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login form with java/sqlite

- by tuxou

hi I would like to create a login form for my application with the possibility to add or remove users for an sqlite database, i have created the table users(nam, pass) but i can't unclud it in my login form, it someone could help me this is my login code: import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; import javax.swing.*; public class login extends JFrame{ // Variables declaration private JLabel jLabel1; private JLabel jLabel2; private JTextField jTextField1; private JPasswordField jPasswordField1; private JButton jButton1; private JPanel contentPane; // End of variables declaration public login(){ super(); create(); this.setVisible(true); } private void create(){ jLabel1 = new JLabel(); jLabel2 = new JLabel(); jTextField1 = new JTextField(); jPasswordField1 = new JPasswordField(); jButton1 = new JButton(); contentPane = (JPanel)this.getContentPane(); // // jLabel1 // jLabel1.setHorizontalAlignment(SwingConstants.LEFT); jLabel1.setForeground(new Color(0, 0, 255)); jLabel1.setText("username:"); // // jLabel2 // jLabel2.setHorizontalAlignment(SwingConstants.LEFT); jLabel2.setForeground(new Color(0, 0, 255)); jLabel2.setText("password:"); // // jTextField1 // jTextField1.setForeground(new Color(0, 0, 255)); jTextField1.setSelectedTextColor(new Color(0, 0, 255)); jTextField1.setToolTipText("Enter your username"); jTextField1.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ jTextField1_actionPerformed(e); } }); // // jPasswordField1 // jPasswordField1.setForeground(new Color(0, 0, 255)); jPasswordField1.setToolTipText("Enter your password"); jPasswordField1.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ jPasswordField1_actionPerformed(e); } }); // // jButton1 // jButton1.setBackground(new Color(204, 204, 204)); jButton1.setForeground(new Color(0, 0, 255)); jButton1.setText("Login"); jButton1.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ jButton1_actionPerformed(e); } }); // // contentPane // contentPane.setLayout(null); contentPane.setBorder(BorderFactory.createEtchedBorder()); contentPane.setBackground(new Color(204, 204, 204)); addComponent(contentPane, jLabel1, 5,10,106,18); addComponent(contentPane, jLabel2, 5,47,97,18); addComponent(contentPane, jTextField1, 110,10,183,22); addComponent(contentPane, jPasswordField1, 110,45,183,22); addComponent(contentPane, jButton1, 150,75,83,28); // // login // this.setTitle("Login To Members Area"); this.setLocation(new Point(76, 182)); this.setSize(new Dimension(335, 141)); this.setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); this.setResizable(false); } /** Add Component Without a Layout Manager (Absolute Positioning) */ private void addComponent(Container container,Component c,int x,int y,int width,int height){ c.setBounds(x,y,width,height); container.add(c); } private void jTextField1_actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ } private void jPasswordField1_actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ } private void jButton1_actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ System.out.println("\njButton1_actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) called."); String username = new String(jTextField1.getText()); String password = new String(jPasswordField1.getText()); if(username.equals("") || password.equals("")){// If password and username is empty > Do this >>> jButton1.setEnabled(false); JLabel errorFields = new JLabel("<HTML><FONT COLOR = Blue>You must enter a username and password to login.</FONT></HTML>"); JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,errorFields); jTextField1.setText(""); jPasswordField1.setText(""); jButton1.setEnabled(true); this.setVisible(true); } else{ JLabel optionLabel = new JLabel("<HTML><FONT COLOR = Blue>You entered</FONT><FONT COLOR = RED> <B>"+username+"</B></FONT> <FONT COLOR = Blue>as your username.<BR> Is this correct?</FONT></HTML>"); int confirm =JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(null,optionLabel); switch(confirm){ // Switch > Case case JOptionPane.YES_OPTION: // Attempt to Login user jButton1.setEnabled(false); // Set button enable to false to prevent 2 login attempts break; case JOptionPane.NO_OPTION: // No Case.(Go back. Set text to 0) jButton1.setEnabled(false); jTextField1.setText(""); jPasswordField1.setText(""); jButton1.setEnabled(true); break; case JOptionPane.CANCEL_OPTION: // Cancel Case.(Go back. Set text to 0) jButton1.setEnabled(false); jTextField1.setText(""); jPasswordField1.setText(""); jButton1.setEnabled(true); break; } // End Switch > Case } } public static void main(String[] args){ JFrame.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true); JDialog.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true); try{ UIManager.setLookAndFeel("com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel"); }catch (Exception ex){ System.out.println("Failed loading L&F: "); System.out.println(ex); } new login(); }; } my connectDb class : public class Connectdb { private static Connection connect; private static String url ="jdbc:sqlite:data.db"; private static Statement st; private static ResultSet rs; /** * Constructeur privé d'une connection à la bd unique */ private ConnectionBd(){ try { Class.forName("org.sqlite.JDBC"); connect = DriverManager.getConnection(url); } catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) { Logger.getLogger(ex.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (SQLException e) { System.exit(e.getErrorCode()); } } public static Connection getInstance(){ if(connect == null){ new Connectdb(); }else{ } return connect; } /** * @return */ public static void initTable(String query){ try { Statement state = getInstance().createStatement(ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY, ResultSet.CONCUR_READ_ONLY); ResultSet res = state.executeQuery(query); res.close(); state.close(); } catch (SQLException e) { JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, e.getMessage(), "ERROR ! ", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE); } }

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How to use data of one table in 'where' clause of another table?

- by sahar

hello, i need ur help guys..i m making website for 'home docor ideas'..i have a log in form(login-form.php) in which when 'log in' and 'password' is inserted,after verification through login-execute.php, redirected to viewOrder.php where user can view all of the orders ordered by clients.. all is fine up till here.. but what i want is,when user get logged in ,he view only that order which is ordered by him not all customer's orders.. two tables are there in database: members and order_insert.. in 'members' table, login and password is stored and in 'order_insert',orders of customers is stored.. codes of these three pages is as follows.. ......................... login-form.php ......................... <form id="loginForm" name="loginForm" method="post" action="login-exec.php"> <table width="300" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td width="112"><b>Login</b></td> <td width="188"><input name="login" type="text" class="textfield" id="login" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td><b>Password</b></td> <td><input name="password" type="password" class="textfield" id="password" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td> </td> <td><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Login" /></td> </tr> </table> </form> ......................... login-execute.php ......................... <?php //Start session session_start(); //Include database connection details require_once('config.php'); //Array to store validation errors $errmsg_arr = array(); //Validation error flag $errflag = false; //Connect to mysql server $link = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD); if(!$link) { die('Failed to connect to server: ' . mysql_error()); } //Select database $db = mysql_select_db(DB_DATABASE); if(!$db) { die("Unable to select database"); } //Function to sanitize values received from the form. Prevents SQL injection function clean($str) { $str = @trim($str); if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) { $str = stripslashes($str); } return mysql_real_escape_string($str); } //Sanitize the POST values $login = clean($_POST['login']); $password = clean($_POST['password']); //Input Validations if($login == '') { $errmsg_arr[] = 'Login ID missing'; $errflag = true; } if($password == '') { $errmsg_arr[] = 'Password missing'; $errflag = true; } //If there are input validations, redirect back to the login form if($errflag) { $_SESSION['ERRMSG_ARR'] = $errmsg_arr; session_write_close(); header("location: login-form.php"); exit(); } //Create query $qry="SELECT * FROM members WHERE login='$login' AND passwd='".md5($_POST['password'])."'"; $result=mysql_query($qry); //Check whether the query was successful or not if($result) { if(mysql_num_rows($result) == 1) { //Login Successful session_regenerate_id(); $member = mysql_fetch_assoc($result); $_SESSION['SESS_MEMBER_ID'] = $member['member_id']; $_SESSION['SESS_FIRST_NAME'] = $member['firstname']; $_SESSION['SESS_LAST_NAME'] = $member['lastname']; session_write_close(); header("location: viewOrder.php"); exit(); }else { //Login failed header("location: login-failed.php"); exit(); } }else { die("Query failed"); } ?> ............................. viewOrder.php .............................. <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" > <? $host="localhost"; // Host name $username="root"; // Mysql username $password=""; // Mysql password $db_name="mydatabase"; // Database name $tbl_name="order_insert"; // Table name $tbl_name2="members"; // connect to server and databases mysql_connect("$host", "$username", "$password")or die("cannot connect"); mysql_select_db("$db_name")or die("cannot select DB"); $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $tbl_name "); print "<center>"; $output .= "<table width=1100 border=1 bordercolor=black>"; $output .= "<tr align=center><td>ID</td><td>First Name</td><td>Last Name</td><td>E Mail</td><td> City </td><td> Country </td><td> Phone</td><td>Decoration Type</td><td>Service Description</td><td>Budget</td><td>Update</td><td>Delete</td></tr>"; $output .= "<th></th><th></th>"; $output .= "</tr>\n\n"; while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){ $output .= "<tr>\n"; foreach ($row as $col=>$val){ $output .= " <td>$val</td>\n"; } // end foreach $keyVal = $row["id"]; $output .= "<td><a href='update.php?ID=$row[orderId]' >Update </a></td>"; $output .= "<td><a href='delete.php?ID=$row[orderId]' >Delete </a></td>"; $output .= "</tr>\n\n"; }// end while $output .= "</table></center>"; print "$output"; ?>   <br> <br> <center><table > <tr><td> <form action="home.php"><font color="#FF0000"><input type="submit" name="btn" style="color:#CC0000" value="<--Back" ></font></form></td></tr></table></center> </body> </html> ..... your help and suggestions will be appreciated

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The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

- by Ross

The Apple iPad is the latest new toy, and we’ve put together a comprehensive list of every tip, trick, and tutorial that we could find to help you get the most out of it—and we’re even giving one away to one lucky reader. So read on! Note: We’ll be keeping this page updated as we find more great articles, so you should bookmark this page for future reference. Want Your Own iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away! All you have to do to enter is become a fan of our Facebook page, and we’ll pick a random fan to win the prize. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Disable the “clicking sound” on the iPad Keyboard Does the clicking sound when you tap the iPad keyboard bother you? Thankfully it’s easy to disable with a couple of taps. How to disable the “clicking sound” on your iPad’s keyboard Enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad By default, Safari doesn’t display the Bookmarks Bar. This tip shows you how to change that. How to enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad Clear the Cache, History and Cookies in Safari for the iPad You’re probably used to clearing this kind of data right from within the browser. Not so with Safari on the iPad – but here’s how you can. How to clear the cache, history and cookies in Safari for iPad How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock The iPad has four icons in its ‘dock’. Did you know it can hold 6? How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock Convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks ePub is the format that iBooks are in. So for those of you with large eBook collections in PDF, here’s how you convert them to read in iBooks. How to convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks How to force your iPad to restart Has an app caused your iPad to freeze up, and you can’t escape? This tip shows you how to force your iPad to restart. How to force your iPad to restart How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC Exporting Keynote presentations from your iPad to your Mac or PC isn’t as straight forward as you might have expected. This tutorial shows you how. How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad Having trouble getting your presentations onto your iPad? How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad How to import documents to Pages on your iPad This guide shows you how to transfer documents (MS Word or Pages) from your Mac/PC to your iPad. How to import documents to Pages on your iPad How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF Want to spice up that doc with a picture you just took? This tutorial will show you how – and how to export that document as a PDF. How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF How to lock your iPad If you have kids or co-workers/friends who think it’s funny to mess with your iPad – lock it. How to lock your iPad How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad Does everyone need to know you just sent that email from your iPad? Probably not. This guide shows you how to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature and replace it with your own (or none). How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad How To Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync This tutorial will show you a workaround on how to sync multiple calendars on your iPad using Google Sync. How to Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync How to determine the MAC address of your iPad If your network restricts connections via MAC address – this guide will show you how to determine what yours is. How to determine the MAC address of your iPad How to take a screenshot of your iPad Do you need to take a screenshot of your iPad? This quick tip shows you how to do just that. How to take a screenshot of your iPad How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad Anyone who had an iPod Touch or iPhone before they had an iPad won’t need this tutorial. But if you’re new to the experience, this one will help. How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad How to determine the iPad ECID on Windows and Mac iPadintosh shows us how to determine the iPad’s ECID code – something you’ll want to have come Jailbreak time. How to grab the iPad ECID in Windows or OS X iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials Enggadget has you covered with reviews of the first slew of iPad specific Twitter and other social networking apps. iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials What does your website look like on an iPad? iPad Peek is a web based tool that allows you to enter any given URL, and it will display that page the same way Safari on the iPad does. Great for web site owners who don’t have access to an iPad. iPadPeek Stream Music and Videos to your iPad Gizmodo reviews the iPad app StreamToMe, which allows you to stream media from your Mac to your iPad across your local network. Their feelings in a nutshell – worth the $3, but not perfect. Review: StreamToMe for the iPad Apple iPad : Change links in Google Reader to point to full HTML webpage How to change links in Safari for iPad so that Google Reader points to a full HTML webpage How to connect an iPad to your existing wireless keyboard This video will show you how to connect your iPad to a wireless keyboard if you’re having any problems – and from the sound of things, quite a few folks are. via TUAW How to get started with the iPad Mashable has a very entry-level guide that will help you set up your iPad for the first time. Mashable’s Guide to Setting up the iPad Essential iPad Apps Downloadsquad gives mini-reviews to 8 iPad apps that you should install as soon as you get your iPad. iPad App Buyers Guide: Essential Apps you should get on day one Videos: The Official iPad Guided Tours From none other than Apple! Great getting started videos for all the included iPad apps. The Official iPad Guided Tours The Official iPad Manual When you buy an iPad, you don’t get a manual. But that’s not to say there isn’t one. Apple provides a 150 guide for your iPad in PDF format. The Official iPad Manual (pdf) How to print from your iPad Sure, it’s actually just an App (PrintCentral – $9.99 USD), but as of right now, it’s the only way. PrintCentral How to make your own iPad Wallpaper A perfectly detailed tutorial on how to make your own wallpaper for your iPad. The author also provides a really nice sample wallpaper, published under the Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. How to make your own iPad Wallpaper Got any more tips? Share them in the comments, and we’ll update the post with the links, or just the tip itself. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookAsk the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and MalwareStupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7 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 Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos

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Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Today is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM (Released). We have had TFS 2010 in Production for nearly 6 months and have had only minimal problems. Update 12th April 2010 – Added Scott Hanselman’s tweet about the MSDN download release time. SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice. I am hoping to make it 3 in a row, but with all the hype around the new version, and with it being a production release and not just a go-live, I think there will be a lot of competition. Developers: MSDN will be updated with #vs2010 downloads and details at 10am PST *today*! @shanselman - Scott Hanselman Same as before, we need to Uninstall 2010 RC and install 2010 RTM. The installer will take care of all the complexity of actually upgrading any schema changes. If you are upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS2010 you can follow our Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration and read my post on our successes. We run TFS 2010 in a Hyper-V virtual environment, so we have the advantage of running a snapshot as well as taking a DB backup. Done - Snapshot the hyper-v server Microsoft does not support taking a snapshot of a running server, for very good reason, and Brian Harry wrote a post after my last upgrade with the reason why you should never snapshot a running server. Done - Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 RC You will need to uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2010 RC client bits that you have on the server. Done - Uninstall TFS 2010 RC Done - Install TFS 2010 RTM Done - Configure TFS 2010 RTM Pick the Upgrade option and point it at your existing “tfs_Configuration” database to load all of the existing settings Done - Upgrade the SharePoint Extensions Upgrade Build Servers (Pending) Test the server The back out plan, and you should always have one, is to restore the snapshot. Upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done The first thing you need to do is off the TFS server and then log into the Hyper-v server and create a snapshot. Figure: Make sure you turn the server off and delete all old snapshots before you take a new one I noticed that the snapshot that was taken before the Beta 2 to RC upgrade was still there. You should really delete old snapshots before you create a new one, but in this case the SysAdmin (who is currently tucked up in bed) asked me not to. I guess he is worried about a developer messing up his server Turn your server on and wait for it to boot in anticipation of all the nice shiny RTM’ness that is coming next. The upgrade procedure for TFS2010 is to uninstal the old version and install the new one. Figure: Remove Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server RC from the system. Figure: Most of the heavy lifting is done by the Uninstaller, but make sure you have removed any of the client bits first. Specifically Visual Studio 2010 or Team Explorer 2010. Once the uninstall is complete, this took around 5 minutes for me, you can begin the install of the RTM. Running the 64 bit OS will allow the application to use more than 2GB RAM, which while not common may be of use in heavy load situations. Figure: It is always recommended to install the 64bit version of a server application where possible. I do not think it is likely, with SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 and even Windows Server 2008 R2 being 64 bit only, I do not think there will be another release of a server app that is 32bit. You then need to choose what it is you want to install. This depends on how you are running TFS and on how many servers. In our case we run TFS and the Team Foundation Build Service (controller only) on out TFS server along with Analysis services and Reporting Services. But our SharePoint server lives elsewhere. Figure: This always confuses people, but in reality it makes sense. Don’t install what you do not need. Every extra you install has an impact of performance. If you are integrating with SharePoint you will need to run this install on every Front end server in your farm and don’t forget to upgrade your Build servers and proxy servers later. Figure: Selecting only Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Foundation Build Services (TFBS) It is worth noting that if you have a lot of builds kicking off, and hence a lot of get operations against your TFS server, you can use a proxy server to cache the source control on another server in between your TFS server and your build servers. Figure: Installing Microsoft .NET Framework 4 takes the most time. Figure: Now run Windows Update, and SSW Diagnostic to make sure all your bits and bobs are up to date. Note: SSW Diagnostic will check your Power Tools, Add-on’s, Check in Policies and other bits as well. Configure Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done Now you can configure the server. If you have no key you will need to pick “Install a Trial Licence”, but it is only £500, or free with a MSDN subscription. Anyway, if you pick Trial you get 90 days to get your key. Figure: You can pick trial and add your key later using the TFS Server Admin. Here is where the real choices happen. We are doing an Upgrade from a previous version, so I will pick Upgrade the same as all you folks that are using the RC or TFS 2008. Figure: The upgrade wizard takes your existing 2010 or 2008 databases and upgraded them to the release. Once you have entered your database server name you can click “List available databases” and it will show what it can upgrade. Figure: Select your database from the list and at this point, make sure you have a valid backup. At this point you have not made ANY changes to the databases. At this point the configuration wizard will load configuration from your existing database if you have one. If you are upgrading TFS 2008 refer to Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration. Mostly during the wizard the default values will suffice, but depending on the configuration you want you can pick different options. Figure: Set the application tier account and Authentication method to use. We use NTLM to keep things simple as we host our TFS server externally for our remote developers. Figure: Setting your TFS server URL’s to be the remote URL’s allows the reports to be accessed without using VPN. Very handy for those remote developers. Figure: Detected the existing Warehouse no problem. Figure: Again we love green ticks. It gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Figure: The username for connecting to Reporting services should be a domain account (if you are on a domain that is). Figure: Setup the SharePoint integration to connect to your external SharePoint server. You can take the option to connect later. You then need to run all of your readiness checks. These check can save your life! it will check all of the settings that you have entered as well as checking all the external services are configures and running properly. There are two reasons that TFS 2010 is so easy and painless to install where previous version were not. Microsoft changes the install to two steps, Install and configuration. The second reason is that they have pulled out all of the stops in making the install run all the checks necessary to make sure that once you start the install that it will complete. if you find any errors I recommend that you report them on http://connect.microsoft.com so everyone can benefit from your misery. Figure: Now we have everything setup the configuration wizard can do its work. Figure: Took a while on the “Web site” stage for some point, but zipped though after that. Figure: last wee bit. TFS Needs to do a little tinkering with the data to complete the upgrade. Figure: All upgraded. I am not worried about the yellow triangle as SharePoint was being a little silly Exception Message: TF254021: The account name or password that you specified is not valid. (type TfsAdminException) Exception Stack Trace: at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Management.Controls.WizardCommon.AccountSelectionControl.TestLogon(String connectionString) at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument) [Info @16:10:16.307] Benign exception caught as part of verify: Exception Message: TF255329: The following site could not be accessed: http://projects.ssw.com.au/. The server that you specified did not return the expected response. Either you have not installed the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products on this server, or a firewall is blocking access to the specified site or the SharePoint Central Administration site. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161206). (type TeamFoundationServerException) Exception Stack Trace: at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SharePoint.WssUtilities.VerifyTeamFoundationSharePointExtensions(ICredentials credentials, Uri url) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.VerifySharePointSitesUrl.Verify() Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF249064: The following Web service returned an response that is not valid: http://projects.ssw.com.au/_vti_bin/TeamFoundationIntegrationService.asmx. This Web service is used for the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products. Either the extensions are not installed, the request resulted in HTML being returned, or there is a problem with the URL. Verify that the following URL points to a valid SharePoint Web application and that the application is available: http://projects.ssw.com.au. If the URL is correct and the Web application is operating normally, verify that a firewall is not blocking access to the Web application. (type TeamFoundationServerInvalidResponseException) Exception Data Dictionary: ResponseStatusCode = InternalServerError I’ll look at SharePoint after, probably the SharePoint box just needs a restart or a kick If there is a problem with SharePoint it will come out in testing, But I will definatly be passing this on to Microsoft. Upgrading the SharePoint connector to TFS 2010 You will need to upgrade the Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies on all of your SharePoint farm front end servers. To do this uninstall the TFS 2010 RC from it in the same way as the server, and then install just the RTM Extensions. Figure: Only install the SharePoint Extensions on your SharePoint front end servers. TFS 2010 supports both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010. Figure: When you configure SharePoint it uploads all of the solutions and templates. Figure: Everything is uploaded Successfully. Figure: TFS even remembered the settings from the previous installation, fantastic. Upgrading the Team Foundation Build Servers to TFS 2010 Just like on the SharePoint servers you will need to upgrade the Build Server to the RTM. Just uninstall TFS 2010 RC and then install only the Team Foundation Build Services component. Unlike on the SharePoint server you will probably have some version of Visual Studio installed. You will need to remove this as well. (Coming Soon) Connecting Visual Studio 2010 / 2008 / 2005 and Eclipse to TFS2010 If you have developers still on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 you will need do download the respective compatibility pack: Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 If you are using Eclipse you can download the new Team Explorer Everywhere install for connecting to TFS. Get your developers to check that you have the latest version of your applications with SSW Diagnostic which will check for Service Packs and hot fixes to Visual Studio as well. Technorati Tags: TFS,TFS2010,TFS 2010,Upgrade

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Week in Geek: LastPass Rescues Xmarks Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to breathe new life into an aging Windows Mobile 6.x device, use filters in Photoshop, backup and move VirtualBox machines, use the BitDefender Rescue CD to clean an infected PC, and had fun setting up a pirates theme on our computers. Photo by _nash. Weekly Feature Do you love using the Faenza icon set on your Ubuntu system but feel that there are a few much needed icons missing (or you desire a different version of a particular icon)? Then you may want to take a look at the Faenza Variants icon pack. The icons are available in the following sizes: 16px, 22px, 32px, 48px and scalable sizes. Photo by Asian Angel. Faenza Variants Random Geek Links Another week with extra link goodness to help keep you on top of the news. Photo by Asian Angel. LastPass acquires Xmarks, premium service announced Xmarks announced that it has been acquired by LastPass, a cross-platform password management service. This also means that Xmarks is now in transition from a “free” to a “freemium” business model. WikiLeaks reappears on European Net domains WikiLeaks has re-emerged on a Swiss Internet domain followed by domains in Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, sidestepping a move that had in effect taken the controversial site off the Internet. Iran: Yes, Stuxnet hurt our nuclear program The Stuxnet worm got some big play from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who acknowledged that the malware dinged his nuclear program. More Windows Rogues than Just AV – Fake Defragmenter Check Disk Don’t think for a second that rogues are limited to scareware, because as so-called products such as “System Defragmenter”, “Scan Disk” “Check Disk” prove, they’re not. Internet Explorer’s Protected Mode can be bypassed Researchers from Verizon Business have now described a way of bypassing Protected Mode in IE 7 and 8 in order to gain access to user accounts. Can you really see who viewed your Facebook profile? Rogue application spreads virally Once again, a rogue application is spreading virally between Facebook users pretending to offer you a way of seeing who has viewed your profile. More holes in Palm’s WebOS Researchers Orlando Barrera and Daniel Herrera, who both work for security firm SecTheory, have discovered a gaping security hole in Palm’s WebOS smartphone operating system. Next-gen banking Trojans hit APAC With the proliferation of banking Trojans, Web and smartphone users of online banking services have to be on constant alert to avoid falling prey to fraud schemes, warned Etay Maor, project manager for RSA Fraud Action. AVG update cripples 64-bit computers A signature update automatically deployed by the AVG virus scanner Thursday has crippled numerous computers. Article includes link to forums to fix computers affected after a restart. Congress moves to outlaw ‘mystery charges’ for Web shoppers Legislation that makes it illegal for Web merchants and so-called post-transaction marketers to charge credit cards without the card owners’ say-so came closer to becoming law this week. Ballmer Set to “Look Into” Windows Home Server Drive Extender Fiasco Tuesday’s announcement from Microsoft regarding the removal of Drive Extender from Windows Home Server has sent shock waves across the web. Google tweaks search recipe to ding scam artists Google has changed its search algorithm to penalize sites deemed to provide an “extremely poor user experience” following a New York Times story on a merchant who justified abusive behavior towards customers as a search-engine optimization tactic. Geek Video of the Week Watch as our two friends debate back and forth about the early adoption of new technology through multiple time periods (Stone Age to the far future). Will our reluctant friend finally succumb to the temptation? Photo by CollegeHumor. Early Adopters Through History Random TinyHacker Links Fix Issues in Windows 7 Using Reliability Monitor Learn how to analyze Windows 7 errors and then fix them using the built-in reliability monitor. Learn About IE Tab Groups Tab groups is a useful feature in IE 8. Here’s a detailed guide to what it is all about. Google’s Book Helps You Learn About Browsers and Web A cool new online book by the Google Chrome team on browsers and the web. TrustPort Internet Security 2011 – Good Security from a Less Known Provider TrustPort is not exactly a well-known provider of security solutions. At least not in the consumer space. This review tests in detail their latest offering. How the World is Using Cell phones An infographic showing the shocking demographics of cell phone use. Super User Questions See the great answers to these questions from Super User. I am unable to access my C drive. It says it is unable to display current owner. List of Windows special directories/shortcuts like ‘%TEMP%’ Is using multiple passes for wiping a disk really necessary? How can I view two files side by side in Notepad++ Is there any tool that automatically puts screenshots to my Dropbox? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Look through our hottest articles from this past week at How-To Geek. How to Create a Software RAID Array in Windows 7 9 Alternatives for Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender Why Doesn’t Disk Cleanup Delete Everything from the Temp Folder? Ask the Readers: How Much Do You Customize Your Operating System? How to Upload Really Large Files to SkyDrive, Dropbox, or Email One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through these awesome articles from one year ago. How To Upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium Edition How To Fix No Aero Transparency in Windows 7 Troubleshoot Startup Problems with Startup Repair Tool in Windows 7 & Vista Rename the Guest Account in Windows 7 for Enhanced Security Disable Error Reporting in XP, Vista, and Windows 7 The Geek Note That wraps things up here for this week. Regardless of the weather wherever you may be, we hope that you have an opportunity to get outside and have some fun! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Tony the Misfit. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Get the Complete Android Guide eBook for Only 99 Cents [Update: Expired] Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography How to Choose What to Back Up on Your Linux Home Server How To Harmonize Your Dual-Boot Setup for Windows and Ubuntu Hang in There Scrat! – Ice Age Wallpaper How Do You Know When You’ve Passed Geek and Headed to Nerd? On The Tip – A Lamborghini Theme for Chrome and Iron What if Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner were Human? [Video] Peaceful Winter Cabin Wallpaper Store Tabs for Later Viewing in Opera with Tab Vault

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I have finally traded my Blackberry in for a Droid!

- by Bob Porter

Over the years I have used a number of different types of phones. Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Nokia, and now Android. Until the Blackberry, which was my last phone (and I still have one issued from my office) I had never found a phone that “just worked” especially with email and messaging. The Blackberry did, and does, excel at those functions. My last personal phone was a Storm 1 which was Blackberry’s first touch screen phone. The Storm 2 was an improved version that fixed some screen press detection issues from the first model and it added Wifi. Over the last few years I have watched others acquire and fall in love with their ‘Droid’s including a number of iPhone users which surprised me. Our office has until recently only supported Blackberry phones, adding iPhones within the last year or so. When I spoke with our internal telecom folks they confirmed they were evaluating Android phones, but felt they still were not secure enough out of the box for corporate use and SOX compliance. That being said, as a personal phone, the Droid Rocks! I am impressed with its speed, the number of apps available, and the overall design. It is not as “flashy” as an iPhone but it does everything that I care about and more. The model I bought is the Motorola Droid 2 Global from Verizon. It is currently running Android 2.2 for it’s OS, 2.3 is just around the corner. It has 8 gigs of internal flash memory and can handle up to a 32 gig SDCard. (I currently have 2 8 gig cards, one for backups, and have ordered a 16 gig card!) Being a geek at heart, I “rooted” the phone which means gained superuser access to the OS on the phone. And opens a number of doors for further modifications down the road. Also being a geek meant I have already setup a development environment and built and deployed the obligatory “Hello Droid” application. I will be writing of my development experiences with this new platform here often, to start off I thought I would share my current application list to give you an idea what I am using. Zedge: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.zedge.android XDA: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.quoord.tapatalkxda.activity WRAL.com: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mylocaltv.wral Wireless Tether: http://market.android.com/details?id=android.tether Winamp: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.nullsoft.winamp Win7 Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.toggles.win7 Wifi Analyzer: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.farproc.wifi.analyzer WeatherBug: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.aws.android Weather Widget Forecast Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.weather.forecastaddon Weather & Toggle Widgets: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather2 Vlingo: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.vlingo.client VirtualTENHO-G: http://market.android.com/details?id=jp.bustercurry.virtualtenho_g Twitter: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.twitter.android TweetDeck: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.thedeck.android.app Tricorder: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.hermit.tricorder Titanium Backup PRO: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackupPro Titanium Backup: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup Terminal Emulator: http://market.android.com/details?id=jackpal.androidterm Talking Tom Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.outfit7.talkingtom Stock Blue: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.theme.stockblue ST: Red Alert Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.oldplanets.redalertwallpaper ST: Red Alert: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.oldplanets.redalertwallpaperplus Solitaire: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.kmagic.solitaire Skype: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.skype.raider Silent Time Lite: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.QuiteHypnotic.SilentTime ShopSavvy: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.biggu.shopsavvy Shopper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.shopper Shiny clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.clock.shiny ShareMyApps: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps Sense Glass ADW Theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dtanquary.senseglassadwtheme ROM Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.rommanager Roboform Bookmarklet Installer: http://market.android.com/details?id=roboformBookmarkletInstaller.android.com RealCalc: http://market.android.com/details?id=uk.co.nickfines.RealCalc Package Buddy: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.psyrus.packagebuddy Overstock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.overstock OMGPOP Toggle: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.toggle.omgpop OI File Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.openintents.filemanager nook: http://market.android.com/details?id=bn.ereader MyAtlas-Google Maps Navigation ext: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adaptdroid.navbookfree3 MSN Droid: http://market.android.com/details?id=msn.droid.im Matrix Live Wallpaper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jarodyv.livewallpaper.matrix LogMeIn: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.logmein.ignitionpro.android Liveshare: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cooliris.app.liveshare Kobo: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.kobobooks.android Instant Heart Rate: http://market.android.com/details?id=si.modula.android.instantheartrate IMDb: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.imdb.mobile Home Plus Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.skin.weather.homeplus Handcent SMS: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.handcent.nextsms H7C Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.clock.skin.h7c GTasks: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.dayup.gtask GPS Status: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.eclipsim.gpsstatus2 Google Voice: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.googlevoice Google Sky Map: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid Google Reader: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.reader GoMarks: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androappsdev.gomarks Goggles: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.unveil Glossy Black Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.skin.glossyblack Fox News: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.foxnews.android Foursquare: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.joelapenna.foursquared FBReader: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.geometerplus.zlibrary.ui.android Fandango: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.fandango Facebook: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.facebook.katana Extensive Notes Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.flufflydelusions.app.extensive_notes_donate Expense Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.expensemanager Espresso UI (LightShow w/ Slide): http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jaguirre.slide.lightshow Engadget: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.aol.mobile.engadget Earth: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.earth Drudge: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.iavian.dreport Dropbox: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dropbox.android DroidForums: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.quoord.tapatalkdrodiforums.activity DroidArmor ADW: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.addesigns.droidarmorADW Droid Weather Icons: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.skins.white Droid 2 Bootstrapper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.droid2.bootstrap doubleTwist: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.doubleTwist.androidPlayer Documents To Go: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dataviz.docstogo Digital Clock Widget: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.maize.digitalClock Desk Home: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cowbellsoftware.deskdock Default Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.clock.skins.defaultclock Daily Expense Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.techahead.ExpenseManager ConnectBot: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.connectbot Colorized Weather Icons: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.colorized Chrome to Phone: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.chrometophone CardStar: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cardstar.android Books: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.books Black Ipad Toggle: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.toggle.widget.skin.blackipad Black Glass ADW Theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dtanquary.blackglassadwtheme Bing: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.microsoft.mobileexperiences.bing BeyondPod Unlock Key: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.beyondpod.unlockkey BeyondPod: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.beyondpod BeejiveIM: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.beejive.im Beautiful Widgets Animations Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.bw.forecast Beautiful Widgets: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.beautifulwidgets Beautiful Live Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.beautifullive BBC News: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.jimblackler.newswidget Barnacle Wifi Tether: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.szym.barnacle Barcode Scanner: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.zxing.client.android ASTRO SMB Module: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.smb ASTRO Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.pro ASTRO Bluetooth Module: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.network.bluetooth ASTRO: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro AppBrain App Market: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps App Drawer Icon Pack: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adwtheme.appdrawericonpack androidVNC: http://market.android.com/details?id=android.androidVNC AndroidGuys: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.handmark.mpp.AndroidGuys Android System Info: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.electricsheep.asi AndFTP: http://market.android.com/details?id=lysesoft.andftp ADWTheme Red: http://market.android.com/details?id=adw.theme.red ADWLauncher EX: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adwfreak.launcher ADW.Theme.One: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.theme.one ADW.Faded theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.xrcore.adwtheme.faded ADW Gingerbread: http://market.android.com/details?id=me.robertburns.android.adwtheme.gingerbread Advanced Task Killer Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.rechild.advancedtaskkiller Adobe Reader: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.reader Adobe Flash Player 10.1: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.flashplayer Adobe AIR: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.air 3G Auto OnOff: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.yuantuo --- Generated by ShareMyApps http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps Sent from my Droid

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Week in Geek: New Security Flaw Confirmed for Internet Explorer Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to use a PC to stay entertained while traveling for the holidays, create quality photo prints with free software, share links between any browser and any smartphone, create perfect Christmas photos using How-To Geek’s 10 best how-to photo guides, and had fun decorating Firefox with a collection of Holiday 2010 Personas themes. Photo by Repoort. Random Geek Links Photo by Asian Angel. Critical 0-Day Flaw Affects All Internet Explorer Versions, Microsoft Warns Microsoft has confirmed a zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE7 and IE6. Note: Article contains link to Microsoft Security Advisory detailing two work-arounds until a security update is released. Hackers targeting human rights, indie media groups Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. OpenBSD: audits give no indication of back doors So far, the analyses of OpenBSD’s crypto and IPSec code have not provided any indication that the system contains back doors for listening to encrypted VPN connections. But the developers have already found two bugs during their current audits. Sophos: Beware Facebook’s new facial-recognition feature Facebook’s new facial recognition software might result in undesirable photos of users being circulated online, warned a security expert, who urged users to keep abreast with the social network’s privacy settings to prevent the abovementioned scenario from becoming a reality. Microsoft withdraws flawed Outlook update Microsoft has withdrawn update KB2412171 for Outlook 2007, released last Patch Tuesday, after a number of user complaints. Skype: Millions still without service Skype was still working to right itself going into the holiday weekend from a major outage that began this past Wednesday. Mozilla improves sync setup and WebGL in Firefox 4 beta 8 Firefox 4.0 beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices. Chrome OS the litmus test for cloud The success or failure of Google’s browser-oriented Chrome OS will be the litmus test to decide if the cloud is capable of addressing user needs for content and services, according to a new Ovum report released Monday. FCC Net neutrality rules reach mobile apps The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally released its long-expected regulations on Thursday and the related explanations total a whopping 194 pages. One new item that was not previously disclosed: mobile wireless providers can’t block “applications that compete with the provider’s” own voice or video telephony services. KDE and the Document Foundation join Open Invention Network The KDE e.V. and the Document Foundation (TDF) have both joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as licensees, expanding the organization’s roster of supporters. Report: SEC looks into Hurd’s ousting from HP The scandal surrounding Mark Hurd’s departure from the world’s largest technology company in August has officially drawn attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Report: Google requests delay of new Google TVs Google TV is apparently encountering a bit of static that has resulted in a programming change. Geek Video of the Week This week we have a double dose of geeky video goodness for you with the original Mac vs PC video and the trailer for the sequel. Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC 2 Trailer Random TinyHacker Links Awesome Tools To Extract Audio From Video Here’s a list of really useful, and free tools to rip audio from videos. Getting Your iPhone Out of Recovery Mode Is your iPhone stuck in recovery mode? This tutorial will help you get it out of that state. Google Shared Spaces Quickly create a shared space and collaborate with friends online. McAfee Internet Security 2011 – Upgrade not worthy of a version change McAfee has released their 2011 version of security products. And as this review details, the upgrades are minimal when compared to their 2010 products. For more information, check out the review. 200 Countries Plotted Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. Super User Questions Enjoy looking through this week’s batch of popular questions and answers from Super User. How to restore windows 7 to a known working state every time it boots? Is there an easy way to mass-transfer all files between two computers? Coffee spilled inside computer, damaged hard drive Computer does not boot after ram upgrade Keyboard not detected when trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a super busy week while preparing for the holiday weekend? Then here is your chance to get caught up on your reading with our five hottest articles for the week. Ask How-To Geek: Rescuing an Infected PC, Installing Bloat-free iTunes, and Taming a Crazy Trackpad How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Eight Geektacular Christmas Projects for Your Day Off VirtualBox 4.0 Rocks Extensions and a Simplified GUI Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer? One Year Ago on How-To Geek Here are more great articles from one year ago for you to read and enjoy during the holiday break. Enjoy Distraction-Free Writing with WriteMonkey Shutter is a State of Art Screenshot Tool for Ubuntu Get Hex & RGB Color Codes the Easy Way Find User Scripts for Your Favorite Websites the Easy Way Access Your Unsorted Bookmarks the Easy Way (Firefox) The Geek Note That “wraps” things up for this week and we hope that everyone enjoys the rest of their holiday break! Found a great tip during the break? Then be sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by ArSiSa7. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Simon’s Cat Explores the Christmas Tree! [Video] The Outdoor Lights Scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [Video] The Famous Home Alone Pizza Delivery Scene [Classic Video] Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Theme for Windows 7 Cardinal and Rabbit Sharing a Tree on a Cold Winter Morning Wallpaper An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video]

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Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty. No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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Apache load balancer limits with Tomcat over AJP

- by PAS

Hi All, I have Apache acting as a load balancer in front of 3 Tomcat servers. Occasionally, Apache returns 503 responses, which I would like to remove completely. All 4 servers are not under significant load in terms of CPU, memory, or disk, so I am a little unsure what is reaching it's limits or why. 503s are returned when all workers are in error state - whatever that means. Here are the details: Apache config: <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 30 MinSpareServers 30 MaxSpareServers 60 MaxClients 200 MaxRequestsPerChild 1000 </IfModule> ... <Proxy *> AddDefaultCharset Off Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> # Tomcat HA cluster <Proxy balancer://mycluster> BalancerMember ajp://10.176.201.9:8009 keepalive=On retry=1 timeout=1 ping=1 BalancerMember ajp://10.176.201.10:8009 keepalive=On retry=1 timeout=1 ping=1 BalancerMember ajp://10.176.219.168:8009 keepalive=On retry=1 timeout=1 ping=1 </Proxy> # Passes thru track. or api. ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyStatus On # Original tracker ProxyPass /m balancer://mycluster/m ProxyPassReverse /m balancer://mycluster/m Tomcat config: <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN"> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" /> <Service name="Catalina"> <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" /> <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" /> <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost"> <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false"> </Engine> </Service> </Server> Apache error log: [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: proxy: AJP: attempt to connect to 10.176.201.10:8009 (10.176.201.10) failed [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (10.176.201.10) [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: AJP: failed to make connection to backend: 10.176.201.10 [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: proxy: AJP: attempt to connect to 10.176.201.9:8009 (10.176.201.9) failed [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (10.176.201.9) [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: AJP: failed to make connection to backend: 10.176.201.9 [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: proxy: AJP: attempt to connect to 10.176.219.168:8009 (10.176.219.168) failed [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (10.176.219.168) [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: AJP: failed to make connection to backend: 10.176.219.168 [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state Load balancer top info: top - 23:44:11 up 210 days, 4:32, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.11, 0.09 Tasks: 135 total, 2 running, 133 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.1%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.2%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.3%st Mem: 524508k total, 517132k used, 7376k free, 9124k buffers Swap: 1048568k total, 352k used, 1048216k free, 334720k cached Tomcat top info: top - 23:47:12 up 210 days, 3:07, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00 Tasks: 63 total, 1 running, 62 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.2%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.8%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2097372k total, 2080888k used, 16484k free, 21464k buffers Swap: 4194296k total, 380k used, 4193916k free, 1520912k cached Catalina.out does not have any error messages in it. According to Apache's server status, it seems to be maxing out at 143 requests/sec. I believe the servers can handle substantially more load than they are, so any hints about low default limits or other reasons why this setup would be maxing out would be greatly appreciated.

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Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

- by ScottGu

Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account. This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it). The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service. You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it. This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog. You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects. We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them). You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data. We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs. You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud. You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog. For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery. You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog. For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level. So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites. This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier). Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications. Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy. Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer. Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure. The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio. For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template. When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property. When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser. This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio. You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance. To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end. Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting. You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!). Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center. Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions. They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services. Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support. It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services. This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services. I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it. Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks). Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings. This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass). Enabling this is now really easy. To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal. This will create a dialog like below. I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository. We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account. Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to. Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories. This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services. Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure. You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services. We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy. Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI. If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase. For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever: Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site. We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app. We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager. You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent. Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go. We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it. We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal. Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it. The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this. Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code. The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages. You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more). The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these. This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications. Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic. The multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure. This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total. To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview. Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit. For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS. Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Data Profiling without SSIS

Strangely enough for a predominantly SSIS blog, this post is all about how to perform data profiling without using SSIS. Whilst the Data Profiling Task is a worthy addition, there are a couple of limitations I’ve encountered of late. The first is that it requires SQL Server 2008, and not everyone is there yet. The second is that it can only target SQL Server 2005 and above. What about older systems, which are the ones that we probably need to investigate the most, or other vendor databases such as Oracle? With these limitations in mind I did some searching to find a quick and easy alternative to help me perform some data profiling for a project I was working on recently. I only had SQL Server 2005 available, and anyway most of my target source systems were Oracle, and of course I had short timescales. I looked at several options. Some never got beyond the download stage, they failed to install or just did not run, and others provided less than I could have produced myself by spending 2 minutes writing some basic SQL queries. In the end I settled on an open source product called DataCleaner. To quote from their website: DataCleaner is an Open Source application for profiling, validating and comparing data. These activities help you administer and monitor your data quality in order to ensure that your data is useful and applicable to your business situation. DataCleaner is the free alternative to software for master data management (MDM) methodologies, data warehousing (DW) projects, statistical research, preparation for extract-transform-load (ETL) activities and more. DataCleaner is developed in Java and licensed under LGPL. As quoted above it claims to support profiling, validating and comparing data, but I didn’t really get past the profiling functions, so won’t comment on the other two. The profiling whilst not prefect certainly saved some time compared to the limited alternatives. The ability to profile heterogeneous data sources is a big advantage over the SSIS option, and I found it overall quite easy to use and performance was good. I could see it struggling at times, but actually for what it does I was impressed. It had some data type niggles with Oracle, and some metrics seem a little strange, although thankfully they were easy to augment with some SQL queries to ensure a consistent picture. The report export options didn’t do it for me, but copy and paste with a bit of Excel magic was sufficient. One initial point for me personally is that I have had limited exposure to things of the Java persuasion and whilst I normally get by fine, sometimes the simplest things can throw me. For example installing a JDBC driver, why do I have to copy files to make it all work, has nobody ever heard of an MSI? In case there are other people out there like me who have become totally indoctrinated with the Microsoft software paradigm, I’ve written a quick start guide that details every step required. Steps 1- 5 are the key ones, the rest is really an excuse for some screenshots to show you the tool. Quick Start Guide Step 1 - Download Data Cleaner. The Microsoft Windows zipped exe option, and I chose the latest stable build, currently DataCleaner 1.5.3 (final). Extract the files to a suitable location. Step 2 - Download Java. If you try and run datacleaner.exe without Java it will warn you, and then open your default browser and take you to the Java download site. Follow the installation instructions from there, normally just click Download Java a couple of times and you’re done. Step 3 - Download Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver. You may have SQL Server installed, but you won’t have a JDBC driver. Version 3.0 is the latest as of April 2010. There is no real installer, we are in the Java world here, but run the exe you downloaded to extract the files. The default Unzip to folder is not much help, so try a fully qualified path such as C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0\ to ensure you can find the files afterwards. Step 4 - If you wish to use Windows Authentication to connect to your SQL Server then first we need to copy a file so that Data Cleaner can find it. Browse to the JDBC extract location from Step 3 and drill down to the file sqljdbc_auth.dll. You will have to choose the correct directory for your processor architecture. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0\sqljdbc_3.0\enu\auth\x86\sqljdbc_auth.dll. Now copy this file to the Data Cleaner extract folder you chose in Step 1. An alternative method is to edit datacleaner.cmd in the data cleaner extract folder as detailed in this data cleaner wiki topic, but I find copying the file simpler. Step 5 – Now lets run Data Cleaner, just run datacleaner.exe from the extract folder you chose in Step 1. Step 6 – Complete or skip the registration screen, and ignore the task window for now. In the main window click settings. Step 7 – In the Settings dialog, select the Database drivers tab, then click Register database driver and select the Local JAR file option. Step 8 – Browse to the JDBC driver extract location from Step 3 and drill down to select sqljdbc4.jar. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 3.0\sqljdbc_3.0\enu\sqljdbc4.jar Step 9 – Select the Database driver class as com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver, and then click the Test and Save database driver button. Step 10 - You should be back at the Settings dialog with a the list of drivers that includes SQL Server. Just click Save Settings to persist all your hard work. Step 11 – Now we can start to profile some data. In the main Data Cleaner window click New Task, and then Profile from the task window. Step 12 – In the Profile window click Open Database Step 13 – Now choose the SQL Server connection string option. Selecting a connection string gives us a template like jdbc:sqlserver://<hostname>:1433;databaseName=<database>, but obviously it requires some details to be entered for example jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=SQLBits. This will connect to the database called SQLBits on my local machine. The port may also have to be changed if using such as when you have a multiple instances of SQL Server running. If using SQL Server Authentication enter a username and password as required and then click Connect to database. You can use Window Authentication, just add integratedSecurity=true to the end of your connection string. e.g jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=SQLBits;integratedSecurity=true. If you didn’t complete Step 4 above you will need to do so now and restart Data Cleaner before it will work. Manually setting the connection string is fine, but creating a named connection makes more sense if you will be spending any length of time profiling a specific database. As highlighted in the left-hand screen-shot, at the bottom of the dialog it includes partial instructions on how to create named connections. In the folder shown C:\Users\<Username>\.datacleaner\1.5.3, open the datacleaner-config.xml file in your editor of choice add your own details. You’ll see a sample connection in the file already, just add yours following the same pattern. e.g.  <bean class="dk.eobjects.datacleaner.gui.model.NamedConnection"> <property name="name" value="SQLBits Local Connection" /> <property name="driverClass" value="com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver" /> <property name="connectionString" value="jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1433;databaseName=SQLBits;integratedSecurity=true" /> <property name="tableTypes"> <list> <value>TABLE</value> <value>VIEW</value> </list> </property> </bean> Step 14 – Once back at the Profile window, you should now see your schemas, tables and/or views listed down the left hand side. Browse this tree and double-click a table to select it for profiling. You can then click Add profile, and choose some profiling options, before finally clicking Run profiling. You can see below a sample output for three of the most common profiles, click the image for full size. I hope this has given you a taster for DataCleaner, and should help you get up and running pretty quickly.

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Who IS Brian Solis?

- by Michael Snow

Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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Sync Your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs with Dropbox

- by Matthew Guay

Pidgin is definitely our favorite universal chat client, but adding all of your chat accounts to multiple computers can be frustrating. Here’s how you can easily transfer your Pidgin settings to other computers and keep them in sync using Dropbox. Getting Started Make sure you have both Pidgin and Dropbox installed on any computers you want to sync. To sync Pidgin, you need to: Move your Pidgin profile folder on your first computer to Dropbox Create a symbolic link from the new folder in Dropbox to your old profile location Delete the default pidgin profile on your other computer, and create a symbolic link from your Dropbox Pidgin profile to the default Pidgin profile location This sounds difficult, but it’s actually easy if you follow these steps. Here we already had all of our accounts setup in Pidgin in Windows 7, and then synced this profile with an Ubuntu and a XP computer with fresh Pidgin installs. Our instructions for each OS are based on this, but just swap the sync order if your main Pidgin install is in XP or Ubuntu. Please Note: Please make sure Pidgin isn’t running on your computer while you are making the changes! Sync Your Pidgin Profile from Windows 7 Here is Pidgin with our accounts already setup. Our Pidgin profile has a Gtalk, MSN Messenger, and Facebook Chat account, and lots of log files. Let’s move this profile to Dropbox to keep it synced. Exit Pidgin, and then enter %appdata% in the address bar in Explorer or press Win+R and enter %appdata%. Select the .purple folder, which is your Pidgin profiles and settings folder, and press Ctrl+X to cut it. Browse to your Dropbox folder, and press Ctrl+V to paste the .purple folder there. Now we need to create the symbolic link. Enter “command” in your Start menu search, right-click on the Command Prompt shortcut, and select “Run as administrator”. We can now use the mklink command to create a symbolic link to the .purple folder. In Command Prompt, enter the following and substitute username for your own username. mklink /D “C:\Users\username\Documents\My Dropbox\.purple” “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\.purple” And that’s it! You can open Pidgin now to make sure it still works as before, with your files being synced with Dropbox. Please Note: These instructions work the same for Windows Vista. Also, if you are syncing settings from another computer to Windows 7, then delete the .purple folder instead of cutting and pasting it, and reverse the order of the file paths when creating the symbolic link. Add your Pidgin Profile to Ubuntu Our Ubuntu computer had a clean install of Pidgin, so we didn’t need any of the information in its settings. If you’ve run Pidgin, even without creating an account, you will need to first remove its settings folder. Open your home folder, and click View, and then “Show Hidden Files” to see your settings folders. Select the .purple folder, and delete it. Now, to create the symbolic link, open Terminal and enter the following, substituting username for your username: ln –s /home/username/Dropbox/.purple /home/username/ Open Pidgin, and you will see all of your accounts that were on your other computer. No usernames or passwords needed; everything is setup and ready to go. Even your status is synced; we had our status set to Away in Windows 7, and it automatically came up the same in Ubuntu. Please Note: If your primary Pidgin account is in Ubuntu, then cut your .purple folder and paste it into your Dropbox folder instead. Then, when creating the symbolic link, reverse the order of the folder paths. Add your Pidgin Profile to Windows XP In XP we also had a clean install of Pidgin. If you’ve run Pidgin, even without creating an account, you will need to first remove its settings folder. Click Start, the Run, and enter %appdata%. Delete your .purple folder. XP does not include a way to create a symbolic link, so we will use the free Junction tool from Sysinternals. Download Junction (link below) and unzip the folder. Open Command Prompt (click Start, select All Programs, then Accessories, and select Command Prompt), and enter cd followed by the path of the folder where you saved Junction. Now, to create the symbolic link, enter the following in Command Prompt, substituting username with your username. junction –d “C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.purple” “C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Dropbox\.purple” Open Pidgin, and you will see all of your settings just as they were on your other computer. Everything’s ready to go. Please Note: If your primary Pidgin account is in Windows XP, then cut your .purple folder and paste it into your Dropbox folder instead. Then, when creating the symbolic link, reverse the order of the folder paths. Conclusion This is a great way to keep all of your chat and IM accounts available from all of your computers. You can easily access logs from chats you had on your desktop from your laptop, or if you add a chat account on your work computer you can use it seamlessly from your home computer that evening. Now Pidgin is the universal chat client that is always ready whenever and wherever you need it! Links Downlaod Pidgin Download and signup for Dropbox Download Junction for XP Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add "My Dropbox" to Your Windows 7 Start MenuUse Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same TimeEasily Add Facebook Chat to PidginPut Your Pidgin Buddy List into the Windows Vista SidebarBackup and Restore Firefox Profiles Easily 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 Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar Manage Photos Across Different Social Sites With Dropico Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3

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A Look Back at 2010 Predictions

- by David Dorf

Now is the time of year people make their predictions for next year, but before I start thinking about 2011 it's worth a look back to see how my predictions for 2010 fared. 1. Borders and Blockbuster bite the dust. I would have never predicted a strong brand such as Circuit City could die, but now I know it can happen to anyone. Borders has lost the battle with Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster has lost to Netflix. And just to be sure, Amazon put an extra nail in each coffin. Borders received additional investment from Bennett LeBow to keep it afloat, but the stock is down around $1.25 with no profits in sight. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy back in September. 2. Every retailer finally has a page on Facebook... but very few figure out how to keep fans engaged. Retailer postings become noise, and fans start to unsubscribe. Twitter goes in the same direction. A few standout retailers will figure out how to use social media, and the rest will remain dumbfounded. Most retailers are on the Facebook bandwagon, and their fan bases seem to be increasing thanks to promotions like The Gap's logo redesign, Lowes' black Friday sneak peak, and Walmart's Crowd Savers. There are several examples of f-commerce advancements, including some interesting integrations from Amazon.3. Smartphones consolidate and grow. More and more people will step-up to smartphones, most of which will choose iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones. Other smartphones will vanish, and networks will start to strain. But retailers will finally embrace mobile as the next big channel. Retail marketing departments will build mobile apps without the help of their IT department, and eventually they will get into a bind. Android has been on a tear lately stealing market share from Blackberry. Palm and Microsoft are trending down, and Apple is holding steady. Smartphone sales are up 15% and expected to continue. Retailers understand the importance of mobile, and some innovative applications have been produced this year. 4. Google helps the little guys. Google will push its Favorite Places project to help give exposure to small retailers and restaurants. They will enable small retailers to act like big ones by providing storefronts, detailed product information, and coupons for consumers. Google will find a way to bring augmented reality to the masses. I can't say I've seen much new from Google regarding Favorite Places, but they've continued to push local product search. From the PC or smartphone, consumers can search for products and see which nearby stores have it stock. Oracle Retail even productized an integration to Google to support this effort. I suppose if Google ever buys Groupon then it will bring them even closer to local shopping. Google talked about augmented humanity, but that has nothing to do with augmented reality. 5. Steve Jobs Is Bugs Bunny and Steve Ballmer is Elmer Fudd. (OK, I stole that headline from an InformationWeek article. I couldn't resist.) Both Apple and Microsoft will continue to open new stores, but only Apple will show real growth. POSReady 2009 (formerly WEPOS) will continue to share the POS market with Linux. The iPhone and iPod will continue to capture market share, but there won't be an Apple tablet. There won't be an Apple tablet? What was I thinking? While Apple has well over 300 stores, there are less than 10 Microsoft stores. Initial impressions show that even though Microsoft is locating its store near Apple Stores, they are not converting customers, with shoppers citing a lack of assortment and high prices. 6. Consolidation of e-commerce software providers. Software vendors in the areas of search, reviews, online call-centers, payments, and e-commerce will consolidate, partly driven by the success of m-commerce and SaaS. Amazon will find someone else to buy, and eBay will continue to lose momentum. Consolidation of e-commerce providers continued with IBM acquiring Sterling Commerce and CoreMetrics, and Oracle recently announcing the acquisition of ATG. Amazon grabbed Zappos, Woot, and Diapers.com to continue its dominance of online selling. While eBay's Marketplace growth may have slowed, its PayPal division is doing quite well, fueled in part by demand for mobile payments. 7. Book publishers mirror music labels. Just as the iPod brought digital downloads to the masses, the Kindle and Nook will power the e-book revolution. Books will continue to use DRM for a few more years before following the path of music. Publishers will try to preserve the margins of hardbacks by associating e-book releases with paperbacks. Amazon has done a good job providing e-reader clients for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. Competition from Barnes & Noble has forced Amazon to support book loaning, and both companies are making it easier for people to publish ebooks (with or without DRM). Progress is slow but steady. 8. NFC makes inroads, RFID treads water. Near Field Communications start to appear in mobile phones, and retailers beta test its use for payments and loyalty programs. RFID tag costs come down a bit, but not enough to spur accelerated adoption.Nokia announced plans to offer NFC-enabled phones in 2011, and rumors are swirling about NFC in the upcoming iPhone. I think NFC is heading in the right direction, and I've heard more interest from retailers about specialized uses for RFID.9. Digital Signage goes the way of augmented reality. People use their camera phones to leave geo-tagged notes all over cities, rating stores and restaurants, and "painting" graffiti. But people get tired of holding their phones in front of their faces, so AR glasses are offered in much the same way bluetooth headsets emerged. Retailers experiement with in-store advertising using AR. Several retailers like Pizza Hut, Benetton, and Target have experimented with AR but its still somewhat of a gimmick used by marketing. I think this prediction is a year or two too early. 10. JDA flip-flops again. After announcing their embracing of the .Net architecture, then switching to J2EE after the Manugistics acquisition, JDA will finally decide to standardize on Apple's Objective C. Everything will be ported to the iPhone and be available on the AppStore. After all, there's not much left to try. This was, of course, a joke but the sentiment is still valid. JDA seems more supply-chain focused than retail focused, which is a an outcrop if their i2 acquisition. Of the 10 predictions, I'm going to say I got 6 somewhat correct. (Don't you just love grading your own paper?) Soon I'll post my predictions for 2011 so be on the lookout. Until then here's one more prediction: Va Tech beats Stanford in the Orange Bowl -- count on it!

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Ubuntu 11.10, using wget/curl fails with ssl

- by Greg Spiers

Note: See edit 3 for solution On a completely new install of Ubuntu I'm getting the following errors when using wget: wget https://test.sagepay.com --2012-03-27 12:55:12-- https://test.sagepay.com/ Resolving test.sagepay.com... 195.170.169.8 Connecting to test.sagepay.com|195.170.169.8|:443... connected. ERROR: cannot verify test.sagepay.com's certificate, issued by `/C=US/O=VeriSign, Inc./OU=VeriSign Trust Network/OU=Terms of use at https://www.verisign.com/rpa (c)06/CN=VeriSign Class 3 Extended Validation SSL SGC CA': Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority. To connect to test.sagepay.com insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'. I've tried installing ca-certificates and configuring the ca-certs and they appear to all be setup in /etc/ssl/certs. The same issue exists for cURL: curl https://test.sagepay.com curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed Which leads me to believe it's something wrong with openssl server wide. wget and curl both work correctly locally on OSX and I have confirmed with a few people that it's working on their servers so I suspect it's nothing to do with the server I'm attempting to connect to. Any ideas or suggestions on things to try to narrow it down? Thank you Edit As requested verbose output from curl curl -Iv https://test.sagepay.com * About to connect() to test.sagepay.com port 443 (#0) * Trying 195.170.169.8... connected * Connected to test.sagepay.com (195.170.169.8) port 443 (#0) * successfully set certificate verify locations: * CAfile: none CApath: /etc/ssl/certs * SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client hello (1): * SSLv3, TLS handshake, Server hello (2): * SSLv3, TLS handshake, CERT (11): * SSLv3, TLS alert, Server hello (2): * SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed * Closing connection #0 curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html Edit 2 Using the hash from your comment I see this: ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ ls -al 7651b327.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 59 2012-03-27 12:48 7651b327.0 -> Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.pem ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ ls -al Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 94 2012-01-18 07:21 Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.pem -> /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ ls -al /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 834 2011-09-28 14:53 /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ more /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICPDCCAaUCEDyRMcsf9tAbDpq40ES/Er4wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQAwXzELMAkG A1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFz cyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MB4XDTk2 MDEyOTAwMDAwMFoXDTI4MDgwMjIzNTk1OVowXzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNV BAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmlt YXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GN ADCBiQKBgQDJXFme8huKARS0EN8EQNvjV69qRUCPhAwL0TPZ2RHP7gJYHyX3KqhE BarsAx94f56TuZoAqiN91qyFomNFx3InzPRMxnVx0jnvT0Lwdd8KkMaOIG+YD/is I19wKTakyYbnsZogy1Olhec9vn2a/iRFM9x2Fe0PonFkTGUugWhFpwIDAQABMA0G CSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4GBABByUqkFFBkyCEHwxWsKzH4PIRnN5GfcX6kb5sroc50i 2JhucwNhkcV8sEVAbkSdjbCxlnRhLQ2pRdKkkirWmnWXbj9T/UWZYB2oK0z5XqcJ 2HUw19JlYD1n1khVdWk/kfVIC0dpImmClr7JyDiGSnoscxlIaU5rfGW/D/xwzoiQ -----END CERTIFICATE----- But doing the steps myself I end up with a different hash: strace -o /tmp/foo.out curl -Iv https://test.sagepay.com and grep ssl /tmp/foo.out open("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.0", O_RDONLY) = 3 stat("/etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.0", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=834, ...}) = 0 open("/etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.0", O_RDONLY) = 4 stat("/etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.1", 0x7fff7dab07b0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) readlink -f /etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.0 /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt more /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICPDCCAaUCEDyRMcsf9tAbDpq40ES/Er4wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQAwXzELMAkG A1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFz cyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MB4XDTk2 MDEyOTAwMDAwMFoXDTI4MDgwMjIzNTk1OVowXzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNV BAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmlt YXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GN ADCBiQKBgQDJXFme8huKARS0EN8EQNvjV69qRUCPhAwL0TPZ2RHP7gJYHyX3KqhE BarsAx94f56TuZoAqiN91qyFomNFx3InzPRMxnVx0jnvT0Lwdd8KkMaOIG+YD/is I19wKTakyYbnsZogy1Olhec9vn2a/iRFM9x2Fe0PonFkTGUugWhFpwIDAQABMA0G CSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4GBABByUqkFFBkyCEHwxWsKzH4PIRnN5GfcX6kb5sroc50i 2JhucwNhkcV8sEVAbkSdjbCxlnRhLQ2pRdKkkirWmnWXbj9T/UWZYB2oK0z5XqcJ 2HUw19JlYD1n1khVdWk/kfVIC0dpImmClr7JyDiGSnoscxlIaU5rfGW/D/xwzoiQ -----END CERTIFICATE----- Any other ideas? Thank you for the help so far :) Edit 3 So it turns out that installing the ca-certificates package didn't install the one that I needed. I found this post about certificates being presented out of order. This seems to be the case with my request to sagepay. The solution ended up being to install another CA certificate from Verisign. I'm not sure why this fixes the issue with it being out of order but it does, but I suspect the out of order issue really isn't a problem at all and it was infact because I was missing a certificate all along. The additional certificate is available in that post but I didn't want to blindly trust it. I've looked at the list of CA certificates from cURL's site and it is listed there so I do trust it. The certificate: Verisign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority ======================================================= -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICPDCCAaUCEHC65B0Q2Sk0tjjKewPMur8wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQECBQAwXzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMx FzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5 IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MB4XDTk2MDEyOTAwMDAwMFoXDTI4MDgwMTIzNTk1OVow XzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAz IFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUA A4GNADCBiQKBgQDJXFme8huKARS0EN8EQNvjV69qRUCPhAwL0TPZ2RHP7gJYHyX3KqhEBarsAx94 f56TuZoAqiN91qyFomNFx3InzPRMxnVx0jnvT0Lwdd8KkMaOIG+YD/isI19wKTakyYbnsZogy1Ol hec9vn2a/iRFM9x2Fe0PonFkTGUugWhFpwIDAQABMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAgUAA4GBALtMEivPLCYA TxQT3ab7/AoRhIzzKBxnki98tsX63/Dolbwdj2wsqFHMc9ikwFPwTtYmwHYBV4GSXiHx0bH/59Ah WM1pF+NEHJwZRDmJXNycAA9WjQKZ7aKQRUzkuxCkPfAyAw7xzvjoyVGM5mKf5p/AfbdynMk2Omuf Tqj/ZA1k -----END CERTIFICATE----- I put this in a file in: /usr/share/ca-certificates/curl/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.crt I then modified the /etc/ca-certificates.conf and added the following line at the end: curl/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.crt After that I ran the command: sudo update-ca-certificates Looking into the /etc/ssl/certs directory I see it correctly linked: ls -al | grep cURL lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 69 2012-03-27 16:03 415660c1.0 -> Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 69 2012-03-27 16:03 7651b327.0 -> Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 101 2012-03-27 16:03 Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.pem -> /usr/share/ca-certificates/curl/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.crt And everything works! curl -I https://test.sagepay.com HTTP/1.1 200 OK...

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How To - Guide to Importing Data from a MySQL Database to Excel using MySQL for Excel

- by Javier Treviño

Fetching data from a database to then get it into an Excel spreadsheet to do analysis, reporting, transforming, sharing, etc. is a very common task among users. There are several ways to extract data from a MySQL database to then import it to Excel; for example you can use the MySQL Connector/ODBC to configure an ODBC connection to a MySQL database, then in Excel use the Data Connection Wizard to select the database and table from which you want to extract data from, then specify what worksheet you want to put the data into. Another way is to somehow dump a comma delimited text file with the data from a MySQL table (using the MySQL Command Line Client, MySQL Workbench, etc.) to then in Excel open the file using the Text Import Wizard to attempt to correctly split the data in columns. These methods are fine, but involve some degree of technical knowledge to make the magic happen and involve repeating several steps each time data needs to be imported from a MySQL table to an Excel spreadsheet. So, can this be done in an easier and faster way? With MySQL for Excel you can. MySQL for Excel features an Import MySQL Data action where you can import data from a MySQL Table, View or Stored Procedure literally with a few clicks within Excel. Following is a quick guide describing how to import data using MySQL for Excel. This guide assumes you already have a working MySQL Server instance, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or 2010 and MySQL for Excel installed. 1. Opening MySQL for Excel Being an Excel Add-In, MySQL for Excel is opened from within Excel, so to use it open Excel, go to the Data tab located in the Ribbon and click MySQL for Excel at the far right of the Ribbon. 2. Creating a MySQL Connection (may be optional) If you have MySQL Workbench installed you will automatically see the same connections that you can see in MySQL Workbench, so you can use any of those and there may be no need to create a new connection. If you want to create a new connection (which normally you will do only once), in the Welcome Panel click New Connection, which opens the Setup New Connection dialog. Here you only need to give your new connection a distinctive Connection Name, specify the Hostname (or IP address) where the MySQL Server instance is running on (if different than localhost), the Port to connect to and the Username for the login. If you wish to test if your setup is good to go, click Test Connection and an information dialog will pop-up stating if the connection is successful or errors were found. 3.Opening a connection to a MySQL Server To open a pre-configured connection to a MySQL Server you just need to double-click it, so the Connection Password dialog is displayed where you enter the password for the login. 4. Selecting a MySQL Schema After opening a connection to a MySQL Server, the Schema Selection Panel is shown, where you can select the Schema that contains the Tables, Views and Stored Procedures you want to work with. To do so, you just need to either double-click the desired Schema or select it and click Next >. 5. Importing data… All previous steps were really the basic minimum needed to drill-down to the DB Object Selection Panel where you can see the Database Objects (grouped by type: Tables, Views and Procedures in that order) that you want to perform actions against; in the case of this guide, the action of importing data from them. a. From a MySQL Table To import from a Table you just need to select it from the list of Database Objects’ Tables group, after selecting it you will note actions below the list become available; then click Import MySQL Data. The Import Data dialog is displayed; you can see some basic information here like the name of the Excel worksheet the data will be imported to (in the window title), the Table Name, the total Row Count and a 10 row preview of the data meant for the user to see the columns that the table contains and to provide a way to select which columns to import. The Import Data dialog is designed with defaults in place so all data is imported (all rows and all columns) by just clicking Import; this is important to minimize the number of clicks needed to get the job done. After the import is performed you will have the data in the Excel worksheet formatted automatically. If you need to override the defaults in the Import Data dialog to change the columns selected for import or to change the number of imported rows you can easily do so before clicking Import. In the screenshot below the defaults are overridden to import only the first 3 columns and rows 10 – 60 (Limit to 50 Rows and Start with Row 10). If the number of rows to be imported exceeds the maximum number of rows Excel can hold in its worksheet, a warning will be displayed in the dialog, meaning the imported number of rows will be limited by that maximum number (65,535 rows if the worksheet is in Compatibility Mode). In the screenshot below you can see the Table contains 80,559 rows, but only 65,534 rows will be imported since the first row is used for the column names if the Include Column Names as Headers checkbox is checked. b. From a MySQL View Similar to the way of importing from a Table, to import from a View you just need to select it from the list of Database Objects’ Views group, then click Import MySQL Data. The Import Data dialog is displayed; identically to the way everything looks when importing from a table, the dialog displays the View Name, the total Row Count and the data preview grid. Since Views are really a filtered way to display data from Tables, it is actually as if we are extracting data from a Table; so the Import Data dialog is actually identical for those 2 Database Objects. After the import is performed, the data in the Excel spreadsheet looks like the following screenshot. Note that you can override the defaults in the Import Data dialog in the same way described above for importing data from Tables. Also the Compatibility Mode warning will be displayed if data exceeds the maximum number of rows explained before. c. From a MySQL Procedure Too import from a Procedure you just need to select it from the list of Database Objects’ Procedures group (note you can see Procedures here but not Functions since these return a single value, so by design they are filtered out). After the selection is made, click Import MySQL Data. The Import Data dialog is displayed, but this time you can see it looks different to the one used for Tables and Views. Given the nature of Store Procedures, they require first that values are supplied for its Parameters and also Procedures can return multiple Result Sets; so the Import Data dialog shows the Procedure Name and the Procedure Parameters in a grid where their values are input. After you supply the Parameter Values click Call. After calling the Procedure, the Result Sets returned by it are displayed at the bottom of the dialog; output parameters and the return value of the Procedure are appended as the last Result Set of the group. You can see each Result Set is displayed as a tab so you can see a preview of the returned data. You can specify if you want to import the Selected Result Set (default), All Result Sets – Arranged Horizontally or All Result Sets – Arranged Vertically using the Import drop-down list; then click Import. After the import is performed, the data in the Excel spreadsheet looks like the following screenshot. Note in this example all Result Sets were imported and arranged vertically. As you can see using MySQL for Excel importing data from a MySQL database becomes an easy task that requires very little technical knowledge, so it can be done by any type of user. Hope you enjoyed this guide! Remember that your feedback is very important for us, so drop us a message: MySQL on Windows (this) Blog - https://blogs.oracle.com/MySqlOnWindows/ Forum - http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172 Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/mysql Cheers!

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Windows Azure Evolution – Preview Developer Portal

- by Shaun

With the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June, there are many new features and updates in windows azure platform. In the coming several posts I will try to cover some of them. And in the first post here I would like to just have a quick walkthrough of the new preview developer portal. History of the Developer Portal If you have been working with windows azure since 2009 or 2010, you should remember the first version of the developer portal. It was built in HTML with very limited features. I have the impression when I was using is old one. The layout is not that attractive and you have very limited features. On November, 2010 alone with the SDK 1.3 release, the developer portal was getting a big jump. In order to give more usability and features this it turned to be built on Silverlight. Hence it runs like a desktop application with many windows, lists, commands and context menus. From 2010 till now many features were involved into this portal, such as the remote desktop, co-admin, virtual connect, VM role, etc.. And the portal itself became more and more complicated. But it brought some problems by using the Silverlight. The first one is the browser capability. As you know in most mobile and tablet device the browser doesn’t allow the rich content plugin, such as Flash and Silverlight. This means people cannot open and configure their azure services from their iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone, etc., even though what they need may just be restart a hosted service, or view the status of their databases. Another problem is the performance. Silverlight provides rich experience to the users, but also needs more bandwidth. So in this upgrade the preview developer portal will be back to use HTML, with JavaScript, as a mobile friendly, cross browser, interactively web site. Preview Portal vs. Silverlight Portal Before I started to talk about the new preview portal I’d better highlight that, this preview portal is a PREVIEW version, which means even though you can do almost all features that already in the old one, as long as some cool new features I will mention in the coming several posts, there are something still under developed and migrated. So sometimes you need to switch back to the old one. For example, in preview portal there is no co-admin manage function, no remote desktop function and the SQL database manage function will take you back to the old SQL Azure Manage Portal. But as Microsoft said these missing features will be moved in the preview portal in the couple of next few months. Since the public URL of the developer portal, https://windows.azure.com/, had been changed to point to this preview one, you need to click to preview button on top of the page and click the “Take me to the previous portal” link. Overview There are four parts in the preview portal. On the top is the header which shows the account you are currently logging in. If you click on the header it will show the top menu of windows azure, where you can navigate to the windows azure home page, the price information page, community and account, etc.. The navigation bar is on the left hand side, with the categories listed below. ALL ITEMS All items in your windows azure account, includes the web sites, services, databases, etc.. WEB SITES The web sites in your windows azure account. It will only show the web sites you have. The linked resources will be shown if you drill down into a web site. VIRTUAL MACHINES The virtual machines that you had been deployed to azure. CLOUD SERVICES All windows azure hosted services in your account. SQL DATABASES All SQL databases (SQL Azure) in your account. STORAGE All windows azure storage services in your account. NETWORKS The virtual network (Windows Azure Connect) you had been created. The available items will be listed in the main part of the page based on which category your currently selected. If there’s no item it will show the link to you to quick create. At the bottom of the page there will be the command and information bar. Based on what is selected and what is performed by the user, it will show the related information and commands. For example, in the image below when I was creating a new web site, the information bar told me that my web site is being provisioned; and there are two commands in the command bar. And once it ready the command bar will show some commands that I can do to my new web site. The “Web Sites” is a new feature introduced alone with this upgrade. It gives us an easier and quicker way to establish a website from the scratch or from some existing library. I will introduce it more details in the coming next post. Also in the command bar you can create a service by clicking the NEW button. It will slide the creation panel up to you. Where’s My Hosted Services The Windows Azure Hosted Services had been renamed to the Cloud Services. Create a new service would be very easy. Just click the NEW button at the bottom of the page, and select the CLOUD SERVICE and QIUICK CREATE. This will create a blank hosted service without deployment and certificate. It just needs you to specify the service URL and the affinity/region. Then the service will be shown in the list. If you clicked the item all information will be shown in the main part. Since there’s no package deployed to this service so currently we cannot see any information about it. But we can upload the package by using the command at the bottom. And as you can see, we could manage the configuration, instances, certificates and we can scale up and down (change the VM size), in and out (increase and decrease the instance count) to our service. Assuming I had created an ASP.NET MVC 3 web role project in Visual Studio and completed the package. Then I can click the UPLOAD button in this page to deploy my package. In the popping up window I just specify my deployment name, package file and configure file. Also I can check the box below so that it will NOT warn me if only one instance of this deployment. Once we clicked the OK button our package will be uploaded and provisioned by the platform. After a while we can see the service was ready from the information bar. We can have the basic information about this service and deployment if we to the dashboard page. For example the usage overview diagram, status, URL, public IP address, etc.. In the configure page we can view and change the CSCFG content such as the monitor setting, connection strings, OS family. In scale page we can increase and decrease the count of the instances. And in the instances page we can view all instances status. And, if your services is using some SQL databases and storages they will be shown as the linked resources under the linked resources page. And you can manage the certificates of this service as well under the certificates page. How About My Storage Services The storage service can be managed by clicking into the STORAGES link in the navigation bar. And we can create a new storage service from the NEW button. After specify the storage name and region it will be previsioned by the platform. If you want to copy or manage the storage key you can just click the Manage Keys button at the bottom, which is very easy. What I want to highlight here is that, you can monitor your storage service by enabling the monitor configuration. Click the storage item in the list and navigate to the configure page. As you can see in the page you can enable the monitoring for blob, table and queue. And you can also enable the logging when any requests come to the storage. But as the tooltip shown in the page, enabling the monitoring and logging will increase the usage of the storage, which means increase the bill of them. So make sure you enable them properly. And My SQL Databases (SQL Azure) The last thing I want to quick introduce is the SQL databases, which was formally named SQL Azure. You can create a new SQL Database Server and a new database by clicking the ADD button under the SQL Database navigation item. In the popping up windows just specify the database name, the edition, size, collation and the server. You can select an existing SQL Database Server if you have, or cerate a new one. If you selected to create a new server, there will be another step you need to do, which is specify the server login, password and the region. Once it ready you can mange your databases as well as the servers in the portal. In a particular server you can update the firewall settings in its Configure page. So, What Else There are some other area on the preview portal I didn’t cover, such as the virtual machines, virtual network and web sites. Regarding the virtual machines and web sites I will talk about them in the future separated post. Regarding the virtual network, it the Windows Azure Connect we are familiar with. But as I mention in the beginning of this post, the preview portal is still under developed. Some features are not available here. For example, you cannot manage the co-admin of your subscriptions, you cannot open the remote desktop on your hosted services, and you cannot navigate to the Windows Azure Service Bus, Access Control and Caching, which formally named Windows Azure AppFabric directly. In these cases you need to navigate back to the old portal. So in the coming several months we might need to use both these two sites. Summary In this post I quick introduced the new windows azure developer portal. Since it had been rearranged and renamed I demonstrated some features that existing in the old portal, such as how to create and deploy a hosted service, how to provision a storage service and SQL database. All features in the old portal had been, is being and will be migrated into this new portal, but some of them were in a different category and page we need to figure out. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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SQL SERVER – 3 Online SQL Courses at Pluralsight and Free Learning Resources

- by pinaldave

Usain Bolt is an inspiration for all. He broke his own record multiple times because he wanted to do better! Read more about him on wikipedia. He is great and indeed fastest man on the planet. Usain Bolt – World’s Fastest Man “Can you teach me SQL Server Performance Tuning?” This is one of the most popular questions which I receive all the time. The answer is YES. I would love to do performance tuning training for anyone, anywhere. It is my favorite thing to do, and it is my favorite thing to train others in. If possible, I would love to do training 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. To me, it doesn’t feel like a job. Of course, as much as I would love to do performance tuning 24/7/365, obviously I am just one human being and can only be in one place t one time. It is also very difficult to train more than one person at a time, and it is difficult to train two or more people at a time, especially when the two people are at different levels. I am also limited by geography. I live in India, and adjust to my own time zone. Trying to teach a live course from India to someone whose time zone is 12 or more hours off of mine is very difficult. If I am trying to teach at 2 am, I am sure I am not at my best! There was only one solution to scale – Online Trainings. I have built 3 different courses on SQL Server Performance Tuning with Pluralsight. Now I have no problem – I am 100% scalable and available 24/7 and 365. You can make me say the same things again and again till you find it right. I am in your mobile, PC as well as on XBOX. This is why I am such a big fan of online courses. I have recorded many performance tuning classes and you can easily access them online, at your own time. And don’t think that just because these aren’t live classes you won’t be able to get any feedback from me. I encourage all my viewers to go ahead and ask me questions by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever way you can get a hold of me. Here are details of three of my courses with Pluralsight. I suggest you go over the description of the course. As an author of the course, I have few FREE codes for watching the free courses. Please leave a comment with your valid email address, I will send a few of them to random winners. SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL Server performance tuning is an art to master – for developers and DBAs alike. This course takes a systematic approach to planning, analyzing, debugging and troubleshooting common query-related performance problems. This includes an introduction to understanding execution plans inside SQL Server. In this almost four hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 10:22 Execution Plan Basics 45:59 Essential Indexing Techniques 20:19 Query Design for Performance 50:16 Performance Tuning Tools 01:15:14 Tips and Tricks 25:53 Checklist: Performance Tuning 07:13 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics This course teaches you how to master the art of performance tuning SQL Server by better understanding indexes. In this almost two hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 02:03 Fundamentals of Indexing 22:21 Practical Indexing Implementation Techniques 37:25 Index Maintenance 16:33 Introduction to ColumnstoreIndex 08:06 Indexing Practical Performance Tips and Tricks 24:56 Checklist : Index and Performance 07:29 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Questions and Answers This course is designed to help you better understand how to use SQL Server effectively. The course presents many of the common misconceptions about SQL Server, and then carefully debunks those misconceptions with clear explanations and short but compelling demos, showing you how SQL Server really works. In this almost 2 hours and 15 minutes course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 00:54 Retrieving IDENTITY value using @@IDENTITY 08:38 Concepts Related to Identity Values 04:15 Difference between WHERE and HAVING 05:52 Order in WHERE clause 07:29 Concepts Around Temporary Tables and Table Variables 09:03 Are stored procedures pre-compiled? 05:09 UNIQUE INDEX and NULLs problem 06:40 DELETE VS TRUNCATE 06:07 Locks and Duration of Transactions 15:11 Nested Transaction and Rollback 09:16 Understanding Date/Time Datatypes 07:40 Differences between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR datatypes 06:38 Precedence of DENY and GRANT security permissions 05:29 Identify Blocking Process 06:37 NULLS usage with Dynamic SQL 08:03 Appendix Tips and Tricks with Tools 20:44 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL in Sixty Seconds You will have to login and to get subscribed to the courses to view them. Here are my free video learning resources SQL in Sixty Seconds. These are 60 second video which I have built on various subjects related to SQL Server. Do let me know what you think about them? Here are three of my latest videos: Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 Effect of Collation on Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #026 You can watch and learn at your own pace. Then you can easily ask me any questions you have. E-mail is easiest, but for really tough questions I’m willing to talk on Skype, Gtalk, or even Facebook chat. Please do watch and then talk with me, I am always available on the internet! Here is the video of the world’s fastest man.Usain St. Leo Bolt inspires us that we all do better than best. We can go the next level of our own record. We all can improve if we have a will and dedication. Watch the video from 5:00 mark. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

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Charms and the App Bar

- by Dennis Vroegop

Ok. I admit. I made a mistake in the last post about our planespotter app. I have dedicated a full part of the hub to Social. I also had a section called Friends but that made sense since I said that “Friends” is a special group of people that connect to each other through our app and only our app. Social however is sharing our spots with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Now, we could write that functionality in our app in a different section but there is one small problem with that: users don’t expect that. Ok, I admit. The mistake was quite deliberate to give me an excuse to write this part. But still: the mistake is one I see a lot. People are trying to do stuff in their application that they shouldn’t be doing. This always strike me as slightly odd: why do some work when others have already done it for you and you can just use it? After all: good developers are lazy (lazy people will always try to find the easiest way to do something and in development land this usually means the cleanest and best to support way…) So. What is that part that Microsoft has done for us and we don’t have to do ourselves? The answer lies on the right hand of your Win8 screen: This is a screenshot of my tablet (as you can see I am writing this right now….) When I swipe my finger from out of the screen on the right inside the screen (or move the mouse to the upper right corner) this menu will appear. Next to settings and the start menu button we’ll find the Search and the Share charms. These are two ways that your app can share the information it contains with the rest of the world, or at least: the rest of your system. So don’t write a Search feature in your app. Don’t write a Share feature in your app. It’s here already. Users, once they are used to Windows 8, will use that feature and expect it to work. If it doesn’t, they won’t like your app and you can kiss you dreams of everlasting fame goodbye. So use these two. What are they? Well, simply they are parts of a contract. In your app you say somewhere in code that you are supporting Search and Share. So when the user selects Share the system will interrogate the current app in the foreground if it supports this feature. Your app will say “But why, yes, I do!” Then the system will ask the app “Ok then, wisecrack, then share!” and you will have to provide the system with some information about the format. Other applications have subscribed to be at the receiving end of the Share contract. They have told the system that they support Sharing (receiving) and which formats they understand. If one or more of them support the formats you specify, the user will see them. The user clicks / taps on the app of their choice and data is moved from your app to the new one. So if you say you support Facebook and Twitter users can post data from your app to these networks by selecting Share. The same applies to Search. Don’t make a “search” button in your app but use the contract to tell the system that you support search and use that instead. Users will be grateful (remember that bar with men/women/creatures that are waiting for you?) The more and more people get to know Windows 8, the more they will use this. And if you are one of the people who wrote an app that helped them learn the system, well, that’s even better. So. We don’t have a Share or a Search button. We do have other buttons. Most important: we probably need a “New Spot” button. And a “Filter” might be useful. Or someway to open the camera so you can add a picture to the spot. Where will be put those? The answer is the “Appbar” . This is a application / context aware menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you move your finger / mouse from below the screen into it. From above downwards works just as well. Here you see an example of the appbar from the People app. (click on it for a larger version). This appears whenever you slide your finger up from below of down from above. This is where you put your commands. Remember, this is context aware so this menu will change when you are in different parts of your app or when you have selected different items. There are a few conventions when you create this appbar. First, the items on the right are “General” items, meaning they have little to do with what is on the screen right now. I think this would be a great place to add our “New Spot” icon. On the far left are items associated with the current selected item or screen. So if you have a spot selected, the button for Add Photo should be visible here and on the left hand side. Not everything is as clear as this, but this is what you should strive for. Group items together. And please note: this is the only place in Metro design where we are allowed to use lines as separators. So when you want to separate a group of icons from another group, add a line. Also note the simplicity of the buttons. No colors, no lights or shadows, no 3D. After a couple of years of fancy almost realistic looking icons people have finally decided that hey, this is a virtual world: it’s ok to look virtual as well. So make things as readable and clear as possible and don’t try to duplicate nature. It’s all about the information, remember? (If you don’t remember I’d like to point you to a older blog post of mine about the what and why of Metro). So.. think about the buttons a bit and think about Share and Search. What will you put there? Remember: this is the way the users interact with your apps and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its covers when it comes to people, this isn’t entirely so when it comes to apps. People DO judge an app by its looks and the way it feels. Take advantage of that. History has learned that a crappy app with a GREAT user interface gets better reviews than a GREAT app with a lousy UI… I know: developers will find this extremely unfair but that’s the world we live in (No, I am not saying you should deliver rubbish apps). Next time: we’ll start by building the darn thing!

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010New Projects3D Calculator: 3D Calc is a simple calculator application for Windows Phone 7, the purpose of this project is to demo the 3D animations capabilities of WP7 and sh...azaleas: AzaleasBlueset Studio Opensource Projects: Only for Opensource projects form Blueset Studio.Breck: A Phoenix and Jumper Moneky Production: Breck is a first person non-violent shooter developed in C++ and Dark GDK. After the main game is developed we are looking into making a sequel or...Discuz! Forum SDK: This project is use to login in and post or reply topic on discuz forum.Dominion.NET: Evolving Dominion source code originally written in VB6 and posted by "jatill" on Collectible Card Game Headquarters. Migration of the design and s...EkspSys2010-ITR: A mini project for the course Experimental System devolopment in spring 2010Facebook Graph Toolkit: This project is a .Net implementation of the Facebook Graph API. The aim of this project is to be a replacement to the existing Facebook Toolkit (h...iFree: This is a solution for Vietnamese network socialInfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor for developer allows user to modify the html text directly inside InfoPath designer or filler and push the change back to InfoPath ...iZeit: Run your own online calendar, with blog integration, recurrence, todo list and categories.machgos dotNet Tests: Just some little test-projects for learningmim: TBAMinePost: MinePost is a game made for the first 48 hour Reddit Game Jam.Mockina: Mockina is a mock framework. Expression tree syntax is used to specify which members to mock, both public and non-public. The code is easy to under...MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad): This is just another shell extension for MSBuild to enable quick execution of MSBuild scripts via Windows Explorer context menu. (C) 2010 Lex LiPeacock: A browser like tabbed applicationPrimeCalculation: PrimeCalculation is a .NET app to calculate primes in a given range. Speed on Core2Duo 2,4GHZ: Found all primes from 0 to 1 billion in 35 seconds (...Slightly Silverlight: A Framework that leverages Silverlight for processing, business logic but standard HTML for the presentation layer.Stopwatch: Stopwatch is a tool for measuring the time. To start and pause stopwatch you only need to press a key on the keyboard. An additional context menu a...YAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib is an XML Serialization library which helps you structure freely the XML result, choose among private and public fields to be serialized, an...New ReleasesActivate Your Glutes: v1.0.3.0: This release is a migration to VS2010, .Net 4, MVC2 and Entity Framework 4. The code has also been considerably cleaned up - taking advantage of E...AnyCAD: AnyCAD.Free.ENU.v1.1: http://www.anycad.net Modeling •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extrude, Loft, Chamfer, Sweep, Revol •Boolean: ...Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 多功能计算器 3.5: 稳定版本。Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook: LLBLGen LINQPad Data Context Driver Ver 1.0.0.0: First release of a Static LLBLGen Pro Data Context Driver for LINQPad I recommend LINQPad 4 as it seems more stable with this driver than LINQPad 2.DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates: Release 1.2. Some behaviour has changed!!: Attention. Some behaviour has changed! Now its necessary to use WildCards in the pattern-parameter for DSQLT.AllSourceContains DSQLT.Databases DSQ...FDS AutoCAD plug-in: FDS to AutoCAD plug-in: Basic functionality was implemented. Some routines like setting fds executable location are still not automated.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: FBGX 2 - Standalone FX: Background: The Feature Builder Guidance is extensible and displays guidance content supplied by all the Feature Builder Guidance Extensions (FBGX...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R3: - You can now right click on the input box to get options for toggling bold, underline, colors, etc. - The size of the nickname column is now saved...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R4: - A user's channel status now appears next to their nick when they talk (e.g. @Nick or +Nick) - Fixed an error where certain kinds of network probl...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailers.NET Downloader v1.0: Version 1.0 Thanks to Wolfgang for all his help. I let this project languish for too long while focusing on other things, but his involvement has ...InfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor Beta 1: Intial Release: Can load InfoPath inner html. Can edit InfoPath inner html. InfoPath 2007 only.LinkSharp: LinkSharp 0.1.0: First release of LinkSharp. Set up iis, and use the sql script to create a new database.PowerAuras: PowerAuras V3.0.0F: This version adds better integration with GTFO New Flags Added PvP flag In 5-Man Instance In Raid Instance In Battleground In ArenaRx Contrib: V1.4: Add the ability to catch internal exception and the ability to publish error by queue adaptersSEO SiteMap: SEO SiteMap RC1: -SevenZipLib Library: v9.13.2: Stable release associated with 7z.dll 9.13 beta. Ability to create and update archives not implemente yet.Silverlight / WPF Controls: Upload, FlipPanel, DeepZoom, Animation, Encryption: Code Camp Demonstration: This code example demonstrates MVVM/MEF with WPF with attached properties,security and custom ICommand class.SQL Data Capture - Black Box Application Testing: SQLDataCapture V1.2: Added Entity Framework Support to CRUD generator (Insert Stored Procedure) and switched to VS 2010 for development.Stopwatch: Stopwatch 0.1: Stopwatch Release 0.1VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30515.0: Automatic drop of latest buildYet another developer blog - Examples: Asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC: This sample application shows how to use jQuery TreeView plugin for creating an asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC. This application is accompani...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersMirror Testing SystemN2 CMSStyleCop

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Beginner Geek: How to Use Bookmarklets on Any Device

- by Chris Hoffman

Web browser bookmarklets allow you to perform actions on the current page with just a click or tap. They’re a lightweight alternative to browser extensions. They even work on mobile browsers that don’t support traditional extensions. To use bookmarklets, all you need is a web browser that supports bookmarks — that’s it! Bookmarklets Explained Web pages you view in your browser use JavaScript code. That’s why web pages aren’t just static documents anymore — they’re dynamic. A bookmarklet is a normal bookmark with a piece of JavaScript code instead of a web address. When you click or tap the bookmarklet, it will execute the JavaScript code on the current page instead of loading a different page, as most bookmarks do. Bookmarklets can be used to do something to a web page with a single click. For example, you’ll find bookmarklets associated with web services like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pocket, and LastPass. When you click the bookmarklet, it will run code that lets you easily share the current page with that service. Bookmarklets don’t just have to be associated with web services. A bookmarklet you click could modify the appearance of the page, stripping away most of the junk and giving you a clean “reading mode.” It could alter fonts, remove images, or insert other content. It can access anything the web page could access. For example, you could use a bookmarklet to reveal a password that just appears as ******* on the page. Unlike browser extensions, bookmarklets don’t run in the background and bog down your browser. They don’t do anything at all until you click them. Because they just use the standard bookmark system, they can also be used in mobile browsers where you couldn’t run extensions. For example, you could install the Pocket bookmarklet in Safari on an iPad and get an “Add to Pocket” option in Safari. Safari doesn’t offer browsing extensions and Apple’s iOS doesn’t offer a “Share” feature like Android and Windows 8 do, so this is the only way to get this direct integration. You could even use the LastPass bookmarklets in Safari on an iPad to integrate LastPass with the Safari web browser. Where to Find Bookmarklets If you’re looking for a bookmarklet for a particular service, you’ll generally find the bookmarklet on that service’s site. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pocket host pages where they provide bookmarklets along with browser extensions. Bookmarklets aren’t like programs. They’re really just a piece of text that you can put in a bookmarklet, so you don’t have to download them a specific site. You can get them from practically anywhere — installing them just involves copying a bit of text off of a web page. For example, you can just search the web for “reveal password bookmarklet” if you wanted a bookmarklet that will reveal passwords. We’ve covered many of the must-have bookmarklets — and our readers have chimed in too — so take a look at our lists for more examples. How to Install a Bookmarklet Bookmarklets are simple to install. When you hover over a bookmarklet on a web page, you’ll see its address begins with “javascript:”. If you have your web browser’s bookmark or favorites toolbar visible, the easiest way to install a bookmarklet is with drag-and-drop. Press Ctrl+Shift+B to show your bookmarks toolbar if you’re using Chrome or Internet Explorer. In Firefox, right-click the toolbar and click Bookmarks Toolbar. Just drag and drop this link to your bookmark toolbar. The bookmarklet is now installed. You can also install bookmarklets manually. Select the bookmarklet’s code and copy it to your clipboard. If the bookmarklet is a link, right-click or long-press the link and copy its address to your clipboard. Open your browser’s bookmarks manager, add a bookmark, and paste the JavaScript code directly into the address box. Give your bookmarklet a name and save it. How to Use a Bookmarklet Bookmarklets are easiest to use if you have your browser’s bookmarks toolbar enabled. Just click the bookmarklet and your browser will run it on the current page. If you don’t have a bookmarks toolbar — such as on Safari on an iPad or another mobile browser — just open your browser’s bookmarks pane and tap or click the bookmark. In mobile Chrome, you’ll need to launch the bookmarklet from the location bar. Open the web page you want to run the bookmarklet on, tap your location bar, and start searching for the name of the bookmarklet. Tap the bookmarklet’s name to run it on the current page. Note that the bookmarklet only appears here because we have it saved as a bookmark in Chrome. You’ll need to add the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks before you can use it in this way. The location bar approach may also be necessary in other browsers. The trick is loading the bookmark so that it will be associated with your current tab. You can’t just open your bookmarks in a separate browser tab and run the bookmarklet from there — it will run on that other browser tab. Bookmarklets are powerful and flexible. While they’re not as flashy as browser extensions, they’re much more lightweight and allow you to get extension-like features in more limited mobile browsers.

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OSX 10.6 Cisco IPSEC strange behavior

- by tair

I'm trying to connect to Cisco IPSEC VPN of my company over DSL Internet. I managed to successfully connect using Cisco VPN Client, now I'm trying to switch to OSX 10.6 native client, because of licensing issues. The problems is that the connection fails with a dialog box containing the message: The negotiation with the VPN server failed. Verify the server address and try reconnecting. I checked logs: Jun 29 13:10:39 racoon[4551]: Connecting. Jun 29 13:10:39 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode message 1). Jun 29 13:10:39 racoon[4551]: IKEv1 Phase1 AUTH: success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode Message 2). Jun 29 13:10:39 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode message 2). Jun 29 13:10:39 racoon[4551]: IKEv1 Phase1 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode). Jun 29 13:10:39 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode message 3). Jun 29 13:10:42 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Mode-Config message). Jun 29 13:10:42 racoon[4551]: IKEv1 XAUTH: success. (XAUTH Status is OK). Jun 29 13:10:42 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Mode-Config message). Jun 29 13:10:42 racoon[4551]: IKEv1 Config: retransmited. (Mode-Config retransmit). Jun 29 13:10:42 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: receive success. (MODE-Config). Jun 29 13:10:42 configd[19]: event_callback: Address added. previous interface setting (name: en1, address: 192.168.1.107), current interface setting (name: u92.168.54.147, subnet: 255.255.255.0, destination: 192.168.54.147). Jun 29 13:10:42 configd[19]: network configuration changed. Jun 29 13:10:42 vmnet-bridge[111]: Dynamic store changed Jun 29 13:10:42 named[62]: not listening on any interfaces Jun 29 13:10:58: --- last message repeated 1 time --- Jun 29 13:10:58 configd[19]: SCNCController: Disconnecting. (Connection tried to negotiate for, 16 seconds). Jun 29 13:10:58 racoon[4551]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Information message). Jun 29 13:10:58 racoon[4551]: IKEv1 Information-Notice: transmit success. (Delete ISAKMP-SA). Jun 29 13:10:58 racoon[4551]: Disconnecting. (Connection tried to negotiate for, 19.113382 seconds). Jun 29 13:10:58 named[62]: not listening on any interfaces Jun 29 13:10:58 vmnet-bridge[111]: Dynamic store changed Jun 29 13:10:58 named[62]: not listening on any interfaces Jun 29 13:10:58 configd[19]: network configuration changed. Then I opened Terminal, started pinging a server behind VPN, and tried to connect again. Now connection is OK! Logs this time: Jun 29 13:46:53 racoon[8136]: Connecting. Jun 29 13:46:53 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode message 1). Jun 29 13:46:53 racoon[8136]: IKEv1 Phase1 AUTH: success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode Message 2). Jun 29 13:46:53 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode message 2). Jun 29 13:46:53 racoon[8136]: IKEv1 Phase1 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode). Jun 29 13:46:53 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Aggressive-Mode message 3). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Mode-Config message). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKEv1 XAUTH: success. (XAUTH Status is OK). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Mode-Config message). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKEv1 Config: retransmited. (Mode-Config retransmit). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: receive success. (MODE-Config). Jun 29 13:46:56 configd[19]: event_callback: Address added. previous interface setting (name: en1, address: 192.168.1.107), current interface settinaddress: 192.168.54.149, subnet: 255.255.255.0, destination: 192.168.54.149). Jun 29 13:46:56 vmnet-bridge[111]: Dynamic store changed Jun 29 13:46:56 named[62]: not listening on any interfaces Jun 29 13:46:56 configd[19]: network configuration changed. Jun 29 13:46:56 named[62]: not listening on any interfaces Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 1). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 2). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 3). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: IKEv1 Phase2 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode). Jun 29 13:46:56 racoon[8136]: Connected. Jun 29 13:46:56 configd[19]: SCNCController: Connected. I tested it several times and it consistently behaves the same. What is the magic?

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Introduction to LinqPad Driver for StreamInsight 2.1

- by Roman Schindlauer

We are announcing the availability of the LinqPad driver for StreamInsight 2.1. The purpose of this blog post is to offer a quick introduction into the new features that we added to the StreamInsight LinqPad driver. We’ll show you how to connect to a remote server, how to inspect the entities present of that server, how to compose on top of them and how to manage their lifetime. Installing the driver Info on how to install the driver can be found in an earlier blog post here. Establishing connections As you click on the “Add Connection” link in the left pane you will notice that now it’s possible to build the data context automatically. The new driver appears as an option in the upper list, and if you pick it you will open a connection dialog that lets you connect to a remote StreamInsight server. The connection dialog lets you specify the address of the remote server. You will notice that it’s possible to pick up the binding information from the configuration file of the LinqPad application (which is normally in the same folder as LinqPad.exe and is called LinqPad.exe.config). In order for the context to be generated you need to pick an application from the server. The control is editable hence you can create a new application if you don’t want to make changes to an existing application. If you choose a new application name you will be prompted for confirmation before this gets created. Once you click OK the connection is created and you can start issuing queries against the remote server. If there’s any connectivity error the connection is marked with a red X and you can see the error message informing you what went wrong (i.e., the remote server could not be reached etc.). The context for remote servers Let’s take a look at what happens after we are connected successfully. Every LinqPad query runs inside a context – think of it as a class that wraps all the code that you’re writing. If you’re connecting to a live server the context will contain the following: The application object itself. All entities present in this application (sources, sinks, subjects and processes). The picture below shows a snapshot of the left pane of LinqPad after a successful connection. Every entity on the server has a different icon which will allow users to figure out its purpose. You will also notice that some entities have a string in parentheses following the name. It should be interpreted as such: the first name is the name of the property of the context class and the second name is the name of the entity as it exists on the server. Not all valid entity names are valid identifier names so in cases where we had to make a transformation you see both. Note also that as you hover over the entities you get IntelliSense with their types – more on that later. Remoting is not supported As you play with the entities exposed by the context you will notice that you can’t read and write directly to/from them. If for instance you’re trying to dump the content of an entity you will get an error message telling you that in the current version remoting is not supported. This is because the entity lives on the remote server and dumping its content means reading the events produced by this entity into the local process. ObservableSource.Dump(); Will yield the following error: Reading from a remote 'System.Reactive.Linq.IQbservable`1[System.Int32]' is not supported. Use the 'Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Linq.RemoteProvider.Bind' method to read from the source using a remote observer. This basically tells you that you can call the Bind() method to direct the output of this source to a sink that has to be defined on the remote machine as well. You can’t bring the results to the LinqPad window unless you write code specifically for that. Compose queries You may ask – what's the purpose of all that? After all the same information is present in the EventFlowDebugger, why bother with showing it in LinqPad? First of all, What gets exposed in LinqPad is not what you see in the debugger. In LinqPad we have a property on the context class for every entity that lives on the server. Because LinqPad offers IntelliSense we in fact have much more information about the entity, and more importantly we can compose with that entity very easily. For example, let’s say that this code creates an entity: using (var server = Server.Connect(...)) { var a = server.CreateApplication("WhiteFish"); var src = a .DefineObservable<int>(() => Observable.Range(0, 3)) .Deploy("ObservableSource"); If later we want to compose with the source we have to fetch it and then we can bind something to a.GetObservable<int>("ObservableSource)").Bind(... This means that we had to know a bunch of things about this: that it’s a source, that it’s an observable, it produces a result with payload Int32 and it’s named “ObservableSource”. Only the second and last bits of information are present in the debugger, by the way. As you type in the query window you see that all the entities are present, you get IntelliSense support for them and it’s much easier to make sense of what’s available. Let’s look at a scenario where composition is plausible. With the new programming model it’s possible to create “cold” sources that are parameterized. There was a way to accomplish that even in the previous version by passing parameters to the adapters, but this time it’s much more elegant because the expression declares what parameters are required. Say that we hover the mouse over the ThrottledSource source – we will see that its type is Func<int, int, IQbservable<int>> - this in effect means that we need to pass two int parameters before we can get a source that produces events, and the type for those events is int – in the particular case of my example I had the source produce a range of integers and the two parameters were the start and end of the range. So we see how a developer can create a source that is not running yet. Then someone else (e.g. an administrator) can pass whatever parameters appropriate and run the process. Proxy Types Here’s an interesting scenario – what if someone created a source on a server but they forgot to tell you what type they used. Worse yet, they might have used an anonymous type and even though they can refer to it by name you can’t figure out how to use that type. Let’s walk through an example that shows how you can compose against types you don’t need to have the definition of. This is how we can create a source that returns an anonymous type: Application.DefineObservable(() => Observable.Range(1, 10).Select(i => new { I = i })).Deploy("O1"); Now if we refresh the connection we can see the new source named O1 appear in the list. But what’s more important is that we now have a type to work with. So we can compose a query that refers to the anonymous type. var threshold = new StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0<int>(5); var filter = from i in O1 where i > threshold select i; filter.Deploy("O2"); You will notice that the anonymous type defined with this statement: new { I = i } can now be manipulated by a client that does not have access to it because the LinqPad driver has generated another type in its stead, named StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0. This type has all the properties and fields of the type defined on the server, except in this case we can instantiate values and use it to compose more queries. It is worth noting that the same thing works for types that are not anonymous – the test is if the LinqPad driver can resolve the type or not. If it’s not possible then a new type will be generated that approximates the type that exists on the server. Control metadata In addition to composing processes on top of the existing entities we can do other useful things. We can delete them – nothing new here as we simply access the entities through the Entities collection of the application class. Here is where having their real name in parentheses comes handy. There’s another way to find out what’s behind a property – dump its expression. The first line in the output tells us what’s the name of the entity used to build this property in the context. Runtime information So let’s create a process to see what happens. We can bind a source to a sink and run the resulting process. If you right click on the connection you can refresh it and see the process present in the list of entities. Then you can drag the process to the query window and see that you can have access to process object in the Processes collection of the application. You can then manipulate the process (delete it, read its diagnostic view etc.). Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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Nashorn, the rhino in the room

- by costlow

Nashorn is a new runtime within JDK 8 that allows developers to run code written in JavaScript and call back and forth with Java. One advantage to the Nashorn scripting engine is that is allows for quick prototyping of functionality or basic shell scripts that use Java libraries. The previous JavaScript runtime, named Rhino, was introduced in JDK 6 (released 2006, end of public updates Feb 2013). Keeping tradition amongst the global developer community, "Nashorn" is the German word for rhino. The Java platform and runtime is an intentional home to many languages beyond the Java language itself. OpenJDK’s Da Vinci Machine helps coordinate work amongst language developers and tool designers and has helped different languages by introducing the Invoke Dynamic instruction in Java 7 (2011), which resulted in two major benefits: speeding up execution of dynamic code, and providing the groundwork for Java 8’s lambda executions. Many of these improvements are discussed at the JVM Language Summit, where language and tool designers get together to discuss experiences and issues related to building these complex components. There are a number of benefits to running JavaScript applications on JDK 8’s Nashorn technology beyond writing scripts quickly: Interoperability with Java and JavaScript libraries. Scripts do not need to be compiled. Fast execution and multi-threading of JavaScript running in Java’s JRE. The ability to remotely debug applications using an IDE like NetBeans, Eclipse, or IntelliJ (instructions on the Nashorn blog). Automatic integration with Java monitoring tools, such as performance, health, and SIEM. In the remainder of this blog post, I will explain how to use Nashorn and the benefit from those features. Nashorn execution environment The Nashorn scripting engine is included in all versions of Java SE 8, both the JDK and the JRE. Unlike Java code, scripts written in nashorn are interpreted and do not need to be compiled before execution. Developers and users can access it in two ways: Users running JavaScript applications can call the binary directly:jre8/bin/jjs This mechanism can also be used in shell scripts by specifying a shebang like #!/usr/bin/jjs Developers can use the API and obtain a ScriptEngine through:ScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngineManager().getEngineByName("nashorn"); When using a ScriptEngine, please understand that they execute code. Avoid running untrusted scripts or passing in untrusted/unvalidated inputs. During compilation, consider isolating access to the ScriptEngine and using Type Annotations to only allow @Untainted String arguments. One noteworthy difference between JavaScript executed in or outside of a web browser is that certain objects will not be available. For example when run outside a browser, there is no access to a document object or DOM tree. Other than that, all syntax, semantics, and capabilities are present. Examples of Java and JavaScript The Nashorn script engine allows developers of all experience levels the ability to write and run code that takes advantage of both languages. The specific dialect is ECMAScript 5.1 as identified by the User Guide and its standards definition through ECMA international. In addition to the example below, Benjamin Winterberg has a very well written Java 8 Nashorn Tutorial that provides a large number of code samples in both languages. Basic Operations A basic Hello World application written to run on Nashorn would look like this: #!/usr/bin/jjs print("Hello World"); The first line is a standard script indication, so that Linux or Unix systems can run the script through Nashorn. On Windows where scripts are not as common, you would run the script like: jjs helloWorld.js. Receiving Arguments In order to receive program arguments your jjs invocation needs to use the -scripting flag and a double-dash to separate which arguments are for jjs and which are for the script itself:jjs -scripting print.js -- "This will print" #!/usr/bin/jjs var whatYouSaid = $ARG.length==0 ? "You did not say anything" : $ARG[0] print(whatYouSaid); Interoperability with Java libraries (including 3rd party dependencies) Another goal of Nashorn was to allow for quick scriptable prototypes, allowing access into Java types and any libraries. Resources operate in the context of the script (either in-line with the script or as separate threads) so if you open network sockets and your script terminates, those sockets will be released and available for your next run. Your code can access Java types the same as regular Java classes. The “import statements” are written somewhat differently to accommodate for language. There is a choice of two styles: For standard classes, just name the class: var ServerSocket = java.net.ServerSocket For arrays or other items, use Java.type: var ByteArray = Java.type("byte[]")You could technically do this for all. The same technique will allow your script to use Java types from any library or 3rd party component and quickly prototype items. Building a user interface One major difference between JavaScript inside and outside of a web browser is the availability of a DOM object for rendering views. When run outside of the browser, JavaScript has full control to construct the entire user interface with pre-fabricated UI controls, charts, or components. The example below is a variation from the Nashorn and JavaFX guide to show how items work together. Nashorn has a -fx flag to make the user interface components available. With the example script below, just specify: jjs -fx -scripting fx.js -- "My title" #!/usr/bin/jjs -fx var Button = javafx.scene.control.Button; var StackPane = javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; var Scene = javafx.scene.Scene; var clickCounter=0; $STAGE.title = $ARG.length>0 ? $ARG[0] : "You didn't provide a title"; var button = new Button(); button.text = "Say 'Hello World'"; button.onAction = myFunctionForButtonClicking; var root = new StackPane(); root.children.add(button); $STAGE.scene = new Scene(root, 300, 250); $STAGE.show(); function myFunctionForButtonClicking(){ var text = "Click Counter: " + clickCounter; button.setText(text); clickCounter++; print(text); } For a more advanced post on using Nashorn to build a high-performing UI, see JavaFX with Nashorn Canvas example. Interoperable with frameworks like Node, Backbone, or Facebook React The major benefit of any language is the interoperability gained by people and systems that can read, write, and use it for interactions. Because Nashorn is built for the ECMAScript specification, developers familiar with JavaScript frameworks can write their code and then have system administrators deploy and monitor the applications the same as any other Java application. A number of projects are also running Node applications on Nashorn through Project Avatar and the supported modules. In addition to the previously mentioned Nashorn tutorial, Benjamin has also written a post about Using Backbone.js with Nashorn. To show the multi-language power of the Java Runtime, there is another interesting example that unites Facebook React and Clojure on JDK 8’s Nashorn. Summary Nashorn provides a simple and fast way of executing JavaScript applications and bridging between the best of each language. By making the full range of Java libraries to JavaScript applications, and the quick prototyping style of JavaScript to Java applications, developers are free to work as they see fit. Software Architects and System Administrators can take advantage of one runtime and leverage any work that they have done to tune, monitor, and certify their systems. Additional information is available within: The Nashorn Users’ Guide Java Magazine’s article "Next Generation JavaScript Engine for the JVM." The Nashorn team’s primary blog or a very helpful collection of Nashorn links.

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Underwriting in a New Frontier: Spurring Innovation

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Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Susan Keuer, product strategy manager for Oracle Insurance, shares her experiences and insight from the 2010 Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) Annual Conference, April 11-14, in San Antonio, Texas How can I be more innovative in underwriting? It's a common question I hear from insurance carriers, producers and others, so it was no surprise that it was the key theme at the recent 2010 AHOU Annual Conference. This year's event drew more than 900 insurance professionals involved in the underwriting process across life and annuities, property and casualty and reinsurance from around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Bahamas, and more, to San Antonio - a Texas city where innovation transformed a series of downtown drainage canals into its premiere River Walk tourist destination. CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta kicked off the conference with a phenomenal opening session that drove home the theme of the conference, "Underwriting in a New Frontier: Spurring Innovation." Drawing from his own experience as a neurosurgeon treating critically injured medical patients in the field in Iraq, Gupta inspired audience members to think outside the box during the underwriting process. He shared a compelling story of operating on a soldier who had suffered a head-related trauma in a field hospital. With minimal supplies available Gupta used a Black and Decker saw to operate on the soldier's head and reduce pressure on his swelling brain. Drawing from this example, Gupta encouraged underwriters to think creatively, be innovative, and consider new tools and sources of information, such as social networking sites, during the underwriting process. So as you are looking at risk take into consideration all resources you have available. Gupta also stressed the concept of IKIGAI - noting that individuals who believe that their life is worth living are less likely to die than are their counterparts without this belief. How does one quantify this approach to life or thought process when evaluating risk? Could this be something to consider as a "category" in the near future? How can this same belief in your own work spur innovation? The role of technology was a hot topic of discussion throughout the conference. Sessions delved into the latest in underwriting software to the rise of social media and how it is being increasingly integrated into underwriting process and solutions. In one session a trio of panelists representing the carrier, producer and vendor communities stressed the importance to underwriters of leveraging new technology and the plethora of online information sources, which all could be used to accurately, honestly and consistently evaluate the risk throughout the underwriting process. Another focused on the explosion of social media noting: 1. Social media is growing exponentially - About eight percent of Americans used social media five years ago. Today about 46 percent of Americans do so, with 85 percent of financial services professionals using social media in their work. 2. It will impact your business - Underwriters reconfirmed over and over that they are increasingly using "free" tools that are available in cyberspace in lieu of more costly solutions, such as inspection reports conducted by individuals in the field. 3. Information is instantly available on the Web, anytime, anywhere - LinkedIn was mentioned as a way to connect to peers in the underwriting community and producers alike. Many carriers and agents also are using Facebook to promote their company to customers - and as a point-of-entry to allow them to perform some functionality - such as accessing product marketing information versus directing users to go to the carrier's own proprietary website. Other carriers have released their tight brand marketing to allow their producers to drive more business to their personal Facebook site where they offer innovative tools such as Application Capture or asking medical information in a more relaxed fashion. Other key topics at the conference included the economy, ongoing industry consolidation, real-estate valuations as an asset and input into the underwriting process, and producer trends. All stressed a "back to basics" approach for low cost, term products. Finally, Connie Merritt, RN, PHN, entertained the large group of atttendees with audience-engaging insight on how to "Tame the Lions in Your Life - Dealing with Complainers, Bullies, Grump and Curmudgeon." Merritt noted "we are too busy for our own good." She shared how her overachieving personality had impacted her life. Audience members then were asked to pick red, yellow, blue, or green shapes, without knowing that each one represented a specific personality trait. For example, those who picked blue were the peacemakers. Those who choose yellow were social - the hint was to "Be Quiet Longer." She then offered these "lion taming" steps: 1. Admit It 2. Accept It 3. Let Go 4. Be Present (which paralleled Gupta's IKIGAI concept) When thinking about underwriting I encourage you to be present in the moment and think creatively, but don't be afraid to look ahead to the future and be an innovator. I hope to see you at next year's AHOU Annual Conference, May 1-4, 2011 at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nev. Susan Keuer is the product strategy manager for new business underwriting. She brings more than 20 years of insurance industry experience working with leading insurance carriers and technology companies to her role on the product strategy team for life/annuities solutions within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit

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