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• The sign of a true manager is delegation (C# style)

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I thought I would write a bit about delegates in C#. Up till recently I have managed to side step any real understanding of what delegates do and why they are useful – I mean, I know roughly what they do and have used them a lot, but I have never really got down dirty with them and mucked about. Recently however with my renewed interest in Silverlight delegates came up again as a possible solution to a particular problem, and suddenly I found myself opening a bland little console application to just see exactly how far I could take delegates with my limited knowledge. So, let’s first look at the MSDN definition of delegates… A delegate declaration defines a reference type that can be used to encapsulate a method with a specific signature. A delegate instance encapsulates a static or an instance method. Delegates are roughly similar to function pointers in C++; however, delegates are type-safe and secure. Well, don’t you love MSDN for such a useful definition. I must give it credit though… later on it really explains it a bit better by saying “A delegate lets you pass a function as a parameter. The type safety of delegates requires the function you pass as a delegate to have the same signature as the delegate declaration.” A little more reading up on delegates mentions that delegates are similar to interfaces in that they enable the separation of specification and implementation. A delegate declares a single method, while an interface declares a group of methods. So enough reading - lets look at some code and see a basic example of a delegate… Let’s assume we have a console application with a simple delegate declared called AdjustValue like below… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); static void Main(string[] args) { } } In a sense, all we have said is that we will be creating one or more methods that follow the same pattern as AdjustValue – i.e. they will take one input value of type int and return an integer. We could then expand our code to have various methods that match the structure of our delegate AdjustValue (remember the structure is int xxx (int xxx)) class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); private static int Dbl(int val) { return val * 2; } private static int AlwaysOne(int val) { return 1; } static void Main(string[] args) { } }  Above I have expanded my project to have two methods, one called Dbl and the other AlwaysOne. Dbl always returns double the input val and AlwaysOne always returns 1. I could now declare a variable and assign it to be one of those functions, like the following… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); private static int Dbl(int val) { return val * 2; } private static int AlwaysOne(int val) { return 1; } static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } } In this instance I have declared an instance of the AdjustValue delegate called myDelegate; I have then told myDelegate to point to the method Dbl, and then called myDelegate(1). What would the result be? Yes, in this instance it would be exactly the same as me calling the following code… static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(Dbl(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); }   So why all the extra work for delegates when we could just do what we did above and call the method directly? Well… that separation of specification to implementation comes to mind. So, this all seems pretty simple. Let’s take a slightly more complicated variation to the console application. Assume that my project is the same as the one previously except that my main method is adjusted as follows… static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; myDelegate = AlwaysOne; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } What would happen in this scenario? Quite simply “1” would be written to the console, the reason being that myDelegate was last pointing to the AlwaysOne method before it was called. Make sense? In a way, the myDelegate is a variable method that can be swapped and changed when needed. Let’s make the code a little more confusing by using a delegate in the declaration of another delegate as shown below… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(InputValue val); private delegate int InputValue(); private static int Dbl(InputValue val) { return val()*2; } private static int GetInputVal() { Console.WriteLine("Enter a whole number : "); return Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); } static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(GetInputVal).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } }   Now it gets really interesting because it looks like we have passed a method into a function in the main method by declaring… Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(GetInputVal).ToString()); So, what it the output? Well, try take a guess on what will happen – then copy the code and see if you got it right. Well that brings me to the end of this short explanation of Delegates. Hopefully it made sense!

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• What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2?

  - by Fat Bloke

  A year is a long time in the IT industry. Since the last VirtualBox feature release, which was a little over a year ago, we've seen: new releases of cool new operating systems, such as Windows 8, ChromeOS, and Mountain Lion; we've seen a myriad of new Linux releases from big Enterprise class distributions like Oracle 6.3, to accessible desktop distros like Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17; and we've also seen the spec of a typical PC or laptop double in power. All of these events have influenced our new VirtualBox version which we're releasing today. Here's how... Powerful hosts  One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's. Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends.  So we're pleased to unveil a more powerful VirtualBox Manager to address the needs of these users: VM Groups Groups allow you to organize your VM library in a sensible way, e.g.  by platform type, by project, by version, by whatever. To create groups you can drag one VM onto another or select one or more VM's and choose Machine...Group from the menu bar. You can expand and collapse groups to save screen real estate, and you can Enter and Leave a group (think iPad navigation here) by using the right and left arrow keys when groups are selected. But groups are more than passive folders, because you can now also perform operations on groups, rather than all the individual VMs. So if you have a multi-tiered solution you can start the whole stack up with just one click. Autostart Many VirtualBox users run dedicated services in their VMs, for example, running a Wiki. With these types of VM workloads, you really want the VM start up when the host machine boots up. So with 4.2 we've introduced a cross-platform Auto-start mechanism to allow you to treat VMs as host services. Headless VM Launching With VM's such as web servers, wikis, and other types of server-class workloads, the Console of the VM is pretty much redundant. For some time now VirtualBox has offered a separate launch mechanism for these VM's, namely the command-line interface commands VBoxHeadless or VBoxManage startvm ... --type headless commands. But with 4.2 we also allow you launch headless VMs from the Manager. Simply hold down Shift when launching the VM from the Manager.  It's that easy. But how do you stop a headless VM? Well, with 4.2 we allow you to Close the VM from the Manager. (BTW best to use the ACPI Shutdown method which allows the guest VM to close down gracefully.) Easy VM Creation For our expert users, the  New VM Wizard was a little tiresome, so now there's a faster 2-click VM creation mode. Just Hide the description when creating a new VM. Powerful VMs  As the hosts have become more powerful, so are the guests that are running inside them. Here are some of the 4.2 features to accommodate them: Virtual Network Interface Cards  With 4.2, it's now possible to create VMs with up to 36 NICs, when using the ICH9 chipset emulation. But with great power comes great responsibility (didn't Obi-Wan say something similar?), and so we have also introduced bandwidth limiting to prevent a rogue VM stealing the whole pipe. VLAN tagging Some of our users leverage VLANs extensively so we've enhanced the E1000 NICs to support this.  Processor Performance If you are running a CPU which supports Nested Paging (aka EPT in the Intel world) such as most of the Core i5 and i7 CPUs, or are running an AMD Bulldozer or later, you should see some performance improvements from our work with these processors. And while we're talking Processors, we've added support for some of the more modern VIA CPUs too. Powerful Automation Because VirtualBox runs atop a fully blown operating system, it makes sense to leverage the capabilities of the host to run scripts that can drive the guest VMs. Guest Automation was introduced in a prior release but with 4.2 we've revamped the APIs to allow a richer and more powerful set of operations to be executed by the guest. Check out the IGuest APIs in the VirtualBox Programming Guide and Reference (SDK). Powerful Platforms  All the hardcore engineering that has gone into 4.2 has been done for a purpose and that is to deliver a fast and powerful engine that can run almost any x86 OS because of the integrity of the virtualization. So we're pleased to add support for these platforms: Mac OS X "Mountain Lion"  Windows 8 Windows Server 2012 Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”) Fedora 17 Oracle Linux 6.3  Here's the proof: We don't have time to go into the myriad of smaller improvements such as support for burning audio CDs from a guest, bi-directional clipboard control,  drag-and-drop of files into Linux guests, etc. so we'll leave that as an exercise for the user as soon as you've downloaded from the Oracle or community site and taken a peek at the User Guide. So all in all, a pretty solid release, one that we hope you'll enjoy discovering. - FB 

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 1 of 3&ndash;Features)

  - by ToStringTheory

  It wasn’t very long ago that I first began to get into CSS precompilers such as SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and LESS (The Dynamic Stylesheet Language) and I had been hooked on the idea since.  When I finally had a new project come up, I leapt at the opportunity to try out one of these languages. Introduction To be honest, I was hesitant at first to add either framework as I didn’t really know much more than what I had read on their homepages, and I didn’t like the idea of adding too much complexity to a project - I couldn’t guarantee I would be the only person to support it in the future. Thankfully, both of these languages just add things into CSS.  You don’t HAVE to know LESS or SASS to do anything, you can still do your old school CSS, and your output will be the same.  However, when you want to start doing more advanced things such as variables, mixins, and color functions, the functionality is all there for you to utilize. From what I had read, SASS has a few more features than LESS, which is why I initially tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a MVC 4 project. However, through my research, I couldn’t find a way to accomplish this without including some bit of the Ruby on Rails framework on the computer running it, and I hated the fact that I had to do that.  Besides SASS, there is little chance of me getting into the RoR framework, at least in the next couple years.  So in the end, I settled with using LESS. Features So, what can LESS (or SASS) do for you?  There are several reasons I have come to love it in the past few weeks. 1 – Constants Using LESS, you can finally declare a constant and use its value across an entire CSS file. The case that most people would be familiar with is colors.  Wanting to declare one or two color variables that comprise the theme of the site, and not have to retype out their specific hex code each time, but rather a variable name.  What’s great about this is that if you end up having to change it, you only have to change it in one place.  An important thing to note is that you aren’t limited to creating constants just for colors, but for strings and measurements as well. 2 – Inheritance This is a cool feature in my mind for simplicity and organization.  Both LESS and SASS allow you to place selectors within other selectors, and when it is compiled, the languages will break the rules out as necessary and keep the inheritance chain you created in the selectors. Example LESS Code: #header {   h1 {     font-size: 26px;     font-weight: bold;   }   p {     font-size: 12px;     a     {       text-decoration: none;       &:hover {         border-width: 1px       }     }   } } Example Compiled CSS: #header h1 {   font-size: 26px;   font-weight: bold; } #header p {   font-size: 12px; } #header p a {   text-decoration: none; } #header p a:hover {   border-width: 1px; } 3 - Mixins Mixins are where languages like this really shine.  The ability to mixin other definitions setup a parametric mixin.  There is really a lot of content in this area, so I would suggest looking at http://lesscss.org for more information.  One of the things I would suggest if you do begin to use LESS is to also grab the mixins.less file from the Twitter Bootstrap project.  This file already has a bunch of predefined mixins for things like border-radius with all of the browser specific prefixes.  This alone is of great use! 4 – Color Functions This is the last thing I wanted to point out as my final post in this series will be utilizing these functions in a more drawn out manner.  Both LESS and SASS provide functions for getting information from a color (R,G,B,H,S,L).  Using these, it is easy to define a primary color, and then darken or lighten it a little for your needs.  Example: Example LESS Code: @base-color: #111; @red:        #842210; #footer {   color: (@base-color + #003300);   border-left:  2px;   border-right: 2px;   border-color: desaturate(@red, 10%); } Example Compiled CSS: #footer {    color: #114411;    border-left:  2px;    border-right: 2px;    border-color: #7d2717; } I have found that these can be very useful and powerful when constructing a site theme. Conclusion I came across LESS and SASS when looking for the best way to implement some type of CSS variables for colors, because I hated having to do a Find and Replace in all of the files using the colors, and in some instances, you couldn’t just find/replace because of the color choices interfering with other colors (color to replace of #000, yet come colors existed like #0002bc).  So in many cases I would end up having to do a Find and manually check each one. In my next post, I am going to cover how I’ve come to set up these items and the structure for the items in the project, as well as the conventions that I have come to start using.  In the final post in the series, I will cover a neat little side project I built in LESS dealing with colors!

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• What to filter when providing very limited open WiFi to a small conference or meeting?

  - by Tim Farley

  Executive Summary The basic question is: if you have a very limited bandwidth WiFi to provide Internet for a small meeting of only a day or two, how do you set the filters on the router to avoid one or two users monopolizing all the available bandwidth? For folks who don't have the time to read the details below, I am NOT looking for any of these answers: Secure the router and only let a few trusted people use it Tell everyone to turn off unused services & generally police themselves Monitor the traffic with a sniffer and add filters as needed I am aware of all of that. None are appropriate for reasons that will become clear. ALSO NOTE: There is already a question concerning providing adequate WiFi at large (500 attendees) conferences here. This question concerns SMALL meetings of less than 200 people, typically with less than half that using the WiFi. Something that can be handled with a single home or small office router. Background I've used a 3G/4G router device to provide WiFi to small meetings in the past with some success. By small I mean single-room conferences or meetings on the order of a barcamp or Skepticamp or user group meeting. These meetings sometimes have technical attendees there, but not exclusively. Usually less than half to a third of the attendees will actually use the WiFi. Maximum meeting size I'm talking about is 100 to 200 people. I typically use a Cradlepoint MBR-1000 but many other devices exist, especially all-in-one units supplied by 3G and/or 4G vendors like Verizon, Sprint and Clear. These devices take a 3G or 4G internet connection and fan it out to multiple users using WiFi. One key aspect of providing net access this way is the limited bandwidth available over 3G/4G. Even with something like the Cradlepoint which can load-balance multiple radios, you are only going to achieve a few megabits of download speed and maybe a megabit or so of upload speed. That's a best case scenario. Often it is considerably slower. The goal in most of these meeting situations is to allow folks access to services like email, web, social media, chat services and so on. This is so they can live-blog or live-tweet the proceedings, or simply chat online or otherwise stay in touch (with both attendees and non-attendees) while the meeting proceeds. I would like to limit the services provided by the router to just those services that meet those needs. Problems In particular I have noticed a couple of scenarios where particular users end up abusing most of the bandwidth on the router, to the detriment of everyone. These boil into two areas: Intentional use. Folks looking at YouTube videos, downloading podcasts to their iPod, and otherwise using the bandwidth for things that really aren't appropriate in a meeting room where you should be paying attention to the speaker and/or interacting.At one meeting that we were live-streaming (over a separate, dedicated connection) via UStream, I noticed several folks in the room that had the UStream page up so they could interact with the meeting chat - apparently oblivious that they were wasting bandwidth streaming back video of something that was taking place right in front of them. Unintentional use. There are a variety of software utilities that will make extensive use of bandwidth in the background, that folks often have installed on their laptops and smartphones, perhaps without realizing.Examples: Peer to peer downloading programs such as Bittorrent that run in the background Automatic software update services. These are legion, as every major software vendor has their own, so one can easily have Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Adobe, Google and others all trying to download updates in the background. Security software that downloads new signatures such as anti-virus, anti-malware, etc. Backup software and other software that "syncs" in the background to cloud services. For some numbers on how much network bandwidth gets sucked up by these non-web, non-email type services, check out this recent Wired article. Apparently web, email and chat all together are less than one quarter of the Internet traffic now. If the numbers in that article are correct, by filtering out all the other stuff I should be able to increase the usefulness of the WiFi four-fold. Now, in some situations I've been able to control access using security on the router to limit it to a very small group of people (typically the organizers of the meeting). But that's not always appropriate. At an upcoming meeting I would like to run the WiFi without security and let anyone use it, because it happens at the meeting location the 4G coverage in my town is particularly excellent. In a recent test I got 10 Megabits down at the meeting site. The "tell people to police themselves" solution mentioned at top is not appropriate because of (a) a largely non-technical audience and (b) the unintentional nature of much of the usage as described above. The "run a sniffer and filter as needed" solution is not useful because these meetings typically only last a couple of days, often only one day, and have a very small volunteer staff. I don't have a person to dedicate to network monitoring, and by the time we got the rules tweaked completely the meeting will be over. What I've Got First thing, I figured I would use OpenDNS's domain filtering rules to filter out whole classes of sites. A number of video and peer-to-peer sites can be wiped out using this. (Yes, I am aware that filtering via DNS technically leaves the services accessible - remember, these are largely non-technical users attending a 2 day meeting. It's enough). I figured I would start with these selections in OpenDNS's UI: I figure I will probably also block DNS (port 53) to anything other than the router itself, so that folks can't bypass my DNS configuration. A savvy user could get around this, because I'm not going to put a lot of elaborate filters on the firewall, but I don't care too much. Because these meetings don't last very long, its probably not going to be worth the trouble. This should cover the bulk of the non-web traffic, i.e. peer-to-peer and video if that Wired article is correct. Please advise if you think there are severe limitations to the OpenDNS approach. What I Need Note that OpenDNS focuses on things that are "objectionable" in some context or another. Video, music, radio and peer-to-peer all get covered. I still need to cover a number of perfectly reasonable things that we just want to block because they aren't needed in a meeting. Most of these are utilities that upload or download legit things in the background. Specifically, I'd like to know port numbers or DNS names to filter in order to effectively disable the following services: Microsoft automatic updates Apple automatic updates Adobe automatic updates Google automatic updates Other major software update services Major virus/malware/security signature updates Major background backup services Other services that run in the background and can eat lots of bandwidth I also would like any other suggestions you might have that would be applicable. Sorry to be so verbose, but I find it helps to be very, very clear on questions of this nature, and I already have half a solution with the OpenDNS thing.

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• Why are my hard drives failing?

  - by WishCow

  I have a small Ubuntu server running at home, with 2 HDDs. There are two software raids (raid1) on the disks, managed by mdadm, which I believe is irrelevant, but mentioning it anyway. Both of the HDDs are Western Digital, and have been used for around 2 years, when one of them started making clicking noises, and died. I figured that maybe it's natural after 2 years, so I bought a new one, and resynced the raid arrays. After about a month, the other drive also died. I didn't get suspicious, since both drives have been bought at the same time, it's not that surprising to see both of them near each other, so I bought another one. So far, 2 old drives failed, and 2 brand new in the system. After one month, one of the new drives died. This is when it started getting suspicious. Since the PC was put together from some really old parts (think AthlonXP), I figured that maybe the motherboard's SATA controller is the culprit. Of course you can't switch parts easily in an old PC like this, so I bought a whole system, new MB, new CPU, new RAM. Took the just failed drive back, since it was under warranty, and got it replaced. So it is up to 2 failed drives from the old ones, and 1 failed drive from the new ones. No problems, for 1 month. After that errors were creeping up again in /var/log/messages, and mdadm was reporting raid array failures. I started tearing my hair out. Everything is new in the system, it's up to the third brand new HDD, it's simply not possible that all of the new drives that I bought were faulty. Let's see what is still common... the cables. Okay, long shot, let's replace the SATA cables. Take HDD back, smile to the guy at the counter and say that I'm really unlucky. He replaces the HDD. I come home, one month passes and one of HDDs fails, again. I'm not joking. Two of the brand new HDDs have failed. Maybe it's a bug in the OS. Let's see what the manufacturer's testing tool says. Download testing tool, burn it to a CD, reboot, leave HDD testing overnight. Test says that the drive is faulty, and I should back up everything, if I still can. I don't know what's happening, but it does not look like a software problem, something is definitely thrashing the HDDs. I should mention now, that the whole system is in a shoebox. Since there are a load of "build your own ikea case" stuff, I thought there shouldn't be any problems throwing the thing in a box, and stuffing it away somewhere. The box is well ventilated, but I thought that just maybe the drives were overheating. There is no other possible answer to this. So I took the HDD back, and got it replaced (for the 3rd time), and bought HDD coolers. And just now, I have heard the sound of doom. click click whizzzzzzzzz. SSH into the box: You have new mail! mail r 1 DegradedArrayEvent on /dev/md0 ... dmesg output: [47128.000051] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [47128.000097] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 58588863 [47128.000134] md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 [48043.976054] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [48043.976086] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen [48043.976132] ata3.00: cmd c8/00:18:bf:40:52/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 dma 12288 in [48043.976135] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) [48043.976208] ata3.00: status: { DRDY } [48043.976241] ata3: soft resetting link [48044.148446] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [48044.148457] ata3.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0 [48044.148477] ata3: EH complete Recap: No possibility of overheating 6 drives have failed, 4 of those have been brand new. I'm not sure now that the original two have been faulty, or suffered the same thing that the new ones. There is nothing common in the system, apart from the OS which is Ubuntu Karmic now (started with Jaunty). New MB, new CPU, new RAM, new SATA cables. No, the little holes on the HDD are not covered I'm crying. Really. I don't have the face to return to the store now, it's not possible for 4 drives to fail under 4 months. A few ideas that I have been thinking: Is it possible that I fuck up something when I partition and resync the drives? Can it be so bad that it physicaly wrecks the drive? (since the vendor supplied tool says that the drive is damaged) I do the partitoning with fdisk, and use the same block size for the raid1 partitions (I check the exact block sizes with fdisk -lu) Is it possible that the linux kernel or mdadm, or something is not compatible with this exact brand of HDDs, and thrashes them? Is it possible that it may be the shoebox? Try placing it somewhere else? It's under a shelf now, so humidity is not a problem either. Is it possible that a normal PC case will solve my problem (I'm going to shoot myself then)? I will get a picture tomorrow. Am I just simply cursed? Any help or speculation is greatly appreciated. Edit: The power strip is guarded against overvoltage. Edit2: I have moved inbetween these 4 months, so the possibility of the cause being "dirty" electricity in both places, is very low. Edit3: I have checked the voltages in the BIOS (couldn't borrow a multimeter), and they are all seem correct, the biggest discrepancy is in the 12V, because it's supplying 11.3. Should I be worried about that? Edit4: I put my desktop PC's PSU into the server. The BIOS reported much more accurate voltage readings, and also it has successfully rebuilt the raid1 array, which took some 3-4 hours, so I feel a little positive now. Will get a new PSU tomorrow to test with that. Also, attaching the picture about the box: (disregard the 3rd drive)

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• Anyone have ideas for solving the "n items remaining" problem on Internet Explorer?

  - by CMPalmer

  In my ASP.Net app, which is javascript and jQuery heavy, but also uses master pages and .Net Ajax pieces, I am consistently seeing on the status bar of IE 6 (and occasionally IE 7) the message "2 items remaining" or "15 items remaining" followed by "loading somegraphicsfile.png|gif ." This message never goes away and may or may not prevent some page functionality from running (it certainly seems to bog down, but I'm not positive). I can cause this to happen 99% of the time by just refreshing an .aspx age, but the number of items and, sometimes, the file it mentions varies. Usually it is 2, 3, 12, 13, or 15. I've Googled for answers and there are several suggestions or explanations. Some of them haven't worked for us, and others aren't practical for us to implement or try. Here are some of the ideas/theories: IE isn't caching images right, so it repeatedly asks for the same image if the image is repeated on the page and the server assumes that it should be cached locally since it's already served it in that page context. IE displays the images correctly, but sits and waits for a server response that never comes. Typically the file it says it is waiting on is repeated on the page. The page is using PNG graphics with transparency. Indeed it is, but they are jQuery-UI Themeroller generated graphics which, according to the jQuery-UI folks, are IE safe. The jQuery-UI components are the only things using PNGs. All of our PNG references are in CSS, if that helps. I've changed some of the graphics from PNG to GIF, but it is just as likely to say it's waiting for somegraphicsfile.png as it is for somegraphicsfile.gif Images are being specified in CSS and/or JavaScript but are on things that aren't currently being displayed (display: none items for example). This may be true, but if it is, then I would think preloading images would work, but so far, adding a preloader doesn't do any good. IIS's caching policy is confusing the browser. If this is true, it is only Microsoft server SW having problems with Microsoft's browser (which doesn't surprise me at all). Unfortunately, I don't have much control over the IIS configuration that will be hosting the app. Has anyone seen this and found a way to combat it? Particularly on ASP.Net apps with jQuery and jQuery-UI? UPDATE One other data point: on at least one of the pages, just commenting out the jQuery-UI Datepicker component setup causes the problem to go away, but I don't think (or at least I'm not sure) if that fixes all of the pages. If it does "fix" them, I'll have to swap out plug-ins because that functionality needs to be there. There doesn't seem to be any open issues against jQuery-UI on IE6/7 currently... UPDATE 2 I checked the IIS settings and "enable content expiration" was not set on any of my folders. Unchecking that setting was a common suggestion for fixing this problem. I have another, simpler, page that I can consistently create the error on. I'm using the jQuery-UI 1.6rc6 file (although I've also tried jQuery-UI 1.7.1 with the same results). The problem only occurs when I refresh the page that contains the jQuery-UI Datepicker. If I comment out the Datepicker setup, the problem goes away. Here are a few things I notice when I do this: This page always says "(1 item remaining) Downloading picture http:///images/Calendar_scheduleHS.gif", but only when reloading. When I look at HTTP logging, I see that it requests that image from the server every time it is dynamically turned on, without regard to caching. All of the requests for that graphic are complete and return the graphic correctly. None are marked code 200 or 304 (indicating that the server is telling IE to use the cached version). Why it says waiting on that graphic when all of the requests have completed I have no idea. There is a single other graphic on the page (one of the UI PNG files) that has a code 304 (Not Modified). On another page where I managed to log HTTP traffic with "2 items remaining", two different graphic files (both UI PNGs) had a 304 as well (but neither was the one listed as "Downloading". This error is not innocuous - the page is not fully responsive. For example, if I click on one of the buttons which should execute a client-side action, the page refreshes. Going away from the page and coming back does not produce the error. I have moved the script and script references to the bottom of the content and this doesn't affect this problem. The script is still running in the $(document).ready() though (it's too hairy to divide out unless I absolutely have to). FINAL UPDATE AND ANSWER There were a lot of good answers and suggestions below, but none of them were exactly our problem. The closest one (and the one that led me to the solution) was the one about long running JavaScript, so I awarded the bounty there (I guess I could have answered it myself, but I'd rather reward info that leads to solutions). Here was our solution: We had multiple jQueryUI datepickers that were created on the $(document).ready event in script included from the ASP.Net master page. On this client page, a local script's $(document).ready event had script that destroyed the datepickers under certain conditions. We had to use "destroy" because the previous version of datepicker had a problem with "disable". When we upgraded to the latest version of jQuery UI (1.7.1) and replaced the "destroy"s with "disable"s for the datepickers, the problem went away (or mostly went away - if you do things too fast while the page is loading, it is still possible to get the "n items remaining" status). My theory as to what was happening goes like this: The page content loads and has 12 or so text boxes with the datepicker class. The master page script creates datepickers on those text boxes. IE queues up requests for each calendar graphic independently because IE doesn't know how to properly cache dynamic image requests. Before the requests get processed, the client area script destroys those datepickers so the graphics are no longer needed. IE is left with some number of orphaned requests that it doesn't know what to do with.

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• CSS drop-down menus pushing page content down

  - by Mason Jones

  This is probably (hopefully) a pretty simple question, but I can't seem to get it to work so I'll turn to the experts here. I'm using a pretty straightforward CSS drop-down menu, with just a little JQuery involved. The issue is that when I hover over the drop-down and it opens, it's pushing everything on the page down below it rather then opening over it. I've tried messing with the z-index but that doesn't seem to be the issue. Any tips would be fantastic, thanks in advance. Here's the HTML; sorry it's not super-pretty, I had to rip out a bunch of stuff to make it simple and generic. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <HTML style="zoom: 100%; "> <HEAD> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.0/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </HEAD> <BODY class="bodyclass" style="background:#BCE2F1; height: 100%;"> <DIV id="maincontainer" style="min-height: 100%;"> <STYLE type="text/css"> #cssdropdown, #cssdropdown ul { font-size: 9pt; background-color: black; list-style: none; } #cssdropdown, #cssdropdown * { padding: 0; margin: 0; } #cssdropdown li.headlink { width: 140px; float: left; margin-left: -1px; border: 1px black solid; background-color: white; text-align: center; } #cssdropdown li.headlink a { display: block; color: #339804; padding: 3px; text-decoration: none; } #cssdropdown li.headlink a:hover { background-color: #F8E0AC; font-weight: bold; } #cssdropdown li.headlink ul { display: none; border-top: 1px black solid; text-align: left; } #cssdropdown li.headlink:hover ul { display: block; text-decoration: none; } #cssdropdown li.headlink ul li a { padding: 5px; height: 15px; } #cssdropdown li.headlink ul li a:hover { background-color: #CCE9F5; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; } /* #cssdropdown a { color: #CCE9F5; } */ #cssdropdown ul li a:hover { text-decoration: none; } #cssdropdown li.headlink { background-color: white; } #cssdropdown li.headlink ul { background-color: white; background-position: bottom; padding-bottom: 2px; } </STYLE> <SCRIPT language="JavaScript"> $(document).ready(function(){ $('#cssdropdown li.headlink').hover( function() { $('ul', this).css('display', 'block'); }, function() { $('ul', this).css('display', 'none'); }); }); </SCRIPT> <DIV class="navigation_box" style="border: none;"> <DIV class="innercontent"> <DIV style="background: white; float: left; padding: 5px; border: solid 1px black;"> LOGO </DIV> <DIV class="navmenu" style="float: right; bottom: 0; font-size: 9pt; text-align: right;"> <SPAN>Logged in as [email protected]</SPAN><BR> <UL id="cssdropdown"> <LI class="headlink"> <A href="http://localhost:3000/one">One</A> <UL style="display: none; "> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/one">Option One</A></LI> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/one">Option Two</A></LI> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/one">Option Three</A></LI> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/one">Option Four</A></LI> </UL> </LI> <LI class="headlink"> <A href="http://localhost:3000/two">Two</A> <UL style="display: none; "> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/two">Option Two-One</A></LI> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/two">Option Two-Two</A></LI> <LI><A href="http://localhost:3000/two">Option Two-Three</A></LI> </UL> </LI> <LI class="headlink" style="width: 80px;"> <A href="http://localhost:3000/three">Three</A> </LI> <LI class="headlink" style="width: 300px; padding-top: 2px; height: 19px;"> <FORM action="http://localhost:3000/search" method="post"> <P> Search: <INPUT id="searchwords" name="searchwords" size="20" type="text" value=""> <INPUT name="commit" type="submit" value="Find"> </P> </FORM> </LI> <LI class="headlink" style="width: 60px;"> <A href="http://localhost:3000/four">Four</A> </LI> <LI class="headlink" style="width: 60px;"> <A href="http://localhost:3000/logout">Logout</A> </LI> </UL> </DIV> </DIV> </DIV> <DIV id="contentwrapper" style="clear:both"> <DIV class="innercontent" style="margin: 0px 20px 20px 20px;"> <H1>Some test content here to fill things out a little bit.</H1> </DIV> </DIV> </DIV> <DIV id="footer" style="clear: both; float: bottom;"> <DIV class="innercontent" style="font-size: 10px;"> Copyright 2008-2010 </DIV> </DIV> </BODY>

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• website creation - for non web programmers?

  - by Tim

  I thought I would find decent questions and answers for this, but none really caught my eye... I am a C++ developer and I own a few domains. I'd like to start off with simple web sites for each with a minimum of time and fuss and minimum learning. I have too many projects going and don't have the time to learn how to build websites. One is for a company that currently has only a single product with custom development as well. I hacked together some really bad html with paypal links on it. It is just one simple product. I want to add uservoice to it and maybe some other stuff like FAQ, forums, etc. Right now I just link to a google group I created. Another is a startup in development phase, but we want to provide simple content like whitepapers and press releases and a section for investors. - mostly an "about us" type of thing. We will also be providing details about our product. Then there is a blog site - currently using godaddy's quickblogcast. Not a bad start but I suspect I want to move to something else. The question is - is there a framework that I can use that will make decent, if not outstanding, sites? Again, I have my hands full with three projects in addition to my day job and don't have time to learn web programming. I also don;t want to just pay a web person and then be out in the cold for upgrades, changes, etc. I have been burned before. I am happy with a web-based app or a desktop app that builds html or whatever and then I can ftp it up to the hosting servers. To summarize: - simple to get started - low time to get a web page going - ability to integrate with a few hand-done pages - pay pal integration - uservoice integration - ability to put under my svn would be nice too EDIT Thanks to the responders. I understand now why my original searches failed. I was not searching for "CMS". I'll go back and do that. I would expect that this is a many-times-duplicate... EDIT: I am considering using Wordpress and Drupal - one for each of the sites. I did one Drupal site quickly just so I could qualify for one of the Microsoft programs for discounted dev tools - anyway - it was a quick and dirty homepage and I am still on the learning curve. I look forward to playing with it. So far it has been ok. I am not sure about doing a taste-test between the two - might be a waste of time where I could just become that much better at Drupal faster than spending time on wordpress... Will keep updated. EDIT: Selecting the Drupal answer by slim for now. That is what I am going with. Don't have time to check them all out. Wordpress sounds like a good option too, but such limited time... Results: I have tried wordpress and drupal so far. Wordpress is great for blogging or for a site that you want to run ads from, but I disagree that it is ready for a corporate site, unless you want to spend lots of time making your own theme, etc. But if you spend that time, why not work with drupal? Drupal was a little intimidating at first - but after spending about 4 hours reading the overview and step-by-step guide online was a HUGE step. I got a simple site up and running easily after that. Trying to make a website just by going to the admin panel without reading anything is a waste of time. You really need to read the docs. The site is great. start here: http://drupal.org/getting-started I'd suggest drupal to anyone. It has amazing capabilities, lots of support and lots of users. Just doing blogging? Wordpress is really great for that. So now I've got two sites running with a lot of the functionality I wanted - and they look good. ONE MORE EDIT Well, I have switched back to wordpress after buying a theme and then getting help from web developers. I guess either one will work - it is just a matter of getting comfortable witht he basics, using the right tools and trying things out.

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• Factorising program not working. Help required.

  - by Ender

  I am working on a factorisation problem using Fermat's Factorization and for small numbers it is working well. I've been able to calculate the factors (getting the answers from Wolfram Alpha) for small numbers, like the one on the Wikipedia page (5959). Just when I thought I had the problem licked I soon realised that my program was not working when it came to larger numbers. The program follows through the examples from the Wikipedia page, printing out the values a, b, a2 and b2; the results printed for large numbers are not correct. I've followed the pseudocode provided on the Wikipedia page, but am struggling to understand where to go next. Along with the Wikipedia page I have been following this guide. Once again, as my Math knowledge is pretty poor I cannot follow what I need to do next. The code I am using so far is as follows: import java.math.BigInteger; /** * * @author AlexT */ public class Fermat { private BigInteger a, b; private BigInteger b2; private static final BigInteger TWO = BigInteger.valueOf(2); public void fermat(BigInteger N) { // floor(sqrt(N)) BigInteger tmp = getIntSqrt(N); // a <- ceil(sqrt(N)) a = tmp.add(BigInteger.ONE); // b2 <- a*a-N b2 = (a.multiply(a)).subtract(N); final int bitLength = N.bitLength(); BigInteger root = BigInteger.ONE.shiftLeft(bitLength / 2); root = root.add(b2.divide(root)).divide(TWO); // while b2 not square root while(!(isSqrt(b2, root))) { // a <- a + 1 a = a.add(BigInteger.ONE); // b2 <- (a * a) - N b2 = (a.multiply(a)).subtract(N); root = root.add(b2.divide(root)).divide(TWO); } b = getIntSqrt(b2); BigInteger a2 = a.pow(2); // Wrong BigInteger sum = (a.subtract(b)).multiply((a.add(b))); //if(sum.compareTo(N) == 0) { System.out.println("A: " + a + "\nB: " + b); System.out.println("A^2: " + a2 + "\nB^2: " + b2); //} } /** * Is the number provided a perfect Square Root? * @param n * @param root * @return */ private static boolean isSqrt(BigInteger n, BigInteger root) { final BigInteger lowerBound = root.pow(2); final BigInteger upperBound = root.add(BigInteger.ONE).pow(2); return lowerBound.compareTo(n) <= 0 && n.compareTo(upperBound) < 0; } public BigInteger getIntSqrt(BigInteger x) { // It returns s where s^2 < x < (s+1)^2 BigInteger s; // final result BigInteger currentRes = BigInteger.valueOf(0); // init value is 0 BigInteger currentSum = BigInteger.valueOf(0); // init value is 0 BigInteger sum = BigInteger.valueOf(0); String xS = x.toString(); // change input x to a string xS int lengthOfxS = xS.length(); int currentTwoBits; int i=0; // index if(lengthOfxS % 2 != 0) {// if odd length, add a dummy bit xS = "0".concat(xS); // add 0 to the front of string xS lengthOfxS++; } while(i < lengthOfxS){ // go through xS two by two, left to right currentTwoBits = Integer.valueOf(xS.substring(i,i+2)); i += 2; // sum = currentSum*100 + currentTwoBits sum = currentSum.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(100)); sum = sum.add(BigInteger.valueOf(currentTwoBits)); // subtraction loop do { currentSum = sum; // remember the value before subtract // in next 3 lines, we work out // currentRes = sum - 2*currentRes - 1 sum = sum.subtract(currentRes); // currentRes++ currentRes = currentRes.add(BigInteger.valueOf(1)); sum = sum.subtract(currentRes); } while(sum.compareTo(BigInteger.valueOf(0)) >= 0); // the loop stops when sum < 0 // go one step back currentRes = currentRes.subtract(BigInteger.valueOf(1)); currentRes = currentRes.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(10)); } s = currentRes.divide(BigInteger.valueOf(10)); // go one step back return s; } /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { Fermat fermat = new Fermat(); //Works //fermat.fermat(new BigInteger("5959")); // Doesn't Work fermat.fermat(new BigInteger("90283")); } } If anyone can help me out with this problem I'll be eternally grateful.

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• cant populate cells with an array when i have loaded a second UITableViewController

  - by richard Stephenson

  hi there, im very new to iphone programming, im creating my first app, (a world cup one) the first view is a table view. the cell text label is filled with an array, so it shows all the groups (group a, B, c,ect) then when you select a group, it pulls on another UITableViewcontroller, but whatever i do i cant set the text label of the cells (e.g france,mexico,south africa, etc. infact nothin i do to the cellForRowAtIndexPath makes a difference , could someone tell me what im doing wrong please Thanks `here is my code for the view controller #import "GroupADetailViewController.h" @implementation GroupADetailViewController @synthesize groupLabel = _groupLabel; @synthesize groupADetail = _groupADetail; @synthesize teamsInGroupA; #pragma mark Memory management - (void)dealloc { [_groupADetail release]; [_groupLabel release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark View lifecycle - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Set the number label to show the number data teamsInGroupA = [[NSArray alloc]initWithObjects:@"France",@"Mexico",@"Uruguay",@"South Africa",nil]; NSLog(@"loaded"); // Set the title to also show the number data [[self navigationItem]setTitle:@"Group A"]; //[[self navigationItem]cell.textLabel.text:@"test"]; //[[self navigationItem] setTitle[NSString String } - (void)viewDidUnload { [self setgroupLabel:nil]; } #pragma mark Table view methods - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView*)tableView { // Return the number of sections in the table view return 1; } - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView*)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { // Return the number of rows in a specific section // Since we only have one section, just return the number of rows in the table return 4; NSLog:("count is %d",[teamsInGroupA count]); } - (UITableViewCell*)tableView:(UITableView*)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath*)indexPath { static NSString *cellIdentifier2 = @"Cell2"; // Reuse an existing cell if one is available for reuse UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:cellIdentifier2]; // If no cell was available, create a new one if (cell == nil) { NSLog(@"no cell, creating"); cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:cellIdentifier2] autorelease]; [cell setAccessoryType:UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator]; } NSLog(@"cell already there"); // Configure the cell to show the data for this row //[[cell textLabel]setText:[NSString string //[[cell textLabel]setText:[teamsInGroupA objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]]; //NSUInteger row = [indexPath row]; //[cell setText:[[teamsInGroupA objectAtIndex:indexPath:row]retain]]; //cell.textLabel.text:@"Test" [[cell textLabel]setText:[teamsInGroupA objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]]; return cell; } @end #import "GroupADetailViewController.h" @implementation GroupADetailViewController @synthesize groupLabel = _groupLabel; @synthesize groupADetail = _groupADetail; @synthesize teamsInGroupA; #pragma mark Memory management - (void)dealloc { [_groupADetail release]; [_groupLabel release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark View lifecycle - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Set the number label to show the number data teamsInGroupA = [[NSArray alloc]initWithObjects:@"France",@"Mexico",@"Uruguay",@"South Africa",nil]; NSLog(@"loaded"); // Set the title to also show the number data [[self navigationItem]setTitle:@"Group A"]; //[[self navigationItem]cell.textLabel.text:@"test"]; //[[self navigationItem] setTitle[NSString String } - (void)viewDidUnload { [self setgroupLabel:nil]; } #pragma mark Table view methods - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView*)tableView { // Return the number of sections in the table view return 1; } - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView*)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { // Return the number of rows in a specific section // Since we only have one section, just return the number of rows in the table return 4; NSLog:("count is %d",[teamsInGroupA count]); } - (UITableViewCell*)tableView:(UITableView*)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath*)indexPath { static NSString *cellIdentifier2 = @"Cell2"; // Reuse an existing cell if one is available for reuse UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:cellIdentifier2]; // If no cell was available, create a new one if (cell == nil) { NSLog(@"no cell, creating"); cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:cellIdentifier2] autorelease]; [cell setAccessoryType:UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator]; } NSLog(@"cell already there"); // Configure the cell to show the data for this row //[[cell textLabel]setText:[NSString string //[[cell textLabel]setText:[teamsInGroupA objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]]; //NSUInteger row = [indexPath row]; //[cell setText:[[teamsInGroupA objectAtIndex:indexPath:row]retain]]; //cell.textLabel.text:@"Test" [[cell textLabel]setText:[teamsInGroupA objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]]; return cell; } @end

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• null pointer exception at org.hibernate.tuple.AbstractEntityTuplizer.createProxy

  - by saurabh

  I am using hibernate 3.2 with struts 1.2 framework I got this exception when i m trying to load the object I am using this code to load the object public Currentprofile findById(java.lang.String id) { log.debug("getting Currentprofile instance with id: " + id); try { Currentprofile instance = (Currentprofile) getSession().get( "com.hibermappings.Currentprofile", id); return instance; } catch (RuntimeException re) { log.error("get failed", re); throw re; } } my hbm file is this <one-to-one name="referenceDb" lazy="proxy" class="com.hibermappings.ReferenceDb" cascade="all" constrained="false" /> <one-to-one name="registration" lazy="proxy" class="com.hibermappings.Registration" cascade="all" constrained="false" /> <one-to-one name="jobseekerpackagedetails" lazy="proxy" class="com.hibermappings.Jobseekerpackagedetails" cascade="all" constrained="false" /> <property name="keyWords" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="keyWords" length="5000" /> </property> <property name="totalExp" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="totalExp" length="100" /> </property> <property name="hqualification" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="hQualification" length="100" /> </property> <property name="preferedLocation" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="preferedLocation" length="100" /> </property> <property name="functionalArea" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="functionalArea" length="1000" /> </property> <property name="expSalary" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="expSalary" length="100" /> </property> <property name="designation" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="designation" length="100" /> </property> <property name="resumeTitle" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="resumeTitle" length="500" /> </property> <property name="profileDetails" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="profileDetails" length="65535" /> </property> <property name="requiredProfile" type="java.lang.String"> <column name="requiredProfile" length="65535" /> </property> <property name="activatedOn" type="java.util.Date"> <column name="activatedOn" length="0" /> </property> <set name="resumes" inverse="true" cascade="save-update"> <key> <column name="jobseekerId" length="50" /> </key> <one-to-many class="com.hibermappings.Resume" /> </set> </class> the same code runs well when I m using in a simple java class within main method .. full stack trace of exception is java.lang.NullPointerException at org.hibernate.tuple.AbstractEntityTuplizer.createProxy(AbstractEntityTuplizer.java:372) at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.createProxy(AbstractEntityPersister.java:3121) at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultLoadEventListener.createProxyIfNecessary(DefaultLoadEventListener.java:232) at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultLoadEventListener.proxyOrLoad(DefaultLoadEventListener.java:173) at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultLoadEventListener.onLoad(DefaultLoadEventListener.java:87) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.fireLoad(SessionImpl.java:862) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.load(SessionImpl.java:781) at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.load(SessionImpl.java:774) at com.DAOs.CurrentprofileDAO.getLoad(CurrentprofileDAO.java:71) at com.action.JobSekeerManage.viewProfile(JobSekeerManage.java:447) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585) at org.apache.struts.actions.DispatchAction.dispatchMethod(DispatchAction.java:270) at org.apache.struts.actions.DispatchAction.execute(DispatchAction.java:187) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionPerform(RequestProcessor.java:431) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:236) at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1196) at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doGet(ActionServlet.java:414) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:689) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:237) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:157) at com.filter.HibernateFilter.doFilter(HibernateFilter.java:24) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:186) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:157) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:214) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:178) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:126) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:107) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:148) at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:825) at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11Protocol.java:731) at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:526) at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt(LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.java:80) at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:684) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595) Error::null

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• Linux C: "Interactive session" with separate read and write named pipes?

  - by ~sd-imi

  Hi all, I am trying to work with "Introduction to Interprocess Communication Using Named Pipes - Full-Duplex Communication Using Named Pipes", http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/named_pipes.html#5 ; in particular fd_server.c (included below for reference) Here is my info and compile line: :~$ cat /etc/issue Ubuntu 10.04 LTS \n \l :~$ gcc --version gcc (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) 4.4.3 :~$ gcc fd_server.c -o fd_server fd_server.c creates two named pipes, one for reading and one for writing. What one can do, is: in one terminal, run the server and read (through cat) its write pipe: :~$ ./fd_server & 2/dev/null [1] 11354 :~$ cat /tmp/np2 and in another, write (using echo) to server's read pipe: :~$ echo "heeellloooo" /tmp/np1 going back to first terminal, one can see: :~$ cat /tmp/np2 HEEELLLOOOO 0[1]+ Exit 13 ./fd_server 2 /dev/null What I would like to do, is make sort of a "interactive" (or "shell"-like) session; that is, the server is run as usual, but instead of running "cat" and "echo", I'd like to use something akin to screen. What I mean by that, is that screen can be called like screen /dev/ttyS0 38400, and then it makes a sort of a interactive session, where what is typed in terminal is passed to /dev/ttyS0, and its response is written to terminal. Now, of course, I cannot use screen, because in my case the program has two separate nodes, and as far as I can tell, screen can refer to only one. How would one go about to achieve this sort of "interactive" session in this context (with two separate read/write pipes)? Thanks, Cheers! Code below: #include <stdio.h> #include <errno.h> #include <ctype.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/stat.h> #include <fcntl.h> //#include <fullduplex.h> /* For name of the named-pipe */ #define NP1 "/tmp/np1" #define NP2 "/tmp/np2" #define MAX_BUF_SIZE 255 #include <stdlib.h> //exit #include <string.h> //strlen int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int rdfd, wrfd, ret_val, count, numread; char buf[MAX_BUF_SIZE]; /* Create the first named - pipe */ ret_val = mkfifo(NP1, 0666); if ((ret_val == -1) && (errno != EEXIST)) { perror("Error creating the named pipe"); exit (1); } ret_val = mkfifo(NP2, 0666); if ((ret_val == -1) && (errno != EEXIST)) { perror("Error creating the named pipe"); exit (1); } /* Open the first named pipe for reading */ rdfd = open(NP1, O_RDONLY); /* Open the second named pipe for writing */ wrfd = open(NP2, O_WRONLY); /* Read from the first pipe */ numread = read(rdfd, buf, MAX_BUF_SIZE); buf[numread] = '0'; fprintf(stderr, "Full Duplex Server : Read From the pipe : %sn", buf); /* Convert to the string to upper case */ count = 0; while (count < numread) { buf[count] = toupper(buf[count]); count++; } /* * Write the converted string back to the second * pipe */ write(wrfd, buf, strlen(buf)); } Edit: Right, just to clarify - it seems I found a document discussing something very similar, it is http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Serial_Programming/Serial_Linux#Configuration_with_stty - a modification of the script there ("For example, the following script configures the device and starts a background process for copying all received data from the serial device to standard output...") for the above program is below: # stty raw # ( ./fd_server 2>/dev/null; )& bgPidS=$! ( cat < /tmp/np2 ; )& bgPid=$! # Read commands from user, send them to device echo $(kill -0 $bgPidS 2>/dev/null ; echo $?) while [ "$(kill -0 $bgPidS 2>/dev/null ; echo $?)" -eq "0" ] && read cmd; do # redirect debug msgs to stderr, as here we're redirected to /tmp/np1 echo "$? - $bgPidS - $bgPid" >&2 echo "$cmd" echo -e "\nproc: $(kill -0 $bgPidS 2>/dev/null ; echo $?)" >&2 done >/tmp/np1 echo OUT # Terminate background read process - if they still exist if [ "$(kill -0 $bgPid 2>/dev/null ; echo $?)" -eq "0" ] ; then kill $bgPid fi if [ "$(kill -0 $bgPidS 2>/dev/null ; echo $?)" -eq "0" ] ; then kill $bgPidS fi # stty cooked So, saving the script as say starter.sh and calling it, results with the following session: $ ./starter.sh 0 i'm typing here and pressing [enter] at end 0 - 13496 - 13497 I'M TYPING HERE AND PRESSING [ENTER] AT END 0~?.N=?(?~? ?????}????@??????~? [garble] proc: 0 OUT which is what I'd call for "interactive session" (ignoring the debug statements) - server waits for me to enter a command; it gives its output after it receives a command (and as in this case it exits after first command, so does the starter script as well). Except that, I'd like to not have buffered input, but sent character by character (meaning the above session should exit after first key press, and print out a single letter only - which is what I expected stty raw would help with, but it doesn't: it just kills reaction to both Enter and Ctrl-C :) ) I was just wandering if there already is an existing command (akin to screen in respect to serial devices, I guess) that would accept two such named pipes as arguments, and establish a "terminal" or "shell" like session through them; or would I have to use scripts as above and/or program own 'client' that will behave as a terminal..

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• Is multithreading the right way to go for my case?

  - by Julien Lebosquain

  Hello, I'm currently designing a multi-client / server application. I'm using plain good old sockets because WCF or similar technology is not what I need. Let me explain: it isn't the classical case of a client simply calling a service; all clients can 'interact' with each other by sending a packet to the server, which will then do some action, and possible re-dispatch an answer message to one or more clients. Although doable with WCF, the application will get pretty complex with hundreds of different messages. For each connected client, I'm of course using asynchronous methods to send and receive bytes. I've got the messages fully working, everything's fine. Except that for each line of code I'm writing, my head just burns because of multithreading issues. Since there could be around 200 clients connected at the same time, I chose to go the fully multithreaded way: each received message on a socket is immediately processed on the thread pool thread it was received, not on a single consumer thread. Since each client can interact with other clients, and indirectly with shared objects on the server, I must protect almost every object that is mutable. I first went with a ReaderWriterLockSlim for each resource that must be protected, but quickly noticed that there are more writes overall than reads in the server application, and switched to the well-known Monitor to simplify the code. So far, so good. Each resource is protected, I have helper classes that I must use to get a lock and its protected resource, so I can't use an object without getting a lock. Moreover, each client has its own lock that is entered as soon as a packet is received from its socket. It's done to prevent other clients from making changes to the state of this client while it has some messages being processed, which is something that will happen frequently. Now, I don't just need to protect resources from concurrent accesses. I must keep every client in sync with the server for some collections I have. One tricky part that I'm currently struggling with is the following: I have a collection of clients. Each client has its own unique ID. When a client connects, it must receive the IDs of every connected client, and each one of them must be notified of the newcomer's ID. When a client disconnects, every other client must know it so that its ID is no longer valid for them. Every client must always have, at a given time, the same clients collection as the server so that I can assume that everybody knows everybody. This way if I'm sending a message to client #1 telling "Client #2 has done something", I know that it will always be correctly interpreted: Client 1 will never wonder "but who is Client 2 anyway?". My first attempt for handling the connection of a new client (let's call it X) was this pseudo-code (remember that newClient is already locked here): lock (clients) { foreach (var client in clients) { lock (client) { client.Send("newClient with id X has connected"); } } clients.Add(newClient); newClient.Send("the list of other clients"); } Now imagine that in the same time, another client has sent a packet that translates into a message that must be broadcasted to every connected client, the pseudo-code will be something like this (remember that the current client - let's call it Y - is already locked here): lock (clients) { foreach (var client in clients) { lock (client) { client.Send("something"); } } } An obvious deadlock occurs here: on one thread X is locked, the clients lock has been entered, started looping through the clients, and at one moment must get Y's lock... which is already acquired on the second thread, itself waiting for the clients collection lock to be released! This is not the only case like this in the server application. There are other collections which must be kept in sync with the clients, some properties on a client can be changed by another one, etc. I tried other types of locks, lock-free mechanisms and a bunch of other things. Either there were obvious deadlocks when I'm using too much locks for safety, or obvious race conditions otherwise. When I finally find a good middle point between the two, it usually comes with very subtle race conditions / dead locks and other multi-threading issues... my head hurts very quickly since for any single line of code I'm writing I have to review almost the whole application to ensure everything will behave correctly with any number of threads. So here's my final question: how would you resolve this specific case, the general case, and more importantly: aren't I going the wrong way here? I have little problems with the .NET framework, C#, simple concurrency or algorithms in general. Still, I'm lost here. I know I could use only one thread processing the incoming requests and everything will be fine. However, that won't scale well at all with more clients... But I'm thinking more and more to go this simple way. What do you think? Thanks in advance to you, StackOverflow people which have taken the time to read this huge question. I really had to explain the whole context if I want to get some help.

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• SINGLE SIGN ON SECURITY THREAT! FACEBOOK access_token broadcast in the open/clear

  - by MOKANA

  Subsequent to my posting there was a remark made that this was not really a question but I thought I did indeed postulate one. So that there is no ambiquity here is the question with a lead in: Since there is no data sent from Facebook during the Canvas Load process that is not at some point divulged, including the access_token, session and other data that could uniquely identify a user, does any one see any other way other than adding one more layer, i.e., a password, sent over the wire via HTTPS along with the access_toekn, that will insure unique untampered with security by the user? Using Wireshark I captured the local broadcast while loading my Canvas Application page. I was hugely surprised to see the access_token broadcast in the open, viewable for any one to see. This access_token is appended to any https call to the Facebook OpenGraph API. Using facebook as a single click log on has now raised huge concerns for me. It is stored in a session object in memory and the cookie is cleared upon app termination and after reviewing the FB.Init calls I saw a lot of HTTPS calls so I assumed the access_token was always encrypted. But last night I saw in the status bar a call from what was simply an http call that included the App ID so I felt I should sniff the Application Canvas load sequence. Today I did sniff the broadcast and in the attached image you can see that there are http calls with the access_token being broadcast in the open and clear for anyone to gain access to. Am I missing something, is what I am seeing and my interpretation really correct. If any one can sniff and get the access_token they can theorically make calls to the Graph API via https, even though the call back would still need to be the site established in Facebook's application set up. But what is truly a security threat is anyone using the access_token for access to their own site. I do not see the value of a single sign on via Facebook if the only thing that was established as secure was the access_token - becuase for what I can see it clearly is not secure. Access tokens that never have an expire date do not change. Access_tokens are different for every user, to access to another site could be held tight to just a single user, but compromising even a single user's data is unacceptable. http://www.creatingstory.com/images/InTheOpen.png Went back and did more research on this: FINDINGS: Went back an re ran the canvas application to verify that it was not any of my code that was not broadcasting. In this call: HTTP GET /connect.php/en_US/js/CacheData HTTP/1.1 The USER ID is clearly visible in the cookie. So USER_ID's are fully visible, but they are already. Anyone can go to pretty much any ones page and hover over the image and see the USER ID. So no big threat. APP_ID are also easily obtainable - but . . . http://www.creatingstory.com/images/InTheOpen2.png The above file clearly shows the FULL ACCESS TOKEN clearly in the OPEN via a Facebook initiated call. Am I wrong. TELL ME I AM WRONG because I want to be wrong about this. I have since reset my app secret so I am showing the real sniff of the Canvas Page being loaded. Additional data 02/20/2011: @ifaour - I appreciate the time you took to compile your response. I am pretty familiar with the OAuth process and have a pretty solid understanding of the signed_request unpacking and utilization of the access_token. I perform a substantial amount of my processing on the server and my Facebook server side flows are all complete and function without any flaw that I know of. The application secret is secure and never passed to the front end application and is also changed regularly. I am being as fanatical about security as I can be, knowing there is so much I don’t know that could come back and bite me. Two huge access_token issues: The issues concern the possible utilization of the access_token from the USER AGENT (browser). During the FB.INIT() process of the Facebook JavaScript SDK, a cookie is created as well as an object in memory called a session object. This object, along with the cookie contain the access_token, session, a secret, and uid and status of the connection. The session object is structured such that is supports both the new OAuth and the legacy flows. With OAuth, the access_token and status are pretty much al that is used in the session object. The first issue is that the access_token is used to make HTTPS calls to the GRAPH API. If you had the access_token, you could do this from any browser: https://graph.facebook.com/220439?access_token=... and it will return a ton of information about the user. So any one with the access token can gain access to a Facebook account. You can also make additional calls to any info the user has granted access to the application tied to the access_token. At first I thought that a call into the GRAPH had to have a Callback to the URL established in the App Setup, but I tested it as mentioned below and it will return info back right into the browser. Adding that callback feature would be a good idea I think, tightens things up a bit. The second issue is utilization of some unique private secured data that identifies the user to the third party data base, i.e., like in my case, I would use a single sign on to populate user information into my database using this unique secured data item (i.e., access_token which contains the APP ID, the USER ID, and a hashed with secret sequence). None of this is a problem on the server side. You get a signed_request, you unpack it with secret, make HTTPS calls, get HTTPS responses back. When a user has information entered via the USER AGENT(browser) that must be stored via a POST, this unique secured data element would be sent via HTTPS such that they are validated prior to data base insertion. However, If there is NO secured piece of unique data that is supplied via the single sign on process, then there is no way to guarantee unauthorized access. The access_token is the one piece of data that is utilized by Facebook to make the HTTPS calls into the GRAPH API. it is considered unique in regards to BOTH the USER and the APPLICATION and is initially secure via the signed_request packaging. If however, it is subsequently transmitted in the clear and if I can sniff the wire and obtain the access_token, then I can pretend to be the application and gain the information they have authorized the application to see. I tried the above example from a Safari and IE browser and it returned all of my information to me in the browser. In conclusion, the access_token is part of the signed_request and that is how the application initially obtains it. After OAuth authentication and authorization, i.e., the USER has logged into Facebook and then runs your app, the access_token is stored as mentioned above and I have sniffed it such that I see it stored in a Cookie that is transmitted over the wire, resulting in there being NO UNIQUE SECURED IDENTIFIABLE piece of information that can be used to support interaction with the database, or in other words, unless there were one more piece of secure data sent along with the access_token to my database, i.e., a password, I would not be able to discern if it is a legitimate call. Luckily I utilized secure AJAX via POST and the call has to come from the same domain, but I am sure there is a way to hijack that. I am totally open to any ideas on this topic on how to uniquely identify my USERS other than adding another layer (password) via this single sign on process or if someone would just share with me that I read and analyzed my data incorrectly and that the access_token is always secure over the wire. Mahalo nui loa in advance.

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• 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Michael Snow

  Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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• Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack upgrade + Windows Anytime Upgrade to Ultimate

  - by krebstar

  Is an install of Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack license upgradeable? Suppose I'm able to install Windows 7 Home Premium on my computer using a Family Pack key. Would I then be able to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate using the Anytime Upgrade option? Considering that the Family Pack only uses one key to activate three PCs, what happens when I upgrade one of those computers with Anytime Upgrade? Would I be able to use the Anytime Upgrade key on all three computers? Or just one computer? Is upgrading this license key even possible?

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• How to resolve "svn: Can't find a temporary directory: Internal error"?

  - by HorusKol

  I have already googled the message, and I have plenty of disk space available on the SVN server (it's about 4% usage of 150 GB). I have noticed that when I try echo $TMPDIR at the command prompt on the SVN server I get nothing. What is making this a little confusing is that I only get this message from one location when I do an svn diff (that I've tested so far) - this error is not coming up when I try from three other computers (one of which is testing against the exact same repository, the other two are different repositories on the same svn server). About the only difference I can see is that the broken working copy is connecting to the server by an IP address where all the others are using a server name (although this resolves over DNS to the same IP Address). I'm hoping that I don't have to scratch the broken working copy and checkout a new one - unfortunately, this is a legacy project and not all changes have been properly revisioned.

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• MS Access Premiere Products Exercise

  - by rynwtts

  I am working with Microsoft Access, Premiere Products Exercises for a college course. I can't seem to get past a specific question. We are working with DBDL and E-R Diagrams. The question is here. Indicate the changes you need to make to the design of the Premiere Products database to support the following situation. A customer is not necessarily represented by a single sales rep but can be represented by several sales reps. when a customer places an order, the sales rep who gets the commission on the order must be one of the collection of sales reps who represents the customer. In the database already each customer is represented by a sales rep. Which yields a one to one relationship. I need to enable a customer to have several sales reps, and make it so that only those sales rep will be eligible for commission upon each order.

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• Need HP recovery partition info

  - by ggambett

  I'm configuring a new HP Pavillion DV4 with a 320 GB disk. I made the recovery DVDs, then did a couple other things (including deleting the recovery partition), and finally decided to restore the system. Unfortunately, the recovery process fails; the three DVDs are read (the recovery program says "Reformatting the Windows partition" and "Copying files required to restore the hard drive") but after it finishes reading the 3rd, and the progress bar reaches 100%, it fails with error 0xe0f00013 - Googling it didn't return anything at all. I'm afraid this may be because I deleted the partitions. So, I'm kindly asking for one of the following, in order of preference, from a HP Pavillion DV4 with a 320 GB hard disk or a similar enough one : 1) A dump of the MBR 2) The type and size of all the partitions in a "new" system so I can try to make a partition table resembling the original one. BTW, I thought the recovery DVDs were supposed to work even if the entire disk was wiped - isn't that the case? Thanks!

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• 401 - Unauthorized On Server 2008 R2 IIS 7.5

  - by mxmissile

  I have a web application deployed to Server 2008 IIS 7.5 box. From remote it gives this error: 401 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials. (remote = desktops on the same LAN) Have tried several remote clients using different browsers, all the same result. (IE, FF, and Chrome) Hitting the application from the desktop of the server itself works flawlessly. The application is using Anonymous Authentication. The application is written in .NET 4.0 Asp.Net using the MVC framework. Sysinternals procmon returns these 2 results for each request: FAST IO DISALLOWED and PATH NOT FOUND. I have 2 other MVC apps running fine on the same server. I have checked the security on the folders and they all match. App runs fine on a Server 2008 IIS 7.0 box. Nothing shows up in the Event log on the server related to this. Pulling my hair out here, any troubleshooting tips?

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• IIS7 Windows Server 2008 FTP -> Response: 530 User cannot log in.

  - by RSolberg

  I just launched my first IIS FTP site following many of the tutorials from IIS.NET... I'm using IIS Users and Permissions rather than anonymous and/or basic. This is what I'm seeing while trying to establish the connection... Status: Resolving address of ftp.mydomain.com Status: Connecting to ###.###.##.###:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220 Microsoft FTP Service Command: USER MyFTPUser Response: 331 Password required for MyFTPUser. Command: PASS ******************** Response: 530 User cannot log in. Error: Critical error Error: Could not connect to server

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• SonicPoint AP Clients Not Able To Connect With DHCP

  - by Mike Keller

  This is my first time setting up anything like this so please be gentle. I'm a web developer who fell into setting up a few SonicWall NSA 4200's... I've tried doing as much research on this through Google and ServerFault but haven't been able to hunt down an answer as to what I'm doing wrong. We've got two virtual access points set up here, one that is intended for employees (tied to X2) and the other for guests (tied to X2:V1). We are not using the DHCP server on the NSA 4200, but one already on the network. When a client connects to the employee SSID they are able to obtain a IP from the network's DHCP server. However when attempting to connect to the guest SSID the client does a search for a DHCP server but can't find one. Any clues, resources, answers would be appreciated.

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• TEMP_PART01 and C drive

  - by SmartLemon

  So we have a Samsung series 9 laptop and it has a 128 GB solid state drive, the problem we are having with it is that it has 4 partitions, one that's 100MB (who knows what for), one thats 40 GB (Primary Windows partition), 60 GB partition (TEMP_PART01) and a microsoft office one. The primary windows partition only has less than, 30 MB left, we want to increase this space, I know that I could just move everything to temp_part01 but we are not quite sure on it. What we are thinking of doing is deleting this partition all together and extending the windows volume. The problem is that the extra partition has 55.7 remaining out of 59.7 GB, which means there is something on it, but it shows up with nothing when we go into it, when we change the settings to show hidden files, but still nothing, I then used CMD to list all the files using dir d: and still no files. So would it be safe to delete it and extend the windows volume? Or what should I do? Here's a screen shot:

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• IIS Permissions or NTFS Permissions?

  - by Jason

  I currently have a Windows Server 2003 setup to serve multiple sites via IIS. One of our directories needs to allow access to only 1 specific AD Security Group. I know there are two ways to accomplish this. One is using IIS to add permissions and the other is to set permissions on the folder/directory itself. A script runs at night and populates the content so users only need read permissions to view it in a browser. My question is which one is preferred?

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