Search Results

Search found 5907 results on 237 pages for 'dist upgrade'.

Page 219/237 | < Previous Page | 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226  | Next Page >

• BI&EPM in Focus June 2014

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Applications Webcast Centre – A Library of Discussion and Research for Best Practice: Achieving Reliable Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Talent Analytics and Big Data – Is HR ready for the challenge Enterprise Data – The cost of non-quality Customers Josephine Niemiec from ADP talks about Oracle Hyperion Workforce Planning at Collaborate 2014 (link) Video Chris Nelms from Ameren talks about Oracle BI Spend and Procurement Analytics at Collaborate 2014 (link) Video Leggett & Platt Leverages Oracle Hyperion EPM and Demantra (link) Video Pella Corporation Accelerates Close Cycle by Cutting Time for Financial Consolidation from Three Days to Less Than One Day (link) Secretaría General de Administración de Justicia en España Enhances Citizen Services with Near-Real-Time Business Intelligence Gleaned from 500 Databases  (link) Bellco Credit Union Speeds Budget Development by 30%—Gains Insight into Specific Branch and Financial Product Profitability  (link)  Video QDQ media Speeds up Financial Reporting by 24x, Gains Business Agility, and Integrates Seamlessly into Corporate Accounting System  (link) Westfield Group Maximizes Shopping Mall Revenue, Shortens Year-End Financial Consolidation by 75%  (link)  IL&FS Transportation Networks Shortens Financial Consolidation and Reporting Cycle by Eight Days, Gains In-Depth Insight into Business Performance   (link) Angel Trains Optimizes Rail Operations for Purchasing, Sourcing, and Project Management to Meet Challenges of Evolving Rail Industry  (link) Enterprise Performance Management June 11, at Oracle Utrecht, NL: Morning session: Explore Planning and Budgeting in the Cloud (link) June 12, London: PureApps Presents: Best Practice Financial Consolidation and Reporting Workshop (link) July 3, Koln: Oracle Hyperion Business Analytics Roundtable (link) Blog: What's Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Operational Transfer Pricing Process (link) YouTube Video: Automate Tax Reporting with Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision (link) YouTube Video: Introducing Oracle Hyperion Planning’s Tablet Optimized Interface (link) OracleEPMWebcasts @ YouTube (link) Partner webcasts: Wednesday, 4 June, 5.00 GMT - Case Study:  Lessons Learned from Edgewater Ranzal's Internal Implementation of Oracle Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) - Learn more and register here! Thursday, 5 June, 4.00 GMT - Achieving Accountable Care Using Oracle Technology - Learn more and register here! Tuesday, 17 June, 4.00 GMT - Optimizing Performance for Oracle EPM Systems - Learn more and register here! Oracle University Blog: The Coolest Features Available with Oracle Hyperion 11.1.2.3 – Training from OU to help you to best use them (link) Support: Proactive Support: EPM Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.3.500 Using RMI Service [Blog] Proactive Support: Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service Videos (link) Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) 11.1.2.3.410 Patch Bundle [Doc ID 1670981.1] Hyperion Analytic Provider Services 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667350.1] Hyperion Essbase 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667346.1] Hyperion Essbase Administration Services 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667348.1] Hyperion Essbase Studio 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667329.1] Hyperion Smart View 11.1.2.5.210 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1669427.1] Using HPCM, HSF or DRM Communities (link) Business Intelligence June 12, Birmingham, UK: Oracle Big Data at Work - Use Cases and Architecture (link) June 17, London: Oracle at Cloud & Big Data World Forums (link) June 17, Partner Webcast: Transform your Planning Capabilities with Peloton's CloudAccelerator for Oracle PBCS (link) June 19, London: Oracle at the Whitehall Media Big Data Analytics Conference and Exhibition (link) June 19, London: Partner Event - Agile BI Conference by Peak Indicators [link] June 25, Munich: Oracle Special Day auf der TDWI 2014 Konferenz (link) July 15, London: Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Workshop (link) July 16, London: BI Applications Workshop – Financial Analytics & Procurement Analytics (link) July 17, London: BI Applications Workshop – HR Analytics (link) Milan, Italy: L’Osservatorio Big Data Analytics & Business Intelligence with Politecnico di Milano (link) OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 - Now Available [Blog] What’s New in OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 [Blog] BI Blog: A closer look at Oracle BI Applications 11.1.1.8.1 release (link) Press Release: BI Applications Deliver Greater Insight into Talent and Procurement (link) Support Blog: OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 Upgrade Guide & Documentation (link) YouTube Video: Glenn Hoormann of Ludus talks to us about Oracle Business Intelligence and ERP at Collaborate 2014 (Link) YouTube Video: Performance Architects talks about key BI and Mobile trends, including Endeca at Collaborate 2014 (link) Big Data Blog: 3 Keys for Using Big Data Effectively for Enhanced Customer Experience (link) Big Data Lite Demo VM 3.0 Now Available on OTN BI Blog: Data Relationship Governance - Workflow in a Bottle (link) MDM Blog: Register for Product Data Management Weekly Cloudcasts (link) MDM Blog: Improve your Customer Experience with High Quality Information (link) MDM Blog: Big Data Challenges & Considerations (link) Oracle University: Oracle BI Applications 11g: Implementation using ODI (link) Proactive Support: Monthly Index [Blog] My Oracle Support: Partner Accreditation for Business Analytics Support [Blog] OBIEE 11g Test-to-Production (T2P) / Clone Procedures Guide [Blog] Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

  Read the article

• How to Increase the VMWare Boot Screen Delay

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you’ve wanted to try out a bootable CD or USB flash drive in a virtual machine environment, you’ve probably noticed that VMWare’s offerings make it difficult to change the boot device. We’ll show you how to change these options. You can do this either for one boot, or permanently for a particular virtual machine. Even experienced users of VMWare Player or Workstation may not recognize the screen above – it’s the virtual machine’s BIOS, which in most cases flashes by in the blink of an eye. If you want to boot up the virtual machine with a CD or USB key instead of the hard drive, then you’ll need more than an eye’s-blink to press Escape and bring up the Boot Menu. Fortunately, there is a way to introduce a boot delay that isn’t exposed in VMWare’s graphical interface – you have to edit the virtual machine’s settings file (a .vmx file) manually. Editing the Virtual Machine’s .vmx Find the .vmx file that contains the settings for your virtual machine. You chose a location for this when you created the virtual machine – in Windows, the default location is a folder called My Virtual Machines in your My Documents folder. In VMWare Workstation, the location of the .vmx file is listed on the virtual machine’s tab. If in doubt, search your hard drive for .vmx files. If you don’t want to use Windows default search, an awesome utility that locates files instantly is Everything. Open the .vmx file with any text editor. Somewhere in this file, enter in the following line… save the file, then close out of the text editor: bios.bootdelay = 20000 This will introduce a 20 second delay when the virtual machine loads up, giving you plenty of time to press the Escape button and access the boot menu. The number in this line is just a value in milliseconds, so for a five second boot delay, enter 5000, and so on. Change Boot Options Temporarily Now, when you boot up your virtual machine, you’ll have plenty of time to enter one of the keystrokes listed at the bottom of the BIOS screen on boot-up. Press Escape to bring up the Boot Menu. This allows you to select a different device to boot from – like a CD drive. Your selection will be forgotten the next time you boot up this virtual machine. Change Boot Options Permanently When the BIOS screen comes up, press F2 to enter the BIOS Setup menu. Switch to the Boot tab, and change the ordering of the items by pressing the “+” key to move items up on the list, and the “-” key to move items down the list. We’ve switched the order so that the CD-ROM Drive boots first. Once you make this change permanent, you may want to re-edit the .vmx file to remove the boot delay. Boot from a USB Flash Drive One thing that is noticeably missing from the list of boot options is a USB device. VMWare’s BIOS just does not allow this, but we can get around that limitation using the PLoP Boot Manager that we’ve previously written about. And as a bonus, since everything is virtual anyway, there’s no need to actually burn PLoP to a CD. Open the settings for the virtual machine you want to boot with a USB drive. Click on Add… at the bottom of the settings screen, and select CD/DVD Drive. Click Next. Click the Use ISO Image radio button, and click Next. Browse to find plpbt.iso or plpbtnoemul.iso from the PLoP zip file. Ensure that Connect at power on is checked, and then click Finish. Click OK on the main Virtual Machine Settings page. Now, if you use the steps above to boot using that CD/DVD drive, PLoP will load, allowing you to boot from a USB drive! Conclusion We’re big fans of VMWare Player and Workstation, as they let us try out a ton of geeky things without worrying about harming our systems. By introducing a boot delay, we can add bootable CDs and USB drives to the list of geeky things we can try out. Download PLoP Boot Manager Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Switch to Console Mode for Ubuntu VMware GuestHack: Turn Off Debug Mode in VMWare Workstation 6 BetaStart Your Computer More Quickly by Delaying the Startup of a Service in VistaEnable Hidden BootScreen in Windows VistaEnable Copy and Paste from Ubuntu VMware Guest TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

  Read the article

• Pella Increases Online Appointment Scheduling and Rapidly Personalizes and Updates Marketing Initiatives

  - by Michael Snow

  Originally posted on Oracle Customers page.Oracle Customer: Pella CorporationLocation:  Pella, IowaIndustry: Industrial Manufacturing Employees:  7,100 Pella Corporation is an innovative leader in creating a better view for homes and businesses by designing, testing, manufacturing, and installing quality windows and doors for new construction, remodeling, and replacement applications. A family-owned company, Pella has an 88-year history of innovation and, today, is the second-largest manufacturer in the country of windows and doors, including patio, entry, and storm doors. The company has 10 manufacturing facilities in United States and window and door showrooms across the United States and Canada. In-home consultations are an important part of Pella’s sales process. Several years ago, the company launched an online appointment scheduling tool to improve customer convenience. While the functionality worked well, the company wanted to increase online conversion rates and decrease the number of incomplete, online appointment schedules. It also wanted to give its business analysts and other line-of-business personnel the ability to update the scheduling tool and interface quickly, without needing IT team intervention and recoding, to better capitalize on opportunities and personalize the interface for specific markets. Pella also looked to reduce IT complexity by selecting a system that integrated easily with its Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 enterprise applications.Pella, which has a large Oracle footprint, selected Oracle WebCenter Sites as the foundation for its new, real-time appointment scheduling application. It used the solution to re-engineer the scheduling process and the information required to set up an appointment. Just a few months after launch, it is seeing improvement in the number of appointments booked online and experiencing fewer abandoned appointments during the scheduling process. As important, Pella can now quickly and easily make changes to images, video, and content displayed on the scheduling tool interface, delivering greater business agility. Previously, such changes required a developer and weeks of coding and testing. Today, a member of Pella’s business analyst team can complete the changes in hours. This capability enables Pella to personalize the Web experience for customers. For example, it can display different products or images for clients in different regions.The solution is also highly scalable. Pella is using Oracle WebCenter Sites for appointment scheduling now and plans to migrate Pella.com, its configurator tool, and dealer microsites onto the platform. Further, Pella plans to leverage the solution to optimize mobile devices. “Moving ahead, we expect to extensively leverage Oracle WebCenter Sites to gain greater flexibility in updating the Web experience, thanks to the ability to make updates quickly without developer resources. Segmentation and targeting capabilities will allow us to create a more personalized experience across both traditional and mobile platforms,” said Teri Lancaster, IT manager, customer experience applications, Pella Corporation. A word from Pella Corporation "Oracle WebCenter Sites?from the start?delivered important benefits. We’ve redesigned the online scheduling process and are seeing more potential customers completing consultation bookings online. More important, the solution opens a world of other possibilities as we plan to migrate Pella.com and our dealer microsites to the platform, and leverage it to optimize the Web experience for our mobile devices.” – Teri Lancaster, IT Manager, Customer Experience Applications, Pella Corporation Oracle Product and Services Oracle WebCenter Sites Why Oracle Pella has a long-standing relationship with Oracle. “We look to Oracle first for a solution. Our Oracle account team came to us with several solutions, and Oracle WebCenter Sites delivered the scalability, ease-of-use, flexibility, and scalability that we required for the appointment scheduling initiative and other Web projects on the horizon, including migrating Pella.com and optimizing our site for mobile platforms,”said Teri Lancaster, IT manager, customer experience applications, Pella Corporation. Implementation Process The Pella implementation team, working with Oracle partner Element Solutions, LLC, integrated the appointment setting application with Pella.com as well as the company’s Oracle E-Business Suite customer relationship management applications. Using Oracle WebCenter Site’s development tools and subversion capabilities to develop the application, the Element Solutions and Pella teams could work remotely and collaboratively, accelerating deployment. Pella went live with the new scheduling tool in just six months. Partner Oracle PartnerElement Solutions, LLC Element Solutions was instrumental at every major stage of the project, including design creation and approval, development, training, and rollout. “Element Solutions was a vital partner for our Oracle WebCenter Sites initiative. The team provided guidance, and more important, critical knowledge transfer at every stage?which equipped us to get the most out of this powerful and versatile solution. We were definitely collaboration partners,” Lancaster said. Resources Pella Corporation Upgrades Enterprise Applications to Continue to Improve Manufacturing Efficiency Thousands of Customers Successfully and Smoothly Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 for New Functionality, Lower Operating Costs and Improved Shared Operations Managing the Virtual World

  Read the article

• Dual Boot Oracle Solaris 11/11 and Linux (Ubuntu 11.10/grub2)

  - by HartmutStreppel

  After having worked with Open Solaris on my laptop first, then with an upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11 Express, I finally did a fresh install of Oracle Solaris 11/11, when it became available. I am not a big fan of upgrades as I know that I am not the perfect administrator and my system gets spoiled with unclean configurations, outdated packages and wrong settings that cannot be reversed. So I prefer to start from scratch. Especially with Oracle Solaris 11 I wanted to have a system just like a customer would have it in production. The installation was smooth - more or less, if I had only read the documentation a bit better in advance. For a number of reasons I prefer a dual boot system. The most important one is, that especially with mobile devices you often run into network problems. And you have a hard time figuring out where the problem is: in your laptop hardware, in the OS you are running, or really within the network. If you have an alternate OS to boot, you can exclude the OS and your hardware. This makes you feel better. The second OS should be a Linux variant - and for some not so obvious reason I decided to go with the latest Ubuntu release (11.10). It replaced a very old Open Suse installation that had not been booted for a while. I knew that it was probably best to install Ubuntu first and then Oracle Solaris 11, as this would put the right boot information for Oracle Solaris  into the MBR and onto the root partition. But then, how to enable dual boot with the 2 OSes. Searching the web one mainly finds information about dual boot of: Linux and Linux Linux and Windows I do not want to explain which wrong configurations I worked through, but I prefer to explain the final setup, which is extremely simple, and I am wondering why this is not covered as the easiest solution for most dual boot setups. I use chainloader from and to both OS'es, with the only disadvantage that I have to confirm two grub menus each time I want to boot the "other" OS. Still there were some hurdles to jump over: Ubuntu did not like getting its boot blocks being placed on the partition instead of the disk; I must admit that I do not fully understand why. But using the --force option you could get that done Ubuntu needs an active partition; that was easy to achieve grub2 uses a different numbering scheme for the partitions. That is in the docs, if you read them. BTW: The usual disclaimer is valid. There is  no guarantee that what I describe works or works well. Please back up your data carefully before trying any of this. So, Oracle Solaris 11 is installed on the first partition and Ubuntu on the third. With Ubtuntu things initially were a bit more complicated, as I did not know how to boot it. And the live CD did not offer the capability to boot the on-disk image (at least I did not find it). So I booted the live CD, mounted the Ubuntu installation at /mnt and wrote the boot blocks into the partition. This is something that does not seem to be recommended, at least grub-install refrained from doing what I intended. After a bit more research I was bold enough to use the --force option and wrote the boot blocks to /dev/sda3 using grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot --force --no-floppy /dev/sda3 So, I now had a system with the Solaris boot loader in the MBR, Solaris specific boot blocks on the Solaris root partition and Ubuntu specific boot blocks in the Ubuntu partition. I just had to chain them together and I was done. Oracle Solaris 11: I have added the following lines to /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst (be aware of the /rpool!!!!) title Ubuntu 11.10root (hd0,2)makeactivechainloader +1boot The Ubuntu root file system sits on the third partition (/dev/sda3). Ubuntu: I have added the following lines to /etc/grub.d/40_custom: menuentry "Solaris 11/11" {      set root=(hd0,1)      chainloader +1} Two things need to be mentioned: a) grub2 starts numbering partitions with 1; so my /dev/sda1 is partition 1. b) Oracle Solaris boots without the partition being made active (btw: the command to make a partition active with grub2 is "parttool (hd0,1) boot+", which currently does not work for me). As debugging grub is a bit complicated, I used the grub CLI to perform some tests and also used a tool, that I found on sourceforge.net that was able to prepare a list of all boot loaders on all partitions. This told me that the basic setup was correct. Unfortunately I lost it in the live CD environment. I hope this is helpful for some of the readers.Hartmut

  Read the article

• Solaris 11 pkg fix is my new friend

  - by user12611829

  While putting together some examples of the Solaris 11 Automated Installer (AI), I managed to really mess up my system, to the point where AI was completely unusable. This was my fault as a combination of unfortunate incidents left some remnants that were causing problems, so I tried to clean things up. Unsuccessfully. Perhaps that was a bad idea (OK, it was a terrible idea), but this is Solaris 11 and there are a few more tricks in the sysadmin toolbox. Here's what I did. # rm -rf /install/* # rm -rf /var/ai # installadm create-service -n solaris11-x86 --imagepath /install/solaris11-x86 \ -s [email protected] Warning: Service svc:/network/dns/multicast:default is not online. Installation services will not be advertised via multicast DNS. Creating service from: [email protected] DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 130/130 264.4/264.4 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 284/284 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Reading search index Done Updating search index 1/1 Creating i386 service: solaris11-x86 Image path: /install/solaris11-x86 So far so good. Then comes an oops..... setup-service[168]: cd: /var/ai//service/.conf-templ: [No such file or directory] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is where you generally say a few things to yourself, and then promise to quit deleting configuration files and directories when you don't know what you are doing. Then you recall that the new Solaris 11 packaging system has some ability to correct common mistakes (like the one I just made). Let's give it a try. # pkg fix installadm Verifying: pkg://solaris/install/installadm ERROR dir: var/ai Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/ai-webserver Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/ai-webserver/compatibility-configuration Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/ai-webserver/conf.d Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/image-server Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/image-server/cgi-bin Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/image-server/images Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/image-server/logs Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/profile Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/service Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/service/.conf-templ Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/service/.conf-templ/AI_data Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/service/.conf-templ/AI_files Missing: directory does not exist file: var/ai/ai-webserver/ai-httpd-templ.conf Missing: regular file does not exist file: var/ai/service/.conf-templ/AI.db Missing: regular file does not exist file: var/ai/image-server/cgi-bin/cgi_get_manifest.py Missing: regular file does not exist Created ZFS snapshot: 2012-12-11-21:09:53 Repairing: pkg://solaris/install/installadm Creating Plan (Evaluating mediators): | DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 3/3 0.0/0.0 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Updating modified actions 16/16 Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done In just a few moments, IPS found the missing files and incorrect ownerships/permissions. Instead of reinstalling the system, or falling back to an earlier Live Upgrade boot environment, I was able to create my AI services and now all is well. # installadm create-service -n solaris11-x86 --imagepath /install/solaris11-x86 \ -s [email protected] Warning: Service svc:/network/dns/multicast:default is not online. Installation services will not be advertised via multicast DNS. Creating service from: [email protected] DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 130/130 264.4/264.4 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 284/284 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Reading search index Done Updating search index 1/1 Creating i386 service: solaris11-x86 Image path: /install/solaris11-x86 Refreshing install services Warning: mDNS registry of service solaris11-x86 could not be verified. Creating default-i386 alias Setting the default PXE bootfile(s) in the local DHCP configuration to: bios clients (arch 00:00): default-i386/boot/grub/pxegrub Refreshing install services Warning: mDNS registry of service default-i386 could not be verified. # installadm create-service -n solaris11u1-x86 --imagepath /install/solaris11u1-x86 \ -s [email protected] Warning: Service svc:/network/dns/multicast:default is not online. Installation services will not be advertised via multicast DNS. Creating service from: [email protected] DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 514/514 292.3/292.3 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 661/661 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Reading search index Done Updating search index 1/1 Creating i386 service: solaris11u1-x86 Image path: /install/solaris11u1-x86 Refreshing install services Warning: mDNS registry of service solaris11u1-x86 could not be verified. # installadm list Service Name Alias Of Status Arch Image Path ------------ -------- ------ ---- ---------- default-i386 solaris11-x86 on i386 /install/solaris11-x86 solaris11-x86 - on i386 /install/solaris11-x86 solaris11u1-x86 - on i386 /install/solaris11u1-x86 This is way way better than pkgchk -f in Solaris 10. I'm really beginning to like this new IPS packaging system.

  Read the article

• FireFox 6 Super Slow? Cache Settings Corruption

  - by Rick Strahl

  For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen some of my tweets regarding major performance problems I've seen with the install of FireFox 6.0. FireFox 6.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and is treated as a 'force feed' update for FireFox 5.0. I'm not sure what the deal is with this braindead versioning that Mozilla is doing with major version releases coming out, what now every other month? Seriously that's retarded especially given the limited number of new features these releases bring, and the upgrade pain for plug-ins that the major version release causes. Anyway, after the FireFox updater bugged me long enough I finally gave in last week and updated to FireFox 6. Immediately after install I noticed terrible performance. Everything was running at a snail's pace with Web pages loading slowly and most content actually slowly 'painting' the page. A typical sign of content downloading slowly. However these are pages that should be mostly cached on my system and even repeated accesses ran just as slow. Just for a reality check I ran the same sites in Chrome (blazing fast) and IE (fast enough :-)) but FireFox - dog on a stick. Why so slow Boss? While complaining lots of people recommended to ditch FireFox - use Chrome, yada yada yada. Yeah, Chrome is fast and getting better but I have a number of plug-ins that I use in FF that I can't easily give up. So I suffered and started looking around more closely at what was happening. The first thing I noticed when accessing pages was that I continually saw accesses to the Google CDN downloading jQuery and jQuery UI. UI especially is pretty heavy in size and currently I'm in a location with a fairly slow IP connection where large files are a bit of an issue. However, seeing the CDN urls pop up repeatedly raised a flag with me. That stuff should be caching and it looked like each and every hit was reloading these scripts and various images over and over again. Fired up FireBug and sure enough I saw something like this on a repeated hit to my blog: Those two highlights are jquery and the main CSS file for the site and both are being loaded fully and taking a while to load. However, since this page had been loaded before, these items should be cached and show 304 requests instead of the full HTTP requests returning 200 result codes. In short it looked like FireFox was not caching ANY content at all and constantly reloading all page resources. No wonder things were running dog slow. Once I realized what the problem was I took a look in the about:config settings and lo and behold a bunch of the cache settings were set to not cache: In my case ALL the main cache flags were set to false for some reason that I can't figure out.  It appears that after the FireFox 6 update these flags somehow mysteriously changed and performance took a nose dive. Switching the .enable flags back to true and resetting all the cache settings tote default reverted performance back to the way it's supposed to be: reasonably fast and snappy as soon as content is cached and accessed again  from cache. I try not to muck with the about:config settings much (other than turning off the IPV6 option) but when there are problems access to these features can be really nice. However, I treat this as a last resort so it took me quite some time before I started looking through ALL the settings. This takes a while, not knowing what I was looking for exactly. If Web load performance is slow it's a good idea to check the cache settings. I have no idea what hosed these settings for me - I certainly didn't explicitly set them in about:config and while in FireFox's Options dialog I didn't see any option that would affect global caching like this, so this remains a mystery to me. Anyway, I hope that this is helpful to some, in case some of you end up running into a similar issue.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in FireFox   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Oracle SQL Developer v3.2.1 Now Available

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Oracle SQL Developer version 3.2.1 is now available. I recommend that everyone now upgrade to this release. It features more than 200 bug fixes, tweaks, and polish applied to the 3.2 edition. The high profile bug fixes submitted by customers and users on our forums are listed in all their glory for your review. I want to highlight a few of the changes though, as I recognize many of you lack the time and/or patience to ‘read the docs.’ That would include me, which is why I enjoy writing these kinds of blog posts. I’m lazy – just like you! No more artificial line breaks between CREATE OR REPLACE and your PL/SQL In versions 3.2 and older, when you pull up your stored procedural objects in our editor, you would see a line break inserted between the CREATE OR REPLACE and then the body of your code. In version 3.2.1, we have removed the line break. 3.1 3.2.1 Trivia Did You Know? The database doesn’t store the ‘CREATE’ or ‘CREATE OR REPLACE’ bit of your PL/SQL code in the database. If we look at the USER_SOURCE view, we can see that the code begins with the object name. So the CREATE OR REPLACE bit is ‘artificial’ The intent is to give you the code necessary to recreate your object – and have it ‘compile’ into the database. We pretty much HAVE to add the ‘CREATE OR REPLACE.’ From now on it will appear inline with the first line of your code. Exporting Tables & Views When exporting data from your tables or views, previous versions of SQL Developer presented a 3 step wizard. It allows you to choose your columns and apply data filters for what is exported. This was kind of redundant. The grids already allowed you to select your columns and apply filters. Wouldn’t it be more intuitive AND efficient to just make the grids behave in a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) fashion? In version 3.2.1, that is exactly what will happen. The wizard now only has two steps and the grid will export the data and columns as defined in the visible grid. Let the grid properties define what is actually exported! And here is what is pasted into my worksheet: "BREWERY"|"CITY" "3 Brewers Restaurant Micro-Brewery"|"Toronto" "Amsterdam Brewing Co."|"Toronto" "Ball Brewing Company Ltd."|"Toronto" "Big Ram Brewing Company"|"Toronto" "Black Creek Historic Brewery"|"Toronto" "Black Oak Brewing"|"Toronto" "C'est What?"|"Toronto" "Cool Beer Brewing Company"|"Toronto" "Denison's Brewing"|"Toronto" "Duggan's Brewery"|"Toronto" "Feathers"|"Toronto" "Fermentations! - Danforth"|"Toronto" "Fermentations! - Mount Pleasant"|"Toronto" "Granite Brewery & Restaurant"|"Toronto" "Labatt's Breweries of Canada"|"Toronto" "Mill Street Brew Pub"|"Toronto" "Mill Street Brewery"|"Toronto" "Molson Breweries of Canada"|"Toronto" "Molson Brewery at Air Canada Centre"|"Toronto" "Pioneer Brewery Ltd."|"Toronto" "Post-Production Bistro"|"Toronto" "Rotterdam Brewing"|"Toronto" "Steam Whistle Brewing"|"Toronto" "Strand Brasserie"|"Toronto" "Upper Canada Brewing"|"Toronto" JUST what I wanted And One Last Thing Speaking of export, sometimes I want to send data to Excel. And sometimes I want to send multiple objects to Excel – to a single Excel file that is. In version 3.2.1 you can now do that. Let’s export the bulk of the HR schema to Excel, with each table going to it’s own workbook in the same worksheet. Select many tables, put them in in a single Excel worksheet If you try this in previous versions of SQL Developer it will just write the first table to the Excel file. This is one of the bugs we addressed in v3.2.1. Here is what the output Excel file looks like now: Many tables - Many workbooks in an Excel Worksheet I have a sneaky suspicion that this will be a frequently used feature going forward. Excel seems to be the cornerstone of many of our popular features. Imagine that!

  Read the article

• XNA Notes 002

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

  Read the article

• Create a Social Community of Trust Along With Your Federal Digital Services Governance

  - by TedMcLaughlan

  The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services. Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations" While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations of the public, social media ecosystem (people AND machines)? A rigid governance framework, controlling by rules, policies and roles the creation and dissemination of digital services may meet the expectations of direct end-users and most stakeholders - including the agency information stewards and security officers. All others who may share comments about the services, write about them, swap or review extracts, repackage, visualize or otherwise repurpose the output for use in entirely unanticipated, social ways - these "stakeholders" will not be governed, but may observe guidance generated by a "Trusted Community". As recognized members of the trusted community, these stakeholders may ultimately define the right scope and detail of governance that all other users might observe, promoting and refining the usefulness of the government product as the social ecosystem expects. So, as part of an agency-centric governance framework, it's advised that a flexible governance model be created for stewarding a "Community of Trust" around the digital services. The first steps follow the approach outlined in the Recommendations: Step 1: Gather a Core Team In addition to the roles and responsibilities described, perhaps a set of characteristics and responsibilities can be developed for the "Trusted Community Steward/Advocate" - i.e. a person or team who (a) are entirely cognizant of and respected within the external social media communities, and (b) are trusted both within the agency and outside as practical, responsible, non-partisan communicators of useful information. The may seem like a standard Agency PR/Outreach team role - but often an agency or stakeholder subject matter expert with a public, active social persona works even better. Step 2: Assess What You Have In addition to existing, agency or stakeholder decision-making bodies and assets, it's important to take a PR/Marketing view of the social ecosystem. How visible are the services across the social channels utilized by current or desired constituents of your agency? What's the online reputation of your agency and perhaps the service(s)? Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a facet of external communications/publishing lifecycles? Who are the public champions, instigators, value-adders for the digital services, or perhaps just influential "communicators" (i.e. with no stake in the game)? You're essentially assessing your market and social presence, and identifying the actors (including your own agency employees) in the existing community of trust. Step 3: Determine What You Want The evolving Community of Trust will most readily absorb, support and provide feedback regarding "Core Principles" (Element B of the "six essential elements of a digital services governance structure") shared by your Agency, and obviously play a large, though probably very unstructured part in Element D "Stakeholder Input and Participation". Plan for this, and seek input from the social media community with respect to performance metrics - these should be geared around the outcome and growth of the trusted communities actions. How big and active is this community? What's the influential reach of this community with respect to particular messaging or campaigns generated by the Agency? What's the referral rate TO your digital services, FROM channels owned or operated by members of this community? (this requires governance with respect to content generation inclusive of "markers" or "tags"). At this point, while your Agency proceeds with steps 4 ("Build/Validate the Governance Structure") and 5 ("Share, Review, Upgrade"), the Community of Trust might as well just get going, and start adding value and usefulness to the existing conversations, existing data services - loosely though directionally-stewarded by your trusted advocate(s). Why is this an "Enterprise Architecture" topic? Because it's increasingly apparent that a Public Service "Enterprise" is not wholly contained within Agency facilities, firewalls and job titles - it's also manifested in actual, perceived or representative forms outside the walls, on the social Internet. An Agency's EA model and resulting investments both facilitate and are impacted by the "Social Enterprise". At Oracle, we're very active both within our Enterprise and outside, helping foster social architectures that enable truly useful public services, digital or otherwise.

  Read the article

• Screen (command-line program) bug?

  - by VioletCrime

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

  Read the article

• Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Sometimes it can be difficult to center a picture in a document just by dragging it dragging it around. Today we show you how to center pictures, images, and other objects perfectly in Word and PowerPoint. Note: For this tutorial we’re using Office 2010, but the steps are nearly identical in 2007. Centering a Picture in Word First let’s insert a picture into our document.  Click the Insert tab, and then click Picture. Once you select the picture you want, it will be added to your document.  Usually, pictures are added wherever your curser was in the document, so in a blank document it will be added at the top left. Also notice Picture Tools show up in the Ribbon after inserting an image. Note: The following menu items are available in Picture Tools Format tab which is displayed when you select the object or image you’re working with. How do we align the picture just like we want?  Click Position to get some quick placement options, including centered in the middle of the document or on the top.    However, for more advanced placement, we can use the Align tool.  If Word isn’t maximized, you may only see the icon without the “Align” label. Notice the tools were grayed out in the menu by default.  To be able to change the Alignment, we need to first change the text wrap settings. Click the Wrap Text button, and any option other than “In Line with Text”.  Your choice will depend on the document you’re writing, just choose the option that works best in the document.   Now, select the Align tools again.  You can now position your image precisely with these options. Align Center will position your picture in the center of the page widthwise. Align Middle will put the picture in the middle of the page height-wise. This works the same with textboxes.  Simply click the Align button in the Format tab, and you can center it in the page. And if you’d like to align several objects together, simply select them all, click Group, and then select Group from the menu.   Now, in the align tools, you can center the whole group on your page for a heading, or whatever you want to use the pictures for. These steps also work the same with Office 2007. Center objects in PowerPoint This works similar in PowerPoint, except that pictures are automatically set for square wrapping automatically, so you don’t have to change anything.  Simply insert the picture or other object of your choice, click Align, and choose the option you want. Additionally, if one object is already aligned like you want, drag another object near it and you will see a Smart Guide to help you align or center the second object with the first.  This only works with shapes in PowerPoint 2010 beta, but will work with pictures, textboxes, and media in the final release this summer. Conclusion These are good methods for centering images and objects in Word and PowerPoint.  From designing perfect headers to emphasizing your message in a PowerPoint presentation, this is something we’ve found useful and hope you will too. Since we’re talking about Office here, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft has announced the Technology Guarantee Program for Office 2010. Essentially what this means is, if you purchase a version of Office 2007 between March 5th and September 30th of this year, when Office 2010 is released you’ll be able to upgrade to it for free! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteAdd More Functions To Office 2007 By Installing Add-InsCustomize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaEasily Rotate Pictures In Word 2007Add Effects To Your Pictures in Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox)

  Read the article

• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

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

  Read the article

• Simple Preferred time control using silverlight 3.

  - by mohanbrij

  Here I am going to show you a simple preferred time control, where you can select the day of the week and the time of the day. This can be used in lots of place where you may need to display the users preferred times. Sample screenshot is attached below. This control is developed using Silverlight 3 and VS2008, I am also attaching the source code with this post. This is a very basic example. You can download and customize if further for your requirement if you want. I am trying to explain in few words how this control works and what are the different ways in which you can customize it further. File: PreferredTimeControl.xaml, in this file I have just hardcoded the controls and their positions which you can see in the screenshot above. In this example, to change the start day of the week and time, you will have to go and change the design in XAML file, its not controlled by your properties or implementation classes. You can also customize it to change the start day of the week, Language, Display format, styles, etc, etc. File: PreferredTimeControl.xaml.cs, In this control using the code below, first I am taking all the checkbox from my form and store it in the Global Variable, which I can use across my page. List<CheckBox> checkBoxList; #region Constructor public PreferredTimeControl() { InitializeComponent(); GetCheckboxes();//Keep all the checkbox in List in the Load itself } #endregion #region Helper Methods private List<CheckBox> GetCheckboxes() { //Get all the CheckBoxes in the Form checkBoxList = new List<CheckBox>(); foreach (UIElement element in LayoutRoot.Children) { if (element.GetType().ToString() == "System.Windows.Controls.CheckBox") { checkBoxList.Add(element as CheckBox); } } return checkBoxList; } Then I am exposing the two methods which you can use in the container form to get and set the values in this controls. /// <summary> /// Set the Availability on the Form, with the Provided Timings /// </summary> /// <param name="selectedTimings">Provided timings comes from the DB in the form 11,12,13....37 /// Where 11 refers to Monday Morning, 12 Tuesday Morning, etc /// Here 1, 2, 3 is for Morning, Afternoon and Evening respectively, and for weekdays /// 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 where 1 is for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thrusday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday respectively /// So if we want Monday Morning, we can can denote it as 11, similarly for Saturday Evening we can write 36, etc /// </param> public void SetAvailibility(string selectedTimings) { foreach (CheckBox chk in checkBoxList) { chk.IsChecked = false; } if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(selectedTimings)) { string[] selectedString = selectedTimings.Split(','); foreach (string selected in selectedString) { foreach (CheckBox chk in checkBoxList) { if (chk.Tag.ToString() == selected) { chk.IsChecked = true; } } } } } /// <summary> /// Gets the Availibility from the selected checkboxes /// </summary> /// <returns>String in the format of 11,12,13...41,42...31,32...37</returns> public string GetAvailibility() { string selectedText = string.Empty; foreach (CheckBox chk in GetCheckboxes()) { if (chk.IsChecked == true) { selectedText = chk.Tag.ToString() + "," + selectedText; } } return selectedText; }   In my example I am using the matrix format for Day and Time, for example Monday=1, Tuesday=2, Wednesday=3, Thursday = 4, Friday = 5, Saturday = 6, Sunday=7. And Morning = 1, Afternoon =2, Evening = 3. So if I want to represent Morning-Monday I will have to represent it as 11, Afternoon-Tuesday as 22, Morning-Wednesday as 13, etc. And in the other way to set the values in the control I am passing the values in the control in the same format as preferredTimeControl.SetAvailibility("11,12,13,16,23,22"); So this will set the checkbox value for Morning-Monday, Morning-Tuesday, Morning-Wednesday, Morning-Saturday, Afternoon of Tuesday and Afternoon of Wednesday. To implement this control, first I have to import this control in xmlns namespace as xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:PreferredTimeControlApp" and finally put in your page wherever you want, <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootGridStyle}"> <Border x:Name="ContentBorder" Style="{StaticResource ContentBorderStyle}"> <controls:PreferredTimeControl x:Name="preferredTimeControl"></controls:PreferredTimeControl> </Border> </Grid> And in the code behind you can just include this code: private void InitializeControl() { preferredTimeControl.SetAvailibility("11,12,13,16,23,22"); } And you are ready to go. For more details you can refer to my code attached. I know there can be even simpler and better way to do this. Let me know if any other ideas. Sorry, Guys Still I have used Silverlight 3 and VS2008, as from the system I am uploading this is still not upgraded, but still you can use the same code with Silverlight 4 and VS2010 without any changes. May be just it will ask you to upgrade your project which will take care of rest. Download Source Code.   Thanks ~Brij

  Read the article

• How to create a PeopleCode Application Package/Application Class using PeopleTools Tables

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  This article describes how - in PeopleCode (Release PeopleTools 8.50) - to enable a grid without enabling each static column, using a dynamic Application Class. The goal is to disable the following grid with three columns “Effort Date”, ”Effort Amount” and “Charge Back” , when the Check Box “Finished with task” is selected , without referencing each static column; this PeopleCode could be used dynamically with any grid. If the check box “Finished with task” is cleared, the content of the grid columns is editable (and the buttons “+” and “-“ are available): So, you create an Application Package “CLASS_EXTENSIONS” that contains an Application Class “EWK_ROWSET”. This Application Class is defined with Class extends “ Rowset” and you add two news properties “Enabled” and “Visible”: After creating this Application Class, you use it in two PeopleCode Events : Rowinit and FieldChange : This code is very ‘simple’, you write only one command : ” &ERS2.Enabled = False” → and the entire grid is “Enabled”… and you can use this code with any Grid! So, the complete PeopleCode to create the Application Package is (with explanation in [….]) : ******Package CLASS_EXTENSIONS : [Name of the Package: CLASS_EXTENSIONS] --Beginning of the declaration part------------------------------------------------------------------------------ class EWK_ROWSET extends Rowset; [Definition Class EWK_ROWSET as a subclass of Class Rowset] method EWK_ROWSET(&RS As Rowset); [Constructor is the Method with the same name of the Class] property boolean Visible get set; property boolean Enabled get set; [Definition of the property “Enabled” in read/write] private [Before the word “private”, all the declarations are publics] method SetDisplay(&DisplaySW As boolean, &PropName As string, &ChildSW As boolean); instance boolean &EnSW; instance boolean &VisSW; instance Rowset &NextChildRS; instance Row &NextRow; instance Record &NextRec; instance Field &NextFld; instance integer &RowCnt, &RecCnt, &FldCnt, &ChildRSCnt; instance integer &i, &j, &k; instance CLASS_EXTENSIONS:EWK_ROWSET &ERSChild; [For recursion] Constant &VisibleProperty = "VISIBLE"; Constant &EnabledProperty = "ENABLED"; end-class; --End of the declaration part------------------------------------------------------------------------------ method EWK_ROWSET [The Constructor] /+ &RS as Rowset +/ %Super = &RS; end-method; get Enabled /+ Returns Boolean +/; Return &EnSW; end-get; set Enabled /+ &NewValue as Boolean +/; &EnSW = &NewValue; %This.InsertEnabled=&EnSW; %This.DeleteEnabled=&EnSW; %This.SetDisplay(&EnSW, &EnabledProperty, False); [This method is called when you set this property] end-set; get Visible /+ Returns Boolean +/; Return &VisSW; end-get; set Visible /+ &NewValue as Boolean +/; &VisSW = &NewValue; %This.SetDisplay(&VisSW, &VisibleProperty, False); end-set; method SetDisplay [The most important PeopleCode Method] /+ &DisplaySW as Boolean, +/ /+ &PropName as String, +/ /+ &ChildSW as Boolean +/ [Not used in our example] &RowCnt = %This.ActiveRowCount; &NextRow = %This.GetRow(1); [To know the structure of a line ] &RecCnt = &NextRow.RecordCount; For &i = 1 To &RowCnt [Loop for each Line] &NextRow = %This.GetRow(&i); For &j = 1 To &RecCnt [Loop for each Record] &NextRec = &NextRow.GetRecord(&j); &FldCnt = &NextRec.FieldCount; For &k = 1 To &FldCnt [Loop for each Field/Record] &NextFld = &NextRec.GetField(&k); Evaluate Upper(&PropName) When = &VisibleProperty &NextFld.Visible = &DisplaySW; Break; When = &EnabledProperty; &NextFld.Enabled = &DisplaySW; [Enable each Field/Record] Break; When-Other Error "Invalid display property; Must be either VISIBLE or ENABLED" End-Evaluate; End-For; End-For; If &ChildSW = True Then [If recursion] &ChildRSCnt = &NextRow.ChildCount; For &j = 1 To &ChildRSCnt [Loop for each Rowset child] &NextChildRS = &NextRow.GetRowset(&j); &ERSChild = create CLASS_EXTENSIONS:EWK_ROWSET(&NextChildRS); &ERSChild.SetDisplay(&DisplaySW, &PropName, &ChildSW); [For each Rowset child, call Method SetDisplay with the same parameters used with the Rowset parent] End-For; End-If; End-For; end-method; ******End of the Package CLASS_EXTENSIONS:[Name of the Package: CLASS_EXTENSIONS] About the Author: Pascal Thaler joined Oracle University in 2005 where he is a Senior Instructor. His area of expertise is Oracle Peoplesoft Technology and he delivers the following courses: For Developers: PeopleTools Overview, PeopleTools I &II, Batch Application Engine, Language Oriented Object PeopleCode, Administration Security For Administrators : Server Administration & Installation, Database Upgrade & Data Management Tools For Interface Users: Integration Broker (Web Service)

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #006

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 This was my very first year of blogging so I was every day learning something new. As I have said many times, that blogging was never an intention. I had really not understood what exactly I am working on or beginning when I was beginning blogging in 2006. I had never knew that my life was going to change forever, once I started blogging. When I look back all of this year, I am happy that we are here together. 2007 IT Outsourcing to India – Top 10 Reasons Companies Outsource Outsourcing is about trust, collaboration and success. Helping other countries in need has been always the course of mankind, outsourcing is nothing different then that. With information technology and process improvements increasing the complexity, costs and skills required to accomplish routine tasks as well as challenging complex tasks, companies are outsourcing such tasks to providers who have the expertise to perform them at lower costs , with greater value and quality outcome. UDF – Remove Duplicate Chars From String This was a very interesting function I wrote in my early career. I am still using this function when I have to remove duplicate chars from strings. I have yet to come across a scenario where it does not work so I keep on using it till today. Please leave a comment if there is any better solution to this problem. FIX : Error : 3702 Cannot drop database because it is currently in use This is a very generic error when DROP Database is command is executed and the database is not dropped. The common mistake user is kept the connection open with this database and trying to drop the database. The database cannot be dropped if there is any other connection open along with it. It is always a good idea to take database in single user mode before dropping it. Here is the quick tutorial regarding how to bring the database in single user mode: Using T-SQL | Using SSMS. 2008 Install SQL Server 2008 – How to Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 – Installation Tutorial This was indeed one of the most popular articles in SQL Server 2008. Lots of people wanted to learn how to install SQL SErver 2008 but they were facing various issues while installation. I build this tutorial which becomes reference points for many. Default Collation of SQL Server 2008 What is the collation of SQL Server 2008 default installations? I often see this question confusing many experienced developers as well. Well the answer is in following image. Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Meeting – November 2008 User group meetings are fun, now a days I am going to User Group meetings every week but there was a case when I have been just a beginner on this subject. The bug of the community was caught on me years ago when I started to present in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQ LServer User Groups. 2009 Validate an XML document in TSQL using XSD My friend Jacob Sebastian wrote an excellent article on the subject XML and XSD. Because of the ‘eXtensible’ nature of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), often there is a requirement to restrict and validate the content of an XML document to a pre-defined structure and values. XSD (XML Schema Definition Language) is the W3C recommended language for describing and validating XML documents. SQL Server implements XSD as XML Schema Collections. Star Join Query Optimization At present, when queries are sent to very large databases, millions of rows are returned. Also the users have to go through extended query response times when joining multiple tables are involved with such queries. ‘Star Join Query Optimization’ is a new feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. This mechanism uses bitmap filtering for improving the performance of some types of queries by the effective retrieval of rows from fact tables. 2010 These puzzles are very interesting and intriguing – there was lots of interest on this subject. If you have free time this weekend. You may want to try them out. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists (Open)  Additionally, I had great fun presenting SQL Server Performance Tuning seminar at fantastic locations in Hyderabad. Installing AdventeWorks Database This has been the most popular request I have received on my blog. Here is the quick video about how one can install AdventureWorks. 2011 Effect of SET NOCOUNT on @@ROWCOUNT There was an interesting incident once while I was presenting a session. I wrote a code and suddenly 10 hands went up in the air.  This was a bit surprise to me as I do not know why they all got alerted. I assumed that there should be something wrong with either project, screen or my display. However the real reason was very interesting – I suggest you read the complete blog post to understand this interesting scenario. Error: Deleting Offline Database and Creating the Same Name This is very interesting because once a user deletes the offline database the MDF and LDF file still exists and if the user attempts to create a new database with the same name it will give error. I found this very interesting and the blog explains the concept very quickly. Have you ever faced a similar situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• EPM and Business Analytics Talking-head Videos from Oracle OpenWorld 2013

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Here is a selection of 2 to 3 minute video interviews at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld: 1. George Somogyi, Solutions Architect, New Edge Group, talks about the importance of having their integrated Oracle Hyperion Platform consisting of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management, Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and Oracle Business Intelligence Extended Edition plus their use of Oracle Managed Cloud Services. Speaker: George Somogyi @ http://youtu.be/kWn0dQxCUy8 2. Gregg Thompson, Director of Financial Systems for ADT, talks about using Oracle Data Relationship Management prior to implementing an Enterprise Performance Management solution. Gregg confirmed that there are big benefits to bringing the full Oracle Hyperion Financial Close suite online with Oracle DRM as the metadata source. Reduced maintenance time and use of external consultants translates into significant time and cost savings and faster implementation times. Speaker: Gregg Thompson @ http://youtu.be/XnFrR9Uk4xk 3. Jeff Spangler, Director Financial Planning and Analysis for Speedy Cash Holdings Corp, talked to us about the benefits achieved through implementing Oracle Hyperion Planning and financial reporting solutions. He also describes how the use of Data Relationship Management will keep the process running smoothly now and in the future. Speaker: Jeff Spangler @ http://youtu.be/kkkuMkgJ22U 4. Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision at Oracle, talks about Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision, how it is an integral part of the financial close process and that it provides better internal controls and automation of this task. Marc talks about Oracle Partners and customers alike who are seeing great value. Speaker: Marc Seewald @ http://youtu.be/lM_nfvACGuA 5. Matt Bradley, SVP of Product Development for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Applications at Oracle, talked to us about different deployment options for Oracle EPM. Cloud services (SaaS), managed services, on-premise, off-premise all have their merits, and organizations need flexibility to easily move between them as their companies evolve. Speaker: Matt Bradley @ http://youtu.be/ATO7Z9dbE-o 6. Neil Sellers, Partner, Qubix International talks about their experience with previewing Oracle’s new Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. He describes the benefits of the step-by-step task lists, the speed of getting the application up and running, and the huge benefits of not having to manage the software and hardware side of the planning process. Speaker: Neil Sellers @ http://youtu.be/xmosO28e4_I 7. Praveen Pasupuleti, Senior Business Intelligence Development Manager of Citrix Systems Inc., talks about their Oracle Hyperion Planning upgrade and the huge performance improvement now experienced in forecasting. He also talked about the benefits of Oracle Hyperion Workforce Planning achieved by Citrix. Speaker: Praveen Pasupuleti @ http://youtu.be/d1e_4hLqw8c 8. CheckPoint Consulting, talked to us about how Enterprise Performance Management should be viewed as an entire solution, rather than as a bunch of applications in silos, to provide significant benefits; and how Data Relationship Management can tie it all together effectively. Speaker: Ron Dimon @ http://youtu.be/sRwbdbbXvUE 9. Sonal Kulkarni, Enterprise Performance Management Leader, Cummins Inc., talks about their use of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management (Account Reconciliation Manager), Oracle Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and how this is providing efficiency, visibility and compliance benefits. Speaker: Sonal Kulkarni @ http://youtu.be/OEgup5dKyVc 10. Todd Renard, Manager Financial Planning and Business Analytics for B/E Aerospace Inc., talks about the huge benefits that B/E Aerospace is experiencing from Oracle Financial Close Suite. He was extremely excited about Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and how this helps them integrate a new business in as little as three weeks. Speaker: Todd Renard @ http://youtu.be/nIfqK46uVI8 11. Peter Smolianski, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia Courts, talked to us about how D.C. Courts is using Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management to push their 5 year plan forward, to report results to their constituents, and take accountability for process changes to become more efficient. Speaker: Peter Smolianski @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-DtB5pl-uk 12. Rich Wilkie, Senior Director of Product Management for Financial Close Suite at Oracle, talked to us about Oracle Financial Management Analytics. He told us how the prebuilt dashboards on top of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Suite make it easy for everyone to see the numbers and understand where they are in the close process, and if there is an issue, they can see where it is. Executives are excited to get this information on mobile devices too. Speaker: Rich Wilkie @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHuHgx74Yg 13. Dinesh Balebail, Senior Director of Software Development for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, talked to us about the power and speed of Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management and how it is being used to do deep costing for Telecoms, Hospitals, Banks and other high transaction volume organizations effectively. Speaker: Dinesh Balebail @ http://youtu.be/ivx5AZCXAfs /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

  Read the article

• Searching for the Perfect Developer&rsquo;s Laptop.

  - by mbcrump

  I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the  Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it.   Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color :  GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech.  =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2  Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below.  Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• Getting a handle on mobile data

  - by Eric Jensen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} written by Ashok Joshi The proliferation of mobile devices in the corporate world is both a blessing as well as a challenge.  Mobile devices improve productivity and the velocity of business for the end users; on the other hand, IT departments need to manage the corporate data and applications that run on these devices. Oracle Database Mobile Server (DMS for short) provides a simple and effective way to deal with the management challenge.  DMS supports data synchronization between a central Oracle database server and data on mobile devices.  It also provides authentication, encryption and application and device management.  Finally, DMS is a highly scalable solution that can be used to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.   Here’s a simplified outline of how such a solution might work. Each device runs local sync and mgmt agents that handle bidirectional data flow with an Oracle enterprise backend, run remote commands, and provide status to the management console. For example, mobile admins could monitor multiple networks of mobile devices, upgrade their software remotely, and even destroy the local database on a compromised device. DMS supports either Oracle Berkeley DB or SQLite for device-local storage, and runs on a wide variety of mobile platforms. The schema for the device-local database is pretty simple – it contains the name of the application that’s installed on the device as well as details such as product name, version number, time of last access etc. Each mobile user has an account on the monitoring system.  DMS supports authentication via the Oracle database authentication mechanisms or alternately, via an external authentication server such as Oracle Identity Management. DMS also provides the option of encrypting the data on disk as well as while it is being synchronized. Whenever a device connects with DMS, it sends the list of all local application changes to the server; the server updates the central repository with this information.  Synchronization can be triggered on-demand, whenever there’s a change on the device (e.g. new application installed or an existing application removed) or via a rule-based schedule (e.g. every Saturday). Synchronization is very fast and efficient, since only the changes are propagated.  This includes resume capability; should synchronization be interrupted for any reason, the next synchronization will resume where the previous synchronization was interrupted. If the device should be lost or stolen, DMS has the capability to remove the applications and/or data from the device. This ability to control access to sensitive data and applications is critical in the corporate environment. The central repository also allows the IT manager to track the kinds of applications that mobile users use and recommend patches and upgrades, while still allowing the mobile user full control over what applications s/he downloads and uses on the device.  This is useful since most devices are used for corporate as well as personal information. In certain restricted use scenarios, the IT manager can also control whether a certain application can be installed on a mobile device.  Should an unapproved application be installed, it can easily be removed the next time the device connects with the central server. Oracle Database mobile server provides a simple, effective and highly secure and scalable solution for managing the data and applications for the mobile workforce.

  Read the article

• Running a Mongo Replica Set on Azure VM Roles

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/15/running-a-mongo-replica-set-on-azure-vm-roles.aspxSetting up a MongoDB Replica Set with a bunch of Azure VMs is straightforward stuff. Here’s a step-by-step which gets you from 0 to fully-redundant 3-node document database in about 30 minutes (most of which will be spent waiting for VMs to fire up). First, create yourself 3 VM roles, which is the minimum number of nodes you need for high availability. You can use any OS that Mongo supports. This guide uses Windows but the only difference will be the mechanism for starting the Mongo service when the VM starts (Windows Service, daemon etc.) While the VMs are provisioning, download and install Mongo locally, so you can set up the replica set with the Mongo shell. We’ll create our replica set from scratch, doing one machine at a time (if you have a single node you want to upgrade to a replica set, it’s the same from step 3 onwards): 1. Setup Mongo Log into the first node, download mongo and unzip it to C:. Rename the folder to remove the version – so you have c:\MongoDB\bin etc. – and create a new folder for the logs, c:\MongoDB\logs. 2. Setup your data disk When you initialize a node in a replica set, Mongo pre-allocates a whole chunk of storage to use for data replication. It will use up to 5% of your data disk, so if you use a Windows VM image with a defsault 120Gb disk and host your data on C:, then Mongo will allocate 6Gb for replication. And that takes a while. Instead you can create yourself a new partition by shrinking down the C: drive in Computer Management, by say 10Gb, and then creating a new logical disk for your data from that spare 10Gb, which will be allocated as E:. Create a new folder, e:\data. 3. Start Mongo When that’s done, start a command line, point to the mongo binaries folder, install Mongo as a Windows Service, running in replica set mode, and start the service: cd c:\mongodb\bin mongod -logpath c:\mongodb\logs\mongod.log -dbpath e:\data -replSet TheReplicaSet –install net start mongodb 4. Open the ports Mongo uses port 27017 by default, so you need to allow access in the machine and in Azure. In the VM, open Windows Firewall and create a new inbound rule to allow access via port 27017. Then in the Azure Management Console for the VM role, under the Configure tab add a new rule, again to allow port 27017. 5. Initialise the replica set Start up your local mongo shell, connecting to your Azure VM, and initiate the replica set: c:\mongodb\bin\mongo sc-xyz-db1.cloudapp.net rs.initiate() This is the bit where the new node (at this point the only node) allocates its replication files, so if your data disk is large, this can take a long time (if you’re using the default C: drive with 120Gb, it may take so long that rs.initiate() never responds. If you’re sat waiting more than 20 minutes, start another instance of the mongo shell pointing to the same machine to check on it). Run rs.conf() and you should see one node configured. 6. Fix the host name for the primary – *don’t miss this one* For the first node in the replica set, Mongo on Windows doesn’t populate the full machine name. Run rs.conf() and the name of the primary is sc-xyz-db1, which isn’t accessible to the outside world. The replica set configuration needs the full DNS name of every node, so you need to manually rename it in your shell, which you can do like this: cfg = rs.conf() cfg.members[0].host = ‘sc-xyz-db1.cloudapp.net:27017’ rs.reconfig(cfg) When that returns, rs.conf() will have your full DNS name for the primary, and the other nodes will be able to connect. At this point you have a working database, so you can start adding documents, but there’s no replication yet. 7. Add more nodes For the next two VMs, follow steps 1 through to 4, which will give you a working Mongo database on each node, which you can add to the replica set from the shell with rs.add(), using the full DNS name of the new node and the port you’re using: rs.add(‘sc-xyz-db2.cloudapp.net:27017’) Run rs.status() and you’ll see your new node in STARTUP2 state, which means its initializing and replicating from the PRIMARY. Repeat for your third node: rs.add(‘sc-xyz-db3.cloudapp.net:27017’) When all nodes are finished initializing, you will have a PRIMARY and two SECONDARY nodes showing in rs.status(). Now you have high availability, so you can happily stop db1, and one of the other nodes will become the PRIMARY with no loss of data or service. Note – the process for AWS EC2 is exactly the same, but with one important difference. On the Azure Windows Server 2012 base image, the MongoDB release for 64-bit 2008R2+ works fine, but on the base 2012 AMI that release keeps failing with a UAC permission error. The standard 64-bit release is fine, but it lacks some optimizations that are in the 2008R2+ version.

  Read the article

• Upgrading SSIS Custom Components for SQL Server 2012

  Having finally got around to upgrading my custom components to SQL Server 2012, I thought I’d share some notes on the process. One of the goals was minimal duplication, so the same code files are used to build the 2008 and 2012 components, I just have a separate project file. The high level steps are listed below, followed by some more details. Create a 2012 copy of the project file Upgrade project, just open the new project file is VS2010 Change target framework to .NET 4.0 Set conditional compilation symbol for DENALI Change any conditional code, including assembly version and UI type name Edit project file to change referenced assemblies for 2012 Change target framework to .NET 4.0 Open the project properties. On the Applications page, change the Target framework to .NET Framework 4. Set conditional compilation symbol for DENALI Re-open the project properties. On the Build tab, first change the Configuration to All Configurations, then set a Conditional compilation symbol of DENALI. Change any conditional code, including assembly version and UI type name The value doesn’t have to be DENALI, it can actually be anything you like, that is just what I use. It is how I control sections of code that vary between versions. There were several API changes between 2005 and 2008, as well as interface name changes. Whilst we don’t have the same issues between 2008 and 2012, I still have some sections of code that do change such as the assembly attributes. #if DENALI [assembly: AssemblyDescription("Data Generator Source for SQL Server Integration Services 2012")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Copyright © 2012 Konesans Ltd")] [assembly: AssemblyVersion("3.0.0.0")] #else [assembly: AssemblyDescription("Data Generator Source for SQL Server Integration Services 2008")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Copyright © 2008 Konesans Ltd")] [assembly: AssemblyVersion("2.0.0.0")] #endif The Visual Studio editor automatically formats the code based on the current compilation symbols, hence in this case the 2008 code is grey to indicate it is disabled. As you can see in the previous example I have distinct assembly version attributes, ensuring I can run both 2008 and 2012 versions of my component side by side. For custom components with a user interface, be sure to update the UITypeName property of the DtsTask or DtsPipelineComponent attributes. As above I use the conditional compilation symbol to control the code. #if DENALI [DtsTask ( DisplayName = "File Watcher Task", Description = "File Watcher Task", IconResource = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTask.ico", UITypeName = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTaskUI,Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask,Version=3.0.0.0,Culture=Neutral,PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b", TaskContact = "File Watcher Task; Konesans Ltd; Copyright © 2012 Konesans Ltd; http://www.konesans.com" )] #else [DtsTask ( DisplayName = "File Watcher Task", Description = "File Watcher Task", IconResource = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTask.ico", UITypeName = "Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask.FileWatcherTaskUI,Konesans.Dts.Tasks.FileWatcherTask,Version=2.0.0.0,Culture=Neutral,PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b", TaskContact = "File Watcher Task; Konesans Ltd; Copyright © 2004-2008 Konesans Ltd; http://www.konesans.com" )] #endif public sealed class FileWatcherTask: Task, IDTSComponentPersist, IDTSBreakpointSite, IDTSSuspend { // .. code goes on... } Shown below is another example I found that needed changing. I borrow one of the MS editors, and use it against a custom property, but need to ensure I reference the correct version of the MS controls assembly. This section of code is actually shared between the 2005, 2008 and 2012 versions of my component hence it has test for both DENALI and KATMAI symbols. #if DENALI const string multiLineUI = "Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls.ModalMultilineStringEditor, Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls, Version=11.0.00.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; #elif KATMAI const string multiLineUI = "Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls.ModalMultilineStringEditor, Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; #else const string multiLineUI = "Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls.ModalMultilineStringEditor, Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Controls, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; #endif // Create Match Expression parameter IDTSCustomPropertyCollection100 propertyCollection = outputColumn.CustomPropertyCollection; IDTSCustomProperty100 property = propertyCollection.New(); property = propertyCollection.New(); property.Name = MatchParams.Name; property.Description = MatchParams.Description; property.TypeConverter = typeof(MultilineStringConverter).AssemblyQualifiedName; property.UITypeEditor = multiLineUI; property.Value = MatchParams.DefaultValue; Edit project file to change referenced assemblies for 2012 We now need to edit the project file itself. Open the MyComponente2012.cproj  in you favourite text editor, and then perform a couple of find and replaces as listed below: Find Replace Comment Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Change the assembly references version from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012. Microsoft SQL Server\100\ Microsoft SQL Server\110\ Change any assembly reference hint path locations from from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012. If you use any Build Events during development, such as copying the component assembly to the DTS folder, or calling GACUTIL to install it into the GAC, you can also change these now. An example of my new post-build event for a pipeline component is shown below, which uses the .NET 4.0 path for GACUTIL. It also uses the 110 folder location, instead of 100 for SQL Server 2008, but that was covered the the previous find and replace. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\gacutil.exe" /if "$(TargetPath)" copy "$(TargetPath)" "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DTS\PipelineComponents" /Y

  Read the article

• OpenSSL Versions in Solaris

  - by darrenm

  Those of you have have installed Solaris 11 or have read some of the blogs by my colleagues will have noticed Solaris 11 includes OpenSSL 1.0.0, this is a different version to what we have in Solaris 10.  I hope the following explains why that is and how it fits with the expectations on binary compatibility between Solaris releases. Solaris 10 was the first release where we included OpenSSL libraries and headers (part of it was actually statically linked into the SSH client/server in Solaris 9).  At time we were building and releasing Solaris 10 the current train of OpenSSL was 0.9.7.  The OpenSSL libraries at that time were known to not always be completely API and ABI (binary) compatible between releases (some times even in the lettered patch releases) though mostly if you stuck with the documented high level APIs you would be fine.   For this reason OpenSSL was classified as a 'Volatile' interface and in Solaris 10 Volatile interfaces were not part of the default library search path which is why the OpenSSL libraries live in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 10.  Okay, but what does Volatile mean ? Quoting from the attributes(5) man page description of Volatile (which was called External in older taxonomy): Volatile interfaces can change at any time and for any reason. The Volatile interface stability level allows Sun pro- ducts to quickly track a fluid, rapidly evolving specif- ication. In many cases, this is preferred to providing additional stability to the interface, as it may better meet the expectations of the consumer. The most common application of this taxonomy level is to interfaces that are controlled by a body other than Sun, but unlike specifications controlled by standards bodies or Free or Open Source Software (FOSS) communities which value interface compatibility, it can not be asserted that an incompatible change to the interface specifica- tion would be exceedingly rare. It may also be applied to FOSS controlled software where it is deemed more important to track the community with minimal latency than to provide stability to our customers. It also common to apply the Volatile classification level to interfaces in the process of being defined by trusted or widely accepted organization. These are generically referred to as draft standards. An "IETF Internet draft" is a well understood example of a specification under development. Volatile can also be applied to experimental interfaces. No assertion is made regarding either source or binary compatibility of Volatile interfaces between any two releases, including patches. Applications containing these interfaces might fail to function properly in any future release. Note that last paragraph!  OpenSSL is only one example of the many interfaces in Solaris that are classified as Volatile.  At the other end of the scale we have Committed (Stable in Solaris 10 terminology) interfaces, these include things like the POSIX APIs or Solaris specific APIs that we have no intention of changing in an incompatible way.  There are also Private interfaces and things we declare as Not-an-Interface (eg command output not intended for scripting against only to be read by humans). Even if we had declared OpenSSL as a Committed/Stable interface in Solaris 10 there are allowed exceptions, again quoting from attributes(5): 4. An interface specification which isn't controlled by Sun has been changed incompatibly and the vast majority of interface consumers expect the newer interface. 5. Not making the incompatible change would be incomprehensible to our customers. In our opinion and that of our large and small customers keeping up with the OpenSSL community is important, and certainly both of the above cases apply. Our policy for dealing with OpenSSL on Solaris 10 was to stay at 0.9.7 and add fixes for security vulnerabilities (the version string includes the CVE numbers of fixed vulnerabilities relevant to that release train).  The last release of OpenSSL 0.9.7 delivered by the upstream community was more than 4 years ago in Feb 2007. Now lets roll forward to just before the release of Solaris 11 Express in 2010. By that point in time the current OpenSSL release was 0.9.8 with the 1.0.0 release known to be coming soon.  Two significant changes to OpenSSL were made between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Express.  First in Solaris 11 Express (and Solaris 11) we removed the requirement that Volatile libraries be placed in /usr/sfw/lib, that means OpenSSL is now in /usr/lib, secondly we upgraded it to the then current version stream of OpenSSL (0.9.8) as was expected by our customers. In between Solaris 11 Express in 2010 and the release of Solaris 11 in 2011 the OpenSSL community released version 1.0.0.  This was a huge milestone for a long standing and highly respected open source project.  It would have been highly negligent of Solaris not to include OpenSSL 1.0.0e in the Solaris 11 release. It is the latest best supported and best performing version.     In fact Solaris 11 isn't 'just' OpenSSL 1.0.0 but we have added our SPARC T4 engine and the AES-NI engine to support the on chip crypto acceleration. This gives us 4.3x better AES performance than OpenSSL 0.9.8 running on AIX on an IBM POWER7. We are now working with the OpenSSL community to determine how best to integrate the SPARC T4 changes into the mainline OpenSSL.  The OpenSSL 'pkcs11' engine we delivered in Solaris 10 to support the CA-6000 card and the SPARC T1/T2/T3 hardware is still included in Solaris 11. When OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 come out we will asses what is best for Solaris customers. It might be upgrade or it might be parallel delivery of more than one version stream.  At this time Solaris 11 still classifies OpenSSL as a Volatile interface, it is our hope that we will be able at some point in a future release to give it a higher interface stability level. Happy crypting! and thank-you OpenSSL community for all the work you have done that helps Solaris.

  Read the article

• Row Count Plus Transformation

  As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work.   All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

  Read the article

• Process Centric Banking: Loan Origination Solution

  - by Manish Palaparthy

  There is an old proverb that goes, "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory". So, we keep doing numerous "Proof of Concepts" with our own products on various business cases to analyze them deeply, understand and explain to our customers. We then present our learnings as they happened. The awareness of each PoC should help readers increase the trustworthiness of the results coming out of these PoCs. I present one such PoC where we invested a lot of time&effort.  Process Centric Banking : Loan Origination Solution Loan Origination is a process by which a borrower applies for a new loan and the lender processes that application. Loan origination includes the series of steps taken by the bank from the point the customer shows interest in a loan product all the way to disbursal of funds. The Loan Origination process is relevant for many kind of lenders in Financial services: Banks, Credit Unions, NBFCs(Non Banking Financial Companies) and so on. For simplicity sake, I will use "Bank" as the lending institution in the rest of my article.  Loan Origination is one of the core processes for Banks as it is the process by which the it creates assets against which the Institution earns most of its profits from. A well tuned loan origination process can affect the Bank in many positive ways. Banks have always shown great interest in automating the loan origination process for the above reason. However, due the constant changes in customer environment, market dynamics, prevailing economic conditions, cost pressures & regulatory environment they run into lot of challenges. Let me categorize some of these challenges for you Customer Environment Multiple Channels: Customer can use any of the available channels (Internet Banking, Email, Fax, Branch, Phone Banking, ATM, Broker, Mobile, Snail Mail) to perform all or some of the activities related to her Visibility into the origination process: Expect immediate update on the status of loan processing & alert messages Reduced Turn Around Time: Expect loans to be processed with least turn around time Reduced loan processing fees: Partly due to market dynamics the customer expects the loan processing fee to be negligible Market Dynamics Competitive environment:  The competition keeps creating many variants of loan products to attract customers, the bank needs to create similar product variants with better offers to attract customers or keep existing ones Ability to migrate loans from one vendor to another: It has become really easy for retail customers to move from one bank to the other given the low fee of loan processing and highly attractive offers. How does the bank protect it's customer base while actively engaging with potential customers banking with competitor banks Flexibility to react to market developments: Market development greatly influence loan processing, underwriting, asset valuation, risk mitigation rules. Can the bank modify rules and policies, the idea is not just to react to market developments but to pro-actively manage new developments Economic conditions Constant change in various rates and their implications on the rates and rules applied when on-boarding a loan: How quickly can the bank apply changes to rates offered to customers when the central bank changes various rates Requirements of Audit by the central banker: Tough economic conditions have demanded much more stringent audit rules and tests. The banks needs to produce ready reports(historic & operational) for audit compliance Risk Mitigation: While risk mitigation has always been a key concern for the bank, this is the area where the bank's underwriters & risk analysts spend the maximum time when processing a loan application. In order to reduce TAT the bank cannot compromise on its risk mitigation strategies Cost pressures Reduce Cost of processing per application: To deliver a reduced loan processing fee to the customer, the bank needs to keep its cost per processing loan application low. Meet customer TAT expectations while reducing the queues and the systems being used to process the loan application: The loan application could potentially be spending a lot of time waiting in the queue for further processing. Different volumes & patterns of applications demand different queuing algorithms. The bank needs to have real-time visibility into these queues and have the flexibility to change queuing algorithms at runtime  Increase the use of electronic communication and reduce the branch channel usage: Lesser automation leads not only leads to Increased turn around time, it also impacts more costs to reach out to customers The objective of our PoC was to implement a Loan Origination Solution whose ownership lies with the bank and effectively meet the challenges listed above. We built a simple story board for the solution We then went about implementing our storyboard using Oracle BPM Suite, Webcenter Content : Imaging. The web UI has been built on ADF technolgies, while the integration with core-services has been implemented using the underlying SOA infrastructure. The BPM process model is quite exhaustive can meet all the challenges listed above to reasonable degree. A bank intending to implement an end-to-end Loan Origination Solution has multiple options at it's disposal. It can Develop a customer Loan Origination Application from scratch: Gives maximum opportunity to build what you want but inflexible to upgrade and maintain. Higher TCO in long term Buy a Packaged application & customize it: Customizing a generic loan application can be tedious and prove as difficult as above. Build it using many disparate & un-integrated tools: Initially seems easier than developing from scratch. But, without integrated tool sets this is not a viable approach either or A solution based on a Framework: Independent Services and Business Process Modeling provide decoupled architecture that is flexible. We built this framework end-to-end with processes the core process of loan origination & several sub-processes such as Analyse and define customer needs, customer credit verification, identity check processes, legal review process, New customer registration & risk assessment.

  Read the article

• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

  Read the article

• Unable to fix broken packages with sudo apt-get install -f

  - by Bob

  Here's my result, of sudo apt-get install -f. i have Ran it twice and got negative result. I believe there is an error at "error in Version string '0:3.6.1-dates for language English Translation data updates for all supported packages for: English" This same statement "error in Version string, caused me three days of attempting to download version 12.04. There is a bug report concerning the quoted text as well. Is there anyway to download the version without the language packs, why would I corrupt version 11.10? Also, when attempting to download Synaptic using sudo apt-get install synaptic, I get the same error message. Again I point out the initial download problems and the same error message receipt. Thanks b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$ sudo apt-get install -f [sudo] password for b0b: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 298 not upgraded. b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$ sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 298 not upgraded. b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages have been kept back: linux-headers-generic software-center The following packages will be upgraded: accountsservice acpi-support acpid aisleriot alsa-utils app-install-data-partner appmenu-qt apport apport-gtk apt-transport-https apt-utils aptdaemon aptdaemon-data apturl apturl-common banshee banshee-extension-soundmenu banshee-extension-ubuntuonemusicstore baobab bind9-host binutils bluez-alsa bluez-cups bluez-gstreamer brasero brasero-cdrkit brasero-common checkbox checkbox-gtk command-not-found command-not-found-data compiz compiz-core compiz-gnome compiz-plugins-default compiz-plugins-main-default cups cups-bsd cups-client cups-common cups-ppdc deja-dup desktop-file-utils dnsutils empathy empathy-common eog evince evince-common evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common file-roller firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support gbrainy gcalctool gconf2 gconf2-common gedit gedit-common ghostscript ghostscript-cups ghostscript-x gir1.2-atspi-2.0 gir1.2-gconf-2.0 gir1.2-gnomebluetooth-1.0 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 gir1.2-totem-1.0 gir1.2-unity-4.0 gir1.2-webkit-3.0 gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-bluetooth gnome-control-center gnome-control-center-data gnome-desktop3-data gnome-font-viewer gnome-games-common gnome-icon-theme gnome-mahjongg gnome-online-accounts gnome-orca gnome-power-manager gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session gnome-session-bin gnome-session-canberra gnome-session-common gnome-settings-daemon gnome-sudoku gnome-system-log gnome-system-monitor gnome-utils-common gnomine gstreamer0.10-gconf gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-bin gvfs-fuse gwibber gwibber-service gwibber-service-facebook gwibber-service-identica gwibber-service-twitter hpijs hplip hplip-cups hplip-data indicator-datetime indicator-session indicator-sound isc-dhcp-client isc-dhcp-common jockey-common jockey-gtk language-selector-common language-selector-gnome libaccountsservice0 libapt-inst1.3 libarchive1 libasound2-plugins libatk-adaptor libbind9-60 libbrasero-media3-1 libcamel-1.2-29 libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk0 libcanberra-gtk3-0 libcanberra-gtk3-module libcanberra-pulse libcanberra0 libdecoration0 libdns69 libebackend-1.2-1 libebook1.2-12 libecal1.2-10 libedata-book-1.2-11 libedata-cal-1.2-13 libedataserver1.2-15 libedataserverui-3.0-1 libevince3-3 libgconf2-4 libgnome-bluetooth8 libgnome-control-center1 libgnome-desktop-3-2 libgoa-1.0-0 libgrip0 libgs9 libgs9-common libgtk-3-bin libgtksourceview-3.0-0 libgtksourceview-3.0-common libgweather-3-0 libgweather-common libgwibber-gtk2 libgwibber2 libhpmud0 libimobiledevice2 libisc62 libisccc60 libisccfg62 libjasper1 liblightdm-gobject-1-0 liblwres60 libmetacity-private0 libmission-control-plugins0 libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil libnautilus-extension1 libnm-glib-vpn1 libnm-glib4 libnm-util2 libnotify0.4-cil libnux-1.0-0 libnux-1.0-common libpam-gnome-keyring libreoffice-emailmerge libreoffice-style-human libsane-hpaio libsmbclient libsnmp-base libsnmp15 libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 libt1-5 libtotem0 libubuntuone-1.0-1 libubuntuone1.0-cil libunity-2d-private0 libunity-core-4.0-4 libunity6 libusbmuxd1 libwbclient0 libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 libwebkitgtk-1.0-common libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-common libxml2 linux-generic linux-image-generic metacity metacity-common mobile-broadband-provider-info modemmanager mousetweaks multiarch-support nautilus nautilus-data nautilus-sendto-empathy network-manager nux-tools onboard openssl pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils python-apport python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets python-aptdaemon.gtkwidgets python-brlapi python-cups python-cupshelpers python-gobject-cairo python-httplib2 python-launchpadlib python-libxml2 python-pam python-papyon python-pkg-resources python-problem-report python-pyatspi2 python-software-properties python-ubuntuone-client python-ubuntuone-storageprotocol samba-common samba-common-bin seahorse shotwell simple-scan smbclient sni-qt software-properties-common software-properties-gtk sudo system-config-printer-common system-config-printer-gnome system-config-printer-udev telepathy-indicator telepathy-mission-control-5 thunderbird thunderbird-globalmenu thunderbird-gnome-support tomboy totem totem-common totem-mozilla totem-plugins ttf-opensymbol ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard ubuntuone-client ubuntuone-client-gnome ubuntuone-couch unity unity-2d unity-2d-launcher unity-2d-panel unity-2d-places unity-2d-spread unity-common unity-lens-applications unity-services update-manager update-manager-core update-notifier update-notifier-common usbmuxd vim-common vim-tiny vinagre vino xorg xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xul-ext-ubufox 296 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/159 MB of archives. After this operation, 10.1 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Extracting templates from packages: 100% Preconfiguring packages ... dpkg: error: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 4131 package 'python-zope.interface': error in Version string '0:3.6.1-dates for language English Translation data updates for all supported packages for: English . language-pack-en-base provides the bulk of translation data and is updated only seldom. This package provides frequent translation updates.': version string has embedded spaces E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) b0b@b0b-IC780M-A:~$

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226  | Next Page >