tap – making this dialog more informative. We’ll be showing exactly what in your model was updated from Excel. Let’s take another look at the model now Voila! Why are we doing this again? The goal is to reduce the number of round-trips from the modeler and the business process owner. One is used to working with Excel – why not allow them to mark up their changes in the tool they already know? This is an early adopter release and I anticipate this feature getting a good bit of tuning up before we release. Why don’t you download 3.3, give it a whirl, and let us know what you think?

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Java Spotlight Episode 86: Tony Printezis on Garbage Collection First

- by Roger Brinkley

Interview with Tony Printezis on Garbage Collection First (GC1). Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel is Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JSR 358: A major revison of the Java Community Process - JCP 3.Next JAX-RS 2.0 Early Draft- Third Edition Events June 11-14, Cloud Computing Expo, New York City June 12, Boulder JUG June 13, Denver JUG June 13, Eclipse Juno DemoCamp, Redwoood Shore June 13, JUG Münster June 14, Java Klassentreffen, Vienna, Austria June 18-20, QCon, New York City June 19, CJUG, Chicago June 20, 1871, Chicago June 26-28, Jazoon, Zurich, Switzerland Jun 27, Houston JUG ?? July 5, Java Forum, Stuttgart, Germany Jul 13-14, IndicThreads, Delhi July 30-August 1, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Feature InterviewTony Printezis is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle, based in Burlington, MA. He has been contributing to the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine since 2006. He spends most of his time working on dynamic memory management for the Java platform, concentrating on performance, scalability, responsiveness, parallelism, and visualization of garbage collectors. He obtained a Ph.D. in 2000 and a BSc (Hons) in 1995, both from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. In addition, he is a JavaOne Rock Star, a title awarded for his highly rated JavaOne session on GC. Mail Bag What’s Cool JavaOne content selection is complete. Notifications done.

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E-Business Tax Release 12 Setup - US Location Based Taxes Part 2, Rules, Types, Profiles

- by Robert Story

Upcoming WebcastTitle: E-Business Tax Release 12 Setup - US Location Based Taxes Part 2, Rules, Types, ProfilesDate: May 6, 2010 Time: 12:00 pm EDT Product Family: Receivables Community Summary This one-hour session is par two of two on setting up a fresh implementation of US Location Based Taxes in Oracle E-Business Tax. It is recommended for functional users who wish to understand the steps involved in setting up E-Business Tax in Release 12. Topics will include: Tax RulesProduct Fiscal Classification TypesParty Tax ProfilesTransaction Business Category CodesDefaults and Controls Troubleshooting Tips A short, live demonstration (only if applicable) and question and answer period will be included. Click here to register for this session....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... .......The above webcast is a service of the E-Business Suite Communities in My Oracle Support.For more information on other webcasts, please reference the Oracle Advisor Webcast Schedule.Click here to visit the E-Business Communities in My Oracle Support Note that all links require access to My Oracle Support.

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Inversion of Control Resource

- by MarkPearl

Well… this is going to be another really short blog posting. I have been meaning to read more about IOC containers and came across this blog post which seemed to really explain the concept well – based on Castle Windsor. I also enjoyed reading the replies about IOC on stack overflow and what it meant. If anyone knows of other good articles that explain the basics really well – wont you comment them to me.

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Life Technologies: Making Life Easier to Manage

- by Michael Snow

12.00 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When we’re thinking about customer engagement, we’re acutely aware of all the forces at play competing for our customer’s attention. Solutions that make life easier for our customers draw attention to themselves. We tend to engage more when there is a distinct benefit and we can take a deep breath and accept that there is hope in the world and everything isn’t designed to frustrate us and make our lives miserable. (sigh…) When products are designed to automate processes that were consuming hours of our time with no relief in sight, they deserve to be recognized. One of our recent Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners in the WebCenter category, Life Technologies, has recently posted a video promoting their “award winning” solution. The Oracle Innovation Awards are part of the overall Oracle Excellence awards given to customers for innovation with Oracle products. More info here. Their award nomination included this description: Life Technologies delivered the My Life Service Portal as part of a larger Digital Hub strategy. This Portal is the first of its kind in the biotechnology service providing industry. The Portal provides access to Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired. The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers. The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. This portal not only provides benefits for Life Technologies internal sales and service teams but provides customers a central place to track all pertinent instrument information including: instrument service history instrument status and previous activities instrument performance analytics planned service visits warranty/contract information discussion forums social networks for lab management and collaboration alerts and notifications on all of the above team scheduling for instrument usage promote optional reagents required to keep instruments performing From their website The Life Technologies Instruments & Services Portal Helps You Save Time and Gain Peace of Mind Introducing the new, award-winning, free online tool that enables easier management of your instrument use and care, faster response to requests for service or service quotes, and instant sharing of key instrument and service information with your colleagues. Now – this unto itself is obviously beneficial for their customers who were previously burdened with having to do all of these tasks separately, manually and inconsistently by nature. Now – all in one place and free to their customers – a portal that ties it all together. They now have built the platform to give their customers yet another reason to do business with them – Their headline on their product page says it all: “Life is now easier to manage - All your instrument use and care in one place – the no-cost, no-hassle Instruments and Services Portal.” Of course – it’s very convenient that the company name includes “Life” and now can also promote to their clients and prospects that doing business with them is easy and their sophisticated lab equipment is easy to manage. In an industry full of PhD’s – “Easy” isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind, but Life Technologies has now tied the word to their brand in a very eloquent way. Between our work lives and family or personal lives, getting any mono-focused minutes of dedicated attention has become such a rare occurrence in our current era of multi-tasking that those moments of focus are highly prized. So – when something is done really well – so well that it becomes captivating and urges sharing impulses – I take notice and dig deeper and most of the time I discover other gems not so hidden below the surface. And then I share with those I know would enjoy and understand. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit here that the first person I shared the videos below with was my daughter. She’s in her senior year of high school in the midst of her college search. She’s passionate about her academics and has already decided that she wants to study Neuroscience in college and like her mother will be in for the long haul to a PhD eventually. In a summer science program at Smith College 2 summers ago – she sent the family famous text to me – “I just dissected a sheep’s brain – wicked cool!” – This was followed by an equally memorable text this past summer in a research mentorship in Neuroscience at UConn – “Just sliced up some rat brain. Reminded me of a deli slicer at the supermarket… sorry I forgot to call last night…” So… needless to say – I knew I had an audience that would enjoy and understand these videos below and are now being shared among her science classmates and faculty. And evidently - so does Life Technologies! They’ve done a great job on these making them fun and something that will easily be shared among their customers social networks. They’ve created a neuro-archetypal character, “Ph.Diddy” and know that their world of clients in academics, research, and other institutions would understand and enjoy the “edutainment” value in this series of videos on their YouTube channel that pokes fun at the stereotypes while also promoting their products at the same time. They use their Facebook page for additional engagement with their clients and as another venue to promote these videos. Enjoy this one as well! More to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/lifetechnologies Stay tuned to this Oracle WebCenter blog channel. Tomorrow we'll be taking a look at another winner of the Innovation Awards, LADWP - helping to keep the citizens of Los Angeles engaged with their Water and Power provider.

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Link To Work Item – Visual Studio extension to link changeset(s) to work item directly from VS history window

- by Utkarsh Shigihalli

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/onlyutkarsh/archive/2014/08/11/link-to-work-item-ndash-visual-studio-extension-to-link.aspxBy linking work items and other objects, you can track related work, dependencies, and changes made over time. As the following illustration shows, specific link types are used to track specific work items and actions. (– via MSDN) While making a check-in, Visual Studio 2013 provides you a quick way to search and assign a work item via pending changes section in Team Explorer. However, if you forget to assign the work item during your check-in, things really get cumbersome as Visual Studio does not provide an easy way of assigning. For example, you usually have to open the work item and then link the changeset which involves approx. 7-8 mouse clicks. Now, you will really feel the difficulty if you have to assign work item to multiple changesets, you have to repeat the same steps again. Hence, I decided to develop a small Visual Studio extension to perform this action of linking work item to changeset bit easier. How to use the extension? First, download and install the extension from VS Gallery (Supports VS 2013 Professional and above). Once you install, you will see a new "Link To Work Item" menu item when you right click on a changeset in history window. Clicking Link To Work Item menu, will open a new dialog with which you can search for a work item. As you can see in below screenshot, this dialog displays the search result and also the type of the work item. You can also open work item from this dialog by right clicking on the work item and clicking 'Open'. Finally, clicking Save button, will actually link the work item to changeset. One feature which I think helpful, is you can select multiple changesets from history window and assign the work item to all those changesets. To summarize the features Directly assign work items to changesets from history window Assign work item to multiple changesets Know the type of the work item before assigning. Open the work item from search results It also supports all default Visual Studio themes. Below is a small demo showcasing the working of this extension. Finally, if you like the extension, do not forget to rate and review the extension in VS Gallery. Also, do not hesitate to provide your suggestions, improvements and any issues you may encounter via github.

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From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

- by thatjeffsmith

This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2010 -- #1008

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Samuel Jack, Alfred Astort(-2-), Nokola(-2-), Avi Pilosof, Chris Klug, Pete Brown, Laurent Bugnion(-2-), and Jaime Rodriguez(-2-, -3-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight" Chris Klug WP7: "Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter" Jaime Rodriguez Training: "Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Koen Zwikstra announced the availability of the first Silverlight Spy 4 Preview 1 Gavin Wignall announced the Launch of Festive game built with Silverlight 4, hosted on Azure ... free to play. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight View Model (MVVM) - A Play In One Act Michael Washington has an interesting take on writing a blog post with this 'play' version of Silverlight View Models and Expression Blend with a heaping dose of Behaviors added in for flavoring. Build a Windows Phone Game in 3 days – Day 1 Samuel Jack is attempting to build a WP7 game in 3 days including downloading the tools and an XNA book... interesting to see where he's headed wth this venture. 4 of 10 - Make sure your finger can hit the target and text is legible Continuing with a series of tips from the folks reviewing apps for the marketplace via Alfred Astort is this number 4 -- touch target size and legible text. 5 of 10 - Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI Alfred Astort's number 5 is also up, and continues the touch discussion with this tip about giving the user feedback on their touch. Fantasia Painter Released for Windows Phone 7 + Tips Nokola took the release of his Fantasia Painter on WP& as an opportunity not only to blog about the fact that we can go buy it, but has a blog full of hints and tips that he gathered while working on it. Games for Windows Phone 7 Resources: Reducing Load Times, RPG Kit; Other Nokola also blogged about the release of the new games education pack, and gives up the cursor he uses in his videos after being asked... The simplest way to do design-time ViewModels with MVVM and Blend. Avi Pilosof attacks the design-time ViewModel issue in Blend with a 'no code' solution. Sharing resources and styles between projects in Silverlight Chris Klug is talking about sharing resources and styles across a large Silverlight project... near and dear to my heart at this moment. Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown has a post up that's generated some interest... creating controls at runtime... and he's demonstrating several different ways for both Silverlight and WPF #twitter for Windows Phone 7 protips (#wp7) Laurent Bugnion was posting these great tips for Twitter for WP7 and rolled all 16 of them up into a blog post... check them and the app out... Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev) Laurent Bugnion's most current post should be of great interest to WP7 devs... providing more touch surface for your user's fat fingers, err, I mean their fat fingerings :) ... great information and samples ... and interesting it is a fail point as listed by Alfred Astort above. Windows Phone Application Performance at Silverlight Firestarter This material from Jaime Rodriguez actually hit prior to his Firestarter presentation, but should be required reading for anyone doing a WP7 app... great Performance tips from the trenches... slide deck, cheat-sheet, and code. UpdateSourceTrigger on Windows Phone data bindings Another post from Jaime Rodriguez actually went through a couple revisions already.. how about a WP7 TextBox that fires notifications to the ViewModel when the text changes? ... would you like a behavior with that? Details on the Push Notification app limits Jaime Rodriguez has yet another required reading post up on Push Notification limits ... what it really entails and how you can be a good WP7 citizen by the way you program your app. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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