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App Stores–In All Things, Its Quality Over Quantity

- by D'Arcy Lussier

Everybody has an opinion about Windows 8. People love it, people hate it, people are meh about it, people are apparently buying it from Microsoft stores in NYC as if it was water before a natural disaster…if there’s one thing that Microsoft product launches do well, its the ability to bring out strong emotional responses. Over at eweek.com, Don Reisinger wrote about 5 good and bad things about Windows 8. Yes, another opinion piece on WIndows 8. I figured since this one had good and bad it might be worthwhile to read. I then came across #10 on his list, and figured “What the hell…might as well post a bit of a rant on Windows 8 myself!” Here’s #10: 10. Bad: Too few apps Unfortunately, Microsoft wasn’t able to get too many developers to start producing applications for its Windows 8 Store. Microsoft hasn’t yet released official numbers, but some have said that the marketplace has less than 8,000 programs. Considering Apple’s App Store has 100 times that, it’s about time Microsoft starts leaning on developers to get more programs into its store. Believe me, Microsoft *has* been leaning on developers to get apps into the store. I’ve been asked at least 5 or 6 times from 5 or 6 different friends at Microsoft about whether I was going to write a Windows 8 app. I think Microsoft felt they had to try and address the number of apps available in their marketplace, since some people (like Don) would draw comparisons to the number of apps in the Apple marketplace. I feel for Microsoft in this, since the number of apps in a marketplace are an empty stat. Quality of Quantity I have an iPad that my family (wife, 10yo daughter, 3yo daughter) use. We all have our own apps installed on it. In addition, my wife has an iPhone 4S that she also installs apps on. As someone who gets asked by his kids often whether they can buy/download an app, the vast majority of the vast catalogue of iOS marketplace apps are crap! Do you realize how many “free” games are out there, only to really be not-free because you have to purchase in-game content to make the game actually playable? And how about searching – with such a vast array of apps and such high numbers of craptastic ones, trying to find something is incredibly difficult and can be frustrating. I would rather see that Microsoft has 8000 high quality apps in their store at launch, instead of 800000 that were mostly junk. Too Few Apps?! And seriously, 8000 is not a small number. How many iOS apps have I actually bought between the iPad and iPhone? I’ll be generous and say 30…heck, let’s round it up to 40. It’s not like I have 10,000 apps installed on my iPad, nor will that ever happen! So if people have, at the *launch* of a new platform ecosystem, EIGHT THOUSAND apps to choose from, I don’t see that as a fail at all! It should be noted that most of the most common apps (Netflix, Skype, etc.) are available for Windows 8 at launch – I guess I’ll have to wait a few weeks for My Pony Ranch and all its clones to start showing up; pity. Let’s Check Back in a Year So look, let’s check back in a year’s time and see what the app store looks like. My hope is that Microsoft doesn’t continue to push quantity over quality. Even knowing the optics that # of apps in the store carries and the pressure to catch Apple and Android marketplaces, I hope Microsoft avoids the scenario where there’s a good percentage of apps in the Windows Store that are utter rubbish and finding the gems will be cumbersome. But if that happens, we can thank guys like Dan who raised the false issue of app count at the launch for it.

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A (Late) Meme Monday Post: On SQLFamily

- by Argenis

Yesterday a member of the SQL community who I deeply admire sent me a DM on Twitter asking whether I had done a SQLFamily post for Thomas LaRock’s (blog|@SQLRockstar) Meme Monday for November. I replied that I did not, and I regretted not having done so. A subtle DM followed my response: “Get on it, you have all week”. And indeed I must. So here’s an attempt to express some of my feelings on a community that has catapulted my career like nothing else before I embraced it. Nanos Gigantium Humeris Insidentes I stand on the shoulders of giants. My SQLFamily has given me support at all levels. Professionally and personally. There is never a lack of will to help and provide advice to others in this community. And I do my best to help. On #SQLHelp on Twitter, via email, or even on the phone. I expect no retribution, because I know that when and if I do run into problems, my SQLFamily will be there for me. I have met some of the most humble, dedicated and most professional people in the SQL community. And some of them have pretty big titles: MVPs, MCMs, Regional Mentors, and even leaders of PASS, SQLCAT members, and even PMs and Devs on the SQL Server team. All are welcome, and that includes YOU! I have also met some people that are rather reserved and don’t participate as much in the community, for whatever reason. Be as it may, let it be know to all that we are a very welcoming community – heck, some of my closest friends and people I can count on in the community have completely opposite political views. We share one goal: to get better and help others get better. Even if you are a lurker – my hope is that one day you’ll decide to give back some of what you have learned. You have to take it to the next level On one of my previous jobs as an IT Supervisor I used to tell my team all the time about the benefits of continuous education and self-driven learning. Shortly after I left that job, the company went bankrupt and some of my staff got laid off – some without any severance pay whatsoever. I eventually found out that some of them had a really hard time finding another job, because their skills were simply outdated. They had become stale professionals. Don’t be one of them. If you don’t take advantage of these learning resources, somebody else will – and that person has an advantage over you when applying for that awesome job position that got opened. There’s a severe shortage of good DBAs and DB Devs out there. What’s your excuse for not being excellent? Even if your knowledge of SQL Server is at the beginner level, really – you have no excuse to get better. Just go to SQLUniversity and learn from there. Don’t get stale! Thank You To all of you in the SQL community who put so much time and energy into helping others, my deepest gratitude to you. I can’t wait to meet you all again at the next event and share our SQL stories over a pint of beer (or a shot of Jaeger) Cheers! -Argenis

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Project Euler 17: (Iron)Python

- by Ben Griswold

In my attempt to learn (Iron)Python out in the open, here’s my solution for Project Euler Problem 17. As always, any feedback is welcome. # Euler 17 # http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=17 # If the numbers 1 to 5 are written out in words: # one, two, three, four, five, then there are # 3 + 3 + 5 + 4 + 4 = 19 letters used in total. # If all the numbers from 1 to 1000 (one thousand) # inclusive were written out in words, how many letters # would be used? # # NOTE: Do not count spaces or hyphens. For example, 342 # (three hundred and forty-two) contains 23 letters and # 115 (one hundred and fifteen) contains 20 letters. The # use of "and" when writing out numbers is in compliance # with British usage. import time start = time.time() def to_word(n): h = { 1 : "one", 2 : "two", 3 : "three", 4 : "four", 5 : "five", 6 : "six", 7 : "seven", 8 : "eight", 9 : "nine", 10 : "ten", 11 : "eleven", 12 : "twelve", 13 : "thirteen", 14 : "fourteen", 15 : "fifteen", 16 : "sixteen", 17 : "seventeen", 18 : "eighteen", 19 : "nineteen", 20 : "twenty", 30 : "thirty", 40 : "forty", 50 : "fifty", 60 : "sixty", 70 : "seventy", 80 : "eighty", 90 : "ninety", 100 : "hundred", 1000 : "thousand" } word = "" # Reverse the numbers so position (ones, tens, # hundreds,...) can be easily determined a = [int(x) for x in str(n)[::-1]] # Thousands position if (len(a) == 4 and a[3] != 0): # This can only be one thousand based # on the problem/method constraints word = h[a[3]] + " thousand " # Hundreds position if (len(a) >= 3 and a[2] != 0): word += h[a[2]] + " hundred" # Add "and" string if the tens or ones # position is occupied with a non-zero value. # Note: routine is broken up this way for [my] clarity. if (len(a) >= 2 and a[1] != 0): # catch 10 - 99 word += " and" elif len(a) >= 1 and a[0] != 0: # catch 1 - 9 word += " and" # Tens and ones position tens_position_value = 99 if (len(a) >= 2 and a[1] != 0): # Calculate the tens position value per the # first and second element in array # e.g. (8 * 10) + 1 = 81 tens_position_value = int(a[1]) * 10 + a[0] if tens_position_value <= 20: # If the tens position value is 20 or less # there's an entry in the hash. Use it and there's # no need to consider the ones position word += " " + h[tens_position_value] else: # Determine the tens position word by # dividing by 10 first. E.g. 8 * 10 = h[80] # We will pick up the ones position word later in # the next part of the routine word += " " + h[(a[1] * 10)] if (len(a) >= 1 and a[0] != 0 and tens_position_value > 20): # Deal with ones position where tens position is # greater than 20 or we have a single digit number word += " " + h[a[0]] # Trim the empty spaces off both ends of the string return word.replace(" ","") def to_word_length(n): return len(to_word(n)) print sum([to_word_length(i) for i in xrange(1,1001)]) print "Elapsed Time:", (time.time() - start) * 1000, "millisecs" a=raw_input('Press return to continue')

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An Unusual UpdatePanel

- by João Angelo

The code you are about to see was mostly to prove a point, to myself, and probably has limited applicability. Nonetheless, in the remote possibility this is useful to someone here it goes… So this is a control that acts like a normal UpdatePanel where all child controls are registered as postback triggers except for a single control specified by the TriggerControlID property. You could basically achieve the same thing by registering all controls as postback triggers in the regular UpdatePanel. However with this, that process is performed automatically. Finally, here is the code: public sealed class SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel : WebControl, INamingContainer { public string TriggerControlID { get; set; } [TemplateInstance(TemplateInstance.Single)] [PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)] public ITemplate ContentTemplate { get; set; } public override ControlCollection Controls { get { this.EnsureChildControls(); return base.Controls; } } protected override void CreateChildControls() { if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(this.TriggerControlID)) throw new InvalidOperationException( "The TriggerControlId property must be set."); this.Controls.Clear(); var updatePanel = new UpdatePanel() { ID = string.Concat(this.ID, "InnerUpdatePanel"), ChildrenAsTriggers = false, UpdateMode = UpdatePanelUpdateMode.Conditional, ContentTemplate = this.ContentTemplate }; updatePanel.Triggers.Add(new SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger { ControlID = this.TriggerControlID }); this.Controls.Add(updatePanel); } } internal sealed class SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger : UpdatePanelControlTrigger { private Control target; private ScriptManager scriptManager; public Control Target { get { if (this.target == null) { this.target = this.FindTargetControl(true); } return this.target; } } public ScriptManager ScriptManager { get { if (this.scriptManager == null) { var page = base.Owner.Page; if (page != null) { this.scriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(page); } } return this.scriptManager; } } protected override bool HasTriggered() { string asyncPostBackSourceElementID = this.ScriptManager.AsyncPostBackSourceElementID; if (asyncPostBackSourceElementID == this.Target.UniqueID) return true; return asyncPostBackSourceElementID.StartsWith( string.Concat(this.target.UniqueID, "$"), StringComparison.Ordinal); } protected override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); foreach (Control control in FlattenControlHierarchy(this.Owner.Controls)) { if (control == this.Target) continue; bool isApplicableControl = false; isApplicableControl |= control is INamingContainer; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackDataHandler; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackEventHandler; if (isApplicableControl) { this.ScriptManager.RegisterPostBackControl(control); } } } private static IEnumerable<Control> FlattenControlHierarchy( ControlCollection collection) { foreach (Control control in collection) { yield return control; if (control.Controls.Count > 0) { foreach (Control child in FlattenControlHierarchy(control.Controls)) { yield return child; } } } } } You can use it like this, meaning that only the B2 button will trigger an async postback: <cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel ID="Test" runat="server" TriggerControlID="B2"> <ContentTemplate> <asp:Button ID="B1" Text="B1" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B2" Text="B2" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B3" Text="B3" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Label ID="LInner" Text="LInner" runat="server" /> </ContentTemplate> </cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel>

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Ajax Autocomplete Extender

- by Jason Ulloa

El objetivo de este post es preparar un ejemplo sobre un tema que es planteado muy frecuentemente en los Foros de MSDN, como realizar un Autocomplete contra una base de datos. Qué requerimos? Antes de poder realizar un Autocomplete debemos tener en cuenta los elementos principales que requerimos para poder hacerlo funcionar, descritos de la siguiente manera: 1. Textbox: Nuestro grandioso amigo Textbox, que será donde el usuario ingresará los datos a buscar. 2. Un Webservice: que contendrá el método que se conectara a la base de datos y devolverá una lista con la información encontrada. 3. Ajax Autocomplete Extender: este es por decirlo así, el elemento más importante. Nos servirá como medio de enlace entre el webservice que expone el método y el textbox recuperando y mostrando los datos en forma de lista desplegable. La implementación Si bien parecierá complicado, crear un autocomplete extender es bastante sencillo. Empezaremos creando un nuevo sitio asp.net, en este sitio agregaremos un textbox y dos controles muy importantes de Ajax el ToolkitScriptManager para controlar el rende rizado de los script de ajax y el AutocompleteExtender que, como mencione anteriormente, será el medio de enlace. Antes de mostrar como quedará el código de lo anterior, explicaré algunas propiedades del AutocompleteExtender para que se entienda de mejor manera: 1. El ServicePath: contiene la ruta relativa al webservice que utilizaremos. 2. MinimumPrefixLength: se refiere al número de caracteres que deben ser digitados antes de iniciar la búsqueda. 3. ServiceMethod: el nombre del metodo de nuestro webservice que se encargará de devolver los datos. 4. EnableCaching: para mantener en cache los datos consultados, obteniendo mayor velocidad. 5. TargetControlID: una de las propiedades más importantes, acá se coloca el nombre del textbox al cual se unirá el Autocomplete 6. CompletionInterval: tiempo que debe transcurrir antes de iniciar con el trabajo de los datos. Una vez, explicadas las propiedades básicas, veamos como queda implementada la primer parte de nuestro autocomplete: <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="manager" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> <asp:AutoCompleteExtender ID="AutoCompleteExtender1" runat="server" ServicePath="WebService.asmx" MinimumPrefixLength="1" ServiceMethod="PersonasInfo " EnableCaching="true" TargetControlID="TextBox1" UseContextKey="True" CompletionSetCount="10" CompletionInterval="0"> </asp:AutoCompleteExtender> </div> </form> Ahora que nuestro código html está completo, es hora de trabajar directamente con nuestro webservice, este deberá contener un método que devuelva una lista o arreglo de datos, los cuales por supuesto, serán traídos desde la base de datos. Antes de implementar este método, debemos asegurarnos de que nuestra clase del webservice tiene habilitados los espacios para ser utilizada [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService()] [WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class WebService : System.Web.Services.WebService {} Ahora si, nuestro metodo principal [WebMethod()] [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptMethod()] public string[] PersonasInfo(string prefixText, int count) { string connstring = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["LocalSqlServer"].ConnectionString; using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(connstring)) { SqlCommand comando = new SqlCommand("select nombre from personas where nombre LIKE '%' + @param + '%' ", conn); comando.Parameters.AddWithValue("@param", prefixText); SqlDataReader dr = default(SqlDataReader); comando.Connection.Open(); dr = comando.ExecuteReader(); List<string> items = new List<string>(); while (dr.Read()) { items.Add(dr["nombre"].ToString()); } comando.Connection.Close(); return items.ToArray(); } } Del método anterior no explicaré en profundidad, pues es bastante sencillo. Una consulta a la base de datos utilizando un datareader y devolviendo los datos en una lista como arreglo. Lo más importante serían las 2 primeras líneas [WebMethod()] y el [ScriptMethod()] las cuales habilitan nuestro método para poder ser accedido y utilizado. Por último, el código de ejemplo en C# (VB Autcomplete):

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SQL Constraints – CHECK and NOCHECK

- by David Turner

One performance issue i faced at a recent project was with the way that our constraints were being managed, we were using Subsonic as our ORM, and it has a useful tool for generating your ORM code called SubStage – once configured, you can regenerate your DAL code easily based on your database schema, and it can even be integrated into your build as a pre-build event if you want to do this. SubStage also offers the useful feature of being able to generate DDL scripts for your entire database, and can script your data for you too. The problem came when we decided to use the generate scripts feature to migrate the database onto a test database instance – it turns out that the DDL scripts that it generates include the WITH NOCHECK option, so when we executed them on the test instance, and performed some testing, we found that performance wasn’t as expected. A constraint can be disabled, enabled but not trusted, or enabled and trusted. When it is disabled, data can be inserted that violates the constraint because it is not being enforced, this is useful for bulk load scenarios where performance is important. So what does it mean to say that a constraint is trusted or not trusted? Well this refers to the SQL Server Query Optimizer, and whether it trusts that the constraint is valid. If it trusts the constraint then it doesn’t check it is valid when executing a query, so the query can be executed much faster. Here is an example base in this article on TechNet, here we create two tables with a Foreign Key constraint between them, and add a single row to each. We then query the tables: 1 DROP TABLE t2 2 DROP TABLE t1 3 GO 4 5 CREATE TABLE t1(col1 int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY) 6 CREATE TABLE t2(col1 int NOT NULL) 7 8 ALTER TABLE t2 WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT fk_t2_t1 FOREIGN KEY(col1) 9 REFERENCES t1(col1) 10 11 INSERT INTO t1 VALUES(1) 12 INSERT INTO t2 VALUES(1) 13 GO14 15 SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t2 16 WHERE EXISTS17 (SELECT *18 FROM t1 19 WHERE t1.col1 = t2.col1) This all works fine, and in this scenario the constraint is enabled and trusted. We can verify this by executing the following SQL to query the ‘is_disabled’ and ‘is_not_trusted’ properties: 1 select name, is_disabled, is_not_trusted from sys.foreign_keys This gives the following result: We can disable the constraint using this SQL: 1 alter table t2 NOCHECK CONSTRAINT fk_t2_t1 And when we query the constraints again, we see that the constraint is disabled and not trusted: So the constraint won’t be enforced and we can insert data into the table t2 that doesn’t match the data in t1, but we don’t want to do this, so we can enable the constraint again using this SQL: 1 alter table t2 CHECK CONSTRAINT fk_t2_t1 But when we query the constraints again, we see that the constraint is enabled, but it is still not trusted: This means that the optimizer will check the constraint each time a query is executed over it, which will impact the performance of the query, and this is definitely not what we want, so we need to make the constraint trusted by the optimizer again. First we should check that our constraints haven’t been violated, which we can do by running DBCC: 1 DBCC CHECKCONSTRAINTS (t2) Hopefully you see the following message indicating that DBCC completed without finding any violations of your constraint: Having verified that the constraint was not violated while it was disabled, we can simply execute the following SQL: 1 alter table t2 WITH CHECK CHECK CONSTRAINT fk_t2_t1 At first glance this looks like it must be a typo to have the keyword CHECK repeated twice in succession, but it is the correct syntax and when we query the constraints properties, we find that it is now trusted again: To fix our specific problem, we created a script that checked all constraints on our tables, using the following syntax: 1 ALTER TABLE t2 WITH CHECK CHECK CONSTRAINT ALL

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#iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

- by andrewbrust

I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults. Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew. For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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How to Build Services from Legacy Applications

- by Chris Falter

The SOA consultants invaded the executive suite at your company or agency, preached the true religion, and converted the unbelievers. Now by divine imperative you must convert your legacy applications into a suite of reusable services. But as usual, you lack the time and resources that you need in order to develop the services properly. So you googled or bing’ed, found this blog post, and began crying in gratitude. Yes, as the title implies, I am going to reveal my easy, 3-step, works-every-time process for converting silos of legacy applications into the inventory of services your CIO has been dreaming about. So just close your eyes and count to 3 … now open them … and here it is…. Not. While wishful thinking is too often the coin of the IT realm, even the most naive practitioner knows that converting legacy applications into reusable services requires more than a magic wand. The reason is simple: if your starting point is your legacy applications, then you will simply be bolting a web service technology layer on top of your legacy API. And that legacy API is built in the image of the silo applications. Enter the wide gate of the legacy API, follow the broad path of generating service interfaces from existing code, and you will arrive at the siloed enterprise destruction that you thought you were escaping. The Straight and Narrow Path This past week I had the opportunity to learn how the FBI Criminal Justice Information Systems department has been transitioning from silo applications to a service inventory. Lafe Hutcheson, IT Specialist in the architecture group and fellow attendee at an SOA Architect Certification Workshop, was my guide. Lafe has survived the chaos of an SOA initiative, so it is not surprising that he was able to return from a US Army deployment to Kabul, Afghanistan with nary a scratch. According to Lafe, building their service inventory is a three-phase process: Model a business process. This requires intense collaboration between the IT and business wings of the organization, of course. The FBI uses IBM Websphere tools to model the process with BPMN. Identify candidate services to facilitate the business process. Convert the BPMN to an executable BPEL orchestration, model and develop the services, and use a BPEL engine to run the process. The FBI uses ActiveVOS for orchestration services. The 12 Step Program to End Your Legacy API Addiction Thomas Erl has documented a process for building a web service inventory that is quite similar to the FBI process. Erl’s process adds a technology architecture definition phase, which allows for the technology environment to influence the inventory blueprint. For example, if you are using an enterprise service bus, you will probably not need to build your own utility services for logging or intermediate routing. Erl also lists a service-oriented analysis phase that highlights the 12-step process of applying the principles of service orientation to modeling your services. Erl depicts the modeling of a service inventory as an iterative process: model a business process, define the relevant technology architecture, define the service inventory blueprint, analyze the services, then model another business process, rinse and repeat. (Astute readers will note that Erl’s diagram, restricted to analysis and modeling process, does not include the implementation phase that concludes the FBI service development methodology.) The service-oriented analysis phase is where you find the 12 steps that will free you from your legacy API addiction. In a nutshell, you identify the steps in the process that need services; identify the different types of services (agnostic entity services, service compositions, and utility services) that are required; apply service-orientation principles; and normalize the inventory into cohesive service models. Rather than discuss each of the 12 steps individually, I will close by simply referring my readers to Erl’s explanation.

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Why I Love the Social Management Platform I Use

- by Mike Stiles

Not long ago, I asked the product heads for the various components of the Oracle Social Cloud’s SRM to say what they thought was coolest about their component. And while they did a fine job, it was recently pointed out to me that no one around here uses the platform in a real-world setting more than I do, as I not only blog and podcast my brains out, I also run Oracle Social’s own social properties. Of course I’m pro-Oracle Social’s product. Duh. But if you can get around immediately writing this off as a puff piece, there are real reasons beyond my employment that the Oracle SRM works for me as a community manager. If it didn’t, I could have simply written about something else, like how people love smartphones or something genius like that. Post Grid I like seeing what I want to see. I’m difficult that way. Post grid lets me see all posts for all channels, with custom columns showing me how posts are doing. I can filter the grid by social channel, published, scheduled, draft, suggested, etc. Then there’s a pullout side panel that shows me post details, including engagement analytics. From the pullout, I can preview the post, do a quick edit, a full edit, or (my favorite) copy a post so I can edit it and schedule it for other times so I don’t have to repeat from scratch. I’m not lazy, just time conscious. The Post Creation Environment Given our post volume, I need this to be as easy as it can be. I can highlight which streams I want the post to go out on, edit for the individual streams, maintain a media library that’s easy to upload to and attach from, tag posts, insert links that auto-shorten to an orac.le shortlink, schedule with a nice calendar visual, geo-target, drop photos inline into Twitter, and review each post. Watching My Channels The Engage component of the Oracle SRM brings in and drops into a grid the activity that’s happening on all my channels. I keep this open round-the-clock. Again, I get to see only what I want; social network, stream, unread messages, engagement by how I labeled them, and date range. I can bring up a post with a click, reply, label it, retweet it, assign it, delete it, archive it, etc. So don’t bother trying to be a troll on my channels. Analytics Social publishing and engaging 24/7 would be pretty unrewarding if I couldn’t see how our audience was responding. Frankly, I get more analytics than I know what to do with (I’m a content creator, not a data analyst). But I do know what numbers I care about, and they’re available by channel, date range, and campaigns. I’m seeing fan count, sources and demographics. I’m seeing engagement, what kinds of posts are getting engagement, and top engagers. I’m seeing my reach, both organic and paid. I’m seeing how individual posts performed in terms of engagement and virality, and posting time/date insight. Have I covered all the value propositions? I’ve covered pathetically few of them. It would be impossible in blog length to give shout-outs to the vast number of features and functionalities. From organizing teams and managing permissions with Workflow to the powerful ability to monitor topics (and your competition) across the web in Listen, it’s a major, and increasingly necessary, weapon in your social marketing arsenal. The life of a Community Manager is not for everybody. So if the Oracle SRM can actually make a Community Manager’s life easier, what’s not to love? I invite you to take a look at and participate in our Oracle Social Cloud social channels! Facebook Twitter YouTube Google Plus LinkedIn Daily Podcast on iHeartRadio @mikestiles @oraclesocial Photo: freeimages.com

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Sprinkle Some Magik on that Java Virtual Machine

- by Jim Connors

GE Energy, through its Smallworld subsidiary, has been providing geospatial software solutions to the utility and telco markets for over 20 years. One of the fundamental building blocks of their technology is a dynamically-typed object oriented programming language called Magik. Like Java, Magik source code is compiled down to bytecodes that run on a virtual machine -- in this case the Magik Virtual Machine. Throughout the years, GE has invested considerable engineering talent in the support and maintenance of this virtual machine. At the same time vast energy and resources have been invested in the Java Virtual Machine. The question for GE has been whether to continue to make that investment on its own or to leverage massive effort provided by the Java community? Utilizing the Java Virtual Machine instead of maintaining its own virtual machine would give GE more opportunity to focus on application solutions. At last count, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of programming languages that have been hosted atop the Java Virtual Machine. Prior to the release of Java 7, that effort, although certainly possible, was generally less than optimal for languages like Magik because of its dynamic nature. Java, as a statically typed language had little use for this capability. In the quest to be a more universal virtual machine, Java 7, via JSR-292, introduced a new bytecode called invokedynamic. In short, invokedynamic affords a more flexible method call mechanism needed by dynamic languages like Magik. With this new capability GE Energy has succeeded in hosting their Magik environment on top of the Java Virtual Machine. So you may ask, why would GE wish to do such a thing? The benefits are many: Competitors to GE Energy claimed that the Magik environment was proprietary. By utilizing the Java Virtual Machine, that argument gets put to bed. JVM development is done in open source, where contributions are made world-wide by all types of organizations and individuals. The unprecedented wealth of class libraries and applications written for the Java platform are now opened up to Magik/JVM platform as first class citizens. In addition, the Magik/JVM solution vastly increases the developer pool to include the 9 million Java developers -- the largest developer community on the planet. Applications running on the JVM showed substantial performance gains, in some cases as much as a 5x speed up over the original Magik platform. Legacy Magik applications can still run on the original platform. They can be seamlessly migrated to run on the JVM by simply recompiling the source code. GE can now leverage the huge Java community. Undeniably the best virtual machine ever created, hundreds if not thousands of world class developers continually improve, poke, prod and scrutinize all aspects of the Java platform. As enhancements are made, GE automatically gains access to these. As Magik has little in the way of support for multi-threading, GE will benefit from current and future Java offerings (e.g. lambda expressions) that aim to further facilitate multi-core/multi-threaded application development. As the JVM is available for many more platforms, it broadens the reach of Magik, including the potential to run on a class devices never envisioned just a few short years ago. For example, Java SE compatible runtime environments are available for popular embedded ARM/Intel/PowerPC configurations that could theoretically host this software too. As compared to other JVM language projects, the Magik integration differs in that it represents a serious commercial entity betting a sizable part of its business on the success of this effort. Expect to see announcements not only from General Electric, but other organizations as they realize the benefits of utilizing the Java Virtual Machine.

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Logging errors caused by exceptions deep in the application

- by Kaleb Pederson

What are best-practices for logging deep within an application's source? Is it bad practice to have multiple event log entries for a single error? For example, let's say that I have an ETL system whose transform step involves: a transformer, pipeline, processing algorithm, and processing engine. In brief, the transformer takes in an input file, parses out records, and sends the records through the pipeline. The pipeline aggregates the results of the processing algorithm (which could do serial or parallel processing). The processing algorithm sends each record through one or more processing engines. So, I have at least four levels: Transformer - Pipeline - Algorithm - Engine. My code might then look something like the following: class Transformer { void Process(InputSource input) { try { var inRecords = _parser.Parse(input.Stream); var outRecords = _pipeline.Transform(inRecords); } catch (Exception ex) { var inner = new ProcessException(input, ex); _logger.Error("Unable to parse source " + input.Name, inner); throw inner; } } } class Pipeline { IEnumerable<Result> Transform(IEnumerable<Record> records) { // NOTE: no try/catch as I have no useful information to provide // at this point in the process var results = _algorithm.Process(records); // examine and do useful things with results return results; } } class Algorithm { IEnumerable<Result> Process(IEnumerable<Record> records) { var results = new List<Result>(); foreach (var engine in Engines) { foreach (var record in records) { try { engine.Process(record); } catch (Exception ex) { var inner = new EngineProcessingException(engine, record, ex); _logger.Error("Engine {0} unable to parse record {1}", engine, record); throw inner; } } } } } class Engine { Result Process(Record record) { for (int i=0; i<record.SubRecords.Count; ++i) { try { Validate(record.subRecords[i]); } catch (Exception ex) { var inner = new RecordValidationException(record, i, ex); _logger.Error( "Validation of subrecord {0} failed for record {1}", i, record ); } } } } There's a few important things to notice: A single error at the deepest level causes three log entries (ugly? DOS?) Thrown exceptions contain all important and useful information Logging only happens when failure to do so would cause loss of useful information at a lower level. Thoughts and concerns: I don't like having so many log entries for each error I don't want to lose important, useful data; the exceptions contain all the important but the stacktrace is typically the only thing displayed besides the message. I can log at different levels (e.g., warning, informational) The higher level classes should be completely unaware of the structure of the lower-level exceptions (which may change as the different implementations are replaced). The information available at higher levels should not be passed to the lower levels. So, to restate the main questions: What are best-practices for logging deep within an application's source? Is it bad practice to have multiple event log entries for a single error?

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Keeping an Eye on Your Storage

- by Fatherjack

There are plenty of resources that advise you about looking for signs that your storage hardware is having problems. SQL Server Alerts for 823, 824 and 825 are covered here by Paul Randall of SQL Skills: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-little-known-sign-of-impending-doom-error-825/ and here by me: https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2011/06/27/alerts-are-good-arent-they/. Now until very recently I wasn’t aware that there was a different way to track the 823 + 824 errors. It was by complete chance that I happened to be searching about in the msdb database when I found the suspect_pages table. Running a query against it I got zero rows. This, as it turns out is a good thing. Highlighting the table name and pressing F1 got me nowhere – Is it just me or does Books Online fail to load properly for no obvious reason sometimes? So I typed the table name into the search bar and got my local version of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174425.aspx. From that we get the following description: Contains one row per page that failed with a minor 823 error or an 824 error. Pages are listed in this table because they are suspected of being bad, but they might actually be fine. When a suspect page is repaired, its status is updated in the event_type column. So, in the table we would, on healthy hardware, expect to see zero rows but on disks that are having problems the event_type column would show us what is going on. Where there are suspect pages on the disk the rows would have an event_type value of 1, 2 or 3, where those suspect pages have been restored, repaired or deallocated by DBCC then the value would be 4, 5 or 7. Having this table means that we can set up SQL Monitor to check the status of our hardware as we can create a custom metric based on the query below: USE [msdb] go SELECT COUNT(*) FROM [dbo].[suspect_pages] AS sp All we need to do is set the metric to collect this value and set an alert to email when the value is not 1 and we are then able to let SQL Monitor take care of our storage. Note that the suspect_pages table does not have any updates concerning Error 825 which the links at the top of the page cover in more detail. I would suggest that you set SQL Monitor to alert on the suspect_pages table in addition to other taking other measures to look after your storage hardware and not have it as your only precaution. Microsoft actually pass ownership and administration of the suspect_pages table over to the database administrator (Manage the suspect_pages Table (SQL Server)) and in a surprising move (to me at least) advise DBAs to actively update and archive data in it. The table will only ever contain a maximum of 1000 rows and once full, new rows will not be added. Keeping an eye on this table is pretty important, although In my opinion, if you get to 1000 rows in this table and are not already waiting for new disks to be added to your server you are doing something wrong but if you have 1000 rows in there then you need to move data out quickly because you may be missing some important events on your server.

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Educational, well-written FOSS projects to read, study or discuss

- by Godot

Before you say it: yes, this "question" has been asked other times. However, I could not fine many of such questions and not that easily, and those I found had similar results. What I'm trying to say that there are no comprehensive lists of well written Open Source projects, so I decided to set some requirements for the entries (one or possibly more): Idiomatic use of the language in which they are written The project should be lightweight. Not as in "a few kbs", as in "clean" and possibly following the UNIX philosophy, making an efficient use of resources and performing its duty and nothing more. No code bloat, most importantly. Projects like Firefox and GNOME wouldn't qualify, for example. Minimal reliance on external, non-standard libraries, with exceptions for some common FOSS libraries (curses, Xlib, OpenGL and possibly "usual suspects" like gtk+, webkit and Boost). Reliance on well-written libraries is welcome. No reliance on proprietary software - for obvious reasons (programs that rely on XNA, DirectX, Cocoa and similar, for example). Well-documented code is welcome. Include link to web interfaces to their repositories if possible. Here are some sample projects that often pop up in these threads: Operating Systems Plan 9 from Bell Labs: More or less, the official "sequel" to UNIX. Written in C by the same people who invented C! NetBSD: The most portable BSD implementation, written in C and also a good example of portable and organized code. Network and Databases Sqlite: Extremely lightweight and extremely efficient, one of the best pieces of C software I've seen. Count the lines yourself! Lighttpd: A small but pretty reliable web server written in C. Programming languages and VMs Lua: extremely lightweight multi-paradigm programming language. Written in C. Tiny C Compiler: Really tiny C compiler. Not really comparable to GCC or Clang but does its job. PyPy: A Python implementation written in Python. Pharo: OK, I admit it, I'm not really a Smalltalk expert but Pharo is a fork of Squeak and looked rather interesting. Stackless Python - An implementation of Python that doesn't rely on the C call stack - written in C (with some parts in Python) Games and 3D: Angband: One of the most accessible roguelike codebases around here, written in C. Ogre3D: Cross-platform 3D engine. Gets bloated if you don't skip the platform-specific implementation code, otherwise is a pretty solid example of good C++ OO. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: Title says it all. Other - dwm: Lightweight window manager. Written in C. Emulation and Reverse Engineering - Bochs: x86 emulator, written in C++ and tiny enough. - MAME: If you want to see C at one of its lowest levels, MAME is for you. May not be as clean as the other projects but it can teach you A LOT. Before you ask: I didn't mention Linux because it has become quite bloated in the last few years, Linus has also confirmed it. Nonetheless, it'd be a great educational read the same, even if for other reasons. Same for GCC. Feel free to edit or wikify my post. I hope you won't lock my question, I'm only trying to organize a little community effort for the good of all those people who want to enhance their coding skills.

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Expanding on requestaudit - Tracing who is doing what...and for how long

- by Kyle Hatlestad

One of the most helpful tracing sections in WebCenter Content (and one that is on by default) is the requestaudit tracing. This tracing section summarizes the top service requests happening in the server along with how they are performing. By default, it has 2 different rotations. One happens every 2 minutes (listing up to 5 services) and another happens every 60 minutes (listing up to 20 services). These traces provide the total time for all the requests against that service along with the number of requests and its average request time. This information can provide a good start in possibly troubleshooting performance issues or tracking a particular issue. >requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.493 Audit Request Monitor !csMonitorTotalRequests,47,1,0.39009329676628113,0.21034042537212372,1>requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor Request Audit Report over the last 120 Seconds for server wcc-base_4444****requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor -Num Requests 47 Errors 1 Reqs/sec. 0.39009329676628113 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.21034042537212372 Max Thread Count 1requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor 1 Service FLD_BROWSE Total Elapsed Time (secs) 3.5320000648498535 Num requests 10 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.3531999886035919 requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor 2 Service GET_SEARCH_RESULTS Total Elapsed Time (secs) 2.694999933242798 Num requests 6 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.4491666555404663requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor 3 Service GET_DOC_PAGE Total Elapsed Time (secs) 1.8839999437332153 Num requests 5 Num errors 1 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.376800000667572requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor 4 Service DOC_INFO Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.4620000123977661 Num requests 3 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.15399999916553497requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor 5 Service GET_PERSONALIZED_JAVASCRIPT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.4099999964237213 Num requests 8 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.051249999552965164requestaudit/6 12.10 16:48:00.509 Audit Request Monitor ****End Audit Report***** To change the default rotation or size of output, these can be set as configuration variables for the server: RequestAuditIntervalSeconds1 – Used for the shorter of the two summary intervals (default is 120 seconds)RequestAuditIntervalSeconds2 – Used for the longer of the two summary intervals (default is 3600 seconds)RequestAuditListDepth1 – Number of services listed for the first request audit summary interval (default is 5)RequestAuditListDepth2 – Number of services listed for the second request audit summary interval (default is 20) If you want to get more granular, you can enable 'Full Verbose Tracing' from the System Audit Information page and now you will get an audit entry for each and every service request. >requestaudit/6 12.10 16:58:35.431 IdcServer-68 GET_USER_INFO [dUser=bob][StatusMessage=You are logged in as 'bob'.] 0.08765099942684174(secs) What's nice is it reports who executed the service and how long that particular request took. In some cases, depending on the service, additional information will be added to the tracing relevant to that service. >requestaudit/6 12.10 17:00:44.727 IdcServer-81 GET_SEARCH_RESULTS [dUser=bob][QueryText=%28+dDocType+%3cmatches%3e+%60Document%60+%29][StatusCode=0][StatusMessage=Success] 0.4696030020713806(secs) You can even go into more detail and insert any additional data into the tracing. You simply need to add this configuration variable with a comma separated list of variables from local data to insert. RequestAuditAdditionalVerboseFieldsList=TotalRows,path In this case, for any search results, the number of items the user found is traced: >requestaudit/6 12.10 17:15:28.665 IdcServer-36 GET_SEARCH_RESULTS [TotalRows=224][dUser=bob][QueryText=%28+dDocType+%3cmatches%3e+%60Application%60+%29][Sta... I also recently ran into the case where services were being called from a client through RIDC. All of the services were being executed as the same user, but they wanted to correlate the requests coming from the client to the ones being executed on the server. So what we did was add a new field to the request audit list: RequestAuditAdditionalVerboseFieldsList=ClientToken And then in the RIDC client, ClientToken was added to the binder along with a unique value that could be traced for that request. Now they had a way of tracing on both ends and identifying exactly which client request resulted in which request on the server.

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Bug in Delphi XE RegularExpressions Unit

- by Jan Goyvaerts

Using the new RegularExpressions unit in Delphi XE, you can iterate over all the matches that a regex finds in a string like this: procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); var RegEx: TRegEx; Match: TMatch; begin RegEx := TRegex.Create('\w+'); Match := RegEx.Match('One two three four'); while Match.Success do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(Match.Value); Match := Match.NextMatch; end end; Or you could save yourself two lines of code by using the static TRegEx.Match call: procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject); var Match: TMatch; begin Match := TRegEx.Match('One two three four', '\w+'); while Match.Success do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(Match.Value); Match := Match.NextMatch; end end; Unfortunately, due to a bug in the RegularExpressions unit, the static call doesn’t work. Depending on your exact code, you may get fewer matches or blank matches than you should, or your application may crash with an access violation. The RegularExpressions unit defines TRegEx and TMatch as records. That way you don’t have to explicitly create and destroy them. Internally, TRegEx uses TPerlRegEx to do the heavy lifting. TPerlRegEx is a class that needs to be created and destroyed like any other class. If you look at the TRegEx source code, you’ll notice that it uses an interface to destroy the TPerlRegEx instance when TRegEx goes out of scope. Interfaces are reference counted in Delphi, making them usable for automatic memory management. The bug is that TMatch and TGroupCollection also need the TPerlRegEx instance to do their work. TRegEx passes its TPerlRegEx instance to TMatch and TGroupCollection, but it does not pass the instance of the interface that is responsible for destroying TPerlRegEx. This is not a problem in our first code sample. TRegEx stays in scope until we’re done with TMatch. The interface is destroyed when Button1Click exits. In the second code sample, the static TRegEx.Match call creates a local variable of type TRegEx. This local variable goes out of scope when TRegEx.Match returns. Thus the reference count on the interface reaches zero and TPerlRegEx is destroyed when TRegEx.Match returns. When we call MatchAgain the TMatch record tries to use a TPerlRegEx instance that has already been destroyed. To fix this bug, delete or rename the two RegularExpressions.dcu files and copy RegularExpressions.pas into your source code folder. Make these changes to both the TMatch and TGroupCollection records in this unit: Declare FNotifier: IInterface; in the private section. Add the parameter ANotifier: IInterface; to the Create constructor. Assign FNotifier := ANotifier; in the constructor’s implementation. You also need to add the ANotifier: IInterface; parameter to the TMatchCollection.Create constructor. Now try to compile some code that uses the RegularExpressions unit. The compiler will flag all calls to TMatch.Create, TGroupCollection.Create and TMatchCollection.Create. Fix them by adding the ANotifier or FNotifier parameter, depending on whether ARegEx or FRegEx is being passed. With these fixes, the TPerlRegEx instance won’t be destroyed until the last TRegEx, TMatch, or TGroupCollection that uses it goes out of scope or is used with a different regular expression.

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SQL Script to Assign All Items to ALL Sites with Dynamics GP

- by Ryan McBee

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When setting up new items within Microsoft Dynamics GP, you will often run into the error message below which reads “This site is not assigned to the selected item. Do you want to assign this site?” The fix is quite simple given that you simply click the Add button below which opens up the Item Quantities Maintenance window which you will hit the save button and proceed with the entry of your Sales Order or Purchase Order. If you have a lot of new items into GP and have just one Site ID setup, the best approach to assigning your items to a particular site is by going to the Site Maintenance Window which is located in Cards>>Inventory>>Site. Once you are in the window below, you can click the Assign button to assign Items to the Site selected. However, if you have you a lot of Sites and Items created, this can be quite a cumbersome and time consuming process. For that, I have created the following SQL Script below that Assigns all Items to all Site ID’s within Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010. declare @item varchar(100) , @loc varchar(100) , @ItemExist int DECLARE TablePositionCursor CURSOR FOR SELECT itemnmbr from IV00101 i OPEN TablePositionCursor FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor INTO @item WHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1) BEGIN DECLARE TablePositionCursor2 CURSOR FOR select locncode from IV40700 OPEN TablePositionCursor2 FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor2 INTO @loc WHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1) BEGIN SELECT @ItemExist = isnull(count(*), 0) FROM IV00102 where ITEMNMBR = @item and LOCNCODE = @loc if @ItemExist = 0 BEGIN insert into iv00102 values( @item ,@loc ,'' ,2 ,'' ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,'01/01/1900' ,'' ,'01/01/1900' ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,'01/01/1900' ,'01/01/1900' ,'01/01/1900' ,'01/01/1900' ,0 ,'' ,'' ,'' ,1 ,0 ,0 ,1 ,0 ,0 ,1 ,2 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,1 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,3 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,'' ,'' ,'' ,'' ,'' ,'' ,'' ,'' ,1 ,1 ,'' ,1 ,1 ,0 ,1 ,1 ,1 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ,0 ) END FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor2 INTO @loc END DEALLOCATE TablePositionCursor2 FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor INTO @item END DEALLOCATE TablePositionCursor The script below works just for GP 2010 since the columns in the IV00102 have changed from version to version. If you need it for prior versions, please email me and I will send it to you. Disclaimer: I tested this on limited data, if you find an issue or have a suggestion for improvement, please let me know and I will post the update here for everyone. This blog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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Sparse virtual machine disk image resizing weirdness?

- by Matt H

I have a partitioned virtual machine disk image created by vmware. What I want to do is resize that by 10GB. The file size is showing as 64424509440. Or 60GB. So I ran this: dd if=/dev/zero of=./win7.img seek=146800640 count=0 It ran without errors and I can verify the new size is in fact 75161927680 bytes or 70GB. This is where it gets a little odd. I started the guest domain in xen which is a Windows 7 enterprise machine. What I was expecting to see in diskmgmt.msc is 2 partitions. 1 system partition at the start of around 100MB and near 60GB partition (which is C drive) followed by around 10GB of free space. Actually what I saw was a 70GB partition!?! That confused me... so I decided to run the Check Disk which when you set it on the C drive it asks you to reboot so it'll run on boot. So I did that and during the boot it ran the checks. It got all the way through stage 3 and didn't show any errors at all. Looked at the partitions in disk manager and now C drive has shrunk back to 60GB and there is no free space. What gives? Ok, I thought I'd try mounting it under Dom0 and examining it with fdisk. This is what I get when mounted sudo xl block-attach 0 tap:aio:/home/xen/vms/otoy_v1202-xen.img xvda w sudo fdisk -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4 GB, 64424509440 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7832 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x582dfc96 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/xvda1 * 1 13 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/xvda2 13 7833 62810112 7 HPFS/NTFS Note the cylinder boundary comment. When I run sudo cfdisk /dev/xvda I get: FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder Press any key to exit cfdisk So I guess this is a bigger problem than first thought. How can I fix this? EDIT: Oops, the cylinder boundary thing is not a problem at all since disks have used LBA etc. So that threw me for a moment... still the problem exists... Now this output looks a little different. sudo sfdisk -uS -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 7832 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System /dev/xvda1 * 2048 206847 204800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda2 206848 125827071 125620224 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda3 0 - 0 0 Empty /dev/xvda4 0 - 0 0 Empty BTW: I do have a backup of the image so if you help me mess it up that's ok. EDIT: sudo parted /dev/xvda print free Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd) Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 32.3kB 1049kB 1016kB Free Space 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary ntfs boot 2 106MB 64.4GB 64.3GB primary ntfs 64.4GB 64.4GB 1049kB Free Space Cool. Linux is showing free space is 10GB which is what I expect. The problem is windows isn't seeing this?

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Platform jumping problems with AABB collisions

- by Vee

See the diagram first: When my AABB physics engine resolves an intersection, it does so by finding the axis where the penetration is smaller, then "push out" the entity on that axis. Considering the "jumping moving left" example: If velocityX is bigger than velocityY, AABB pushes the entity out on the Y axis, effectively stopping the jump (result: the player stops in mid-air). If velocityX is smaller than velocitY (not shown in diagram), the program works as intended, because AABB pushes the entity out on the X axis. How can I solve this problem? Source code: public void Update() { Position += Velocity; Velocity += World.Gravity; List<SSSPBody> toCheck = World.SpatialHash.GetNearbyItems(this); for (int i = 0; i < toCheck.Count; i++) { SSSPBody body = toCheck[i]; body.Test.Color = Color.White; if (body != this && body.Static) { float left = (body.CornerMin.X - CornerMax.X); float right = (body.CornerMax.X - CornerMin.X); float top = (body.CornerMin.Y - CornerMax.Y); float bottom = (body.CornerMax.Y - CornerMin.Y); if (SSSPUtils.AABBIsOverlapping(this, body)) { body.Test.Color = Color.Yellow; Vector2 overlapVector = SSSPUtils.AABBGetOverlapVector(left, right, top, bottom); Position += overlapVector; } if (SSSPUtils.AABBIsCollidingTop(this, body)) { if ((Position.X >= body.CornerMin.X && Position.X <= body.CornerMax.X) && (Position.Y + Height/2f == body.Position.Y - body.Height/2f)) { body.Test.Color = Color.Red; Velocity = new Vector2(Velocity.X, 0); } } } } } public static bool AABBIsOverlapping(SSSPBody mBody1, SSSPBody mBody2) { if(mBody1.CornerMax.X <= mBody2.CornerMin.X || mBody1.CornerMin.X >= mBody2.CornerMax.X) return false; if (mBody1.CornerMax.Y <= mBody2.CornerMin.Y || mBody1.CornerMin.Y >= mBody2.CornerMax.Y) return false; return true; } public static bool AABBIsColliding(SSSPBody mBody1, SSSPBody mBody2) { if (mBody1.CornerMax.X < mBody2.CornerMin.X || mBody1.CornerMin.X > mBody2.CornerMax.X) return false; if (mBody1.CornerMax.Y < mBody2.CornerMin.Y || mBody1.CornerMin.Y > mBody2.CornerMax.Y) return false; return true; } public static bool AABBIsCollidingTop(SSSPBody mBody1, SSSPBody mBody2) { if (mBody1.CornerMax.X < mBody2.CornerMin.X || mBody1.CornerMin.X > mBody2.CornerMax.X) return false; if (mBody1.CornerMax.Y < mBody2.CornerMin.Y || mBody1.CornerMin.Y > mBody2.CornerMax.Y) return false; if(mBody1.CornerMax.Y == mBody2.CornerMin.Y) return true; return false; } public static Vector2 AABBGetOverlapVector(float mLeft, float mRight, float mTop, float mBottom) { Vector2 result = new Vector2(0, 0); if ((mLeft > 0 || mRight < 0) || (mTop > 0 || mBottom < 0)) return result; if (Math.Abs(mLeft) < mRight) result.X = mLeft; else result.X = mRight; if (Math.Abs(mTop) < mBottom) result.Y = mTop; else result.Y = mBottom; if (Math.Abs(result.X) < Math.Abs(result.Y)) result.Y = 0; else result.X = 0; return result; }

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SQL 2012 Licensing Thoughts

- by Geoff N. Hiten

The only thing more controversial than new Federal Tax plans is new Licensing plans from Microsoft. In both cases, everyone calculates several numbers. First, will I pay more or less under this plan? Second, will my competition pay more or less than now? Third, will <insert interesting person/company here> pay more or less? Not that items 2 and 3 are meaningful, that is just how people think. Much like tax plans, the devil is in the details, so lets see how this looks. Microsoft shows it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/sql2012-licensing.aspx First up is a switch from per-socket to per-core licensing. Anyone who didn’t see something like this coming should rapidly search for a new line of work because you are not paying attention. The explosion of multi-core processors has made SQL Server a bargain. Microsoft is in business to make money and the old per-socket model was not going to do that going forward. Per-core licensing also simplifies virtualization licensing. Physical Core = Virtual Core, at least for licensing. Oversubscribe your processors, that’s your lookout. You still pay for what is exposed to the VM. The cool part is you can seamlessly move physical and virtual workloads around and the licenses follow. The catch is you have to have Software Assurance to make the licenses mobile. Nice touch there. Let’s have a moment of silence for the late, unlamented, largely ignored Workgroup Edition. To quote the Microsoft FAQ: “Standard becomes our sole edition for basic database needs”. Considering I haven’t encountered a singe instance of SQL Server Workgroup Edition in the wild, I don’t think this will be all that controversial. As for pricing, it looks like a wash with current per-socket pricing based on four core sockets. Interestingly, that is the minimum core count Microsoft proposes to swap to transition per-socket to per-core if you are on Software Assurance. Reading the fine print shows that if you are using more, you will get more core licenses: From the licensing FAQ. 15. How do I migrate from processor licenses to core licenses? What is the migration path? Licenses purchased with Software Assurance (SA) will upgrade to SQL Server 2012 at no additional cost. EA/EAP customers can continue buying processor licenses until your next renewal after June 30, 2012. At that time, processor licenses will be exchanged for core-based licenses sufficient to cover the cores in use by processor-licensed databases (minimum of 4 cores per processor for Standard and Enterprise, and minimum of 8 EE cores per processor for Datacenter). Looks like the folks who invested in the AMD 12-core chips will make out like bandits. Now, on to something new: SQL Server Business Intelligence Edition. Yep, finally a BI-specific SKU licensed for server+CAL configurations only. Note that Enterprise Edition still supports the complete feature set; the BI Edition is intended for smaller shops who want to use the full BI feature set but without needing Enterprise Edition scale (or costs). No, you don’t get ColumnStore, Compression, or Partitioning in the BI Edition. Those are Enterprise scale features, ThankYouVeryMuch. Then again, your starting licensing costs are about one sixth of an Enterprise Edition system (based on an 8 core server). The only part of the message I am missing is if the current Failover Licensing Policy will change. Do we need to fully or partially license failover servers? That is a detail I definitely want to know.

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database design help for game / user levels / progress

- by sprugman

Sorry this got long and all prose-y. I'm creating my first truly gamified web app and could use some help thinking about how to structure the data. The Set-up Users need to accomplish tasks in each of several categories before they can move up a level. I've got my Users, Tasks, and Categories tables, and a UserTasks table which joins the three. ("User 3 has added Task 42 in Category 8. Now they've completed it.") That's all fine and working wonderfully. The Challenge I'm not sure of the best way to track the progress in the individual categories toward each level. The "business" rules are: You have to achieve a certain number of points in each category to move up. If you get the number of points needed in Cat 8, but still have other work to do to complete the level, any new Cat 8 points count toward your overall score, but don't "roll over" into the next level. The number of Categories is small (five currently) and unlikely to change often, but by no means absolutely fixed. The number of points needed to level-up will vary per level, probably by a formula, or perhaps a lookup table. So the challenge is to track each user's progress toward the next level in each category. I've thought of a few potential approaches: Possible Solutions Add a column to the users table for each category and reset them all to zero each time a user levels-up. Have a separate UserProgress table with a row for each category for each user and the number of points they have. (Basically a Many-to-Many version of #1.) Add a userLevel column to the UserTasks table and use that to derive their progress with some kind of SUM statement. Their current level will be a simple int in the User table. Pros & Cons (1) seems like by far the most straightforward, but it's also the least flexible. Perhaps I could use a naming convention based on the category ids to help overcome some of that. (With code like "select cats; for each cat, get the value from Users.progress_{cat.id}.") It's also the one where I lose the most data -- I won't know which points counted toward leveling up. I don't have a need in mind for that, so maybe I don't care about that. (2) seems complicated: every time I add or subtract a user or a category, I have to maintain the other table. I foresee synchronization challenges. (3) Is somewhere in between -- cleaner than #2, but less intuitive than #1. In order to find out where a user is, I'd have mildly complex SQL like: SELECT categoryId, SUM(points) from UserTasks WHERE userId={user.id} & countsTowardLevel={user.level} groupBy categoryId Hmm... that doesn't seem so bad. I think I'm talking myself into #3 here, but would love any input, advice or other ideas. P.S. Sorry for the cross-post. I wrote this up on SO and then remembered that there was a game dev-focused one. Curious to see if I get different answers one place than the other....

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More Free Apps Bound for the Marketplace

- by Scott Kuhl

Microsoft has announced they are raising the limit of free applications a developer can submit from 5 to 100. But what does that really mean? First, lets look at the reason for the limitation. The iTunes Store and the Android Market both have a lot more applications available than the Windows Phone Marketplace. But that says nothing about the quality of those applications. I attended a couple of pre-launch events and Microsoft representatives were clearly told to send a message. We don’t want a bunch of junky applications that do nothing but spam the marketplace. That was the reason for the 5 free application limit. Okay, so now what has the result been? Well, there are still fart apps, but there is no sign of a developer flooding the marking with 1500 wallpaper applications or 1000 of the same application all pointed at different RSS feeds. On the other hand there are developers who want to release real free apps but are constrained by the 5 app limit. So why did Microsoft change it’s mind? Is it to get the count of applications up, or is to make developers happy? Windows Phone Marketplace is growing fast but it’s a long way behind the other guys. I don’t think Microsoft wants to have 100,000 apps show up in the next 3 months if they are loaded with copy cat apps. Those numbers will get picked apart quickly and the press will start complaining about the same problems the Android Market has. I do think the bump was at developer request. Microsoft is usually good about listening to developer feedback, but has been pretty slow about it at times. And from a financial perspective, there will me more apps that Microsoft has to review that they will see no profit on. At least not until they bake in a advertising model connected to Bing. Ultimately, what does this mean for the future? Well, there are developers out there looking to release more than 5 simple free apps, so I think we will see more hobby apps. And there are developers out there trying to make money from advertising instead of sales, so I think we will see more of those also. But the category that I think will grow the fastest is free versions of paid applications that are the same as the trial version of the application. While technically that makes no sense, its purely a marketing move. Free apps get downloaded a lot more than paid apps, even with a trial mode. It always surprises me how little consumers are willing to spend on mobile apps. How many reviews of applications have you seen that says something like “a bit pricey at $1.99”. Really? Have you looked at how much you spend on your phone and plan? I always thought the trial mode baked into Windows Marketplace was a good idea. So I’m not sure how the more open free market will play out. In the long run though, I won’t be surprised to see a Bing ad mobile ad model show up so Microsoft can capitalize on the more open and free Windows Marketplace. Bonus: The Oatmeal on How I Feel About Buying Apps

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Simple Merging Of PDF Documents with iTextSharp 5.4.5.0

- by Mladen Prajdic

As we were working on our first SQL Saturday in Slovenia, we came to a point when we had to print out the so-called SpeedPASS's for attendees. This SpeedPASS file is a PDF and contains thier raffle, lunch and admission tickets. The problem is we have to download one PDF per attendee and print that out. And printing more than 10 docs at once is a pain. So I decided to make a little console app that would merge multiple PDF files into a single file that would be much easier to print. I used an open source PDF manipulation library called iTextSharp version 5.4.5.0 This is a console program I used. It’s brilliantly named MergeSpeedPASS. It only has two methods and is really short. Don't let the name fool you It can be used to merge any PDF files. The first parameter is the name of the target PDF file that will be created. The second parameter is the directory containing PDF files to be merged into a single file. using iTextSharp.text; using iTextSharp.text.pdf; using System; using System.IO; namespace MergeSpeedPASS { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { if (args.Length == 0 || args[0] == "-h" || args[0] == "/h") { Console.WriteLine("Welcome to MergeSpeedPASS. Created by Mladen Prajdic. Uses iTextSharp 5.4.5.0."); Console.WriteLine("Tool to create a single SpeedPASS PDF from all downloaded generated PDFs."); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Example: MergeSpeedPASS.exe targetFileName sourceDir"); Console.WriteLine(" targetFileName = name of the new merged PDF file. Must include .pdf extension."); Console.WriteLine(" sourceDir = path to the dir containing downloaded attendee SpeedPASS PDFs"); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine(@"Example: MergeSpeedPASS.exe MergedSpeedPASS.pdf d:\Downloads\SQLSaturdaySpeedPASSFiles"); } else if (args.Length == 2) CreateMergedPDF(args[0], args[1]); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit..."); Console.Read(); } static void CreateMergedPDF(string targetPDF, string sourceDir) { using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(targetPDF, FileMode.Create)) { Document pdfDoc = new Document(PageSize.A4); PdfCopy pdf = new PdfCopy(pdfDoc, stream); pdfDoc.Open(); var files = Directory.GetFiles(sourceDir); Console.WriteLine("Merging files count: " + files.Length); int i = 1; foreach (string file in files) { Console.WriteLine(i + ". Adding: " + file); pdf.AddDocument(new PdfReader(file)); i++; } if (pdfDoc != null) pdfDoc.Close(); Console.WriteLine("SpeedPASS PDF merge complete."); } } } } Hope it helps you and have fun.

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Information on upgrading Kinect Applications to MS SDK Beta 2.

- by mbcrump

Introduction Microsoft recently released the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta 2. It contains many enhancements and fixes that can be found here. The only problem with it is that a lot of current demo applications no longer function properly. Today, I’m going to walk you through a typical scenario of upgrading a Kinect application built with Beta 1 to Beta 2. Note: This tutorial covers WPF, but you can use the same techniques for WinForms. 1) Fix the references Let’s start with a fairly popular Kinect demo called Kinect User Interface Demo. This project uses the beta 1 version of Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll and version 1.0.0.0 of Coding4Fun’s Kinect library. After you download the source code and extract the zip you will see the following references in Visual Studio 2010: Pay attention to the following references as these are the .dlls that you will have to update: Coding4Fun.Kinect.Wpf Microsoft.Research.Kinect If you click on Coding4Fun.Kinect.Wpf file you will see the following version information (v1.0.0.0): This needs to be upgraded to the Coding4Fun Kinect library built against Beta 2. So head over to http://c4fkinect.codeplex.com/ and hit download and you will have the following files. Go ahead and hit the delete key on your keyboard to remove the Coding4Fun.Kinect.Wpf.dll file from your project. Select “Add Reference” and navigate out to the folder where you extracted the files and select Coding4Fun.Kinect.Wpf.dll. If you click on the Coding4Fun.Kinect.Wpf.dll file and check properties it should be listed at 1.1.0.0: Fix Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll The official SDK Beta 2 released a new .dll that you will need to reference in your application. Go ahead and select Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll in your application and hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Go ahead and select Add Reference again and select Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll from the .NET tab. Double check and make sure the version number is 1.0.0.45 as shown below. References fixed – Runtime needs to be updated. So we have fixed the references in a typical Kinect application that uses Microsoft’s SDK and C4F Kinect libraries. Now, we will need to update the runtime. All Beta 1 Kinect applications will instantiate the Runtime with the following code: Can you see that it is now marked with [Depreciated]? That means we need to update it before Microsoft decides to remove it from future versions of the SDK. We can fix this very easily by replacing this code: readonly Runtime _runtime = new Runtime(); with Microsoft.Research.Kinect.Nui.Runtime _nui; and adding similar code to our Loaded event as shown below public MainWindow() { InitializeComponent(); Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(MainWindow_Loaded); } void MainWindow_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (Runtime.Kinects.Count == 0) { txtInfo.Text = "Missing Kinect"; } else { _nui = Runtime.Kinects[0]; _nui.Initialize(RuntimeOptions.UseColor); // Video Frame Ready Event can happen now!!! //_nui.VideoFrameReady += new EventHandler<ImageFrameReadyEventArgs>(_nui_VideoFrameReady); _nui.VideoStream.Open(ImageStreamType.Video, 2, ImageResolution.Resolution640x480, ImageType.Color); } } In this sample, I am testing to see if a Kinect is detected and if it is then I initialize the runtime with my first Kinect by using the Runtime.Kinects[0]. You can also specify other Kinect devices here. The rest of the code is standard code that you simply modify however you wish (ie Skeletal, Depth, etc) depending on what type of video feed you want. Conclusion As you can see it really wasn’t that painful to upgrade your project to Beta 2. I would recommend that you go ahead and upgrade to Beta 2 as future versions of the SDK will use these methods. Thanks for reading. Subscribe to my feed

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WebLogic Server Performance and Tuning: Part II - Thread Management

- by Gokhan Gungor

WebLogic Server, like any other java application server, provides resources so that your applications use them to provide services. Unfortunately none of these resources are unlimited and they must be managed carefully. One of these resources is threads which are pooled to provide better throughput and performance along with the fast response time and to avoid deadlocks. Threads are execution points that WebLogic Server delivers its power and execute work. Managing threads is very important because it may affect the overall performance of the entire system. In previous releases of WebLogic Server 9.0 we had multiple execute queues and user defined thread pools. There were different queues for different type of work which had fixed number of execute threads. Tuning of this thread pools and finding the proper number of threads was time consuming which required many trials. WebLogic Server 9.0 and the following releases use a single thread pool and a single priority-based execute queue. All type of work is executed in this single thread pool. Its size (thread count) is automatically decreased or increased (self-tuned). The new “self-tuning” system simplifies getting the proper number of threads and utilizing them.Work manager allows your applications to run concurrently in multiple threads. Work manager is a mechanism that allows you to manage and utilize threads and create rules/guidelines to follow when assigning requests to threads. We can set a scheduling guideline or priority a request with a work manager and then associate this work manager with one or more applications. At run-time, WebLogic Server uses these guidelines to assign pending work/requests to execution threads. The position of a request in the execute queue is determined by its priority. There is a default work manager that is provided. The default work manager should be sufficient for most applications. However there can be cases you want to change this default configuration. Your application(s) may be providing services that need mixture of fast response time and long running processes like batch updates. However wrong configuration of work managers can lead a performance penalty while expecting improvement.We can define/configure work managers at;• Domain Level: config.xml• Application Level: weblogic-application.xml • Component Level: weblogic-ejb-jar.xml or weblogic.xml(For a specific web application use weblogic.xml)We can use the following predefined rules/constraints to manage the work;• Fair Share Request Class: Specifies the average thread-use time required to process requests. The default is 50.• Response Time Request Class: Specifies a response time goal in milliseconds.• Context Request Class: Assigns request classes to requests based on context information.• Min Threads Constraint: Limits the number of concurrent threads executing requests.• Max Threads Constraint: Guarantees the number of threads the server will allocate to requests.• Capacity Constraint: Causes the server to reject requests only when it has reached its capacity. Let’s create a work manager for our application for a long running work.Go to WebLogic console and select Environment | Work Managers from the domain structure tree. Click New button and select Work manager and click next. Enter the name for the work manager and click next. Then select the managed server instances(s) or clusters from available targets (the one that your long running application is deployed) and finish. Click on MyWorkManager, and open the Configuration tab and check Ignore Stuck Threads and save. This will prevent WebLogic to tread long running processes (that is taking more than a specified time) as stuck and enable to finish the process.

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Call For Papers Tips and Tricks

- by speakjava

This year's JavaOne session review has just been completed and by now everyone who submitted papers should know whether they were successful or not. I had the pleasure again this year of leading the review of the 'JavaFX and Rich User Experiences' track. I thought it would be useful to write up a few comments to help people in future when submitting session proposals, not just for JavaOne, but for any of the many developer conferences that run around the world throughout the year. This also draws on conversations I recently had with various Java User Group leaders at the Oracle User Group summit in Riga. Many of these leaders run some of the biggest and most successful Java conferences in Europe. Try to think of a title which will sound interesting. For example, "Experiences of performance tuning embedded Java for an ARM architecture based single board computer" probably isn't going to get as much attention as "Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java on the Raspberry Pi". When thinking of the subject and title for your talk try to steer clear of sessions that might be too generic (and so get lost in a group of similar sessions). Introductory talks are great when the audience is new to a subject, but beware of providing sessions that are too basic when the technology has been around for a while and there are lots of tutorials already available on the web. JavaOne, like many other conferences has a number of fields that need to be filled in when submitting a paper. Many of these are selected from pull-down lists (like which track the session is applicable to). Check these lists carefully. A number of sessions we had needed to be shuffled between tracks when it was thought that the one selected was not appropriate. We didn't count this against any sessions, but it's always a good idea to try and get the right one from the start, just in case. JavaOne, again like many other conferences, has two fields that describe the session being submitted: abstract and summary. These are the most critical to a successful submission. The two fields have different names and that is significant; a frequent mistake people make is to write an abstract for a session and then duplicate it for the summary. The abstract (at least in the case of JavaOne) is what gets printed in the show guide and is typically what will be used by attendees when deciding what sessions to attend. This is where you need to sell your session, not just to the reviewers, but also the people who you want in your audience. Submitting a one line abstract (unless it's a really good one line) is not usually enough to decide whether this is worth investing an hour of conference time. The abstract typically has a limit of a few hundred characters. Try to use as many of them as possible to get as much information about your session across. The summary should be different from the abstract (and don't leave it blank as some people do). This field is where you can give the reviewers more detail about things like the structure of the talk, possible demonstrations and so on. As a reviewer I look to this section to help me decide whether the hard-sell of the title and abstract will actually be reflected in the final content. Try to make this comprehensive, but don't make it excessively long. When you have to review possibly hundreds of sessions a certain level of conciseness can make life easier for reviewers and help the cause of your session. If you've not made many submissions for talks in the past, or if this is your first, try to give reviewers places to find background on you as a presenter. Having an active blog and Twitter handle can also help reviewers if they're not sure what your level of expertise is. Many call-for-papers have places for you to include this type of information. It's always good to have new and original presenters and presentations for conferences. Hopefully these tips will help you be successful when you answer the next call-for-papers.

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