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  • Easily use google maps, openstreet maps etc offline.

    - by samkea
    I did it and i am going to explain step by step. The explanatination may appear long but its simple if you follow. Note: All the softwares i have used are the latest and i have packaged them and provided them in the link below. I use Nokia N96 1) RootSign smartComGPS and install it on your phone(i havent provided the signer so that u wuld do some little work. i used Secman' rootsign). 2) Install Universal Maps Downloader, SmartCom OGF2 converter and OziExplorer 3.95.4s on my PC. a) UMD is used to download map tiles from any map source like googlemaps,opensourcemaps etc... and also combine the tiles into an image file like png,jpg,bmp etc... b) SmartCom OGF2 converter is used to convert the image file into a format usable on your mobile phone. c) OziExplorer will help you to calibrate the usable map file so that it can be used with GPS on your mobile phone without the use of internet. 3) Go to google maps or where u pick your maps and pan to the area of your interest. Zoom the map to at least 15 or 16 zoom level where you can see your area clearly and the streets. 4) copy this script in a notepad file and save it on your desktop: javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().ge tCenter())); 5) Open the universal maps downloader. You will notice that you are required to add the: left longitude, right longitude,top latitude, bottom latitude. 6) On your map in google maps, doubleclick on the your prefered to most middle point. you will notice that the map will center in that area. 7) copy the script and paste it in the address bar then press enter. You will notice that a dialog with your (top latitude) and longitude respectively pops up. 8) copy the top latitude ONLY and paste it in the corresponding textbox in the UMD. 9) repeat steps 6-7 for the botton latitude. 10)repeat steps 6-7 for left longitude and right longitude too, but u have to copy the longitudes here. (***BTW record these points in the text file as they may be needed later in calibration) 11) Give the zoom level to the same zoom level that you prefered in google maps. 12) Dont forget to choose a path to save your files and under options set the proxy connection settings in UMD if you are using so. 13) Click on start and bingo! there you have your image tiles and a file with an extension .umd will be saved in the same folder. 14) On the UMD, go to tools, click on MapViewer and choose the .umd file. you will now see your map in one piece....and you will smile! 15) Still go to tools and click on map combiner. A dialog will popup for you to choose the .umd file and to enter the IMAGE file name. u can use another extension for the image file like png, jpg etc...i usually use png. 16) Combine.....bingo! there u go! u have an IMAGE file for your map. *I SUGGEST THAT CREATE A .BMP FILE and A .PNG file* 17) Close UMD and open SmartCom OGF2 converter. 18) Choose your .png image and create an ogf2 file. 19) Connect your phone to your PC in Mass Memory mode and transfer the file to the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 20) Now disconnect your phone and load smartComGPS. it will load the map and propt you to add a calibration point. Go ahead and add one calibration point with dummy coordinates. You will notice that it will add another file with extension .map in the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 21) Connect yiur ohone and copy that file and paste it in your working folder on your PC. Delete that .map file from the phone too because you are going to edit it from your PC and put it back. 22) Now Open the OziExplorer, go to file-->Load and Calibrate Map Image. 23) Choose the .bmp image and bingo! it will load with your map in the same zoom level. 24) Now you are going to calibrate. Use the MapView window and take the small box locater to all the 4 cornners of the map. You will notice that the map in the back ground moves to that area too. 25)On the right side, select the Point1 tab. Now you are in calibration mode. Now move the red box in mapview in the left upper corner to calibrate point1. 26) out of mapview go to the the left upper corner of the background map and choose poit (0,0) and your 1st calibration point. You will notice that these X,Y cordinated will be reflected in the Point1 image cordinates. 27) now go back to the text file where you saved your coordibates and enter the top latitude and the left longitude in the corresponding places. 28) Repeat steps 25-27 for point2,point3,point4 and click on save. Thats it, you have calibrated your image and you are about to finish. 29) Go to save and a dilaog which prompts you to save a .map file will poop up. Do save the map file in your working folder. 30) Right click that .map file and edit the filename in the .map file to remove the pc's directory structure. Eg. Change C\OziExplorer\data\Kampala.bmp to Kampala.ogf2. 31) Save the .map file in the smartComGPS\Maps folder on your phone. 32) now open smartComGPS on your phone and bingo! there is your map with GPS capability and in the same zoom level. 33) In smartComGPS options, choose connect and simulate. By now you should be smiling. Whoa! Hope i was of help. i case you get a problem, please inform me Below is the link to the software. regards. http://rapidshare.com/files/230296037/Utilities_Used.rar.html Ok, the Rapidshare files i posted are gone, so you will have to download as described in the solution. If you need more help, go here: http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-160491.html Some months later, someone else gave almost the same kind of solution here. http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-180123.html Note: the solutions were mean't to help view maps on Symbian phones, but i think now they ca even do for Windows Phones, iphones and others so read, extract what you want and use it. Hope it helps. Sam Kea

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  • Social Network Updates: While You Were Busy Marketing 2

    - by Mike Stiles
    Since social moves at the speed of data, it’s already time for another update, as we did back in April, on the changes the various social networks have made or gone through while you were busy marketing. Facebook There’s a lot of talk Facebook’s developing a mobile product to act like Flipboard and surface news, from both users and media outlets. The biggest news was Facebook/Instagram’s introduction of 15-second videos, enhanced with with filters, to take some of Vine’s candy. You can also delete parts of videos and rerecord them, and there’s image stabilization. Facebook’s ad revenue is coming along just fine, thank you very much. 35% quarter-to-quarter growth in Q2. And it looks like new formats like Mobile App Install Ads and Unpublished Page Posts are adding to the mix. If you don’t already, you’ll soon see a little camera in comment boxes letting you insert photos right into the comments you make. The drive toward “more visual” continues. The other big news is Facebook’s adoption of our Twitter friend, the hashtag. Adding # sets apart the post topic so it can be easily found or discovered. It’s also being added to Google Plus, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Twitter Want to send someone a promoted tweet when they’re in range of your store? That could be happening by the end of this year. Some users have been seeing automatic in-stream previews of images on Twitter.com. Right now it’s images in your own tweets, but we can assume all tweets are next. Get your followers organized! Twitter raised the limit on the number of lists you can create from 20 to 1,000. They also raised the number of accounts you can have in a list from 500 to 5,000. Twitter started notifying you when someone favorites a tweet you’re mentioned in or re-tweets a tweet you re-tweeted. Anyway, it’s the first time Twitter’s notified you about indirect interactions like that. Who’s afraid of Instagram? A study shows 6-second Vine videos are being posted to Twitter at the rate of 9/second, up from 5/second 2 months ago. Vine has over 13 million users and branded Vines are 4x more likely to be shared than video ads. Google Plus Now featuring a 3-column redesigned stream, and images that take up a whole column. And photo filters Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome work to turn your photos into a real show. Google Hangouts is the workhorse for all Google messaging now, it’s not just an online chat with 9 people anymore. Google Plus Dashboard improves the connection between your company’s Google Plus business page and your Google Plus Local. Updates go out across all Google properties and you can do your managing from the dashboard. With Google Plus’ authorship system, you can build “Author Rank” based on what you write and put on the web. If your stuff is +1’ed and shared a lot, you’re the real deal and there are search result benefits. LinkedIn "Who's Viewed Your Updates" shows you what you’ve shared recently, who saw it and what they did about it in real-time. “Influencers” is, well, influential. Traffic to all LI news products has gone up 8x since it was introduced. LinkedIn is quickly figuring out how to get users to stick around awhile. You and your brand can post images and documents in status updates now. In fact, that whole “document posting” thing is making some analysts wonder if LinkedIn will drift on over to the Dropboxes and YouSendIts of the world. C’mon, admit it. Your favorite part of LinkedIn is being able to see who’s viewed your profile. Now you’ve got even more info and can see what/who you have in common. Premium users get even deeper insights about how people are finding them. If you’re a big fan of security, you’ll love that LinkedIn started offering two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s optional, but step 2 is a one-time code texted to your registered mobile. Pinterest A study showed pins have a looong shelf life compared to other social net posts. “Clicks kept coming for 30 days and beyond.” Most pins are timeless, and the infinite scroll causes people to see older pins. Is it a keeper? Pinterest jumped 82% to 54 million users in the past year. It’s valued at $2.5 billion and is one of the biggest sources of referral traffic there is. That said, CEO Ben Silbermann adds, "Right now, we don't make money." A new search feature stops you from having to endlessly scroll through your own pins looking for that waterfall picture you posted. Simply select “just my pins” in the search bar. New "Rich Pins" lets brands add info like price and availability to pins that can be updated daily via a data feed from your merchant site. Not so fast, you have to apply to Pinterest for it first. Like other social nets, Pinterest does not allow sexual content, nudity, or even partial nudity. However…some art contains nudity, and Pinterest wants to allow art. What constitutes “art” will be judged by…what we have to assume are Pinterest employees who love their job. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng, Tim Marmon

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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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  • Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

    - by Matthew Guay
    Fonts can help your documents stand out and be easier to read, and Office 2010 helps you take your fonts even further with support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, and more.  Here’s a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010. Introduction Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft has made an effort to support more advanced font features across their products.  Windows 7 includes support for advanced OpenType font features and laid the groundwork for advanced font support in programs with the new DirectWrite subsystem.  It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures. Now, with the upcoming release of Office 2010, Microsoft is bringing advanced typographical features to the Office programs we love.  This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more.  These new features are available in Word, Outlook, and Publisher 2010, and work the same on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Please note that Windows does include several OpenType fonts that include these advanced features.  Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, and Corbel all include multiple number forms, while Consolas, Palatino Linotype, and Gabriola (Windows 7 only) include all the OpenType features.  And, of course, these new features will work great with any other OpenType fonts you have that contain advanced ligatures, stylistic sets, and number forms. Using advanced typography in Word To use the new font features, open a new document, select an OpenType font, and enter some text.  Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font.  Click the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to open the font properties. Alternately, select the text and click Font. Now, click on the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features. You can change the ligatures setting… Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing… And even select Lining or Old-style number forms. Here’s a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font. Finally, you can choose various Stylistic sets for your font.  The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many.  Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6. Here’s lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6. Impressive, huh?  The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing.  Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6. Here’s another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri. These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too. And, since Outlook uses Word as it’s editing engine, you can use the same options in Outlook 2010.  Note that these font effects may not show up the same if the recipient’s email client doesn’t support advanced OpenType typography.  It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010. Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010 Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features.  This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design.  Simply insert a text box, enter some text, select it, and click the arrow on the bottom of the font box as in Word to open the font properties. This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Word’s font options.  You can preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box.  You can also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters.   Conclusion Advanced typographical effects are a welcome addition to Word and Publisher 2010, and they are very impressive when coupled with modern fonts such as Gabriola.  From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun. Do you have a favorite OpenType font that includes advanced typographical features?  Let us know in the comments! More Reading Advances in typography in Windows 7 – Engineering 7 Blog New features in Microsoft Word 2010 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Font in Excel 2007Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both?Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in SafariAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteFriday Fun: Desktop Tower Defense Pro TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

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  • System locking up with suspicious messages about hard disk

    - by Chris Conway
    My system has started behaving strangely, intermittently locking up. I see messages like the following in syslog: Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.078156] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.078163] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000000 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.078167] sr 2:0:0:0: CDB: Test Unit Ready: 00 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.078182] ata3.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.078184] res 50/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x1 (device error) Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.078188] ata3.00: status: { DRDY } Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.080887] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.080890] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000000 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.080893] sr 2:0:0:0: CDB: Test Unit Ready: 00 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.080905] ata3.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.080906] res 50/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x1 (device error) Nov 18 22:22:00 claypool kernel: [ 3428.080910] ata3.00: status: { DRDY } And then this: Nov 18 23:13:56 claypool kernel: [ 6544.000798] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen Nov 18 23:13:56 claypool kernel: [ 6544.000804] ata1.00: failed command: FLUSH CACHE EXT Nov 18 23:13:56 claypool kernel: [ 6544.000814] ata1.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 Nov 18 23:13:56 claypool kernel: [ 6544.000815] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x4 (timeout) Nov 18 23:13:56 claypool kernel: [ 6544.000819] ata1.00: status: { DRDY } Nov 18 23:13:56 claypool kernel: [ 6544.000825] ata1: hard resetting link Nov 18 23:14:01 claypool kernel: [ 6549.360324] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) Nov 18 23:14:06 claypool kernel: [ 6554.008091] ata1: COMRESET failed (errno=-16) Nov 18 23:14:06 claypool kernel: [ 6554.008103] ata1: hard resetting link Nov 18 23:14:11 claypool kernel: [ 6559.372246] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) Nov 18 23:14:16 claypool kernel: [ 6564.020228] ata1: COMRESET failed (errno=-16) Nov 18 23:14:16 claypool kernel: [ 6564.020235] ata1: hard resetting link Nov 18 23:14:21 claypool kernel: [ 6569.380109] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) Nov 18 23:14:31 claypool kernel: [ 6579.460243] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Nov 18 23:14:31 claypool kernel: [ 6579.486595] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 Nov 18 23:14:31 claypool kernel: [ 6579.486601] ata1.00: retrying FLUSH 0xea Emask 0x4 Nov 18 23:14:31 claypool kernel: [ 6579.486939] ata1.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0 Nov 18 23:14:31 claypool kernel: [ 6579.486952] ata1: EH complete Nov 18 23:17:01 claypool CRON[3910]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Nov 18 23:17:01 claypool CRON[3908]: (CRON) error (grandchild #3910 failed with exit status 1) Nov 18 23:17:01 claypool postfix/sendmail[3925]: fatal: open /etc/postfix/main.cf: No such file or directory Nov 18 23:17:01 claypool CRON[3908]: (root) MAIL (mailed 1 byte of output; but got status 0x004b, #012) Nov 18 23:39:01 claypool CRON[4200]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -print0 | xargs -n 200 -r -0 rm) There are no messages marked after 23:39. When I next tried to use the machine, it would not return from the screensaver (blank screen), nor switch to another terminal, and I had to hard reboot it. [UPDATE] The output of smartctl is here. I had trouble getting this, because / is being mounted read-only (?!), which prevents most applications from running. Also, it may not be related, but I have the following worrying messages in dmesg: [ 10.084596] k8temp 0000:00:18.3: Temperature readouts might be wrong - check erratum #141 [ 10.098477] i2c i2c-0: nForce2 SMBus adapter at 0x600 [ 10.098483] ACPI: resource nForce2_smbus [io 0x0700-0x073f] conflicts with ACPI region SM00 [??? 0x00000700-0x0000073f flags 0x30] [ 10.098486] ACPI: This conflict may cause random problems and system instability [ 10.098487] ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it instead of the native driver [ 10.098509] i2c i2c-1: nForce2 SMBus adapter at 0x700 [ 10.112570] Linux agpgart interface v0.103 [ 10.155329] atk: Resources not safely usable due to acpi_enforce_resources kernel parameter [ 10.161506] it87: Found IT8712F chip at 0x290, revision 8 [ 10.161517] it87: VID is disabled (pins used for GPIO) [ 10.161527] it87: in3 is VCC (+5V) [ 10.161528] it87: in7 is VCCH (+5V Stand-By) [ 10.161560] ACPI: resource it87 [io 0x0295-0x0296] conflicts with ACPI region ECRE [??? 0x00000290-0x000002af flags 0x45] [ 10.161562] ACPI: This conflict may cause random problems and system instability [ 10.161564] ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it instead of the native driver [UPDATE 2] I swapped in a new SATA cable, per Phil's suggestion. The current output of smartctl is here, if it helps. [UPDATE 3] I don't think the cable fixed it. The system hasn't locked up yet, but my media player crashed a few minutes ago and I have the following in the syslog: Nov 20 16:07:17 claypool kernel: [ 2294.400033] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) Nov 20 16:07:47 claypool kernel: [ 2324.084581] ata1: COMRESET failed (errno=-16) Nov 20 16:07:47 claypool kernel: [ 2324.084588] ata1: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps Nov 20 16:07:47 claypool kernel: [ 2324.084592] ata1: hard resetting link I get the following response from smartctl: $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda [sudo] password for chris: sudo: Can't open /var/lib/sudo/chris/0: Read-only file system smartctl 5.40 2010-03-16 r3077 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net Device: /0:0:0:0 Version: scsiModePageOffset: response length too short, resp_len=47 offset=50 bd_len=46 >> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

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  • Restore Your PC from Windows Home Server

    - by Mysticgeek
    If your computer crashes or you get a virus infection that makes it unrecoverable, doing a clean install can be a hassle, let alone getting your data back. If you’re backing up your computers to Windows Home Server, you can completely restore them to the last successful backup. Note: For this process to work you need to verify the PC you want to restore is connected to your network via Ethernet. If you have it connected wirelessly it won’t work. Restore a PC from Windows Home Server On the computer you want to restore, pop in the Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore disc and boot from it. If you don’t have one already made, you can easily make one following these instructions. We have also included the link to the restore disc below. Boot from the CD then select if your machine has 512MB or RAM or more. The disc will initialize… Then choose your language and keyboard settings. Hopefully if everything goes correctly, your network card will be detected and you can continue. However, if it doesn’t like in our example, click on the Show Details button. In the Detect Hardware screen click on the Install Drivers button. Now you will need to have a USB flash drive with the correct drivers on it. It has to be a flash drive or a floppy (if you happen to still have one of those) because you can’t take out the Restore CD. If you want to make sure you have the correct drivers on the USB flash drive, open the Windows Home Server Console on another computer on your network. In the Computers and Backup section right-click on the computer you want to restore and select View Backups. Select the backup you want to restore from and click the Open button in the Restore or view Files section. Now drag the entire contents of the folder named Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore to the USB flash drive. Back to the machine you’re trying to restore, insert the USB flash drive with the correct drivers and click the Scan button. Wait a few moments while the drivers are found then click Ok then Continue.   The Restore Computer Wizard starts up… Enter in your home server password and click Next. Select the computer you want to restore. If it isn’t selected by default you can pull it up from the dropdown list under Another Computer. Make certain you’re selecting the correct machine. Now select the backup you want to restore. In this example we only have one but chances are you’ll have several. If you have several backups to choose from, you might want to check out the details for them. Now you can select the disk from backup and and restore it to the destination volume. You might need to initialize a disk, change a drive letter, or other disk management tasks, if so, then click on Run Disk Manger. For example we want to change the destination drive letter to (C:).   After you’ve made all the changes to the destination disk you can continue with the restore process. If everything looks correct, confirm the restore configuration. If you need to make any changes at this point, you can still go back and make them. Now Windows Home Server will restore your drive. The amount of time it takes will vary depend on the amount of data you have to restore, network connection speed, and hardware. You are notified when the restore successfully completes. Click Finish and the PC will reboot and be restored and should be working correctly. All the updates, programs, and files will be back that were saved to the last successful backup. Anything you might have installed after that backup will be gone. If you have your computers set to backup every night, then hopefully it won’t be a big issue.   Conclusion Backing up the computers on your network to Windows Home Server is a valuable tool in your backup strategy. Sometimes you may only need to restore a couple files and we’ve covered how to restore them from backups on WHS and that works really well. If the unthinkable happens and you need to restore the entire computer, WHS makes that easy too.  Download Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore CD Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerCreate A Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore DiscGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using SambaInstalling Windows Home Server TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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  • Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today.  With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010New ProjectsAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 is a web application developed in ASP.NET 3.5 with Entity Framework, Coolite UI web controls and MySQL database that helps to catalog and ...AssemblyInfo Editor: AssemblyInfo Editor is a small Visual Studio 2010 extension I developed for my personal use mainly for automatically incrementing AssemblyVersion a...CommLine: It's a Command Line Interpreter. At the moment, it's a beta version, so I wait for developers that wanna help meFlowgraph Viewer: The flowgraph viewer enables users to view, build and share flowgraphs for the Crysis-franchise. It's built on Silverlight4, using MEF and Mvvmlight.Hash Calculator: WPF Windows 7 program to compute SHA1 & MD5 hash functions.MediaRSS library for .NET: This is a small set of libraries that allow you to create, read, and write MediaRSS files. By leveraging the syndication model object in .NET this...MEF Visualizer Tool: Helps to see what is going on inside the CompositionContainerone framework for developing asp.net project more elegent、flexible、and testable: if you are familiar with jsf、cdi、scoped javabean and work under asp.net, you may want to support aop and max flexibility and testability , all of ...Picasa Manager: A Silverlight Out Of Browser Application that Helps you manage your PicasaWeb albums in the easyest way possible.SharePhone: Windows Phone 7 library for connecting to SharePoint 2007/2010. Lets you work with SPWeb, SPList, reading/writing strong typed list items, user ...Silverlight Resource Extension: Silverlight Resource Extension. Extension silverlight project for use ResX resources and localize satellite dll.Silverlight Streamgraph: Streamgraph component for SilverlightTFTP Server: Managed TFTP server implementation, written in C#. Supports: - IPv4 and IPv6 - correct retry behavior. - TFTP options: block size, transfer size, a...Virtual UserGroup Video Helpers: This is a project that holds all the tools used by the C4MVC Virtual Usergroup. Tools written in C# and Powershell to automate, Live Meeting, Expr...xBlog: xBlog is a project to build a simple and extensible Blog Engine based on xml and linqXmlCodeEditor: XmlCodeEditor is a Silverlight 4 control based on RichTextControl that creates coloring and intellisense similar to the one in Visual Studio for ed...Zinc Launcher: Zinc Launcher is a simple Windows Media Center plugin that launches Zinc and attempts to manage the windows as seamlessly as possible. In addition ...New ReleasesAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 - v1.0: Arquivos para implantação do sistema Acervo2 Aplicação web Web service Smart ClientAssemblyInfo Editor: Beta 1: Initial release of Assembly Info Editor. At this point, it is feature-complete and is relatively stable. There are undoubtedly some bugs to work o...Box2D.XNA: Box2D.XNA r70 Source Code and Solution: This version is synced to changeset 44697. This represents our official port of the C Box2D up to r70 on the Google Code project. With this versi...Boxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Will now stop Media Center playback before launching BoxeeBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Boxee and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar a...CommLine: Beta Version 0.1: First Beta Of the AppCommLine: Source v0.1 Beta: Source Code C of 0.1 beta versionEncrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.2: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6.2), with general changes and improved randomness for the key generator. It has an installer that...Hash Calculator: HashCalculator: HashCalculator 1.0Hash Calculator: HashCalculator Source code: HashCalculator 1.0Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Hulu and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar ar...Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Hulu Launcher will now stop playback in Media Center before launching Hulu Desktop.Innovative Games: 4.3 - Sprite Effects: Source code download for chapter 4.3 - "Sprite Effects"MediaRSS library for .NET: 0.1: Alpha release. Majority of MediaRSS spec is supported. A small set of unit test / sample code are included. A lightly tested CustomFormatter object...MEF Visualizer Tool: MEF Visualizer Tool 0.1: Help to see what going on in side CompositionContainer Container = new CompositionContainer( new AggregateCatalog( ...Ncqrs Framework - A CQRS framework for .NET: Ncqrs with sample application: This is the first release of the Ncqrs Framework. It contains the Ncqrs source code and a runnable sample application. All the code in this release...Rubik Cube's 3D Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution: Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution: This project is a realization of Silverlight 3.0 Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution. The Solution is available for 3x3x3 cube, other features are...Scrabler: scrabler release 0.6.2.5: fixed a bug that werent executed some scriptsSharePhone: SharePhone: Initial release with basic functionality: Open SharePoint webs and subwebs Retrieve lists on SPWeb objects Read metadata/properties on lists ...SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.1: Fixed a bug that prevented saving list items to SharePointSharePoint Labs: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the first best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab ...Silverlight Resource Extension: ResourceExtension (alpha): Alpha version is not stable. Only for review.Silverlight Streamgraph: Port from processing.org: A port from the processing.org streamgraph. Code-heavy with very little XAML involved at this point.Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.1: What’s New! Added Menu Options 2010 Schedule Access 2007 Runtime There are still many uncompleted items so this is still a conceptual release....Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.2: Fixed the Schedule Import. Need needs to be tested. Click import button and make sure you can get the 2010 Schedule from the internet.thinktecture Starter STS (Community Edition): StarterSTS v1.0 RTW: Version 1.0 RTWTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0 - Now has sliding and absolute expiration on cache entries. Functional Alpha Release - But do not use in productionTwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: TwitterVB-2.3.1: This is mostly a minor release that adds br.st URL shortening to the menu (API key from http://br.st required)Virtu: Virtu 0.8.1: Source Requirements.NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1 Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1, or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition with Service Pa...Visual Studio DSite: Advanced C++ Calculator: An advanced visual c 2008 calculator that can do all your basic operations, plus some advanced mathematical functions. Source Code Only.xnaWebcam: xnaWebcam 0.3: xnaWebcam 0.3 Version 0.3: -ResolutionSet: 400x300 (Default), 800x600, 1024x720 -Settings Window got Icon -Settings Window Changes -DevConsole.cs ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrFacebook Developer ToolkitjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesLINQ to TwitterBlogEngine.NETN2 CMSBase Class LibrariesFarseer Physics Engine

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  • To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question&hellip;

    - by Patrick Liekhus
    UPDATE:  Thanks for the feedback and comments.  I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations.  I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping.  According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care?  Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this?  Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed.  No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members.  Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability.  The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose.  It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified.  The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help?  Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched.  I have been interested in ORM for some time now.  My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations.  However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns.  Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO).  The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO.  With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps.  While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking.  DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it.  This sounds worse than it really is.  What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with.  Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable.  And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - -   Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes                 I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities.  In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these.  We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers.  Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly.  This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team.  I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”.  In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework.  Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements.  With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance.  Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems.  If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it?  Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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  • Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script

    In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application With PowerShell you can add powerful scripting to your build to for example execute a deployment. If you want more information on PowerShell, please refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757.aspx For this example we will create a simple PowerShell script that prints “Hello world!”. To create the script, create a new text file and name it “HelloWorld.ps1”. Add to the contents of the script: Write-Host “Hello World!” To test the script do the following: Open the command prompt To run the script you must change the execution policy. To do this execute in the command prompt: powershell set-executionpolicy remotesigned Now go to the directory where you have saved the PowerShell script Execute the following command powershell .\HelloWorld.ps1 In this example I use a relative path, but when the path to the PowerShell script contains spaces, you need to change the syntax to powershell "& '<full path to script>' " for example: powershell "& ‘C:\sources\Build Customization\SolutionToBuild\PowerShell Scripts\HellloWorld.ps1’ " In this blog post, I create a new solution and that solution includes also this PowerShell script. I want to create an argument on the Build Process Template that holds the path to the PowerShell script. In the Build Process Template I will add an InvokeProcess activity to execute the PowerShell command. This InvokeProcess activity needs the location of the script as an argument for the PowerShell command. Since you don’t know the full path at the build server of this script, you can either specify in the argument the relative path of the script, but it is hard to find out what the relative path is. I prefer to specify the location of the script in source control and then convert that server path to a local path. To do this conversion you can use the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity. So to complete the task, open the Build Process Template CustomTemplate.xaml that we created in earlier parts, follow the following steps Add a new argument called “DeploymentScript” and set the appropriate settings in the metadata. See Part 2: Add arguments and variables  for more information. Scroll down beneath the TryCatch activity called “Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items” Add a new If activity and set the condition to "Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(DeploymentScript)" to ensure it will only run when the argument is passed. Add in the Then branch of the If activity a new Sequence activity and rename it to “Start deployment” Click on the activity and add a new variable called DeploymentScriptFilename (scoped to the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a ConvertWorkspaceItem activity on the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a InvokeProcess activity beneath the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity in the “Start deployment” Sequence Click on the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity and change the properties DisplayName = Convert deployment script filename Input = DeploymentScript Result = DeploymentScriptFilename Workspace = Workspace Click on the InvokeProcess activity and change the properties Arguments = String.Format(" ""& '{0}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename) DisplayName = Execute deployment script FileName = "PowerShell" To see results from the powershell command drop a WriteBuildMessage activity on the "Handle Standard Output" and pass the stdOutput variable to the Message property. Do the same for a WriteBuildError activity on the "Handle Error Output" To publish it, check in the Build Process Template This leads to the following result We now go to the build definition that depends on the template and set the path of the deployment script to the server path to the HelloWorld.ps1. (If you want to see the result of the PowerShell script, change the Logging verbosity to Detailed or Diagnostic). Save and run the build. A lot of the deployment scripts you have will have some kind of arguments (like username / password or environment variables) that you want to define in the Build Definition. To make the PowerShell configurable, you can follow the following steps. Create a new script and give it the name "HelloWho.ps1". In the contents of the file add the following lines: param (         $person     ) $message = [System.String]::Format(“Hello {0}!", $person) Write-Host $message When you now run the script on the command prompt, you will see the following So lets change the Build Process Template to accept one parameter for the deployment script. You can of course make it configurable to add a for-loop that reads through a collection of parameters but that is out of scope of this blog post. Add a new Argument called DeploymentScriptParameter In the InvokeProcess activity where the PowerShell command is executed, modify the Arguments property to String.Format(" ""& '{0}' '{1}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename, DeploymentScriptParameter) Check in the Build Process Template Now modify the build definition and set the Parameter of the deployment to any value and run the build. You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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  • SQLAuthority News – A Real Story of Book Getting ‘Out of Stock’ to A 25% Discount Story Available

    - by pinaldave
    As many of my readers may know, I have recently written a few books.  Right now I’d like to talk about SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (http://bit.ly/sqlinterviewbook ), my newest release. What inspired me to write this book was similar to my motivations for my previous titles – I wanted to help people understand SQL Server concepts and ace interview questions so that they could get a great job they love, as much as I love my own job. If you are new to SQL Server, don’t think I left you out of my book writing efforts. If you are new to the subject or have not had to deal with SQL Server in a long time, this book is perfect for someone who wants or needs a last minute refresher. If you are facing an upcoming interview and want to impress your future bosses, this book is perfect for getting you up to speed in a short time. However, if you are already an expert, you will still find a lot to learn and many pointers and suggestions that go deep into the subject. As I said before, I wrote this book in order to help my community, and I certainly hoped that this book would become popular. However, we decided to print a very limited number of copies to begin with. We did not think that it would sell out since much of the information is available for free online. We could not have been more wrong! We incorrectly estimated what people wanted. We did not realize that there is still a need and an interest for structured learning. So, with great reservations, we printed quite a large number of copies – and it still ran out in 36 hours! We got call from the online store with a request for more copies within 12 hours. But we had printed only as many as we had sent them. There were no extra copies. We finally talked to the printer to get more copies. However, due to festivals and holidays the copies could not be shipped to the online retailer for two days. We knew for sure that they were going to be out of the book for 48 hours. 48 hours – this was very difficult as the book was very highly anticipated. Many people wanted to buy this book quickly, and receive it soon in order to meet a deadline or to study for an upcoming test of their knowledge. But now this book was out of stock on the retail store. The way the online store works is that if the Indian-priced book is not there they list the US version of the book so that buyers will not be disappointed. The problem was that the US price of the book is three times more than the Indian price – which means one has to pay three times as much to buy this book instead of the previous very low price. We received a lot of communication on this subject, here are some examples: We are now businessmen and only focusing on money Why has the price tripled in 36 hours Why we are not honest with the price If the prices will ever come down And some of the letters we cannot post here! Well, finally after 48 hours the Indian stock was finally available online. Thanks to our printer who worked day and night to get all the copies printed. He divided the complete stock in two parts. The first part they sent immediately to online retailer  and the second part they kept with them to sell. Finally, the online retailer got them online promptly as well, and the price returned to normal. Our book once again got in business and became the eighth most popular new release in 36 hours. We appreciate your love and support. Without all of your interest and love we would have never come this far and the book would not be so successful. After thinking about all your support and how patient you were with our online troubles, the online retailer has decided to give an extra 25% discount for a limited time only. I think the 48 hours when the book was out of stock were very horrible and stressful and I’d like to apologize to my loyal readers for the mishap. I hope that the 25% off is enough to sooth any remaining hurt feelings, and that everyone will continue to learn and discover things in the book. Once again thank you so much and I truly hope that you all enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. My book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers is available now. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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  • Windows Phone 7 development: first impressions

    - by DigiMortal
    After hard week in work I got some free time to play with Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools. Although my first test application is still unfinished I think it is good moment to share my first experiences to you. In this posting I will give you quick overview of Windows Phone 7 developer tools from developer perspective. If you are familiar with Visual Studio 2010 then you will feel comfortable because Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools base on Visual Studio 2010 Express. Project templates There are five project templates available. Three of them are based on Silverlight and two on XNA Game Studio: Windows Phone Application (Silverlight) Windows Phone List Application (Silverlight) Windows Phone Class Library (Silverlight) Windows Phone Game (XNA Game Studio) Windows Phone Game Library (XNA Game Studio) Currently I am writing to test applications. One of them is based on Windows Phone Application and the other on Windows Phone List Application project template. After creating these projects you see the following views in Visual Studio. Windows Phone Application. Click on image to enlarge. Windows Phone List Application. Click on image to enlarge.  I suggest you to use some of these templates to get started more easily. Windows Phone 7 emulator You can run your Windows Phone 7 applications on Windows Phone 7 emulator that comes with developer tools CTP. If you run your application then emulator is started automatically and you can try out how your application works in phone-like emulator. You can see screenshot of emulator on right. Currently there is opened Windows Phone List Application as it is created by default. Click on image to enlarge it. Emulator is a little bit slow and uncomfortable but it works pretty well. This far I have caused only couple of crashes during my experiments. In these cases emulator works but Visual Studio gets stuck because it cannot communicate with emulator. One important note. Emulator is based on virtual machine although you can see only phone screen and options toolbar. If you want to run emulator you must close all virtual machines running on your machine and run Visual Studio 2010 as administrator. Once you run emulator you can keep it open because you can stop your application in Visual Studio, modify, compile and re-deploy it without restarting emulator. Designing user interfaces You can design user interface of your application in Visual Studio. When you open XAML-files it is displayed in window with two panels. Left panel shows you device screen and works as visual design environment while right panel shows you XAML mark-up and let’s you modify XML if you need it. As it is one of my very first Silverlight applications I felt more comfortable with XAML editor because property names in property boxes of visual designer confused me a little bit. Designer panel is not very good because it is visually hard to follow. It has black background that makes dark borders of controls very hard to see. If you have monitor with very high contrast then it is may be not a real problem. I have usual monitor and I have problem. :) Putting controls on design surface, dragging and resizing them is also pretty painful. Some controls are drawn correctly but for some controls you have to set width and height in XML so they can be resized. After some practicing it is not so annoying anymore. On the right you can see toolbox with some controllers. This is all you get out of the box. But it is sufficient to get started. After getting some experiences you can create your own controls or use existing ones from other vendors or developers. If it is your first time to do stuff with Silverlight then keep Google open – you need it hard. After getting over the first shock you get the point very quickly and start developing at normal speed. :) Writing source code Writing source code is the most familiar part of this action. Good old Visual Studio code editor with all nice features it has. But here you get also some surprises: The anatomy of Silverlight controls is a little bit different than the one of user controls in web and forms projects. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t run on full version of Windows (I bet it is some version of Windows CE or something like this) then there is less system classes you can use. Some familiar classes have less methods that in full version of .NET Framework and in these cases you have to write all the code by yourself or find libraries or source code from somewhere. These problems are really not so much problems than limitations and you get easily over them. Conclusion Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools help you do a lot of things on Windows Phone 7. Although I expected better performance from tools I think that current performance is not a problem. This far my first test project is going very well and Google has answer for almost every question. Windows Phone 7 is mobile device and therefore it has less hardware resources than desktop computers. This is why toolset is so limited. The more you need memory the more slower is device and as you may guess it needs the more battery. If you are writing apps for mobile devices then make your best to get your application use as few resources as possible and act as fast as possible.

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  • Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: The Insurance Industry’s Dream

    - by Jenna Danko
    On June 3rd, I saw the Gaylord Resort Centre in Washington D.C. become the hub of C level executives and managers of insurance carriers for the IASA 2013 Conference.  Insurance Accounting/Regulation and Technology sessions took the focus, but there were plenty of tertiary sessions for career development, which complemented the overall strong networking side of the conference.  As an exhibitor, Oracle, along with several hundred other product providers, welcomed the opportunity to display and demonstrate our solutions and we were encouraged by hustle and bustle of the exhibition floor.  The IASA organizers had pre-arranged fast track tours whereby interested conference delegates could sign up for a series of like-themed presentations from Vendors, giving them a level of 'Speed Dating' introductions to possible solutions and services.  Oracle participated in a number of these, which were very well subscribed.  Clearly, the conference had a strong business focus; however, attendees saw technology as a key enabler to get their processes done smarter, faster and cheaper.  As we navigated through the exhibition, it became clear from the inquiries that came to us that insurance carriers are gravitating to a number of focus areas: Navigating the maze of upcoming regulatory reporting changes. For US carriers with European holdings, Solvency II carries a myriad of rules and reporting requirements. Alignment across the globe of the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) processes brings to the fore the National Insurance of Insurance commissioners' (NAIC) recent guidance manual publication. Doing more with less and to certainly expect more from technology for less dollars. The overall cost of IT, in particular hardware, has dropped in real terms (though the appetite for more has risen: more CPU, more RAM, more storage), but software has seen less change. Clearly, customers expect either to pay less or get a lot more from their software solutions for the same buck. Doing things smarter – A recognition that with the advance of technology to stand still no longer means you are technically going backwards. Technology and, in particular technology interactions with human business processes, has undergone incredible change over the past 5 years. Consumer usage (iPhones, etc.) has been at the forefront, but now at the Enterprise level ever more effective technology exploitation is beginning to take place. That data and, in particular gleaning knowledge from data, is refining and improving business processes.  Organizations are now consuming more data than ever before, and it is set to grow exponentially for some time to come.  Amassing large volumes of data is one thing, but effectively analyzing that data is another.  It is the results of such analysis that leads to improvements both in terms of insurance product offerings and the processes to support them. Regulatory Compliance, damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Clearly, around the globe at lot is changing from a regulatory perspective and it is evident that in terms of regulatory requirements, whilst there is a greater convergence across jurisdictions bringing uniformity, there is also a lot of work to be done in the next 5 years. Just like the big data, hidden behind effective regulatory compliance there often lies golden nuggets that can give competitive advantages. From Oracle's perspective, our Rating Engine, Billing, Document Management and Insurance Analytics solutions on display served to strike up good conversations and, as is always the case at conferences, it was a great opportunity to meet and speak with existing Oracle customers that we might not have otherwise caught up with for a while. Fortunately, I was able to catch up on a few sessions at the close of the Exhibition.  The speaker quality was high and the audience asked challenging, but pertinent, questions.  During Dr. Jackie Freiberg’s keynote “Bye Bye Business as Usual,” the author discussed 8 strategies to help leaders create a culture where teams consistently deliver innovative ideas by disrupting the status quo.  The very first strategy: Get wired for innovation.  Freiberg admitted that folks in the insurance and financial services industry understand and know innovation is important, but oftentimes they are slow adopters.  Today, technology and innovation go hand in hand. In speaking to delegates during and after the conference, a high degree of satisfaction could be measured from their positive comments of speaker sessions and the exhibitors. I suspect many will be back in 2014 with Indianapolis as the conference location. Did you attend the IASA Conference in Washington D.C.?  If so, I would love to hear your comments. Andrew Collins is the Director, Solvency II of Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at andrew.collins AT oracle.com.

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  • Data Mining Resources

    - by Dejan Sarka
    There are many different types of analyses, each one with its own pros and cons. Relational reports have a predefined structure, and end users cannot change it. They are simple to use for end users. Reports can use real-time data and snapshots of data to show the state of a report at specific points in time. One of the drawbacks is that report authoring is limited to IT pros and advanced users. Any kind of dynamic restructuring is very limited. If real-time data is used for a report, the report has a negative impact on the performance of the source system. Processing of the reports might be slow because the data comes from relational database management systems, which are not optimized for reporting only. If you create a semantic model of your data, your end users can create ad-hoc report structures. However, the development is more complex because a developer is needed to create these semantic models. For OLAP, you typically use specialized database management systems. You get lightning speed of analyses. End users can use rich and thin clients to interactively change the structure of the report. Typically, they do it graphically. However, the development of an OLAP system is many times quite complex. It involves the preparation and maintenance of an enterprise data warehouse and OLAP cubes. In order to exploit the possibility of real-time restructuring of reports, the users must be both active and educated. The data is usually stale, as it is loaded into data warehouses and OLAP cubes with a scheduled process. With data mining, a structure is not selected in advance; it searches for the structure. As a result, data mining can give you the most valuable results because you can discover patterns you did not expect. A data mining model structure is limited only by the attributes that you use to train the model. One of the drawbacks is that a lot of knowledge is needed for a successful data mining project. End users have to understand the results. Subject matter experts and IT professionals need to understand business problem thoroughly. The development might be sometimes even more complex than the development of OLAP cubes. Each type of analysis has its own place in an enterprise system. SQL Server has tools for all kinds of analyses. However, data mining is the most advanced way of analyzing the data; this is the “I” in BI. In order to get the most out of it, you need to learn quite a lot. In this blog post, I am gathering together resources for learning, including forthcoming events. Books Multiple authors: SQL Server MVP Deep Dives – I wrote an introductory data mining chapter there. Erik Veerman, Teo Lachev and Dejan Sarka: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance – you can find a good overview of a complete BI solution, including data mining, in this book. Jamie MacLennan, ZhaoHui Tang, and Bogdan Crivat: Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – can’t miss this book if you want to mine your data with SQL Server tools. Michael Berry, Gordon Linoff: Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management – data mining from both, business and technical perspective. Dorian Pyle: Data Preparation for Data Mining – an in-depth book about data preparation. Thomas and Ronald Wonnacott: Introductory Statistics – if you thought that you could get away without statistics, then you are not serious about data mining. Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber: Data Mining Concepts and Techniques – in-depth explanation of the most popular data mining algorithms. Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff: Data Mining Techniques – another book that explains data mining algorithms, more fro a business perspective. Paolo Guidici: Applied Data Mining – very mathematical book, only if you enjoy statistics and mathematics in general. Forthcoming presentations I am presenting two data mining related sessions during the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC: Wednesday, October 16th, 2013 - Fraud Detection: Notes from the Field – I am showing how to use data mining for a specific business problem. The presentation is based on real-life projects. Friday, October 18th: Excel 2013 Advanced Analytics – I am focusing on Excel Data Mining Add-ins, and how to use them together with Power Pivot and other add-ins. This is the most you can get out of Excel. Sinergija 2013, Belgrade, Serbia Tuesday, October 22nd: Excel 2013 Analytics to the Max – another presentation focusing on the most advanced analytics you can get in Excel. SQL Rally Amsterdam, Netherlands Thursday, November 7th: Advanced Analytics in Excel 2013 – and again I am presenting about data mining in Excel. Why three different titles for the same presentation? I don’t know, I guess I forgot the name I proposed every time right after I sent the proposal. Courses Data Mining with SQL Server 2012 – I wrote a 3-day course for SolidQ. If you are interested in this course, which I could also deliver in a shorter seminar way, you can contact your closes SolidQ subsidiary, or, of course, me directly on addresses [email protected] or [email protected]. This course could also complement the existing courseware portfolio of training providers, which are welcome to contact me as well. OK, now you know: no more excuses, start learning data mining, get the most out of your data

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  • Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

    The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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  • Partition Wise Joins

    - by jean-pierre.dijcks
    Some say they are the holy grail of parallel computing and PWJ is the basis for a shared nothing system and the only join method that is available on a shared nothing system (yes this is oversimplified!). The magic in Oracle is of course that is one of many ways to join data. And yes, this is the old flexibility vs. simplicity discussion all over, so I won't go there... the point is that what you must do in a shared nothing system, you can do in Oracle with the same speed and methods. The Theory A partition wise join is a join between (for simplicity) two tables that are partitioned on the same column with the same partitioning scheme. In shared nothing this is effectively hard partitioning locating data on a specific node / storage combo. In Oracle is is logical partitioning. If you now join the two tables on that partitioned column you can break up the join in smaller joins exactly along the partitions in the data. Since they are partitioned (grouped) into the same buckets, all values required to do the join live in the equivalent bucket on either sides. No need to talk to anyone else, no need to redistribute data to anyone else... in short, the optimal join method for parallel processing of two large data sets. PWJ's in Oracle Since we do not hard partition the data across nodes in Oracle we use the Partitioning option to the database to create the buckets, then set the Degree of Parallelism (or run Auto DOP - see here) and get our PWJs. The main questions always asked are: How many partitions should I create? What should my DOP be? In a shared nothing system the answer is of course, as many partitions as there are nodes which will be your DOP. In Oracle we do want you to look at the workload and concurrency, and once you know that to understand the following rules of thumb. Within Oracle we have more ways of joining of data, so it is important to understand some of the PWJ ideas and what it means if you have an uneven distribution across processes. Assume we have a simple scenario where we partition the data on a hash key resulting in 4 hash partitions (H1 -H4). We have 2 parallel processes that have been tasked with reading these partitions (P1 - P2). The work is evenly divided assuming the partitions are the same size and we can scan this in time t1 as shown below. Now assume that we have changed the system and have a 5th partition but still have our 2 workers P1 and P2. The time it takes is actually 50% more assuming the 5th partition has the same size as the original H1 - H4 partitions. In other words to scan these 5 partitions, the time t2 it takes is not 1/5th more expensive, it is a lot more expensive and some other join plans may now start to look exciting to the optimizer. Just to post the disclaimer, it is not as simple as I state it here, but you get the idea on how much more expensive this plan may now look... Based on this little example there are a few rules of thumb to follow to get the partition wise joins. First, choose a DOP that is a factor of two (2). So always choose something like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on... Second, choose a number of partitions that is larger or equal to 2* DOP. Third, make sure the number of partitions is divisible through 2 without orphans. This is also known as an even number... Fourth, choose a stable partition count strategy, which is typically hash, which can be a sub partitioning strategy rather than the main strategy (range - hash is a popular one). Fifth, make sure you do this on the join key between the two large tables you want to join (and this should be the obvious one...). Translating this into an example: DOP = 8 (determined based on concurrency or by using Auto DOP with a cap due to concurrency) says that the number of partitions >= 16. Number of hash (sub) partitions = 32, which gives each process four partitions to work on. This number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on your data and system. In this case my main reasoning is that if you get more room on the box you can easily move the DOP for the query to 16 without repartitioning... and of course it makes for no leftovers on the table... And yes, we recommend up-to-date statistics. And before you start complaining, do read this post on a cool way to do stats in 11.

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  • JavaOne Afterglow by Simon Ritter

    - by JuergenKress
    Last week was the eighteenth JavaOne conference and I thought it would be a good idea to write up my thoughts about how things went. Firstly thanks to Yoshio Terada for the photos, I didn't bother bringing a camera with me so it's good to have some pictures to add to the words. Things kicked off full-throttle on Sunday.  We had the Java Champions and JUG leaders breakfast, which was a great way to meet up with a lot of familiar faces and start talking all things Java.  At midday the show really started with the Strategy and Technical Keynotes.  This was always going to be tougher job than some years because there was no big shiny ball to reveal to the audience.  With the Java EE 7 spec being finalised a few months ago and Java SE 8, Java ME 8 and JDK8 not due until the start of next year there was not going to be any big announcement.  I thought both keynotes worked really well each focusing on the things most important to Java developers: Strategy One of the things that is becoming more and more prominent in many companies marketing is the Internet of Things (IoT).  We've moved from the conventional desktop/laptop environment to much more mobile connected computing with smart phones and tablets.  The next wave of the internet is not just billions of people connected, but 10s or 100s of billions of devices connected to the network, all generating data and providing much more precise control of almost any process you can imagine.  This ties into the ideas of Big Data and Cloud Computing, but implementation is certainly not without its challenges.  As Peter Utzschneider explained it's about three Vs: Volume, Velocity and Value.  All these devices will create huge volumes of data at very high speed; to avoid being overloaded these devices will need some sort of processing capabilities that can filter the useful data from the redundant.  The raw data then needs to be turned into useful information that has value.  To make this happen will require applications on devices, at gateways and on the back-end servers, all very tightly integrated.  This is where Java plays a pivotal role, write once, run everywhere becomes essential, having nine million developers fluent in the language makes it the defacto lingua franca of IoT.  There will be lots more information on how this will become a reality, so watch this space. Technical How do we make the IoT a reality, technically?  Using the game of chess Mark Reinhold, with the help of people like John Ceccarelli, Jasper Potts and Richard Bair, showed what you could do.  Using Java EE on the back end, Java SE and JavaFX on the desktop and Java ME Embedded and JavaFX on devices they showed a complete end-to-end demo. This was really impressive, using 3D features from JavaFX 8 (that's included with JDK8) to make a 3D animated Duke chess board.  Jasper also unveiled the "DukePad" a home made tablet using a Raspberry Pi, touch screen and accelerometer. Although the Raspberry Pi doesn't have earth shattering CPU performance (about the same level as a mid 1990s Pentium), it does have really quite good GPU performance so the GUI works really well.  The plans are all open sourced and available here.  One small, but very significant announcement was that Java SE will now be included with the NOOB and Raspbian Linux distros provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation (these can be found here).  No more hassle having to download and install the JDK after you've flashed your SD card OS image.  The finale was the Raspberry Pi powered chess playing robot.  Really very, very cool.  I talked to Jasper about this and he told me each of the chess pieces had been 3D printed and then he had to use acetone to give them a glossy finish (not sure what his wife thought of him spending hours in the kitchen in a gas mask!)  The way the robot arm worked was very impressive as it did not have any positioning data (like a potentiometer connected to each motor), but relied purely on carefully calibrated timings to get the arm to the right place.  Having done things like this myself in the past I know how easy it is to find a small error gets magnified into very big mistakes. Here's some pictures from the keynote: The "Dukepad" architecture Nice clear perspex case so you can see the innards. The very nice 3D chess set.  Maya's obviously a great tool. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Simon Ritter,Java One,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • SQL SERVER – Fundamentals of Columnstore Index

    - by pinaldave
    There are two kind of storage in database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data is relevant or not, column store queries need only to search much lesser number of the columns. This means major increases in search speed and hard drive use. Additionally, the column store indexes are heavily compressed, which translates to even greater memory and faster searches. I am sure this looks very exciting and it does not mean that you convert every single index from row store to column store index. One has to understand the proper places where to use row store or column store indexes. Let us understand in this article what is the difference in Columnstore type of index. Column store indexes are run by Microsoft’s VertiPaq technology. However, all you really need to know is that this method of storing data is columns on a single page is much faster and more efficient. Creating a column store index is very easy, and you don’t have to learn new syntax to create them. You just need to specify the keyword “COLUMNSTORE” and enter the data as you normally would. Keep in mind that once you add a column store to a table, though, you cannot delete, insert or update the data – it is READ ONLY. However, since column store will be mainly used for data warehousing, this should not be a big problem. You can always use partitioning to avoid rebuilding the index. A columnstore index stores each column in a separate set of disk pages, rather than storing multiple rows per page as data traditionally has been stored. The difference between column store and row store approaches is illustrated below: In case of the row store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple rows of the columns spanning across multiple pages. In case of column store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple single columns. This will lead only the columns needed to solve a query will be fetched from disk. Additionally there is good chance that there will be redundant data in a single column which will further help to compress the data, this will have positive effect on buffer hit rate as most of the data will be in memory and due to same it will not need to be retrieved. Let us see small example of how columnstore index improves the performance of the query on a large table. As a first step let us create databaseset which is large enough to show performance impact of columnstore index. The time taken to create sample database may vary on different computer based on the resources. USE AdventureWorks GO -- Create New Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [LineTotal] [numeric](38, 6) NOT NULL, [rowguid] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create clustered index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [CL_MySalesOrderDetail] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] ( [SalesOrderDetailID]) GO -- Create Sample Data Table -- WARNING: This Query may run upto 2-10 minutes based on your systems resources INSERT INTO [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] SELECT S1.* FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail S1 GO 100 Now let us do quick performance test. I have kept STATISTICS IO ON for measuring how much IO following queries take. In my test first I will run query which will use regular index. We will note the IO usage of the query. After that we will create columnstore index and will measure the IO of the same. -- Performance Test -- Comparing Regular Index with ColumnStore Index USE AdventureWorks GO SET STATISTICS IO ON GO -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO -- Table 'MySalesOrderDetail'. Scan count 1, logical reads 342261, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0. -- Create ColumnStore Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [MySalesOrderDetail] (UnitPrice, OrderQty, ProductID) GO -- Select Table with Columnstore Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO It is very clear from the results that query is performance extremely fast after creating ColumnStore Index. The amount of the pages it has to read to run query is drastically reduced as the column which are needed in the query are stored in the same page and query does not have to go through every single page to read those columns. If we enable execution plan and compare we can see that column store index performance way better than regular index in this case. Let us clean up the database. -- Cleanup DROP INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GO TRUNCATE TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO DROP TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO In future posts we will see cases where Columnstore index is not appropriate solution as well few other tricks and tips of the columnstore index. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Optimizing collision engine bottleneck

    - by Vittorio Romeo
    Foreword: I'm aware that optimizing this bottleneck is not a necessity - the engine is already very fast. I, however, for fun and educational purposes, would love to find a way to make the engine even faster. I'm creating a general-purpose C++ 2D collision detection/response engine, with an emphasis on flexibility and speed. Here's a very basic diagram of its architecture: Basically, the main class is World, which owns (manages memory) of a ResolverBase*, a SpatialBase* and a vector<Body*>. SpatialBase is a pure virtual class which deals with broad-phase collision detection. ResolverBase is a pure virtual class which deals with collision resolution. The bodies communicate to the World::SpatialBase* with SpatialInfo objects, owned by the bodies themselves. There currenly is one spatial class: Grid : SpatialBase, which is a basic fixed 2D grid. It has it's own info class, GridInfo : SpatialInfo. Here's how its architecture looks: The Grid class owns a 2D array of Cell*. The Cell class contains two collection of (not owned) Body*: a vector<Body*> which contains all the bodies that are in the cell, and a map<int, vector<Body*>> which contains all the bodies that are in the cell, divided in groups. Bodies, in fact, have a groupId int that is used for collision groups. GridInfo objects also contain non-owning pointers to the cells the body is in. As I previously said, the engine is based on groups. Body::getGroups() returns a vector<int> of all the groups the body is part of. Body::getGroupsToCheck() returns a vector<int> of all the groups the body has to check collision against. Bodies can occupy more than a single cell. GridInfo always stores non-owning pointers to the occupied cells. After the bodies move, collision detection happens. We assume that all bodies are axis-aligned bounding boxes. How broad-phase collision detection works: Part 1: spatial info update For each Body body: Top-leftmost occupied cell and bottom-rightmost occupied cells are calculated. If they differ from the previous cells, body.gridInfo.cells is cleared, and filled with all the cells the body occupies (2D for loop from the top-leftmost cell to the bottom-rightmost cell). body is now guaranteed to know what cells it occupies. For a performance boost, it stores a pointer to every map<int, vector<Body*>> of every cell it occupies where the int is a group of body->getGroupsToCheck(). These pointers get stored in gridInfo->queries, which is simply a vector<map<int, vector<Body*>>*>. body is now guaranteed to have a pointer to every vector<Body*> of bodies of groups it needs to check collision against. These pointers are stored in gridInfo->queries. Part 2: actual collision checks For each Body body: body clears and fills a vector<Body*> bodiesToCheck, which contains all the bodies it needs to check against. Duplicates are avoided (bodies can belong to more than one group) by checking if bodiesToCheck already contains the body we're trying to add. const vector<Body*>& GridInfo::getBodiesToCheck() { bodiesToCheck.clear(); for(const auto& q : queries) for(const auto& b : *q) if(!contains(bodiesToCheck, b)) bodiesToCheck.push_back(b); return bodiesToCheck; } The GridInfo::getBodiesToCheck() method IS THE BOTTLENECK. The bodiesToCheck vector must be filled for every body update because bodies could have moved meanwhile. It also needs to prevent duplicate collision checks. The contains function simply checks if the vector already contains a body with std::find. Collision is checked and resolved for every body in bodiesToCheck. That's it. So, I've been trying to optimize this broad-phase collision detection for quite a while now. Every time I try something else than the current architecture/setup, something doesn't go as planned or I make assumption about the simulation that later are proven to be false. My question is: how can I optimize the broad-phase of my collision engine maintaining the grouped bodies approach? Is there some kind of magic C++ optimization that can be applied here? Can the architecture be redesigned in order to allow for more performance? Actual implementation: SSVSCollsion Body.h, Body.cpp World.h, World.cpp Grid.h, Grid.cpp Cell.h, Cell.cpp GridInfo.h, GridInfo.cpp

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  • Product Development Investment: A Measure of Vendor Performance

    - by Jim Mcglothlin
    The relationship between a large, complex organization and its key suppliers of information technology is normally more than just "strategic". Expectations about the duration of the relationship typically exceed 20 years. Enterprise applications and technology infrastructure are not expected to be changed out like petunias. So how would you rate the due diligence processes as performed in Higher Education when selecting critical, transformational information technology? My observation: I see a lot of effort put into elaborate demonstration of basic software functionality. I see a lot of attention paid to the cost element of technology acquisition, including the contracted cost of implementation consulting services. But the factor that receives only cursory analysis and due diligence is long-term performance--the ability of a vendor to grow, expand, and develop, and bring its customers along with it. So what should you look for in a long-term IT supplier? Oracle has a public track record for product development. The annual investment has been on a run rate of almost $3 Billion organic product development. Oracle's well-publicized acquisitions and mergers have been supplemental to its R&D. This is important for Higher Education. Another meaningful way to evaluate a company is to look at the tangible track record of enhancement. Consider the Oracle-PeopleSoft enterprise business platform since acquired by Oracle 6 years ago: Product or Technology Enhancement Customer or User Impact Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 300+ new web services delivered in versions 9.0 & 9.1 provide flexibility, so that customers can integrate PeopleSoft with other applications. Campus Solutions has added Admissions and Constituent Web Services. Constituent Relationship Management PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 for Higher Education introduced new process flows for student recruiting and retention to support "Student Success" initiatives. A 360 view of the constituent is now delivered, and the concept of a single-stop Student Services Center is now in CRM 9.1 with tight integration to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. Human Capital Management Contract Pay for Education, with flexibility for configuration and calculation, has been extended in HCM 9.1. New chartfield integration among Project Costing - Time & Labor - Payroll to serve the labor distribution requirements for Grants / Sponsored Research. Talent Management PeopleSoft 9.0 and 9.1 feature an integrated talent management approach centered on definitions in "Profile Manager", with all new usability improvements. Internal and external candidate pools, and the entire recruitment process, are driven by delivered configurable selection and on-boarding processes. Interview scheduling, and online job offers are newly delivered processes. Performance Management PeopleSoft HCM ePerformance 9.1 will include significant new functionality designed to help organizations more effectively align business objectives with employee goals. Using an Organization Chart view, your business goals can flow down to become tangible objectives per employee. Succession Planning / Workforce Development New in HCM 9.0, enhanced in 9.1, is a planning capability for regular or unusual (major organizational change) succession of internal or external candidates. PeopleSoft supports employee-based career planning, which ultimately increases the integrity of the succession planning process (identify their career needs, plans, preferences, and interests). Dashboards / Oracle Business Intelligence Application Suite Oracle Human Resources Analytics provides the workforce information foundation that integrates data from HR functional areas and Finance. Oracle Human Resources Analytics delivers 9 dashboards and over 200 reports. Provide your HR professionals and front-line managers the tools to analyze workforce staffing, retention, productivity, to better source high-quality applicants, and to reduce absence costs. Multi-year Planning and Commitment Control External funding sources, especially Grants, require a multi-year encumbrance business process. PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 adds multi-year funding and commitment control, including budget checking. The newly designed Real Time Budget Checking will provide the customer with an updated snapshot of their budget and encumbrances at any given time. Position Budgeting with Hyperion Hyperion Planning world-class products now include delivered integration to PeopleSoft HCM. Position Budgeting is available in the new Public Sector Planning module of Hyperion. Web 2.0 features for the latest in usability PeopleSoft 9.1 features a contemporary internet user experience: Partial-page refreshing Drag and drop pagelets New menu structure Navigation pagelets Modal popup message windows Favorites & recently used links Type-ahead Drag and drop grid columns, pop-out grids Portal Workspaces Enterprise 2.0 for your collaborative web communities, using new content management, along with Wikis, blogs, and discussion forums in PeopleSoft Portal 9.1. PeopleTools enhanced by Oracle Fusion Middleware Standards-based tools have been added to the PeopleTools application infrastructure: BI (XML) Publisher, Java tools. Certified for use with PeopleSoft: Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE), Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Weblogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite. Hosting for PeopleSoft applications A solid new deployment option: Oracle On Demand remote hosting center for high scalability, security, and continuity of operations. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for HCM / Payroll functions Partnership with AT&T provides hosting of HR/Payroll application along with payroll business process operations, and subscription-based service fees (SaaS). AT&T BPO full service includes pay sheet processing, bank and 3rd party file transfer, payroll tax handling, etc. Continuous Delivery Model Feature Packs provide faster time-to-benefit; new features become available in PeopleSoft 9.1 (or Campus Solutions 9.0) without need to perform upgrade. Golden person data model across all campus applications Oracle Higher Education Constituent Hub provides synchronization and data governance of person data across any application, e.g. HR/ Payroll, Student Information System, Housing, Emergency Contact, LMS, CRM. Oracle's aggressive enhancement plans within the "Applications Unlimited" program continue, as new functionality is under development for a new version of a PeopleSoft release planned for 2012. Meanwhile, new capabilities are planned on an annual basis in Feature Packs. PeopleSoft just delivered the HCM 2010 Feature Pack and another is planned for 2011. In February we plan to have over 100 customers from our Customer Advisory Boards at our PeopleSoft Development Center in California to review designs for all of these releases. For those of you near New York City The investment and progressive development story described above is the subject of an Oracle road show event on February 9, 2011. Charting Your Course with Oracle Applications is a global event series designed to help business and IT executives assess the impact of new inflection points on their business and applications roadmap: changing workforces, shifting customer and constituent bases, and increased volatility. Learn how innovations ranging from new deployment models like cloud computing to the introduction of social applications and smart devices are delivering results across all areas of business and industry. THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND MAY NOT BE INCORPORATED INTO A CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT.

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  • JQuery and the multiple date selector

    - by David Carter
    Overview I recently needed to build a web page that would allow a user to capture some information and most importantly select multiple dates. This functionality was core to the application and hence had to be easy and quick to do. This is a public facing website so it had to be intuitive and very responsive. On the face of it it didn't seem too hard, I know enough juery to know what it is capable of and I was pretty sure that there would be some plugins that would help speed things along the way. I'm using ASP.Net MVC for this project as I really like the control that it gives you over the generated html and javascript. After years of Web Forms development it makes me feel like a web developer again and puts a smile on my face, that can only be a good thing!   The Calendar The first item that I needed on this page was a calender and I wanted the ability to: have the calendar be always visible select/deselect multiple dates at the same time bind to the select/deselect event so that I could update a seperate listing of the selected dates allow the user to move to another month and still have the calender remember any dates in the previous month I was hoping that there was a jQuery plugin that would meet my requirements and luckily there was! The jQuery datepicker does everything I want and there is quite a bit of documentation on how to use it. It makes use of a javascript date library date.js which I had not come across before but has a number of very useful date utilities that I have used elsewhere in the project. As you can see from the image there still needs to be some styling done! But there will be plenty of time for that later. The calendar clearly shows which dates the user has selected in red and i also make use of an unordered list to show the the selected dates so the user can always clearly see what has been selected even if they move to another month on the calendar. The javascript code that is responsible for listening to events on the calendar and synchronising the list look as follows: <script type="text/javascript">     $(function () {         $('.datepicker').datePicker({ inline: true, selectMultiple: true })         .bind(             'dateSelected',             function (e, selectedDate, $td, state) {                                 var dateInMillisecs = selectedDate.valueOf();                 if (state) { //adding a date                     var newDate = new Date(selectedDate);                     //insert the new item into the correct place in the list                     var listitems = $('#dateList').children('li').get();                     var liToAdd = "<li id='" + dateInMillisecs + "' >" + newDate.toString('ddd dd MMM yyyy') + "</li>";                     var targetIndex = -1;                     for (var i = 0; i < listitems.length; i++) {                         if (dateInMillisecs <= listitems[i].id) {                             targetIndex = i;                             break;                         }                     }                     if (targetIndex < 0) {                         $('#dateList').append(liToAdd);                     }                     else {                         $($('#dateList').children("li")[targetIndex]).before(liToAdd);                     }                 }                 else {//removing a date                     $('ul #' + dateInMillisecs).remove();                 }             }         )     }); When a date is selected on the calendar a function is called with a number of parameters passed to it. The ones I am particularly interested in are selectedDate and state. State tells me whether the user has selected or deselected the date passed in the selectedDate parameter. The <ul> that I am using to show the date has an id of dateList and this is what I will be adding and removing <li> items from. To make things a little more logical for the user I decided that the date should be sorted in chronological order, this means that each time a new date is selected it need to be placed in the correct position in the list. One way to do this would be just to append a new <li> to the list and then sort the whole list. However the approach I took was to get an array of all the items in the list var listitems = ('#dateList').children('li').get(); and then check the value of each item in the array against my new date and as soon as I found the case where the new date was less than the current item remember that position in the list as this is where I would insert it later. To make this work easily I decided to store a numeric representation of each date in the list in the id attribute of each <li> element. Fortunately javascript natively stores dates as the number of milliseconds since 1 Jan 1970. var dateInMillisecs = selectedDate.valueOf(); Please note that this is the value of the date in UTC! I always like to store dates in UTC as I learnt a long time ago that it saves a lot of refactoring at a later date... When I convert the dates back to their original back on the server I will need the UTC offset that was used when calculating the dates, this and how to actually serialise the dates and get them posted back will be the subject of another post.

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  • Prevent Changing the Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7

    - by Mysticgeek
    Sometimes you might not want users to have the ability to change Screen Savers and Wallpaper on Windows 7 workstations. Today we look at how to prevent them from changing either one or both. You might administer computers in your home or small office and find it annoying when users continuously change the wallpaper and Screen Savers to something obnoxious. A lot of times they might be inexperienced users and download these so-called “wonderful and free” Screen Saver/Wallpaper packages from shady sites that include loads of Spyware. Preventing users from changing them is another helpful tool to avoid wasteful time spent switching things back. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using Group Policy Editor  Note: This method uses Group Policy which is not available in Home versions on Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and enter gpedit.msc into the Search box and hit Enter. When Local Group Policy Editor opens, navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Control Panel \ Personalization. Then in the right column double-click on Prevent changing desktop background. Now check the radio button next to Enabled, then click OK. Back on the Group Policy Screen, double-click on Prevent changing screen saver. In the next screen select the radio button next to Enable, click OK, then close out of Group Policy Editor. Now when a user goes into the Personalization section, the Desktop Background hyperlink is now grayed out and inactive. Notice the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator at the bottom of the section. If they click to change the Screen Saver, an error message will pop up letting them know the function is disabled. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using a Registry Hack You can also make a couple Registry changes to prevent users from changing the Wallpaper & Screen Saver…which will work on Home versions of Windows 7. Before making any Registry changes make sure you back it up first. Open the Registry by typing regedit into the Search box in the Start menu and hit Enter. First we’ll start with the Wallpaper. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and create a new String Value and name it Wallpaper. Then modify the Value data to point to the location of the Wallpaper you want it to always be. Where in this example it’s our main wallpaper on our local drive…then click OK. Now let’s make sure they can’t change the Screen Saver. In the same Registry location, we need to make a new DWORD (32-bit) Value. Give it the Value name of NoDispScrSavPage and the value data of “1” and click OK. Close out of the Registry and restart the machine or simply log off then back on again for the changes to take effect. Results For the Wallpapers, a user can still go in and see the selections, however if they try to change it to something else… It will just go back to the Personalization screen and no changes will be made, as we set the value to only be the background we specified. If the user tries to make a change to the Screen Saver, the hyperlink will be grayed out and inactive, and the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator will be displayed at the bottom of the section. Conclusion If you’re tired of users changing the Wallpaper and Screen Saver, and want another way to help avoid Malware, locking down these settings can help a lot. Again, before making any changes to the Registry, make sure to back it up. These settings should work in Vista and XP as well. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Save 1-4% More Battery Life With Windows Vista Battery SaverCustomize Your Windows Vista Logon ScreenEnable "Ubuntu Style" Logons in Windows VistaManage the Delete Confirmation Dialog box in Windows 7Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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  • Plan your SharePoint 2010 Content Type Hub carefully

    - by Wayne
    Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location. Setting up the Content Type Hub is not that difficult but you must make it very careful to avoid a lot of work and troubleshooting. Here is a short tutorial with a few tips and tricks to make it easy for you to get started. Determine location of Content Type Hub First of all you need to decide in which Site Collection to place your Content Type Hub; in the root site collection or a specific one. I think using a specific Site Collection that only acts as a Content Type Hub is the best way, there are no best practice as of now. So I create a new Site Collection, at for instance http://server/sites/CTH/. The top-level site of this site collection should be for instance a Team Site. You cannot use Blank Site by default, which would have been the best option IMHO, since that site does not have the Taxonomy feature stapled upon it (check the TaxonomyFeatureStapler feature for which site templates that can be used). Configure Managed Metadata Service Application Next you need to create your Managed Metadata Service Application or configure the existing one, Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications. Select the Managed Metadata service application and click Properties if you already have created it. In the bottom of the dialog window when you are creating the service application or when you are editing the properties is a section to fill in the Content Type Hub. In this text box fill in the URL of the Content Type Hub. It is essential that you have decided where your Content Type Hub will reside, since once this is set you cannot change it. The only way to change it is to rebuild the whole managed metadata service application! Also make sure that you enter the URL correctly. I did copy and paste the URL once and got the /default.aspx in the URL which funked the whole service up. Make sure that you only use the URL to the Site Collection of the hub. Now you have to set up so that other Site Collections can consume the content types from the hub. This is done by selecting the connection for the managed metadata service application and clicking properties. A new dialog window opens and there you need to click the Consumes content types from the Content Type Gallery at nnnn. Now you are free to syndicate your Content Types from the Hub. Publish Content Types To publish a Content Type from the hub you need to go to Site Settings > Content Types and select the content type that you would like to publish. Then select Manage publishing for this content type. This takes you to a page from where you can Publish, Unpublish or Republish the content type. Once the content type is published it can take up to an hour for the subscribing Site Collections to get it. This is controlled by the Content Type Subscriber job that is scheduled to run once an hour. To speed up your publishing just go to Central Administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions > Content Type Subscriber and click Run now and you content type is very soon available for use. Published Content Type status You can check the status of the content type publishing in your destination site collections by selecting Site Settings > Content Type Publishing. From here you can force a refresh of all subscribed content types, see which ones that are subscribed and finally check the publishing error log. This error log is very useful for detecting errors during the publishing. For instance if you use any features such as ratings, metadata, document ids in your content type hub and your destination site collection does not have those features available this will be reported here.

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  • EHome IR receiver and Ubuntu 13 - any one have this working?

    - by squakie
    I have a "generic" USB IR receiver I purchased off of Ebay to make my life a little easier with XBMC on my Ubuntu box. I am currently running 13.10 and have never tried nor have any knowledge of IR in Ubuntu. I know of lirc, and I know a lot of it is now included in the kernel. My understanding is that lirc in basic terms maps pulses from an remote control to functions - like keyboard or mouse clicks. It is also my understanding that I might still need a driver or something for my device. lsusb shows the device as: Bus 006 Device 003: ID 147a:e016 Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. eHome Infrared Receiver dmesg shows the following pertaining to the device: [43635.311985] usb 6-2: USB disconnect, device number 2 [43641.344387] usb 6-2: new full-speed USB device number 3 using ohci-pci [43641.543454] usb 6-2: New USB device found, idVendor=147a, idProduct=e016 [43641.543467] usb 6-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [43641.543473] usb 6-2: Product: eHome Infrared Transceiver [43641.543478] usb 6-2: Manufacturer: Formosa21 [43641.543483] usb 6-2: SerialNumber: FM000623 [43641.555736] Registered IR keymap rc-rc6-mce [43641.555968] input: Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared Remote Transceiver (147a:e016) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.0/rc/rc2/input15 [43641.556221] rc2: Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared Remote Transceiver (147a:e016) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.0/rc/rc2 [43641.556584] input: MCE IR Keyboard/Mouse (mceusb) as /devices/virtual/input/input16 [43641.557186] rc rc2: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (mceusb) registered at minor = 0 [43641.731965] mceusb 6-2:1.0: Registered Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver with mce emulator interface version 1 [43641.731978] mceusb 6-2:1.0: 2 tx ports (0x0 cabled) and 2 rx sensors (0x0 active) (excuse the double spacing, but I had to put in extra cr/lf using "enter" or the entire thing was just one long unreadable string). When I connect the same IR receiver to a Raspberry Pi running OpenELEC/XBMC there is no flashing led unless I press a remote button, and the device works. In Ubuntu, the led is constantly blinking, and nothing happens when I press a remote key. I tried the command line program to test but it never echoes anything back to the terminal window. I believe it must need some sort of driver or something else, but I am completely in the dark on this. If it matters I also have: - Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse USB receiver - Tenda USB wireless adapter And.....I've also noticed some errors now that show in dmesg that seem to somehow related to HDMI if that makes any sense: 46721.144731] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46721.144749] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46721.444025] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46721.444061] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46721.743375] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46721.743411] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.043092] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.043118] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.343086] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.343122] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.642517] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.642574] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.942459] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.942485] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46723.242103] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46723.242129] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46723.541877] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46723.541923] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58366.651954] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58366.651980] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58366.951523] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58366.951549] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58367.251075] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58367.251121] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58367.550517] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58367.550563] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58367.850219] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58367.850256] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58368.150160] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58368.150185] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58368.449544] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58368.449570] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58368.749583] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58368.749629] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58369.049280] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58369.049326] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58394.706273] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58394.706300] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58394.706350] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58394.706367] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.003032] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.003058] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.302680] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.302705] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.602442] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.602477] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.902143] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.902179] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58396.201839] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58396.201875] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58396.501538] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58396.501574] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58396.801232] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58396.801268] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58397.100583] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58397.100627] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [63095.766042] systemd-hostnamed[8875]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname! dave@davepc:~$ EDIT: Maybe another way to look at this would be what does Ubuntu do or not do that OpenELEC does or doesn't do (on Raspberry Pi) such that it works in OpenELEC but not in Ubuntu?

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  • Big Data – Evolution of Big Data – Day 3 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we answered what is the Big Data. Today we will understand why and how the evolution of Big Data has happened. Though the answer is very simple, I would like to tell it in the form of a history lesson. Data in Flat File In earlier days data was stored in the flat file and there was no structure in the flat file.  If any data has to be retrieved from the flat file it was a project by itself. There was no possibility of retrieving the data efficiently and data integrity has been just a term discussed without any modeling or structure around. Database residing in the flat file had more issues than we would like to discuss in today’s world. It was more like a nightmare when there was any data processing involved in the application. Though, applications developed at that time were also not that advanced the need of the data was always there and there was always need of proper data management. Edgar F Codd and 12 Rules Edgar Frank Codd was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He presented 12 rules for the Relational Database and suddenly the chaotic world of the database seems to see discipline in the rules. Relational Database was a promising land for all the unstructured database users. Relational Database brought into the relationship between data as well improved the performance of the data retrieval. Database world had immediately seen a major transformation and every single vendors and database users suddenly started to adopt the relational database models. Relational Database Management Systems Since Edgar F Codd proposed 12 rules for the RBDMS there were many different vendors who started them to build applications and tools to support the relationship between database. This was indeed a learning curve for many of the developer who had never worked before with the modeling of the database. However, as time passed by pretty much everybody accepted the relationship of the database and started to evolve product which performs its best with the boundaries of the RDBMS concepts. This was the best era for the databases and it gave the world extreme experts as well as some of the best products. The Entity Relationship model was also evolved at the same time. In software engineering, an Entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing a database in an abstract way. Enormous Data Growth Well, everything was going fine with the RDBMS in the database world. As there were no major challenges the adoption of the RDBMS applications and tools was pretty much universal. There was a race at times to make the developer’s life much easier with the RDBMS management tools. Due to the extreme popularity and easy to use system pretty much every data was stored in the RDBMS system. New age applications were built and social media took the world by the storm. Every organizations was feeling pressure to provide the best experience for their users based the data they had with them. While this was all going on at the same time data was growing pretty much every organization and application. Data Warehousing The enormous data growth now presented a big challenge for the organizations who wanted to build intelligent systems based on the data and provide near real time superior user experience to their customers. Various organizations immediately start building data warehousing solutions where the data was stored and processed. The trend of the business intelligence becomes the need of everyday. Data was received from the transaction system and overnight was processed to build intelligent reports from it. Though this is a great solution it has its own set of challenges. The relational database model and data warehousing concepts are all built with keeping traditional relational database modeling in the mind and it still has many challenges when unstructured data was present. Interesting Challenge Every organization had expertise to manage structured data but the world had already changed to unstructured data. There was intelligence in the videos, photos, SMS, text, social media messages and various other data sources. All of these needed to now bring to a single platform and build a uniform system which does what businesses need. The way we do business has also been changed. There was a time when user only got the features what technology supported, however, now users ask for the feature and technology is built to support the same. The need of the real time intelligence from the fast paced data flow is now becoming a necessity. Large amount (Volume) of difference (Variety) of high speed data (Velocity) is the properties of the data. The traditional database system has limits to resolve the challenges this new kind of the data presents. Hence the need of the Big Data Science. We need innovation in how we handle and manage data. We need creative ways to capture data and present to users. Big Data is Reality! Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Basics of Big Data Architecture. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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