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• Private Cloud: Putting some method behind the madness

  - by Sudip Datta

  Finally, I decided to join the blogging community. And what could be a better time to start than the week after OpenWorld 2012. 50K+ attendees, demonstrations, speaker sessions and a whole lot of buzz on Oracle Cloud..It was raining clouds in this year's Openworld. I am not here to write about Oracle's cloud strategy in general, but on Enterprise Manager's cloud management capabilities. This year's Openworld was the first after we announced the 12c Cloud Control and we were happy to share the stage with quite a few early adopters. Stay tuned for videos from our customers and partners, I will post them as they get published. I met a number of platform administrators in Oracle-DBAs, Middleware Admins, SOA Admins...The cloud has affected them all, at least to the point where it beckoned more than just curiosity..Most IT infrastructure are already heavily virtualized (on VMWare and on others including Oracle VM), and some would claim they are already on “cloud” (at least their Sysadmins told them so). But none of them were confident of the benefits because their pain points continued to grow.. Isn't cloud supposed to ease those? Instead, they were chasing hundreds of databases running on hundreds of VMs, often with as much certainty propounded by Heisenberg. What happened to the age-old IT discipline around administration, compliance, configuration management? VMs are great for what they are. I personally think they have opened the doors to new approaches in which an application stack gets provisioned and updated. In fact, Enterprise Manager 12c is possibly the only tool out there that can provision full-fledged application as VM Assemblies. In this year's Openworld, customers talked on how they provisioned RAC and Siebel assemblies, which as the techies out there know, are not trivial (hearing provisioning time for Siebel down from weeks to hours was gratifying indeed). However, I do have an issue with a "one-size fits all" approach to cloud. In a week's span, I met several personas: Project owners requiring an EC2 like VM instance for their projects Admins needing the same for Sparc-Solaris. DBAs requiring dedicated databases for new projects APEX Developers needing just a ready-to-consume schema as a service Java Developers looking for a runtime platform QA engineers needing a fast clone of their production environment If you drill down further, you will end up peeling more layers of the details. For example, the requirements for Load testing and Functional testing are very different. For Load testing the test environment should ideally be the same as the production. You shouldn't run production on Exadata and load test on a VM; they will just not be good representations of one another. For Functional testing it does not possibly matter. DBAs seem to be at the worst affected of the lot. It seems they have been asked to choose between agile provisioning and  faster runtime performance. And in some cases, it is really a Hobson's choice, because their infrastructure provider made no distinction between the OLTP application and the Virtual desktop! Sad indeed. When one looks at the portfolio of services that we already offer (vanilla IaaS, VM Assembly based PaaS, DBaaS) or have announced (Java PaaS, Instant Cloning, Schema-aaS), one can possibly think that we are trying to be the "renaissance man" ! Well I would have possibly digested that had it not been for the various personas that I described above. Getting the use cases right is very important for an application such as cloud management. We iterate and iterate over these over and over again and re-validate them in CABs (Customer Advisory Boards). We consider over the major aspects of tenancy: service placement, resource isolation (can a tenant execute an expensive SQL and run away with all the resources), quota and security. We, in Engineering, keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with enterprise clouds. We owe it to our customer base ! In the coming posts, I will drill down more into each of the services. In the meanwhile, here are some collateral and  demos for starters with EM 12c. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/cloud-mgmt/index.html Sudip Datta The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter --

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• GRUB is not Booting Correctly

  - by msknapp

  I have a PC with three hard disks. Windows 7 is installed on the first, Ubuntu 14.04 is installed on the third. After I re-booted, it went straight to Windows 7. So I tried explicitly telling my PC to boot using the third hard disk, but that just takes me to the grub rescue prompt. I followed Scott Severence's instructions here to try and recover. Essentially, I updated grub, reinstalled grub, and then updated it again. After re-booting, absolutely nothing had changed. So instead I tried using the boot-repair tool. In the past it had failed for me, saying that I had programs running and it could not unmount drives, when I was running nothing. I never figured out how to solve that problem, but it went away when I bought another hard drive and used that for my Ubuntu installation, I don't know why. In any case, I ran the boot-repair tool and this time it said it was successful. First time for everything right? I re-booted, only to be taken straight to the grub rescue prompt. So I changed my BIOS settings to use the third hard disk for boot start up. That is the same hard drive where I have Ubuntu and grub installed, and the same one that the grub-repair tool told me to use. It still took me straight to the grub rescue prompt. So I went from not being able to boot Ubuntu, to not being able to boot either OS installed on my system. Thanks boot-repair! Boot repair gave me this URL for future troubleshooting: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8131669 When I try to boot from the third hard disk, this is my console: Loading Operating System ... error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'. Entering rescue mode... grub rescue> grub rescue> set cmdpath=(hd0) prefix=(hd0,gpt2)/boot/grub root=hd0,gpt2 grub rescue> ls (hd0) (hd0,gpt3) (hd0,gpt2) (hd0,gpt1) (hd1) (hd2) (hd2,gpt2) (hd2,gpt1) (hd3) Those values look correct to me. I have also experimented with changing some of those values, but 'insmod normal' always throws the same error. Somebody please tell me how to fix this. I have tried everything, reinstalling grub, and running boot-repair. =========================== Update: I think the problem might be that the ubuntu installer did not partition my hard disk correctly. I booted from live USB and then launched gparted and looked at how it partitioned things. This is what gparted says: Partition, File System, Size, Used, Unused, Flags /dev/sda1 (!), unknown, 1.00 MiB, ---, ---, bios_grub /dev/sda2, ext4, 2.71 TiB, 47.30 GiB, 2.67 TiB, /dev/sda3, linux-swap, 16.00 GiB, 0.00 B, 16.00 GiB, So that first line looks problematic. It is supposed to be the /boot partition. However, it was given only 1 MiB? I am assuming that MiB is actually supposed to mean megabyte, no idea why that 'i' is there. It also says the file system is unknown. I read the answer by andrew here, and he says he had to do a custom install, explicitly configuring the boot partition. So I think that maybe Ubuntu's installer has a bug in it, where it does not set up the boot partition correctly if you are not installing on the first hard disk in your computer. I am going to try reinstalling with a custom partition scheme. I read elsewhere (askubuntu won't let me post another link) that I don't even need a /boot partition any more. So instead of following Andrew's instructions ver batim, I'm first going to try having just two partitions: one for /, and another for my 16GB swap space. Both as primary partitions. The first will be formatted as ext4. If that doesn't work, I may try again using /boot. ======================== So I did my custom install with no /boot partition, and it did not work. When I rebooted, I had an error message saying that some address did not exist. So for the hundredth time, I booted from the live USB, and ran boot-repair. Now I get this message GPT detected. Please create a BIOS-Boot partition (>1MB, unformatted filesystem, bios_grub flag). This can be performed via tools such as Gparted. Then try again. I feel like I'm running in circles and nobody will help me.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

  - by Jeff

  This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 2: Platforms and Features

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 2 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. In the previous post I discussed what reasons a company might have for creating a smartphone application.  In this installment I will cover some of history and state of the different platforms as well as features that can be leveraged for building enterprise smartphone applications. Platforms Before you start choosing a platform to develop your solutions on it is good to understand how we got here and what features you can leverage. History To my memory we owe all of this to a product called the Apple Newton that came out in 1987. It was the first PDA and back then I was much more of an Apple fan.  I was very impressed with this device even though it never really went anywhere.  The Palm Pilot by US Robotics was the next major advancement in PDA. It had a simple short hand window that allowed for quick stylus entry.. Later, Windows CE came out and started the broadening of the PDA market. After that it was the Palm and CE operating systems that started showing up on cell phones and for some time these were the two dominant operating systems that were distributed with devices from multiple hardware vendors. Current The iPhone was the first smartphone to take away the stylus and give us a multi-touch interface.  It was a revolution in usability and really changed the attractiveness of smartphones for the general public.  This brought us to the beginning of the current state of the market with the concept of an online store that makes it easy for customers to get new features and functionality on demand. With Android, Google made this more than a one horse race.  Not only did they come to compete, their low cost actually made them the leading OS.  Of course what made Android so attractive also is its major fault.  It is so open that it has been a target for malware which leaves consumers exposed.  Fortunately for Google though, most consumers aren’t aware of the threat that they are under. Although Microsoft had put out one of the first smart phone operating systems with CE it had to play catch up and finally came out with the Windows Phone.  They have gone for a market approach between those of iOS and Android.  They support multiple hardware vendors like Google, but they kept a certification process for applications that is similar to Apple.  They also created a user interface that was different enough to give it a clear separation from the other two platforms. The result of all this is hundreds of millions of smartphones being sold monthly across all three platforms giving us a wide range of choices and challenges when it comes to developing solutions. Features So what are the features that make these devices flexible enough be considered for use in the enterprise? The biggest advantage of today's devices is network connectivity.  The ability to access information from multiple sources at a moment’s notice is critical for businesses.  Add to that the ability to communicate over a variety of text, voice and video modes and we have a powerful starting point. Every smartphone has a cameras and they are not just useful for posting to Instagram. We are seeing more applications such as Bing vision that allow us to scan just about any printed code or text to find information.  These capabilities have been made available to developers in the form of standard libraries for reading barcodes of just about an flavor and optical character recognition (OCR) interpretation. Bluetooth give us the ability to communicate with multiple devices. Whether these are headsets, keyboard or printers the wireless communication capabilities are just starting to evolve.  The more these wireless communication protocols grow, the more opportunities we will see to transfer data between users and a variety of devices. Local storage of information that can be called up even when the device cannot reach the network is the other big capability.  This give users the ability to work offline as well and transmit information when connections are restored. These are the tools that we have to work with to build applications that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage for companies that implement them. Coming Up In the third installment I will cover key concerns that you face when building enterprise smartphone apps. del.icio.us Tags: smartphones,enterprise smartphone Apps,architecture,iOS,Android,Windows Phone

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• Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

  - by charlie.mott

  I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined.  But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose?  Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type.  Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance.  Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works.  Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged.  But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there?  What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

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• What Counts for A DBA - Logic

  - by drsql

  "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who will always wonder why there are only two items in my list and those who will figured it out the first time they saw this very old joke."  Those readers who will give up immediately and get frustrated with me for not explaining it to them are not likely going to be great technical professionals of any sort, much less a programmer or administrator who will be constantly dealing with the common failures that make up a DBA's day.  Many of these people will stare at this like a dog staring at a traffic signal and still have no more idea of how to decipher the riddle. Without explanation they will give up, call the joke "stupid" and, feeling quite superior, walk away indignantly to their job likely flipping patties of meat-by-product. As a data professional or any programmer who has strayed  to this very data-oriented blog, you would, if you are worth your weight in air, either have recognized immediately what was going on, or felt a bit ignorant.  Your friends are chuckling over the joke, but why is it funny? Unfortunately you left your smartphone at home on the dresser because you were up late last night programming and were running late to work (again), so you will either have to fake a laugh or figure it out.  Digging through the joke, you figure out that the word "two" is the most important part, since initially the joke mentioned 10. Hmm, why did they spell out two, but not ten? Maybe 10 could be interpreted a different way?  As a DBA, this sort of logic comes into play every day, and sometimes it doesn't involve nerdy riddles or Star Wars folklore.  When you turn on your computer and get the dreaded blue screen of death, you don't immediately cry to the help desk and sit on your thumbs and whine about not being able to work. Do that and your co-workers will question your nerd-hood; I know I certainly would. You figure out the problem, and when you have it narrowed down, you call the help desk and tell them what the problem is, usually having to explain that yes, you did in fact try to reboot before calling.  Of course, sometimes humility does come in to play when you reach the end of your abilities, but the ‘end of abilities’ is not something any of us recognize readily. It is handy to have the ability to use logic to solve uncommon problems: It becomes especially useful when you are trying to solve a data-related problem such as a query performance issue, and the way that you approach things will tell your coworkers a great deal about your abilities.  The novice is likely to immediately take the approach of  trying to add more indexes or blaming the hardware. As you become more and more experienced, it becomes increasingly obvious that performance issues are a very complex topic. A query may be slow for a myriad of reasons, from concurrency issues, a poor query plan because of a parameter value (like parameter sniffing,) poor coding standards, or just because it is a complex query that is going to be slow sometimes. Some queries that you will deal with may have twenty joins and hundreds of search criteria, and it can take a lot of thought to determine what is going on.  You can usually figure out the problem to almost any query by using basic knowledge of how joins and queries work, together with the help of such things as the query plan, profiler or monitoring tools.  It is not unlikely that it can take a full day’s work to understand some queries, breaking them down into smaller queries to find a very tiny problem. Not every time will you actually find the problem, and it is part of the process to occasionally admit that the problem is random, and everything works fine now.  Sometimes, it is necessary to realize that a problem is outside of your current knowledge, and admit temporary defeat: You can, at least, narrow down the source of the problem by looking logically at all of the possible solutions. By doing this, you can satisfy your curiosity and learn more about what the actual problem was. For example, in the joke, had you never been exposed to the concept of binary numbers, there is no way you could have known that binary - 10 = decimal - 2, but you could have logically come to the conclusion that 10 must not mean ten in the context of the joke, and at that point you are that much closer to getting the joke and at least won't feel so ignorant.

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• Navigate Quickly with JustCode and Ctrl+Click

  Ctrl + Click is a widely used shortcut for Go To Definition in many development environments but not in Visual Studio. We, the JustCode team, find it really useful so we added it to Visual Studio. But we didn't stop there - we improved it even further. Read on to find the details. With JustCode you get an enhanced Go To Definition. By default you can execute it in the Visual Studio editor using one of the following shortcuts: Middle Click, Ctrl+Left Click, F12, Ctrl+Enter, Ctrl+B. The first usage of this feature is not much different from the default Visual Studio Go To Definition command use it where a member, type, method, property, etc is used to navigate to the definition of that item. For example, if you have this method:         public void Start()         {             lion = new Lion();             lion.Roar();         } If you hold Ctrl and click on the usage of the lion you will go to the lion member definition. If you hold Ctrl and click on the Lion you will go to the Lion class definition. What we added is the ability to easily find all the usages of the item you just navigated to. For example:     public class Lion     {         public void Roar()         {             Console.WriteLine("Rhaaaar");         }     }   If you hold Ctrl and click on the Lion definition you will see all the usages of the Lion type; if you click on the Roar method definition you will see all the usages of the Roar method: And if there is only one usage you will get automatically to that usage. In the examples I use C#, but it works also in VB.NET, JavaScript, ASP.NET and XAML. Why we like this feature? Let me first start with how the Ctrl+Click (or Go To Definition command) is used. We noticed that developers use it especially in what we call "code browsing sessions". In simple words this is when you browse around the code looking for a bug, just reading the code or searching for something. Sounds familiar? In our experience when you go to the definition of some item you often want to know more about it and the first thing you need is to find its usages. With JustCode this is just one click away. Why Ctrl+Click/Middle Click over F12/Ctrl+Enter/Ctrl+B? Actually you can use all of them. But during these "code browsing sessions" we noticed that most developers use the mouse. So the mouse is already in use and pressing Ctrl+Click (or the Middle Click) is so natural. During heavy coding sessions or if you are a keyboard type developer F12 (or any of the other keyboard shortcuts) is the key. We really use heavily this feature not only in our team but in the whole company. It saves us a bit of time many times a day. And it adds up. We hope you will like it too. Your feedback is more than welcome for us. P.S. If you dont want JustCode to capture the Ctrl+Click and the Middle Click in the editor, you can change that in JustCode->Options->General in the Navigation group. Keyboard shortcuts can be reassigned using the Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts editor.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How to Hashtag (Without Being #Annoying)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The right tool in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. Giving a chimpanzee a chain saw would not be a pretty picture. And putting Twitter hashtags in the hands of social marketers who were never really sure how to use them can be equally unattractive. Boiled down, hashtags are for search and organization of tweets. A notch up from that, they can also be used as part of a marketing strategy. In terms of search, if you’re in the organic apple business, you want anyone who searches “organic” on Twitter to see your posts about your apples. It’s keyword tactics not unlike web site keyword search tactics. So get a clear idea of what keywords are relevant for your tweet. It’s reasonable to include #organic in your tweet. Is it fatal if you don’t hashtag the word? It depends on the person searching. If they search “organic,” your tweet’s going to come up even if you didn’t put the hashtag in front of it. If the searcher enters “#organic,” your tweet needs the hashtag. Err on the side of caution and hashtag it so it comes up no matter how the searcher enters it. You’ll also want to hashtag it for the second big reason people hashtag, organization. You can follow a hashtag. So can the rest of the Twitterverse. If you’re that into organic munchies, you can set up a stream populated only with tweets hashtagged #organic. If you’ve established a hashtag for your brand, like #nobugsprayapples, you (and everyone else) can watch what people are tweeting about your company. So what kind of hashtags should you include? They should be directly related to the core message of your tweet. Ancillary or very loosely-related hashtags = annoying. Hashtagging your brand makes sense. Hashtagging your core area of interest makes sense. Creating a specific event or campaign hashtag you want others to include and spread makes sense (the burden is on you to promote it and get it going). Hashtagging nearly every word in the tweet is highly annoying. Far and away, the majority of hashtagged words in such tweets have no relevance, are not terms that would be searched, and are not terms needed for categorization. It looks desperate and spammy. Two is fine. One is better. And it is possible to tweet with --gasp-- no hashtags! Make your hashtags as short as you can. In fact, if your brand’s name really is #nobugsprayapples, you’re burning up valuable, limited characters and risking the inability of others to retweet with added comments. Also try to narrow your topic hashtag down. You’ll find a lot of relevant users with #organic, but a lot of totally uninterested users with #food. Just as you can join online forums and gain credibility and a reputation by contributing regularly to that forum, you can follow hashtagged topics and gain the same kind of credibility in your area of expertise. Don’t just parachute in for the occasional marketing message. And if you’re constantly retweeting one particular person, stop it. It’s kissing up and it’s obvious. Which brings us to the king of hashtag annoyances, “hashjacking.” This is when you see what terms are hot and include them in your marketing tweet as a hashtag, even though it’s unrelated to your content. Justify it all you want, but #justinbieber has nothing to do with your organic apples. Equally annoying, piggybacking on a popular event’s hashtag to tweet something not connected to the event. You’re only fostering ill will and mistrust toward your account from the people you’ve tricked into seeing your tweet. Lastly, don’t @ mention people just to make sure they see your tweet. If the tweet’s not for them or about them, it’s spammy. What I haven’t covered is use of the hashtag for comedy’s sake. You’ll see this a lot and is a matter of personal taste. No one will search these hashtagged terms or need to categorize then, they’re just there for self-expression and laughs. Twitter is, after all, supposed to be fun.  What are some of your biggest Twitter pet peeves? #blogsovernow

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• Modifying the SL/WIF Integration Bits to support Issued Token Credentials

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  The SL/WIF integration code that ships with the Identity Training Kit only supports Windows and UserName credentials to request tokens from an STS. This is fine for simple single STS scenarios (like a single IdP). But the more common pattern for claims/token based systems is to split the STS roles into an IdP and a Resource STS (or whatever you wanna call it). In this case, the 2nd leg requires to present the issued token from the 1st leg – this is not directly supported by the bits. But they can be easily modified to accomplish this. The Credential Fist we need a class that represents an issued token credential. Here we store the RSTR that got returned from the client to IdP request: public class IssuedTokenCredentials : IRequestCredentials {     public string IssuedToken { get; set; }     public RequestSecurityTokenResponse RSTR { get; set; }     public IssuedTokenCredentials(RequestSecurityTokenResponse rstr)     {         RSTR = rstr;         IssuedToken = rstr.RequestedSecurityToken.RawToken;     } } The Binding Next we need a binding to be used with issued token credential requests. This assumes you have an STS endpoint for mixed mode security with SecureConversation turned off. public class WSTrustBindingIssuedTokenMixed : WSTrustBinding {     public WSTrustBindingIssuedTokenMixed()     {         this.Elements.Add( new HttpsTransportBindingElement() );     } } WSTrustClient The last step is to make some modifications to WSTrustClient to make it issued token aware. In the constructor you have to check for the credential type, and if it is an issued token, store it away. private RequestSecurityTokenResponse _rstr; public WSTrustClient( Binding binding, EndpointAddress remoteAddress, IRequestCredentials credentials )     : base( binding, remoteAddress ) {     if ( null == credentials )     {         throw new ArgumentNullException( "credentials" );     }     if (credentials is UsernameCredentials)     {         UsernameCredentials usernname = credentials as UsernameCredentials;         base.ChannelFactory.Credentials.UserName.UserName = usernname.Username;         base.ChannelFactory.Credentials.UserName.Password = usernname.Password;     }     else if (credentials is IssuedTokenCredentials)     {         var issuedToken = credentials as IssuedTokenCredentials;         _rstr = issuedToken.RSTR;     }     else if (credentials is WindowsCredentials)     { }     else     {         throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("credentials", "type was not expected");     } } Next – when WSTrustClient constructs the RST message to the STS, the issued token header must be embedded when needed: private Message BuildRequestAsMessage( RequestSecurityToken request ) {     var message = Message.CreateMessage( base.Endpoint.Binding.MessageVersion ?? MessageVersion.Default,       IssueAction,       (BodyWriter) new WSTrustRequestBodyWriter( request ) );     if (_rstr != null)     {         message.Headers.Add(new IssuedTokenHeader(_rstr));     }     return message; } HTH

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• Why won't USB 3.0 external hard drive run at USB 3.0 speeds?

  - by jgottula

  I recently purchased a PCI Express x1 USB 3.0 controller card (containing the NEC USB 3.0 controller) with the intent of using a USB 3.0 external hard drive with my Linux box. I installed the card in an empty PCIe slot on my motherboard, connected the card to a power cable, strung a USB 3.0 cable between one of the new ports and my external HDD, and connected the HDD to a wall socket for power. Booting the system, the drive works 100% as intended, with the one exception of throughput: rather than using SuperSpeed 4.8 Gbps connectivity, it seems to be falling back to High Speed 480 Mbps USB 2.0-style throughput. Disk Utility shows it as a 480 Mbps device, and running a couple Disk Utility and dd benchmarks confirms that the drive fails to exceed ~40 MB/s (the approximate limit of USB 2.0), despite it being an SSD capable of far more than that. When I connect my USB 3.0 HDD, dmesg shows this: [ 3923.280018] usb 3-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6 where I would expect to find this: [ 3923.280018] usb 3-2: new SuperSpeed USB device using xhci_hcd and address 6 My system was running on kernel 2.6.35-25-generic at the time. Then, I stumbled upon this forum thread by an individual who found that a bug, which was present in kernels prior to 2.6.37-rc5, could be the culprit for this type of problem. Consequently, I installed the 2.6.37-generic mainline Ubuntu kernel to determine if the problem would go away. It didn't, so I tried 2.6.38-rc3-generic, and even the 2.6.38 nightly from 2010.02.01, to no avail. In short, I'm trying to determine why, with USB 3.0 support in the kernel, my USB 3.0 drive fails to run at full SuperSpeed throughput. See the comments under this question for additional details. Output that might be relevant to the problem (when booting from 2.6.38-rc3): Relevant lines from dmesg: [ 19.589491] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [ 19.589512] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 19.589516] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: xHCI Host Controller [ 19.589623] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 12 [ 19.650492] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: irq 17, io mem 0xf8100000 [ 19.650556] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: irq 47 for MSI/MSI-X [ 19.650560] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: irq 48 for MSI/MSI-X [ 19.650563] xhci_hcd 0000:03:00.0: irq 49 for MSI/MSI-X [ 19.653946] xHCI xhci_add_endpoint called for root hub [ 19.653948] xHCI xhci_check_bandwidth called for root hub Relevant section of sudo lspci -v: 03:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 30) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17 Memory at f8100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [70] MSI: Enable- Count=1/8 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=8 Masked- Capabilities: [a0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff Capabilities: [150] #18 Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd Kernel modules: xhci-hcd Relevant section of sudo lsusb -v: Bus 012 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 3.00 bDeviceClass 9 Hub bDeviceSubClass 0 Unused bDeviceProtocol 3 bMaxPacketSize0 9 idVendor 0x1d6b Linux Foundation idProduct 0x0003 3.0 root hub bcdDevice 2.06 iManufacturer 3 Linux 2.6.38-020638rc3-generic xhci_hcd iProduct 2 xHCI Host Controller iSerial 1 0000:03:00.0 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 25 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0xe0 Self Powered Remote Wakeup MaxPower 0mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 1 bInterfaceClass 9 Hub bInterfaceSubClass 0 Unused bInterfaceProtocol 0 Full speed (or root) hub iInterface 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0004 1x 4 bytes bInterval 12 Hub Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 41 nNbrPorts 4 wHubCharacteristic 0x0009 Per-port power switching Per-port overcurrent protection TT think time 8 FS bits bPwrOn2PwrGood 10 * 2 milli seconds bHubContrCurrent 0 milli Ampere DeviceRemovable 0x00 PortPwrCtrlMask 0xff Hub Port Status: Port 1: 0000.0100 power Port 2: 0000.0100 power Port 3: 0000.0100 power Port 4: 0000.0100 power Device Status: 0x0003 Self Powered Remote Wakeup Enabled Full, non-verbose lsusb: Bus 012 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 011 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 010 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 009 Device 003: ID 04d9:0702 Holtek Semiconductor, Inc. Bus 009 Device 002: ID 046d:c068 Logitech, Inc. G500 Laser Mouse Bus 009 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 006: ID 174c:5106 ASMedia Technology Inc. Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0bda:0151 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Storage Device (Multicard Reader) Bus 003 Device 002: ID 058f:6366 Alcor Micro Corp. Multi Flash Reader Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 006: ID 1687:0163 Kingmax Digital Inc. Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 046d:081b Logitech, Inc. Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Full output: full dmesg full lspci full lsusb

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• UK OUG Conference Highlights and Insights

  - by Richard Bingham

  As per my preemptive post, this was the first time the annual conference organized by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) was split into two events, one for Oracle Applications and another in December for Oracle Technology. Apps13, as it was branded, was hailed as a success, with over 1000 registered attendees and three days of sessions, exhibition, round-tables and many other types of content. As this poster on their stand illustrates, the UKOUG is a strong community with popular participants from both big and small Oracle partners and customers. The venue was a more intimate setting than previous years also, allowing everyone to casually bump into those they hoped to. It gave a real feeling of an Apps Community. The main themes over the days where CRM and Customer Experience, HCM, and FIN/SCM. This allowed people to attend just one focused day if they wanted. In addition the Apps Transformation stream ran across all three days, offering insights, advice, and details on the newer product solutions like Fusion Applications.  Here are some of the key take-aways I got from the conference, specific to my role in Fusion Applications Developer Relations: User Experience continues to be a significant reason for adopting some of the newer application products available, with immediately obvious gains in user productivity and satisfaction reported by customers. Also this doesn't stop with the baked-in UX either, with their Design Patterns proving popular and indeed currently being extended to including things like extending on ADF mobile and customizing the Simplified UI. More on this to come from us soon. The executive sessions emphasized the "it's a journey" phrase, illustrating that modern business applications are powered by technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data and these can be harnessed to help propel your organization forward. Indeed the emphasis is away from the traditional vendor prescribed linear applications road map, and towards plotting a course based on business priorities supported by a broad range of integrated solutions. To help with this several conference sessions demoed the new "Applications Navigator" tool, developed in partnership with OUG members, which offers a visual framework to help organizations plan their Oracle Applications investments around business and technology imperatives. Initial reaction was positive, especially as customers do not need to decipher Oracle's huge product catalog and embeds the best blend of proven and integrated applications solutions. We'll share more on this when it is generally available. Several sessions focused around explanations and interpretation of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, helping highlight the key Oracle Applications messages and directions. With a relative small percentage of conference attendees also at OpenWorld (from a show of hands) this was a popular way to distill the information available down into specific items of interest for the community. Please note the original OpenWorld 2013 content is still available for download but will not remain available forever (via the Oracle website OpenWorld Content Catalog > pick a session > see the PDF download). With the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 the move to develop and deploy on the Fusion Middleware stack becomes a reality for many Oracle Applications customers. This coupled with recent E-Business Suite features such as the Integrated SOA Gateway and the E-Business Suite SDK for Java, illustrates how the gap between the technologies and techniques involved in extending E-Business Suite and Fusion Applications is quickly narrowing. We'll see this merging continue to evolve going forwards. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Applications is actually easier than many customers expected, with a broad selection of both large and medium sized organizations explaining how they added new features to their existing Oracle Applications portfolios. New functionality available from Fusion HCM and CX are popular extensions that do not have to disrupt those core business services. Coexistence is the buzzword here, and the available integration is also simpler than many expected, commonly involving an initial setup data load, then regularly incremental synchronizations, often without a need for real-time constant communication between systems. With much of this pre-built already the implementation process is also quite rapid. With most people dressed in suits, we wanted to get the conversations going without the traditional english reserve, so we decided to make ourselves a bit more obvious, as the photo below shows. This seemed to be quite successful and helped those interested identify and approach us. Keep a look out for similar again. In fact if you're in the UK there is an "Apps Transformation Day" planned by the UKOUG for the 19th March 2014, with more details to follow. Again something we'll be sure to participate in. I am hoping to attend the next half of the UKOUG annual conference, Tech13, that focuses more on Oracle technology and where there is more likely to be larger attendance of those interested in the lower-level aspects of applications customization and development. If you're going, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• Windows 8 for productivity?

  - by Charles Young

  At long last I’ve started using Windows 8.  I boot from a VHD on which I have installed Office, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.  For a week, now, I’ve been happily writing code and documents and using Visio and PowerPoint.  I am, very much, a ‘productivity’ user rather than a content consumer.   I spend my days flitting between countless windows and browser tabs displayed across dual monitors.  I need to access a lot of different functionality and information in as fluid a fashion as possible. With that in mind, and like so many others, I was worried about Windows 8.  The Metro interface is primarily about content consumption on touch-enabled screens, and not really geared for people like me sitting in front of an 8-core non-touch laptop and an additional Samsung monitor.  I still use a mouse, not my finger.  And I create more than I consume. Clearly, Windows 8 won’t be viable for people like me unless Metro keeps out of my hair when using productivity and development tools.  With this in mind, I had long expected Microsoft to provide some mechanism for switching Metro off.  There was a registry hack in last year’s Developer Preview, but this capability has been removed.   That’s brave.  So, how have things worked out so far? Well, I am really quite surprised.  When I played with the Developer Preview last year, it was clear that Metro was unfinished and didn’t play well enough with the desktop.  Obviously I expected things to improve, but the context switching from desktop to full-screen seemed a heavy burden to place on users.  That sense of abrupt change hasn’t entirely gone away (how could it), but after a few days, I can’t say that I find it burdensome or irritating.   I’ve got used very quickly to ‘gesturing’ with my mouse at the bottom or top right corners of the screen to move between applications, using the Windows key to toggle the Start screen and generally finding my way around.   I am surprised at how effective the Start screen is, given the rather basic grouping features it provides.  Of course, I had to take control of it and sort things the way I want.  If anything, though, the Start screen provides a better navigation and application launcher tool than the old Start menu. What I didn’t expect was the way that Metro enhances the productivity story.  As I write this, I’ve got my desktop open with a maximised Word window.  However, the desktop extends only across about 85% of the width of my screen.  On the left hand side, I have a column that displays the new Metro email client.  This is currently showing me a list of emails for my main work account.  I can flip easily between different accounts and read my email within that same column.  As I work on documents, I want to be able to monitor my inbox with a quick glance. The desktop, of course, has its own snap feature.  I could run the desktop full screen and bring up Outlook and Word side by side.  However, this doesn’t begin to approach the convenience of snapping the Metro email client.  Consider that when I snap a window on the desktop, it initially takes up 50% of the screen.  Outlook doesn’t really know anything about snap, and doesn’t adjust to make effective use of the limited screen estate.  Even at 50% screen width, it is difficult to use, so forget about trying to use it in a Metro fashion. In any case, I am left with the prospect of having to manually adjust everything to view my email effectively alongside Word.  Worse, there is nothing stopping another window from overlapping and obscuring my email.  It becomes a struggle to keep sight of email as it arrives.  Of course, there is always ‘toast’ to notify me when things arrive, but if Outlook is obscured, this just feels intrusive. The beauty of the Metro snap feature is that my email reader now exists outside of my desktop.   The Metro app has been crafted to work well in the fixed width column as well as in full-screen.  It cannot be obscured by overlapping windows.  I still get notifications if I wish.  More importantly, it is clear that careful attention has been given to how things work when moving between applications when ‘snapped’.  If I decide, say to flick over to the Metro newsreader to catch up with current affairs, my desktop, rather than my email client, obligingly makes way for the reader.  With a simple gesture and click, or alternatively by pressing Windows-Tab, my desktop reappears. Another pleasant surprise is the way Windows 8 handles dual monitors.  It’s not just the fact that both screens now display the desktop task bar.  It’s that I can so easily move between Metro and the desktop on either screen.  I can only have Metro on one screen at a time which makes entire sense given the ‘full-screen’ nature of Metro apps.  Using dual monitors feels smoother and easier than previous versions of Windows. Overall then, I’m enjoying the Windows 8 improvements.  Strangely, for all the hype (“Windows reimagined”, etc.), my perception as a ‘productivity’ user is more one of evolution than revolution.  It all feels very familiar, but just better.

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• 2012&ndash;The End Of The World Review

  - by Tim Murphy

  The end of the world must be coming.  Not because the Mayan calendar says so, but because Microsoft is innovating more than Apple.  It has been a crazy year, with pundits declaring not that the end of the world is coming, but that the end of Microsoft is coming.  Let’s take a look at what 2012 has brought us. The beginning of year is a blur.  I managed to get to TechEd in June which was the first time that I got to take a deep dive into Windows 8 and many other things that had been announced in 2011.  The promise I saw in these products was really encouraging.  The thought of being able to run Windows 8 from a thumb drive or have Hyper-V native to the OS told me that at least for developers good things were coming. I finally got my feet wet with Windows 8 with the developer preview just prior to the RTM.  While the initial experience was a bit of a culture shock I quickly grew to love it.  The media still seems to hold little love for the “reimagined” platform, but I think that once people spend some time with it they will enjoy the experience and what the FUD mongers say will fade into the background.  With the launch of the OS we finally got a look at the Surface.  I think this is a bold entry into the tablet market.  While I wish it was a little more affordable I am already starting to see them in the wild being used by non-techies. I was waiting for Windows Phone 8 at least as much as Windows 8, probably more.  The new hardware, better marketing and new OS features I think are going to finally push us to the point of having a real presence in the smartphone market.  I am seeing a number of iPhone users picking up a Nokia Lumia 920 and getting rid of their brand new iPhone 5.  The only real debacle that I saw around the launch was when they held back the SDK from general developers. Shortly after the launch events came Build 2012.  I was extremely disappointed that I didn’t make it to this year’s Build.  Even if they weren’t handing out Surface and Lumia devices I think the atmosphere and content were something that really needed to be experience in person.  Hopefully there will be a Build next year and it’s schedule will be announced soon.  As you would expect Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development were the mainstay of the conference, but improvements in Azure also played a key role.  This movement of services to the cloud will continue and we need to understand where it best fits into the solutions we build. Lower on the radar this year were Office 2013, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012.  Their glory stolen by the consumer OS and hardware announcements, these new releases are no less important.  Companies will see significant improvements in performance and capabilities if they upgrade.  At TechEd they had shown some of the new features of Windows Server 2012 around hardware integration and Hyper-V performance which absolutely blew me away.  It is our job to bring these important improvements to our company’s attention so that they can be leveraged. Personally, the consulting business in 2012 was the busiest it has been in a long time.  More companies were ready to attack new projects after several years of putting them on the back burner.  I also worked to bring back momentum to the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Both the community and clients are excited about the new technologies that have come out in 2012 and now it is time to deliver. What does 2013 have in store.  I don’t see it be quite as exciting as 2012.  Microsoft will be releasing the Surface Pro in January and it seems that we will see more frequent OS update for Windows.  There are rumors that we may see a Surface phone in 2013.  It has also been announced that there will finally be a rework of the XBox next fall.  The new year will also be a time for us in the development community to take advantage of these new tools and devices.  After all, it is what we build on top of these platforms that will attract more consumers and corporations to using them. Just as I am 99.999% sure that the world is not going to end this year, I am also sure that Microsoft will move on and that most of this negative backlash from the media is actually fear and jealousy.  In the end I think we have a promising year ahead of us. del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft,Pundits,Mayans,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Surface

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• What to leave when you're leaving

  - by BuckWoody

  There's already a post on this topic - sort of. I read this entry, where the author did a good job on a few steps, but I found that a few other tips might be useful, so if you want to check that one out and then this post, you might be able to put together your own plan for when you leave your job.  I once took over the system administrator (of which the Oracle and SQL Server servers were a part) at a mid-sized firm. The outgoing administrator had about a two- week-long scheduled overlap with me, but was angry at the company and told me "hey, I know this is going to be hard on you, but I want them to know how important I was. I'm not telling you where anything is or what the passwords are. Good luck!" He then quit that day. It took me about three days to find all of the servers and crack the passwords. Yes, the company tried to take legal action against the guy and all that, but he moved back to his home country and so largely got away with it. Obviously, this isn't the way to leave a job. Many of us have changed jobs in the past, and most of us try to be very professional about the transition to a new team, regardless of the feelings about a particular company. I've been treated badly at a firm, but that is no reason to leave a mess for someone else. So here's what you should put into place at a minimum before you go. Most of this is common sense - which of course isn't very common these days - and another good rule is just to ask yourself "what would I want to know"? The article I referenced at the top of this post focuses on a lot of documentation of the systems. I think that's fine, but in actuality, I really don't need that. Even with this kind of documentation, I still perform a full audit on the systems, so in the end I create my own system documentation. There are actually only four big items I need to know to get started with the systems: 1. Where is everything/everybody?The first thing I need to know is where all of the systems are. I mean not only the street address, but the closet or room, the rack number, the IU number in the rack, the SAN luns, all that. A picture here is worth a thousand words, which is why I really like Visio. It combines nice graphics, full text and all that. But use whatever you have to tell someone the physical locations of the boxes. Also, tell them the physical location of the folks in charge of those boxes (in case you aren't) or who share that responsibility. And by "where" in this case, I mean names and phones.  2. What do they do?For both the servers and the people, tell them what they do. If it's a database server, detail what each database does and what application goes to that, and who "owns" that application. In my mind, this is one of hte most important things a Data Professional needs to know. In the case of the other administrtors or co-owners, document each person's responsibilities.   3. What are the credentials?Logging on/in and gaining access to the buildings are things that the new Data Professional will need to do to successfully complete their job. This means service accounts, certificates, all of that. The first thing they should do, of course, is change the passwords on all that, but the first thing they need is the ability to do that!  4. What is out of the ordinary?This is the most tricky, and perhaps the next most important thing to know. Did you have to use a "special" driver for that video card on server X? Is the person that co-owns an application with you mentally unstable (like me) or have special needs, like "don't talk to Buck before he's had coffee. Nothing will make any sense"? Do you have service pack requirements for a specific setup? Write all that down. Anything that took you a day or longer to make work is probably a candidate here. This is my short list - anything you care to add? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Exiting a reboot loop

  - by user12617035

  If you're in a situation where the system is panic'ing during boot, you can use # boot net -s to regain control of your system. In my case, I'd added some diagnostic code to a (PCI) driver (that is used to boot the root filesystem). There was a bug in the driver, and each time during boot, the bug occurred, and so caused the system to panic: ... 000000000180b950 genunix:vfs_mountroot+60 (800, 200, 0, 185d400, 1883000, 18aec00) %l0-3: 0000000000001770 0000000000000640 0000000001814000 00000000000008fc %l4-7: 0000000001833c00 00000000018b1000 0000000000000600 0000000000000200 000000000180ba10 genunix:main+98 (18141a0, 1013800, 18362c0, 18ab800, 180e000, 1814000) %l0-3: 0000000070002000 0000000000000001 000000000180c000 000000000180e000 %l4-7: 0000000000000001 0000000001074800 0000000000000060 0000000000000000 skipping system dump - no dump device configured rebooting... If you're logged in via the console, you can send a BREAK sequence in order to gain control of the firmware's (OBP's) prompt. Enter Ctrl-Shift-[ in order to get the TELNET prompt. Once telnet has control, enter this: telnet> send brk You'll be presented with OBP's prompt: ok You then enter the following in order to boot into single-user mode via the network: ok boot net -s Note that booting from the network under Solaris will implicitly cause the system to be INSTALLED with whatever software had last been configured to be installed. However, we are using boot net -s as a "handle" with which to get at the Solaris prompt. Once at that prompt, we can perform actions as root that will let us back out our buggy driver (ok... MY buggy driver :-)) ...and replace it with the original, non-buggy driver. Entering the boot command caused the following output, as well as left us at the Solaris prompt (in single-user-mode): Sun Blade 1500, No Keyboard Copyright 1998-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.16.4, 1024 MB memory installed, Serial #53463393. Ethernet address 0:3:ba:2f:c9:61, Host ID: 832fc961. Rebooting with command: boot net -s Boot device: /pci@1f,700000/network@2 File and args: -s 1000 Mbps FDX Link up Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet 4000 1000 Mbps FDX Link up Requesting Internet address for 0:3:ba:2f:c9:61 SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_118833-17 64-bit Copyright 1983-2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms. Booting to milestone "milestone/single-user:default". Configuring devices. Using RPC Bootparams for network configuration information. Attempting to configure interface bge0... Configured interface bge0 Requesting System Maintenance Mode SINGLE USER MODE # Our goal is to now move to the directory containing the buggy driver and replace it with the original driver (that we had saved away before ever loading our buggy driver! :-) However, since we booted from the network, the root filesystem ("/") is NOT mounted on one of our local disks. It is mounted on an NFS filesystem exported by our install server. To verify this, enter the following command: # mount | head -1 / on my-server:/export/install/media/s10u2/solarisdvd.s10s_u2dvd/latest/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot remote/read/write/setuid/devices/dev=4ac0001 on Wed Dec 31 16:00:00 1969 As a result, we have to create a temporary mount point and then mount the local disk onto that mount point: # mkdir /tmp/mnt # mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/mnt Note that your system will not necessarily have had its root filesystem on "c0t0d0s0". This is something that you should also have recorded before you ever loaded your.. er... "my" buggy driver! :-) One can find the local disk mounted under the root filesystem by entering: # df -k / Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 76703839 4035535 71901266 6% / To continue with our example, we can now move to the directory of buggy-driver in order to replace it with the original driver. Note that /tmp/mnt is prefixed to the path of where we'd "normally" find the driver: # cd /tmp/mnt/platform/sun4u/kernel/drv/sparcv9 # ls -l pci\* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 288504 Dec 6 15:38 pcisch -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 288504 Dec 6 15:38 pcisch.aar -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 211616 Jun 8 2006 pcisch.orig # cp -p pcisch.orig pcisch We can now synchronize any in-memory filesystem data structures with those on disk... and then reboot. The system will then boot correctly... as expected: # sync;sync # reboot syncing file systems... done Sun Blade 1500, No Keyboard Copyright 1998-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.16.4, 1024 MB memory installed, Serial #xxxxxxxx. Ethernet address 0:3:ba:2f:c9:61, Host ID: yyyyyyyy. Rebooting with command: boot Boot device: /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/disk@0,0:a File and args: SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_118833-17 64-bit Copyright 1983-2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms. Hostname: my-host NIS domain name is my-campus.Central.Sun.COM my-host console login: ...so that's how it's done! Of course, the easier way is to never write a buggy-driver... but.. then.. we all "have an eraser on the end of each of our pencils"... don't we ? :-) "...thank you... and good night..."

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• Determining the angle to fire a shot when target and shooter moves, and bullet moves with shooter velocity added in

  - by Azaral

  I saw this question: Predicting enemy position in order to have an object lead its target and followed the link in the answer to stack overflow. In the stack overflow page I used the 2nd answer, the one that is a large mathematical derivation. My situation is a little different though. My first question though is will the answer provided in the stack overflow page even work to begin with, assuming the original circumstances of moving target and stationary shooter. My situation is a little different than that situation. My target moves, the shooter moves, and the bullets from the shooter start off with the velocities in x and y added to the bullets' x and y velocities. If you are sliding to the right, the bullets will remain in front of you as you move so as long as your velocity remains constant. What I'm trying to do is to get the enemy to be able to determine where they need to shoot in order to hit the player. Unless the player and enemy is stationary, the velocity from the ship adding to the velocity of the bullets will cause a miss. I'd rather like to prevent that. I used the formula in the stack overflow answer and did what I thought were the appropriate adjustments. I've been banging at this for the last four hours and I just can't make it click. It is probably something really simple and boneheaded that I am missing (that seems to be a lot of my problems lately). Here is the solution presented from the stack overflow answer: It boils down to solving a quadratic equation of the form: a * sqr(x) + b * x + c == 0 Note that by sqr I mean square, as opposed to square root. Use the following values: a := sqr(target.velocityX) + sqr(target.velocityY) - sqr(projectile_speed) b := 2 * (target.velocityX * (target.startX - cannon.X) + target.velocityY * (target.startY - cannon.Y)) c := sqr(target.startX - cannon.X) + sqr(target.startY - cannon.Y) Now we can look at the discriminant to determine if we have a possible solution. disc := sqr(b) - 4 * a * c If the discriminant is less than 0, forget about hitting your target -- your projectile can never get there in time. Otherwise, look at two candidate solutions: t1 := (-b + sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) t2 := (-b - sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) Note that if disc == 0 then t1 and t2 are equal. If there are no other considerations such as intervening obstacles, simply choose the smaller positive value. (Negative t values would require firing backward in time to use!) Substitute the chosen t value back into the target's position equations to get the coordinates of the leading point you should be aiming at: aim.X := t * target.velocityX + target.startX aim.Y := t * target.velocityY + target.startY Here is my code, after being corrected by Sam Hocevar (thank you again for your help!). It still doesn't work. For some reason it never enters the section of code inside the if(disc = 0) (obviously because it is always less than zero but...). However, if I plug the numbers from my game log on the enemy and player positions and velocities it outputs a valid firing solution. I have looked at the code side by side a couple of times now and I can't find any differences. There has got to be something simple I'm missing here. If someone else could look at this code and determine what is going on here I'd appreciate it. I know it's not going through that section because if it were, shouldShoot would become true and the enemy would be blasting away at the player. This section calls the function in question, CalculateShootHeading() if(shouldMove) { UseEngines(); } x += xVelocity; y += yVelocity; CalculateShootHeading(); if(shouldShoot) { ShootWeapons(); } UpdateWeapons(); This is CalculateShootHeading(). This is inside the enemy class so x and y are the enemy's x and y and the same with velocity. One output from my game log gives Player X = 2108, Player Y = -180.956, Player X velocity = 10.9949, Player Y Velocity = -6.26017, Enemy X = 1988.31, Enemy Y = -339.051, Enemy X velocity = 1.81666, Enemy Y velocity = -9.67762, 0 enemy projectiles. The output from the console tester is Bullet position = 2210.49, -239.313 and Player Position = 2210.49, -239.313. This doesn't make any sense. The only thing that could be different is the code or the input into my function in the game and I've checked that and I don't think that it is wrong as it's updated before this and never changed. float const bulletSpeed = 30.f; float const dx = playerX - x; float const dy = playerY - y; float const vx = playerXVelocity - xVelocity; float const vy = playerYVelocity - yVelocity; float const a = vx * vx + vy * vy - bulletSpeed * bulletSpeed; float const b = 2.f * (vx * dx + vy * dy); float const c = dx * dx + dy * dy; float const disc = b * b - 4.f * a * c; shouldShoot = false; if (disc >= 0.f) { float t0 = (-b - std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); float t1 = (-b + std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); if (t0 < 0.f || (t1 < t0 && t1 >= 0.f)) { t0 = t1; } if (t0 >= 0.f) { float shootx = vx + dx / t0; float shooty = vy + dy / t0; heading = std::atan2(shooty, shootx) * RAD2DEGREE; } shouldShoot = true; }

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• "Mega Menus" for SEO [duplicate]

  - by Thought Space Designs

  This question already has an answer here: How do I handle having to many links on a webpage because of my menu 4 answers I'm using the term "Mega Menus" loosely here. I'm redesigning my WordPress site (it's going to be responsive), and as part of the redesign, I was debating incorporating some sort of descriptive menu setup. For example, normal navigation drop down menus come in the form of unordered lists of links like so: <nav> <ul> <li> <a href="#">Link1</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Link2</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Link3</a> <ul> <li> <a href="#">Sub Link1</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Sub Link2</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Sub Link3</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li> <a href="#">Link4</a> </li> </ul> </nav> What I'm looking to do is build my drop down menus with more information than your standard menu. For example, I have a top level link named "Team", and under that link, I want to make a large drop down that contains head shots, headers (in the form of styled p tags) and brief (<100 words) descriptions of each team member (only 2 currently). I want to accompany this with a "Read More" link that takes you to their actual team page. This is just one example, of course, and the other top level links would also have descriptive drop downs in the same fashion. On mobile, I was planning on hiding the "mega menu", and delivering a standard unordered list of links. Here's what I was thinking for overall structure and syntax: <nav> <ul> <li> <a href="#">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">About</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Team</a> <ul> <!-- DESKTOP --> <li class="mega-menu row"> <a class="col-sm-6" href="#"> <div class="row"> <div class="col-sm-4"> <img src="#" alt="Team Member 1" /> </div> <div class="col-sm-8"> <p class="header">Team Member 1</p> <p>Short description goes here.</p> </div> </div> </a> <a class="col-sm-6" href="#"> <!-- OTHER TEAM MEMBER INFO --> </a> </li> <!-- END DESKTOP --> <!-- MOBILE --> <li> <a href="#">Team Member 1</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Team Member 2</a> </li> <!-- END MOBILE --> </ul> </li> <li> <a href="#">Contact</a> </li> </ul> </nav> Can anybody think of any potential SEO ramifications of doing this? I'm not going to be loading these menus full of links, so it shouldn't hurt page rank, but what are the effects of having a good bit of text and maybe even forms within nav elements? Is there such a thing as overloading nav with HTML? EDIT: Here's an example of what the menu would look like rendered on desktop. I'm currently hovering the "Team" menu, but you can't see because my mouse went away when I took the screenshot. EDIT 2: This question is not a duplicate. I'm not going to have "too many" links in my menus. I'm wondering how having images and text inside of header navigation will affect my menus. Also, I don't just want "yes, this is bad" answers. Please cite your sources and be specific with reasoning.

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• migrating Solaris to RH: network latency issue, tcp window size & other tcp parameters

  - by Bastien

  Hello I have a client/server app (Java) that I'm migrating from Solaris to RH Linux. since I started running it in RH, I noticed some issues related to latency. I managed to isolate the problem that looks like this: client sends 5 messages (32 bytes each) in a row (same application timestamp) to the server. server echos messages. client receives replies and prints round trip time for each msg. in Solaris, all is well: I get ALL 5 replies at the same time, roughly 80ms after having sent original messages (client & server are several thousands miles away from each other: my ping RTT is 80ms, all normal). in RH, first 3 messages are echoed normally (they arrive 80ms after they've been sent), however the following 2 arrive 80ms later (so total 160ms RTT). the pattern is always the same. clearly looked like a TCP problem. on my solaris box, I had previously configured the tcp stack with 2 specific options: disable nagle algorithm globally set tcp_deferred_acks_max to 0 on RH, it's not possible to disable nagle globally, but I disabled it on all of my apps' sockets (TCP_NODELAY). so I started playing with tcpdump (on the server machine), and compared both outputs: SOLARIS: 22 2.085645 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=111 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_1 RCV" 23 2.085680 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [ACK] Seq=106 Ack=133 Win=50400 Len=0 24 2.085908 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=133 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_2 RCV" 25 2.085925 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [ACK] Seq=106 Ack=155 Win=50400 Len=0 26 2.086175 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=155 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_3 RCV" 27 2.086192 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [ACK] Seq=106 Ack=177 Win=50400 Len=0 28 2.086243 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [PSH, ACK] Seq=106 Ack=177 Win=50400 Len=21 "MSG_1 ECHO" 29 2.086440 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=177 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_4 RCV" 30 2.086454 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [ACK] Seq=127 Ack=199 Win=50400 Len=0 31 2.086659 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [PSH, ACK] Seq=127 Ack=199 Win=50400 Len=21 "MSG_2 ECHO" 32 2.086708 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=199 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_5 RCV" 33 2.086721 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [ACK] Seq=148 Ack=221 Win=50400 Len=0 34 2.086947 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [PSH, ACK] Seq=148 Ack=221 Win=50400 Len=21 "MSG_3 ECHO" 35 2.087196 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [PSH, ACK] Seq=169 Ack=221 Win=50400 Len=21 "MSG_4 ECHO" 36 2.087500 server client TCP 6006 > 56150 [PSH, ACK] Seq=190 Ack=221 Win=50400 Len=21 "MSG_5 ECHO" 37 2.165390 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [ACK] Seq=221 Ack=148 Win=66632 Len=0 38 2.166314 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [ACK] Seq=221 Ack=190 Win=66588 Len=0 39 2.364135 client server TCP 56150 > 6006 [ACK] Seq=221 Ack=211 Win=66568 Len=0 REDHAT: 17 2.081163 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=111 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_1 RCV" 18 2.081178 server client TCP 6006 > 55879 [ACK] Seq=106 Ack=133 Win=5888 Len=0 19 2.081297 server client TCP 6006 > 55879 [PSH, ACK] Seq=106 Ack=133 Win=5888 Len=21 "MSG_1 ECHO" 20 2.081711 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=133 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_2 RCV" 21 2.081761 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=155 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_3 RCV" 22 2.081846 server client TCP 6006 > 55879 [PSH, ACK] Seq=127 Ack=177 Win=5888 Len=21 "MSG_2 ECHO" 23 2.081995 server client TCP 6006 > 55879 [PSH, ACK] Seq=148 Ack=177 Win=5888 Len=21 "MSG_3 ECHO" 24 2.082011 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=177 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_4 RCV" 25 2.082362 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [PSH, ACK] Seq=199 Ack=106 Win=66672 Len=22 "MSG_5 RCV" 26 2.082377 server client TCP 6006 > 55879 [ACK] Seq=169 Ack=221 Win=5888 Len=0 27 2.171003 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [ACK] Seq=221 Ack=148 Win=66632 Len=0 28 2.171019 server client TCP 6006 > 55879 [PSH, ACK] Seq=169 Ack=221 Win=5888 Len=42 "MSG_4 ECHO + MSG_5 ECHO" 29 2.257498 client server TCP 55879 > 6006 [ACK] Seq=221 Ack=211 Win=66568 Len=0 so, I got confirmation things are not working correctly for RH: packet 28 is sent TOO LATE, it looks like the server is waiting for packet 27's ACK before doing anything. seems to me it's the most likely reason... then I realized that the "Win" parameters are different on Solaris & RH dumps: 50400 on Solaris, only 5888 on RH. that's another hint... I read the doc about the slide window & buffer window, and played around with the rcvBuffer & sendBuffer in java on my sockets, but never managed to change this 5888 value to anything else (I checked each time directly with tcpdump). does anybody know how to do this ? I'm having a hard time getting definitive information, as in some cases there's "auto-negotiation" that I might need to bypass, etc... I eventually managed to get only partially rid of my initial problem by setting the "tcp_slow_start_after_idle" parameter to 0 on RH, but it did not change the "win" parameter at all. the same problem was there for the first 4 groups of 5 messages, with TCP retransmission & TCP Dup ACK in tcpdump, then the problem disappeared altogether for all following groups of 5 messages. It doesn't seem like a very clean and/or generic solution to me. I'd really like to reproduce the exact same conditions under both OSes. I'll keep researching, but any help from TCP gurus would be greatly appreciated ! thanks !

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• how would you debug this javascript problem?

  - by pedalpete

  I've been travelling and developing for the past few weeks. The site I'm developing was running well. Then, the other day, i connected to a network and the page 'looked' fine, but it turns out the javascript wasn't running. I checked firebug, and there were no errors, as I was suspecting that maybe a script didn't load (I'm using the google api for jQuery and jQuery UI, as well as loading google maps api and fbconnect). I would suspect that if the issue was with one of these pages not loading I would get an error, and yet there was nothing. Thinking maybe i didn't connect properly or something, i reconnected to the network and even restarted my computer, as well as trying to run the local version. I got nothing. The local version not running also hinted to me that it was the loading of an external javascript which caused the problem. I let it pass as something strange with that one network. Unfortunately now I'm 100s of miles away. Today my brother sent me an e-mail that the network he was on at the airport wouldn't load my page. Same issue. Everything is laid out properly, and part of the layout is set in Javascript, so clearly javascript is running. he too got no errors. Of course, he got on his plane, and now he is no longer at the airport. Now the site works on his computer (and i haven't changed anything). How on earth would you go about figuring out what happened in this situation? That is two of maybe 12 or so networks. But I have no idea how i would find a network that doesn't work (and living in a small town, it could be difficult for me to find a network that doesn't work). Any ideas? The site is still in Dev, so I'd rather not post a link just yet (but could in a few days). What I can see not working is the javascript functions which are called on load, and on click. So i do think it is a javascript issue, but no errors. This wouldn't be as HUGE an issue if I could find and sit on one of these networks, but I can't. So what would you do? EDIT ---------------------------------------------------------- the first function(s - their linked) that doesn't get called is below. I've cut the code of at the .ajax call as the call wasn't being made. function getResultsFromForm(){ jQuery('form#filterList input.button').hide(); var searchAddress=jQuery('form#filterList input#searchTxt').val(); if(searchAddress=='' || searchAddress=='<?php echo $searchLocation; ?>'){ mapShow(20, -40, 0, 'areaMap', 2); jQuery('form#filterList input.button').show(); return; } if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) { var geo = new GClientGeocoder(); geo.setBaseCountryCode(cl.address.country); geo.getLocations(searchAddress, function (result) { if(!result.Placemark && searchAddress!='<?php echo $searchLocation; ?>'){ jQuery('span#addressNotFound').text('<?php echo $addressNotFound; ?>').slideDown('slow'); jQuery('form#filterList input.button').show(); } else { jQuery('span#addressNotFound').slideUp('slow').empty(); jQuery('span#headerLocal').text(searchAddress); var date = new Date(); date.setTime(date.getTime() + (8 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000)); jQuery.cookie('address', searchAddress, { expires: date}); var accuracy= result.Placemark[0].AddressDetails.Accuracy; var lat = result.Placemark[0].Point.coordinates[1]; var long = result.Placemark[0].Point.coordinates[0]; lat=parseFloat(lat); long=parseFloat(long); var getTab=jQuery('div#tabs div#active').attr('class'); jQuery('div#tabs').show(); loadForecast(lat, long, getTab, 'true', 0); var zoom=zoomLevel(); mapShow(lat, long, accuracy, 'areaMap', zoom ); } }); } } function zoomLevel(){ var zoomarray= new Array(); zoomarray=jQuery('span.viewDist').attr('id'); zoomarray=zoomarray.split("-"); var zoom=zoomarray[1]; if(zoom==''){ zoom=5; } zoom=parseFloat(zoom); return(zoom); } function loadForecast(lat, long, type, loadForecast, page){ jQuery('div#holdForecast').empty(); var date = new Date(); var d = date.getDate(); var day = (d < 10) ? '0' + d : d; var m = date.getMonth() + 1; var month = (m < 10) ? '0' + m : m; var year='2009'; toDate=year+'-'+month+'-'+day; var genre=jQuery('span.genreblock span#updateGenre').html(); var numDays=''; var numResults=''; var range=jQuery('span.viewDist').attr('id'); var dateRange = jQuery('.updateDate').attr('id'); jQuery('div#holdShows ul.showList').html('<li class="show"><div class="showData"><center><img src="../hwImages/loading.gif"/></center></div></li>'); jQuery('div#holdShows ul.'+type+'List').livequery(function(){ jQuery.ajax({ type: "GET", url: "processes/formatShows.php", data: "output=&genre="+genre+"&numResults="+numResults+"&date="+toDate+"&dateRange="+dateRange+"&range="+range+"&lat="+lat+"&long="+long+'&page='+page, success: function(response){ EDIT 2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please keep in mind that the problem is not that I can't load the site, the site works fine on most connections, but there are times when the site doesn't work, and no errors are thrown, and nothing changes. My brother couldn't run it earlier today while I had no problems, so it was something to do with his location/network. HOWEVER, the page loads, he had a connection, it was his first time visiting the site, so nothing could have been cashed. Same with when I had the issue a few days before. I didn't change anything, and I got to a different network and everything worked fine.

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• HTTP 500 Internal Server Error on IIS 7.5 with MVC3

  - by Tor Haugen

  I am trying to install an MVC3 application on our production server with no luck. The application is from a 3rd party (compiled), and so debugging is not available to me. Besides, I strongly suspect the error occurs before any code in the site has a chance to execute. Our staging server is - as far as I can determine - set up excactly like the production server. Both run Windows Server 2008 Standard R2, both also run a Sharepoint 2010 site (though this install doesn't touch that in any way). IIS is version 7.5, and .NET Framework 4.0 (required by the MVC app) is (recently) installed (by me, with a reboot after). The application is very small and simple and, as far as I can tell sticks to fairly standard functionality - including forms authentication (ie. it doesnt' pull any dirty tricks). The error message shown in the browser is very general: HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. The bit about 'An error message detailing the cause' being in the application event log seems to be just speculation - a pious hope that whatever code actually caused the error will log it. Nothing useful is to be found in the event log (only the very same message, logged by IIS). Module: AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification: BeginRequest Handler: StaticFile Error Code: 0x80070002 Requested URL: http://xxxxxx.xxxxxx.xx:80/ Physical Path: C:\Xxxxxxx\Prod\WebClient Logon Method: Not yet determined Logon User: Not yet determined Using Failed Request Tracing, I have been able to track the error (as also indicated above) to the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule: 103. -NOTIFY_MODULE_START ModuleName AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification 1 fIsPostNotification false Notification BEGIN_REQUEST 104. -SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_DESCRIPTION ErrorDescription An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. 105. -MODULE_SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_STATUS ModuleName AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification 1 HttpStatus 500 HttpReason Internal Server Error HttpSubStatus 0 ErrorCode 2147942402 ConfigExceptionInfo Notification BEGIN_REQUEST ErrorCode The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002) So there you have it. Seemingly, the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule fails to find some file. So some questions are: What is the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule? It is not listed in the fairly exhausting list of modules configurable in IIS manager for the site. I have had no success googling it either. Maybe it's secret.. I access the root URL of the site. This is supposed to be redirected to /Account/LogOn by the FormsAuthenticationModule. Why then is the handler StaticFile? Is that a clue? I have tried removing the infamous system.webserver/modules/runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute, and that makes the error go away (but MVC not actually working, of course). I am prepared to specify all necessary modules manually if that's what it takes, but if the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule is actually needed, I will be just as stuck. Does anyone know, or can anyone direct me to someone who knows, exactly what modules a typical MVC3 application actually needs? This question might well be a duplicate of this one, but he didn't get any useful answer, and also asked less specific questions. So I'll have my own go. Hoping for some help here :) Edit: I have now tried setting up a trivial MVC 3 project on the server. I created a new project using the MVC Application template, compiled it and deployed it to the server. It behaves in exactly the same way. The server simply cannot run MVC 3 projects.

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• Debian, 6rd tunnel, and connection troubles

  - by Chris B

  Long story short I am having issues with IPv6 using a 6rd tunnel with my ISP, charter business. They offer a 6rd tunnel that I think I have properly set up, but the server doesn’t reply to every ipv6 request. When the server has the network interfaces idle with no traffic for about 10 minutes, then IPv6 stops accepting inbound connections. to re-allow it, I must go into the server, and make it do a outbound ipv6 connection (normally a ping) to start it back up. Whats weird though i that if I run iptraf when its not working, it still shows a inbound ipv6 packet… the server is just not replying, and I can’t figure out why. Also, if I try to access my server over IPv6 from a house about 1 mile away on the same ISP, it is never able to connect. it always times out, but again the iptraf shows a ipv6 inbound packet. Again, it just does not reply. To test if my server is accessible through IPv6 I always have to use my vzw 4g phone (they use IPv6) or ipv6proxy dot net. Here is all of the configuration information my ISP gives on there tunnel server: 6rd Prefix = 2602:100::/32 Border Relay Address = 68.114.165.1 6rd prefix length = 32 IPv4 mask length = 0 Here is my /etc/network/interfaces for ipv6 (used x's to block real addresses) auto charterv6 iface charterv6 inet6 v4tunnel address 2602:100:189f:xxxx::1 netmask 32 ttl 64 gateway ::68.114.165.1 endpoint 68.114.165.1 local 24.159.218.xxx up ip link set mtu 1280 dev charterv6 here is my iptables config filter :INPUT DROP [0:0] :fail2ban-ssh – [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD DROP [0:0] :hold – [0:0] -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 22 -j fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -m state —state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport -j ACCEPT —dports 80,443,25,465,110,995,143,993,587,465,22 -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 10000 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 5900:5910 -j ACCEPT -A fail2ban-ssh -j RETURN -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT COMMIT and last here is my ip6tables firewall config filter :INPUT DROP [1653:339023] :FORWARD DROP [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [60141:13757903] :hold – [0:0] -A INPUT -m state —state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport —dports 80,443,25,465,110,995,143,993,587,465,22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 10000 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 5900:5910 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT COMMIT So Summary: 1.iptraf always shows IPv6 traffic, so its always making it to the server 2.server stops replying on ipv6 after no traffic for awhile (10 minutesish) until a outbound connection is made, then the process repeats. 3.server is NEVER accessable vi same ISP (yet iptraf still shows ipv6 request) Notes: When I try to access it from the same ISP from across town, even with iptables and ip6tables allowing ALL inbound traffic, this is what iptraf shows. IPv6 (92 bytes) from 97.92.18.xxx to 24.159.218.xxx on eth0 ICMP dest unrch (port) (120 bytes) from 24.159.218.xxx to 97.92.18.xxx on eth1 its strange, like its trying to forward to LAN? (eth1 is LAN, eth0 is WAN) even with the IPv6 address being set in the hosts file to the servers domain name. With iptables set up normally with the above configurations it only says this: IPv6 (100 bytes) from 97.92.18.xxx to 24.159.218.xxx on eth0 Im REALLY stuck on this, and any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

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• Splitting a raidctl mirror safely

  - by milkfilk

  I have a Sun T5220 server with the onboard LSI card and two disks that were in a RAID 1 mirror. The data is not important right now but we had a failed disk and are trying to understand how to do this for real if we had to recover from a failure. The initial situation looked like this: # raidctl -l c1t0d0 Volume Size Stripe Status Cache RAID Sub Size Level Disk ---------------------------------------------------------------- c1t0d0 136.6G N/A DEGRADED OFF RAID1 0.1.0 136.6G GOOD N/A 136.6G FAILED Green light on the 0.0.0 disk. Find / lights up the 0.1.0 disk. So I know I have a bad drive and which one it is. Server still boots obviously. First, we tried putting a new disk in. This disk came from an unknown source. Format would not see it, cfgadm -al would not see it so raidctl -l would not see it. I figure it's bad. We tried another disk from another spare server: # raidctl -c c1t1d0 c1t0d0 (where t1 is my good disk - 0.1.0) Disk has occupied space. Also the different syntax options don't change anything: # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" -r 1 1 Disk has occupied space. # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" 1 Disk has occupied space. Ok. Maybe this is because the disk from the spare server had a RAID 1 on it already. Aha, I can see another volume in raidctl: # raidctl -l Controller: 1 Volume:c1t1d0 (this is my server's root mirror) Volume:c1t132d0 (this is the foreign root mirror) Disk: 0.0.0 Disk: 0.1.0 ... No problem. I don't care about the data, I'll just delete the foreign mirror. # raidctl -d c1t132d0 (warning about data deletion but it works) At this point, /usr/bin/ binaries freak out. By that I mean, ls -l /usr/bin/which shows 1.4k but cat /usr/bin/which gives me a newline. Great, I just blew away the binaries (ie: binaries in mem still work)? I bounce the box. It all comes back fine. WTF. Anyway, back to recreating my mirror. # raidctl -l Controller: 1 Volume:c1t1d0 (this is my server's root mirror) Disk: 0.0.0 Disk: 0.1.0 ... Man says that you can delete a mirror and it will split it. Ok, I'll delete the root mirror. # raidctl -d c1t0d0 Array in use. (this might not be the exact error) I googled this and found of course you can't do this (even with -f) while booted off the mirror. Ok. I boot cdrom -s and deleted the volume. Now I have one disk that has a type of "LSI-Logical-Volume" on c1t1d0 (where my data is) and a brand new "Hitachi 146GB" on c1t0d0 (what I'm trying to mirror to): (booted off the CD) # raidctl -c c1t1d0 c1t0d0 (man says it's source destination for mirroring) Illegal Array Layout. # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" -r 1 1 (alt syntax per man) Illegal Array Layout. # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" 1 (assumes raid1, no help) Illegal Array Layout. Same size disks, same manufacturer but I did delete the volume instead of throwing in a blank disk and waiting for it to resync. Maybe this was a critical error. I tried selecting the type in format for my good disk to be a plain 146gb disk but it resets the partition table which I'm pretty sure would wipe the data (bad if this was production). Am I boned? Anyone have experience with breaking and resyncing a mirror? There's nothing on Google about "Illegal Array Layout" so here's my contrib to the search gods.

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• Monit won't run

  - by Yaniro

  I have two identical EC2 instances (the second is a replica of the first), running Gentoo. The first instance has monit running which monitors a single process and some system resources and functions great. In the second instance, monit runs but quits right away. The configuration is similar on both instances so are the versions of monit. monit.log shows: [GMT Oct 3 08:36:41] info : monit daemon with PID 5 awakened Final lines on strace monit show: write(2, "monit daemon with PID 5 awakened"..., 33monit daemon with PID 5 awakened ) = 33 time(NULL) = 1349252827 open("/etc/localtime", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=118, ...}) = 0 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=118, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb773a000 read(4, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 118 _llseek(4, -6, [112], SEEK_CUR) = 0 read(4, "\nGMT0\n", 4096) = 6 close(4) = 0 munmap(0xb773a000, 4096) = 0 write(3, "[GMT Oct 3 08:27:07] info :"..., 33) = 33 write(3, "monit daemon with PID 5 awakened"..., 33) = 33 waitpid(-1, NULL, WNOHANG) = -1 ECHILD (No child processes) close(3) = 0 exit_group(0) = ? No core dumps (ulimit -c shows unlimited) monit -v shows: monit: Debug: Adding host allow 'localhost' monit: Debug: Skipping redundant host 'localhost' monit: Debug: Skipping redundant host 'localhost' monit: Debug: Adding credentials for user 'xxxx'. Runtime constants: Control file = /etc/monitrc Log file = /var/log/monit/monit.log Pid file = /var/run/monit.pid Id file = /var/run/monit.pid Debug = True Log = True Use syslog = False Is Daemon = True Use process engine = True Poll time = 30 seconds with start delay 0 seconds Expect buffer = 256 bytes Event queue = base directory /var/monit with 100 slots Mail server(s) = xx.xxx.xx.xxx with timeout 30 seconds Mail from = (not defined) Mail subject = (not defined) Mail message = (not defined) Start monit httpd = True httpd bind address = Any/All httpd portnumber = 2812 httpd signature = True Use ssl encryption = False httpd auth. style = Basic Authentication and Host/Net allow list Alert mail to = [email protected] Alert on = All events The service list contains the following entries: System Name = xxxx Monitoring mode = active CPU wait limit = if greater than 20.0% 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert CPU system limit = if greater than 30.0% 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert CPU user limit = if greater than 70.0% 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Swap usage limit = if greater than 25.0% 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Memory usage limit = if greater than 75.0% 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Load avg. (5min) = if greater than 2.0 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Load avg. (1min) = if greater than 4.0 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Process Name = xxxx Group = server Pid file = /var/run/xxxx.pid Monitoring mode = active Start program = '/etc/init.d/xxxx restart' timeout 20 second(s) Stop program = '/etc/init.d/xxxx stop' timeout 30 second(s) Existence = if does not exist 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then restart else if succeeded 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Pid = if changed 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Ppid = if changed 1 times within 1 cycle(s) then alert Timeout = If restarted 3 times within 5 cycle(s) then unmonitor Alert mail to = [email protected] Alert on = All events Alert mail to = [email protected] Alert on = All events ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- monit daemon with PID 5 awakened Ran emerge --sync before emerge -va monit which installed monit v5.3.2. When that didn't work i've downloaded v5.5 from their website and compiled from source which did not work either.

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