volume shadow copy - Page 556

Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects and for an explanation of branching see Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams. Update 17th May 2010 – We are currently trialling running a single Sprint branch to improve our history. Whenever I setup a new Team Project I implement the basic version control structure. I put “readme.txt” files in the folder structure explaining the different levels, and a solution file called “[Client].[Product].sln” located at “$/[Client]/[Product]/DEV/Main” within version control. Developers should add any projects you need to create to that solution in the format “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly]” and they will automatically be picked up and built automatically when you setup Automated Builds using Team Foundation Build. All test projects need to be done using MSTest to get proper IDE and Team Foundation Build integration out-of-the-box and be named for the assembly that it is testing with a naming convention of “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly].Tests” Here is a description of the folder layout; this content should be replicated in readme files under version control in the relevant locations so that even developers new to the project can see how to do it. Figure: The Team Project level - at this level there should be a folder for each the products that you are building if you are using Areas correctly in TFS 2010. You should try very hard to avoided spaces as these things always end up in a URL eventually e.g. "Code Auditor" should be "CodeAuditor". Figure: Product Level - At this level there should be only 3 folders (DEV, RELESE and SAFE) all of which should be in capitals. These folders represent the three stages of your application production line. Each of them may contain multiple branches but this format leaves all of your branches at the same level. Figure: The DEV folder is where all of the Development branches reside. The DEV folder will contain the "Main" branch and all feature branches is they are being used. The DEV designation specifies that all code in every branch under this folder has not been released or made ready for release. And feature branches MUST merge (Forward Integrate) from Main and stabilise prior to merging (Reverse Integration) back down into Main and being decommissioned. Figure: In the Feature branching scenario only merges are allowed onto Main, no development can be done there. Once we have a mature product it is important that new features being developed in parallel are kept separate. This would most likely be used if we had more than one Scrum team working on a single product. Figure: when we are ready to do a release of our software we will create a release branch that is then stabilised prior to deployment. This protects the serviceability of of our released code allowing developers to fix bugs and re-release an existing version. Figure: All bugs found on a release are fixed on the release. All bugs found in a release are fixed on the release and a new deployment is created. After the deployment is created the bug fixes are then merged (Reverse Integration) into the Main branch. We do this so that we separate out our development from our production ready code. Figure: SAFE or RTM is a read only record of what you actually released. Labels are not immutable so are useless in this circumstance. When we have completed stabilisation of the release branch and we are ready to deploy to production we create a read-only copy of the code for reference. In some cases this could be a regulatory concern, but in most cases it protects the company building the product from legal entanglements based on what you did or did not release. Figure: This allows us to reference any particular version of our application that was ever shipped. In addition I am an advocate of having a single solution with all the Project folders directly under the “Trunk”/”Main” folder and using the full name for the project folders.. Figure: The ideal solution If you must have multiple solutions, because you need to use more than one version of Visual Studio, name the solutions “[Client].[Product][VSVersion].sln” and have it reside in the same folder as the other solution. This makes it easier for Automated build and improves the discoverability of your code and its dependencies. Send me your feedback! Technorati Tags: VS ALM,VSTS Developing,VS 2010,VS 2008,TFS 2010,TFS 2008,TFBS

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Branching and Merging Improvements in TFS2010

- by jehan

Introducing the concept of “first class branches” is a significant improvement as part of the 2010 release with respect to version control. Not only does it help to distinguish between folders and branches, but it enables branch visualizations. Let us see improvements in detail. · In TFS2008, you don’t know which of the folders are Branches: All folders looks the same, all have the folder icon. Now, In TFS 2010 there is a new icon that shows which of the folder is a Branch. · There is no visual means to manage branches in TFS2008: You dont have any means to identify which branches are related and the relation type. Now, In TFS 2010 you have visual tools to see the Branches Hierarchy. In order to see a Branch Hierarchy just Right Click the Branch and choose: Branching and Merging –> View Hierarchy · In TFS2008, there is no option to track changes path between the Branches: If you have made a merge in a Branch you can’t track from which Branch this Merge came from. Now, you have the tools that shows the path of change between the Branches, you can also see where change was added on a timeline. In order to track a change do the following: Step1: Right click the Branch and click View History Step 2: Choose a changeset to track and click the “Track Changeset” button. Step 3: Choose the branches that will be in the view and click “Visualize”. In above visual, you can see that Changesets 108,109,110 and 119 where merged from Main to Release1.0 Branch and then “Release_1.0” Branched to “Dev1.0. Step4: You can also see the Merges on a Timeline by clicking on the “Timeline Tracking” button. Creating New Branches: In TFS 2010, the creation of branches has been streamlined a bit from the process in 2008. In 2008, creating a new branch was like every other action in the system – changes were pended on the client, and then checked in to the server. Because of this creating new branch in TFS2008 was time-consuming process. In TFS2010, the step where changes are pended has been bypassed and now performing the branch creation is entirely on the server. With this approach, the round trip time for downloading a copy of each file on the branch and then uploading each file again has been eliminated. Note: In TFS2010, the new branch will be created and committed as a single operation on the server. Pending changes will not be created, it doesn’t require a check-in as it will be carried out as a single operation and it’s not possible to cancel. Manage Branch Permissions: The properties view for branches is also different than that of ordinary folders or file, containing some metadata for the branch, relationship information, and permissions for the branch. In TFS2008, the users who have checkout and Check-in permissions can create a branch. But, In TFS2010 you can control the permissions for Branches using Manage Branch permissions. Reparent option in TFS2010: In TFS2008, if we have two branches which don’t have parent-child relation and we want perform merge between these two branches then we have to perform baseless merge using tf.exe command line. I have two branches Release_1.0 and Dev1.0_F2 which don’t have any relation between them, that’s why when I click on merge option in Release_1.0, in Target Branch it’s not showing Dev1.0_F2 branch to perform the merges. Let us see what can we do for this in TFS2010, first perform a TFS baseless merge to establish a relationship between the parent branch and the child branches. It will only merge the folder, not its contents. TFS baseless merges are performed via the command line using VS2010 command prompt and do the following: tf merge /baseless <ParentBranch> <childBranch> Check in your pending changes. It will create the link between the branches but the relationships are still not completed. Now, select the child branch in Source Control Explorer and from the File menu choose Source Control –> Branching and Merging –> Reparent. In the dialog box, choose the appropriate branch as the new parent. Click Reparent and then go to parent branch and click merge. Now, will see that in Target Branch option Dev1.0_F2 branch is added. Converting Folders to Branches and Branches to Folders: You can convert any Folder as Branch from Context Menu by performing right click on the folderàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch. In similar way, you can convert the Branches to Folder using Convert to Folder option available in File Menu (FileàSource ControlàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch). This option is not available in context menu.

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How to setup SyntaxHighlighter with GeeksWithBlogs in about 10 minutes.

- by mbcrump

SyntaxHighlighter is a fully functional self-contained code syntax highlighter developed in JavaScript. Below is a sample of what it looks like in your blog. class Test { static void Main() { System.Console.WriteLine("Sample SyntaxHighlighter"); } } This tutorial will help you setup SyntaxHighlighter with GeeksWithBlogs.net in about 10 minutes. Even though this guide is specifically for GWB, you can use it on any other hosting provider that does not allow you to upload custom CSS/JavaScript. It is recommended that if you are using LiveWriter to go ahead and download Code Snippet with SyntaxHighlighter Support to integrate this functionality within Live Writer. 1) Log into GWB and select Options->Configure Now under the Custom CSS insert the following code at the top of the textbox: @import url("http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css"); @import url("http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css"); Please note that you can change the default theme by changing the shThemeDefault.css to one listed below: shThemeDefault.css shThemeDjango.css shThemeEmacs.css shThemeFadeToGrey.css shThemeMidnight.css shThemeRDark.css 2) Under the Static News/Announcements insert the following code at the top: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js"></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script language='javascript'> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> Please note that this will only give you support for Java, JavaScript and C Sharp. If you want more languages like Ruby and SQL. Then add the proper tags listed below. The reason that I didn’t add them is because I do not want to load languages that I will not be blogging about. <link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPhp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPython.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushRuby.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPerl.js' type='text/javascript'></script> <script language='javascript'> SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.all(); </script> 3) Now install Code Snippet with SyntaxHighlighter Support and launch Windows Live Writer. Click on the PreCode Snippet plugin add copy/paste your code into the windows. Make sure you select “PRE” and the Language that you are using. It should look similar to the following screenshot. After you finish editing the post, hit publish and your code should look nice and neat like the example shown earlier.

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Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 14 – Insuring Integrity & Availability

- by MarkPearl

After reading this section you should be able to Identify the characteristics of a network that keep data safe from loss or damage Protect an enterprise-wide network from viruses Explain network and system level fault tolerance techniques Discuss issues related to network backup and recovery strategies Describe the components of a useful disaster recovery plan and the options for disaster contingencies What are integrity and availability? Integrity – the soundness of a networks programs, data, services, devices, and connections Availability – How consistently and reliably a file or system can be accessed by authorized personnel A number of phenomena can compromise both integrity and availability including… security breaches natural disasters malicious intruders power flaws human error users etc Although you cannot predict every type of vulnerability, you can take measures to guard against the most damaging events. The following are some guidelines… Allow only network administrators to create or modify NOS and application system users. Monitor the network for unauthorized access or changes Record authorized system changes in a change management system’ Install redundant components Perform regular health checks on the network Check system performance, error logs, and the system log book regularly Keep backups Implement and enforce security and disaster recovery policies These are just some of the basics… Malware Malware refers to any program or piece of code designed to intrude upon or harm a system or its resources. Types of Malware… Boot sector viruses Macro viruses File infector viruses Worms Trojan Horse Network Viruses Bots Malware characteristics Some common characteristics of Malware include… Encryption Stealth Polymorphism Time dependence Malware Protection There are various tools available to protect you from malware called anti-malware software. These monitor your system for indications that a program is performing potential malware operations. A number of techniques are used to detect malware including… Signature Scanning Integrity Checking Monitoring unexpected file changes or virus like behaviours It is important to decide where anti-malware tools will be installed and find a balance between performance and protection. There are several general purpose malware policies that can be implemented to protect your network including… Every compute in an organization should be equipped with malware detection and cleaning software that regularly runs Users should not be allowed to alter or disable the anti-malware software Users should know what to do in case the anti-malware program detects a malware virus Users should be prohibited from installing any unauthorized software on their systems System wide alerts should be issued to network users notifying them if a serious malware virus has been detected. Fault Tolerance Besides guarding against malware, another key factor in maintaining the availability and integrity of data is fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is the ability for a system to continue performing despite an unexpected hardware or software malfunction. Fault tolerance can be realized in varying degrees, the optimal level of fault tolerance for a system depends on how critical its services and files are to productivity. Generally the more fault tolerant the system, the more expensive it is. The following describe some of the areas that need to be considered for fault tolerance. Environment (Temperature and humidity) Power Topology and Connectivity Servers Storage Power Typical power flaws include Surges – a brief increase in voltage due to lightening strikes, solar flares or some idiot at City Power Noise – Fluctuation in voltage levels caused by other devices on the network or electromagnetic interference Brownout – A sag in voltage for just a moment Blackout – A complete power loss The are various alternate power sources to consider including UPS’s and Generators. UPS’s are found in two categories… Standby UPS – provides continuous power when mains goes down (brief period of switching over) Online UPS – is online all the time and the device receives power from the UPS all the time (the UPS is charged continuously) Servers There are various techniques for fault tolerance with servers. Server mirroring is an option where one device or component duplicates the activities of another. It is generally an expensive process. Clustering is a fault tolerance technique that links multiple servers together to appear as a single server. They share processing and storage responsibilities and if one unit in the cluster goes down, another unit can be brought in to replace it. Storage There are various techniques available including the following… RAID Arrays NAS (Storage (Network Attached Storage) SANs (Storage Area Networks) Data Backup A backup is a copy of data or program files created for archiving or safekeeping. Many different options for backups exist with various media including… These vary in cost and speed. Optical Media Tape Backup External Disk Drives Network Backups Backup Strategy After selecting the appropriate tool for performing your servers backup, devise a backup strategy to guide you through performing reliable backups that provide maximum data protection. Questions that should be answered include… What data must be backed up At what time of day or night will the backups occur How will you verify the accuracy of the backups Where and for how long will backup media be stored Who will take responsibility for ensuring that backups occurred How long will you save backups Where will backup and recovery documentation be stored Different backup methods provide varying levels of certainty and corresponding labour cost. There are also different ways to determine which files should be backed up including… Full backup – all data on all servers is copied to storage media Incremental backup – Only data that has changed since the last full or incremental backup is copied to a storage medium Differential backup – Only data that has changed since the last backup is coped to a storage medium Disaster Recovery Disaster recovery is the process of restoring your critical functionality and data after an enterprise wide outage has occurred. A disaster recovery plan is for extreme scenarios (i.e. fire, line fault, etc). A cold site is a place were the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exist but they are not appropriately configured. A warm site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists with some appropriately configured devices. A hot site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists and all are appropriately configured.

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The Linux powered LAN Gaming House

- by sachinghalot

LAN parties offer the enjoyment of head to head gaming in a real-life social environment. In general, they are experiencing decline thanks to the convenience of Internet gaming, but Kenton Varda is a man who takes his LAN gaming very seriously. His LAN gaming house is a fascinating project, and best of all, Linux plays a part in making it all work.Varda has done his own write ups (short, long), so I'm only going to give an overview here. The setup is a large house with 12 gaming stations and a single server computer.The client computers themselves are rack mounted in a server room, and they are linked to the gaming stations on the floor above via extension cables (HDMI for video and audio and USB for mouse and keyboard). Each client computer, built into a 3U rack mount case, is a well specced gaming rig in its own right, sporting an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 560 along with a 60GB SSD drive.Originally, the client computers ran Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows and the games executed under WINE, but Varda had to abandon this scheme. As he explains on his site:"Amazingly, a majority of games worked fine, although many had minor bugs (e.g. flickering mouse cursor, minor rendering artifacts, etc.). Some games, however, did not work, or had bad bugs that made them annoying to play."Subsequently, the gaming computers have been moved onto a more conventional gaming choice, Windows 7. It's a shame that WINE couldn't be made to work, but I can sympathize as it's rare to find modern games that work perfectly and at full native speed. Another problem with WINE is that it tends to suffer from regressions, which is hardly surprising when considering the difficulty of constantly improving the emulation of the Windows API. Varda points out that he preferred working with Linux clients as they were easier to modify and came with less licensing baggage.Linux still runs the server and all of the tools used are open source software. The hardware here is a Intel Xeon E3-1230 with 4GB of RAM. The storage hanging off this machine is a bit more complex than the clients. In addition to the 60GB SSD, it also has 2x1TB drives and a 240GB SDD.When the clients were running Linux, they booted over PXE using a toolchain that will be familiar to anyone who has setup Linux network booting. DHCP pointed the clients to the server which then supplied PXELINUX using TFTP. When booted, file access was accomplished through network block device (NBD). This is a very easy to use system that allows you to serve the contents of a file as a block device over the network. The client computer runs a user mode device driver and the device can be mounted within the file system using the mount command.One snag with offering file access via NBD is that it's difficult to impose any security restrictions on different areas of the file system as the server only sees a single file. The advantage is perfomance as the client operating system simply sees a block device, and besides, these security issues aren't relevant in this setup.Unfortunately, Windows 7 can't use NBD, so, Varda had to switch to iSCSI (which works in both server and client mode under Linux). His network cards are not compliant with this standard when doing a netboot, but fortunately, gPXE came to the rescue, and he boostraps it over PXE. gPXE is also available as an ISO image and is worth knowing about if you encounter an awkward machine that can't manage a network boot. It can also optionally boot from a HTTP server rather than the more traditional TFTP server.According to Varda, booting all 12 machines over the Gigabit Ethernet network is surprisingly fast, and once booted, the machines don't seem noticeably slower than if they were using local storage. Once loaded, most games attempt to load in as much data as possible, filling the RAM, and the the disk and network bandwidth required is small. It's worth noting that these are aspects of this project that might differ from some other thin client scenarios.At time of writing, it doesn't seem as though the local storage of the client machines is being utilized. Instead, the clients boot into Windows from an image on the server that contains the operating system and the games themselves. It uses the copy on write feature of LVM so that any writes from a client are added to a differencing image allocated to that client. As the administrator, Varda can log into the Linux server and authorize changes to the master image for updates etc.SummaryOverall, Varda estimates the total cost of the project at about $40,000, and of course, he needed a property that offered a large physical space in order to house the computers and the gaming workstations. Obviously, this project has stark differences to most thin client projects. The balance between storage, network usage, GPU power and security would not be typical of an office installation, for example. The only letdown is that WINE proved to be insufficiently compatible to run a wide variety of modern games, but that is, perhaps, asking too much of it, and hats off to Varda for trying to make it work.

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Caveat utilitor - Can I run two versions of Microsoft Project side-by-side?

- by Martin Hinshelwood

A number of out customers have asked if there are any problems in installing and running multiple versions of Microsoft Project on a single client. Although this is a case of Caveat utilitor (Let the user beware), as long as the user understands and accepts the issues that can occur then they can do this. Although Microsoft provide the ability to leave old versions of Office products (except Outlook) on your client when you are installing a new version of the product they certainly do not endorse doing so. Figure: For Project you can choose to keep the old stuff That being the case I would have preferred that they put a “(NOT RECOMMENDED)” after the options to impart that knowledge to the rest of us, but they did not. The default and recommended behaviour is for the newer version installer to remove the older versions. Of course this does not apply in the revers. There are no forward compatibility packs for Office. There are a number of negative behaviours (or bugs) that can occur in this configuration: There is only one MS Project In Windows a file extension can only be associated with a single program. In this case, MPP files can be associated with only one version of winproj.exe. The executables are in different folders so if a user double-clicks a Project file on the desktop, file explorer, or Outlook email, Windows will launch the winproj.exe associated with MPP and then load the MPP file. There are problems associated with this situation and in some cases workarounds. The user double-clicks on a Project 2010 file, Project 2007 launches but is unable to open the file because it is a newer version. The workaround is for the user to launch Project 2010 from the Start menu then open the file. If the file is attached to an email they will need to first drag the file to the desktop. All your linked MS Project files need to be of the same version There are a number of problems that occur when people use on Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. The three common uses of OLE are: for inserted projects where a Master project contains sub-projects and each sub-project resides in its own MPP file shared resource pools where multiple MPP files share a common resource pool kept in a single MPP file cross-project links where a task or milestone in one MPP file has a predecessor/successor relationship with a task or milestone in a different MPP file What I’ve seen happen before is that if you are running in a version of Project that is not associated with the MPP extension and then try and activate an OLE link then Project tries to launch the other version of Project. Things start getting very confused since different MPP files are being controlled by different versions of Project running at the same time. I haven’t tried this in awhile so I can’t give you exact symptoms but I suspect that if Project 2010 is involved the symptoms will be different then in a Project 2003/2007 scenario. I’ve noticed that Project 2010 gives different error messages for the exact same problem when it occurs in Project 2003 or 2007. -Anonymous The recommendation would be either not to use this feature if you have to have multiple versions of Project installed or to use only a single version of Project. You may get unexpected negative behaviours if you are using shared resource pools or resource pools even when you are not running multiple versions as I have found that they can get broken very easily. If you need these thing then it is probably best to use Project Server as it was created to solve many of these specific issues. Note: I would not even allow multiple people to access a network copy of a Project file because of the way Windows locks files in write mode. This can cause write-locks that get so bad a server restart is required I’ve seen user’s files get write-locked to the point where the only resolution is to reboot the server. Changing the default version to run for an extension So what if you want to change the default association from Project 2007 to Project 2010? Figure: “Control Panel | Folder Options | Change the file associated with a file extension” Windows normally only lists the last version installed for a particular extension. You can select a specific version by selecting the program you want to change and clicking “Change program… | Browse…” and then selecting the .exe you want to use on the file system. Figure: You will need to select the exact version of “winproj.exe” that you want to run Conclusion Although it is possible to run multiple versions of Project on one system in the main it does not really make sense.

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Memento with optional state?

- by Korey Hinton

EDIT: As pointed out by Steve Evers and pdr, I am not correctly implementing the Memento pattern, my design is actually State pattern. Menu Program I built a console-based menu program with multiple levels that selects a particular test to run. Each level more precisely describes the operation. At any level you can type back to go back one level (memento). Level 1: Server Type? [1] Server A [2] Server B Level 2: Server environment? [1] test [2] production Level 3: Test type? [1] load [2] unit Level 4: Data Collection? [1] Legal docs [2] Corporate docs Level 4.5 (optional): Load Test Type [2] Multi TIF [2] Single PDF Level 5: Command Type? [1] Move [2] Copy [3] Remove [4] Custom Level 6: Enter a keyword [setup, cleanup, run] Design States PROBLEM: Right now the STATES enum is the determining factor as to what state is BACK and what state is NEXT yet it knows nothing about what the current memento state is. Has anyone experienced a similar issue and found an effective way to handle mementos with optional state? static enum STATES { SERVER, ENVIRONMENT, TEST_TYPE, COLLECTION, COMMAND_TYPE, KEYWORD, FINISHED } Possible Solution (Not-flexible) In reference to my code below, every case statement in the Menu class could check the state of currentMemo and then set the STATE (enum) accordingly to pass to the Builder. However, this doesn't seem flexible very flexible to change and I'm struggling to see an effective way refactor the design. class Menu extends StateConscious { private State state; private Scanner reader; private ServerUtils utility; Menu() { state = new State(); reader = new Scanner(System.in); utility = new ServerUtils(); } // Recurring menu logic public void startPromptingLoop() { List<State> states = new ArrayList<>(); states.add(new State()); boolean redoInput = false; boolean userIsDone = false; while (true) { // get Memento from last loop Memento currentMemento = states.get(states.size() - 1) .saveMemento(); if (currentMemento == null) currentMemento = new Memento.Builder(0).build(); if (!redoInput) System.out.println(currentMemento.prompt); redoInput = false; // prepare Memento for next loop Memento nextMemento = null; STATES state = STATES.values()[states.size() - 1]; // get user input String selection = reader.nextLine(); switch (selection) { case "exit": reader.close(); return; // only escape case "quit": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); break; case "back": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(previous(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); if (states.size() <= 1) { states.remove(0); } else { states.remove(states.size() - 1); states.remove(states.size() - 1); } break; case "1": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "2": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "3": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "4": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; default: if (state.equals(STATES.CATEGORY)) { String command = selection; System.out.println("Executing " + command + " command on: " + currentMemento.type + " " + currentMemento.environment); utility.executeCommand(currentMemento.nickname, command); userIsDone = true; states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else if (state.equals(STATES.KEYWORD)) { nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else { redoInput = true; System.out.println("give it another try"); continue; } break; } if (userIsDone) { // start the recurring menu over from the beginning for (int i = 0; i < states.size(); i++) { if (i != 0) { states.remove(i); // remove all except first } } reader = new Scanner(System.in); this.state = new State(); userIsDone = false; } if (!redoInput) { this.state.restoreMemento(nextMemento); states.add(this.state); } } } }

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Death March

- by Nick Harrison

It is a horrible sight to watch a project fail. There are few things as bad. Watching a project fail regardless of the reason is almost like sitting in a room with a "Dementor" from Harry Potter. It will literally suck all of the life and joy out of the room. Nearly every project that I have seen fail has failed because of political challenges or management challenges. Sometimes there are technical challenges that bring a project to its knees, but usually projects fail for less technical reasons. Here a few observations about projects failing for political reasons. Both the client and the consultants have to be committed to seeing the project succeed. Put simply, you cannot solve a problem when the primary stake holders do not truly want it solved. This could come from a consultant being more interested in extended the engagement. It could come from a client being afraid of what will happen to them once the problem is solved. It could come from disenfranchised stake holders. Sometimes a project is beset on all sides. When you find yourself working on a project that has this kind of threat, do all that you can to constrain the disruptive influences of the bad apples. If their influence cannot be constrained, you truly have no choice but to move on to a new project. Tough choices have to be made to make a project successful. These choices will affect everyone involved in the project. These choices may involve users not getting a change request through that they want. Developers may not get to use the tools that they want. Everyone may have to put in more hours that they originally planned. Steps may be skipped. Compromises will be made, but if everyone stays committed to the end goal, you can still be successful. If individuals start feeling disgruntled or resentful of the compromises reached, the project can easily be derailed. When everyone is not working towards a common goal, it is like driving with one foot on the break and one foot on the accelerator. Not only will you not get to where you are planning, you will also damage the car and possibly the passengers as well. It is important to always keep the end result in mind. Regardless of the development methodology being followed, the end goal is not comprehensive documentation. In all cases, it is working software. Comprehensive documentation is nice but useless if the software doesn't work. You can never get so distracted by the next goal that you fail to meet the current goal. Most projects are ultimately marathons. This means that the pace must be sustainable. Regardless of the temptations, you cannot burn the team alive. Processes will fail. Technology will get outdated. Requirements will change, but your people will adapt and learn and grow. If everyone on the team from the most senior analyst to the most junior recruit trusts and respects each other, there is no challenge that they cannot overcome. When everyone involved faces challenges with the attitude "This is my project and I will not let it fail" "You are my teammate and I will not let you fail", you will in fact not fail. When you find a team that embraces this attitude, protect it at all cost. Edward Yourdon wrote a book called Death March. In it, he included a graph for categorizing Death March project types based on the Happiness of the Team and the Chances of Success. Chances are we have all worked on Death March projects. We will all most likely work on more Death March projects in the future. To a certain extent, they seem to be inevitable, but they should never be suicide or ugly. Ideally, they can all be "Mission Impossible" where everyone works hard, has fun, and knows that there is good chance that they will succeed. If you are ever lucky enough to work on such a project, you will know that sense of pride that comes from the eventual success. You will recognize a profound bond with the team that you worked with. Chances are it will change your life or at least your outlook on life. If you have not already read this book, get a copy and study it closely. It will help you survive and make the most out of your next Death March project.

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Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise, Part II

- by dbayard

Part II – Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise In the first post in this series (see https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/solving_big_problems_with_oracle), we showed how you can use R to perform historical rate of return calculations against investment data sourced from a spreadsheet. We demonstrated the calculations against sample data for a small set of accounts. While this worked fine, in the real-world the problem is much bigger because the amount of data is much bigger. So much bigger that our approach in the previous post won’t scale to meet the real-world needs. From our previous post, here are the challenges we need to conquer: The actual data that needs to be used lives in a database, not in a spreadsheet The actual data is much, much bigger- too big to fit into the normal R memory space and too big to want to move across the network The overall process needs to run fast- much faster than a single processor The actual data needs to be kept secured- another reason to not want to move it from the database and across the network And the process of calculating the IRR needs to be integrated together with other database ETL activities, so that IRR’s can be calculated as part of the data warehouse refresh processes In this post, we will show how we moved from sample data environment to working with full-scale data. This post is based on actual work we did for a financial services customer during a recent proof-of-concept. Getting started with the Database At this point, we have some sample data and our IRR function. We were at a similar point in our customer proof-of-concept exercise- we had sample data but we did not have the full customer data yet. So our database was empty. But, this was easily rectified by leveraging the transparency features of Oracle R Enterprise (see https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/analyzing_big_data_using_the). The following code shows how we took our sample data SimpleMWRRData and easily turned it into a new Oracle database table called IRR_DATA via ore.create(). The code also shows how we can access the database table IRR_DATA as if it was a normal R data.frame named IRR_DATA. If we go to sql*plus, we can also check out our new IRR_DATA table: At this point, we now have our sample data loaded in the database as a normal Oracle table called IRR_DATA. So, we now proceeded to test our R function working with database data. As our first test, we retrieved the data from a single account from the IRR_DATA table, pull it into local R memory, then call our IRR function. This worked. No SQL coding required! Going from Crawling to Walking Now that we have shown using our R code with database-resident data for a single account, we wanted to experiment with doing this for multiple accounts. In other words, we wanted to implement the split-apply-combine technique we discussed in our first post in this series. Fortunately, Oracle R Enterprise provides a very scalable way to do this with a function called ore.groupApply(). You can read more about ore.groupApply() here: https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/analyzing_big_data_using_the1 Here is an example of how we ask ORE to take our IRR_DATA table in the database, split it by the ACCOUNT column, apply a function that calls our SimpleMWRR() calculation, and then combine the results. (If you are following along at home, be sure to have installed our myIRR package on your database server via “R CMD INSTALL myIRR”). The interesting thing about ore.groupApply is that the calculation is not actually performed in my desktop R environment from which I am running. What actually happens is that ore.groupApply uses the Oracle database to perform the work. And the Oracle database is what actually splits the IRR_DATA table by ACCOUNT. Then the Oracle database takes the data for each account and sends it to an embedded R engine running on the database server to apply our R function. Then the Oracle database combines all the individual results from the calls to the R function. This is significant because now the embedded R engine only needs to deal with the data for a single account at a time. Regardless of whether we have 20 accounts or 1 million accounts or more, the R engine that performs the calculation does not care. Given that normal R has a finite amount of memory to hold data, the ore.groupApply approach overcomes the R memory scalability problem since we only need to fit the data from a single account in R memory (not all of the data for all of the accounts). Additionally, the IRR_DATA does not need to be sent from the database to my desktop R program. Even though I am invoking ore.groupApply from my desktop R program, because the actual SimpleMWRR calculation is run by the embedded R engine on the database server, the IRR_DATA does not need to leave the database server- this is both a performance benefit because network transmission of large amounts of data take time and a security benefit because it is harder to protect private data once you start shipping around your intranet. Another benefit, which we will discuss in a few paragraphs, is the ability to leverage Oracle database parallelism to run these calculations for dozens of accounts at once. From Walking to Running ore.groupApply is rather nice, but it still has the drawback that I run this from a desktop R instance. This is not ideal for integrating into typical operational processes like nightly data warehouse refreshes or monthly statement generation. But, this is not an issue for ORE. Oracle R Enterprise lets us run this from the database using regular SQL, which is easily integrated into standard operations. That is extremely exciting and the way we actually did these calculations in the customer proof. As part of Oracle R Enterprise, it provides a SQL equivalent to ore.groupApply which it refers to as “rqGroupEval”. To use rqGroupEval via SQL, there is a bit of simple setup needed. Basically, the Oracle Database needs to know the structure of the input table and the grouping column, which we are able to define using the database’s pipeline table function mechanisms. Here is the setup script: At this point, our initial setup of rqGroupEval is done for the IRR_DATA table. The next step is to define our R function to the database. We do that via a call to ORE’s rqScriptCreate. Now we can test it. The SQL you use to run rqGroupEval uses the Oracle database pipeline table function syntax. The first argument to irr_dataGroupEval is a cursor defining our input. You can add additional where clauses and subqueries to this cursor as appropriate. The second argument is any additional inputs to the R function. The third argument is the text of a dummy select statement. The dummy select statement is used by the database to identify the columns and datatypes to expect the R function to return. The fourth argument is the column of the input table to split/group by. The final argument is the name of the R function as you defined it when you called rqScriptCreate(). The Real-World Results In our real customer proof-of-concept, we had more sophisticated calculation requirements than shown in this simplified blog example. For instance, we had to perform the rate of return calculations for 5 separate time periods, so the R code was enhanced to do so. In addition, some accounts needed a time-weighted rate of return to be calculated, so we extended our approach and added an R function to do that. And finally, there were also a few more real-world data irregularities that we needed to account for, so we added logic to our R functions to deal with those exceptions. For the full-scale customer test, we loaded the customer data onto a Half-Rack Exadata X2-2 Database Machine. As our half-rack had 48 physical cores (and 96 threads if you consider hyperthreading), we wanted to take advantage of that CPU horsepower to speed up our calculations. To do so with ORE, it is as simple as leveraging the Oracle Database Parallel Query features. Let’s look at the SQL used in the customer proof: Notice that we use a parallel hint on the cursor that is the input to our rqGroupEval function. That is all we need to do to enable Oracle to use parallel R engines. Here are a few screenshots of what this SQL looked like in the Real-Time SQL Monitor when we ran this during the proof of concept (hint: you might need to right-click on these images to be able to view the images full-screen to see the entire image): From the above, you can notice a few things (numbers 1 thru 5 below correspond with highlighted numbers on the images above. You may need to right click on the above images and view the images full-screen to see the entire image): The SQL completed in 110 seconds (1.8minutes) We calculated rate of returns for 5 time periods for each of 911k accounts (the number of actual rows returned by the IRRSTAGEGROUPEVAL operation) We accessed 103m rows of detailed cash flow/market value data (the number of actual rows returned by the IRR_STAGE2 operation) We ran with 72 degrees of parallelism spread across 4 database servers Most of our 110seconds was spent in the “External Procedure call” event On average, we performed 8,200 executions of our R function per second (110s/911k accounts) On average, each execution was passed 110 rows of data (103m detail rows/911k accounts) On average, we did 41,000 single time period rate of return calculations per second (each of the 8,200 executions of our R function did rate of return calculations for 5 time periods) On average, we processed over 900,000 rows of database data in R per second (103m detail rows/110s) R + Oracle R Enterprise: Best of R + Best of Oracle Database This blog post series started by describing a real customer problem: how to perform a lot of calculations on a lot of data in a short period of time. While standard R proved to be a very good fit for writing the necessary calculations, the challenge of working with a lot of data in a short period of time remained. This blog post series showed how Oracle R Enterprise enables R to be used in conjunction with the Oracle Database to overcome the data volume and performance issues (as well as simplifying the operations and security issues). It also showed that we could calculate 5 time periods of rate of returns for almost a million individual accounts in less than 2 minutes. In a future post, we will take the same R function and show how Oracle R Connector for Hadoop can be used in the Hadoop world. In that next post, instead of having our data in an Oracle database, our data will live in Hadoop and we will how to use the Oracle R Connector for Hadoop and other Oracle Big Data Connectors to move data between Hadoop, R, and the Oracle Database easily.

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Automating custom software installation in a zone

- by mgerdts

In Solaris 11, the internals of zone installation are quite different than they were in Solaris 10. This difference allows the administrator far greater control of what software is installed in a zone. The rules in Solaris 10 are simple and inflexible: if it is installed in the global zone and is not specifically excluded by package metadata from being installed in a zone, it is installed in the zone. In Solaris 11, the rules are still simple, but are much more flexible: the packages you tell it to install and the packages on which they depend will be installed. So, where does the default list of packages come from? From the AI (auto installer) manifest, of course. The default AI manifest is /usr/share/auto_install/manifest/zone_default.xml. Within that file you will find: <software_data action="install"> <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name> </software_data> So, the default installation will install pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server. Cool. What is that? You can figure out what is in the package by looking for it in the repository with your web browser (click the manifest link), or use pkg(1). In this case, it is a group package (pkg:/group/), so we know that it just has a bunch of dependencies to name the packages that really wants installed. $ pkg contents -t depend -o fmri -s fmri -r solaris-small-server FMRI compress/bzip2 compress/gzip compress/p7zip ... terminal/luit terminal/resize text/doctools text/doctools/ja text/less text/spelling-utilities web/wget If you would like to see the entire manifest from the command line, use pkg contents -r -m solaris-small-server. Let's suppose that you want to install a zone that also has mercurial and a full-fledged installation of vim rather than just the minimal vim-core that is part of solaris-small-server. That's pretty easy. First, copy the default AI manifest somewhere where you will edit it and make it writable. # cp /usr/share/auto_install/manifest/zone_default.xml ~/myzone-ai.xml # chmod 644 ~/myzone-ai.xml Next, edit the file, changing the software_data section as follows: <software_data action="install"> <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name> <name>pkg:/developer/versioning/mercurial</name> <name>pkg:/editor/vim</name> </software_data> To figure out the names of the packages, either search the repository using your browser, or use a command like pkg search hg. Now we are all ready to install the zone. If it has not yet been configured, that must be done as well. # zonecfg -z myzone 'create; set zonepath=/zones/myzone' # zoneadm -z myzone install -m ~/myzone-ai.xml A ZFS file system has been created for this zone. Progress being logged to /var/log/zones/zoneadm.20111113T004303Z.myzone.install Image: Preparing at /zones/myzone/root. Install Log: /system/volatile/install.15496/install_log AI Manifest: /tmp/manifest.xml.XfaWpE SC Profile: /usr/share/auto_install/sc_profiles/enable_sci.xml Zonename: myzone Installation: Starting ... Creating IPS image Installing packages from: solaris origin: http://localhost:1008/solaris/54453f3545de891d4daa841ddb3c844fe8804f55/ DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 169/169 34047/34047 185.6/185.6 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 46498/46498 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 169/169 Image State Update Phase 2/2 Installation: Succeeded Note: Man pages can be obtained by installing pkg:/system/manual done. Done: Installation completed in 531.813 seconds. Next Steps: Boot the zone, then log into the zone console (zlogin -C) to complete the configuration process. Log saved in non-global zone as /zones/myzone/root/var/log/zones/zoneadm.20111113T004303Z.myzone.install Now, for a few things that I've seen people trip over: Ignore that bit about man pages - it's wrong. Man pages are already installed so long as the right facet is set properly. And that's a topic for another blog entry. If you boot the zone then just use zlogin myzone, you will see that services you care about haven't started and that svc:/milestone/config:default is starting. That is because you have not yet logged into the console with zlogin -C myzone. If the zone has been booted for more than a very short while when you first connect to the zone console, it will seem like the console is hung. That's not really the case - hit ^L (control-L) to refresh the sysconfig(1M) screen that is prompting you for information.

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How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

- by alexrussell

Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, September 29, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, September 29, 2012Popular ReleasesWindows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryPDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.4: Session name is displayed in the UI. Changes data directory for clickonce deployment so that sessions files are persisted between versions. Added a delete button in the sessions list window. Allow opening of the sessions local folder from the session list widow. Display the session name in the main window Ability to select which diablo process to hook up to when pressing new () function BUT only if multi-process support is selected in the generals settings tab menu. Session picker...WPUtils: WPUtils 1.2: Just fixed an issue related to isolated storage path for ChoosePhotoBehavior. Specifically CreateDirectory method only accepts relative path, but was given a "/photos/" path which would result in exception. Please make sure you have this fix if you are using ChoosePhotoBehavior! NOTE: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 or higher is required.CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogFree Aspx Image Gallery: Free Aspx Image Gallery Release V1: This is first basic release of my free aspx image gallery project. It is free to use and modify by the user without any need of providing any credit to me.Simple Microsoft Excel Document Converter (Convert To XLS, XLSX, PDF, XPS): ExcelDocConverter 0.1 Beta: Initial Release Microsoft Excel Documents Converter. Microsoft Excel 1997-2003 (XLS) Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 (XLSX) Portable Document Format (PDF) Microsoft XPS Document (XPS) Difference between NET2.0 and NET3.5 This program uses .NET Framework runtime library to run. Basically, they are no differences. Only the runtime library version is different. For older computers, i.e. Windows XP, might not have .NET Framework 3.5 installed, then use NET2.0 in stead. But, some Windows XP SP2 mig...Chaos games: Chaos games: Small app for generating fractals using chaos games[ITFA GROUP] CODE GENER: Code Gener 3.0 Final (Professional for .NET): Code Gener 3.0 Final (Professional for .NET) ReleaseTumblen3: tumblen3 Version27Sep2012: updated: instagram viewerVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.16: Changelog for 2.2.16 (32bit and 64bit) Now a standalone remote client also available to control the Engine remotely. 1. Added support for remote connections for status and configuration. MCEBuddy now uses port 23332. The remote server name, remote server port and local server port can be updated from the MCEBuddy.conf file BUT the Service or GUI needs to be restarted (i.e. reboot or restart service or restart program) for it to take effect. Refer to documentation for more details http://mce...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.1: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. This release uses Entity Framework 5 for data access and Ninject 3 for dependency injection. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 6): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 5 Added separate samples download with .vsix dependencies instead of source dependencies Support for FreeWheel SmartXML ad responses Support for Smooth Streaming SDK DownloaderPlugins Support for VMAP and TTML polling for live scenarios Support for custom smooth streaming byte stream and scheme handlers Support for new play time and position tracking plugin Added IsLiveChanged event Added AdaptivePlugin.MaxBitrate property Add...New Projects1325: amosaidhauidhaudhawud1326: sefsefsfsfefAggravation: A computer version of the classic board game Aggravation. This was built in Silverlight 4, and makes use of Prism and Behaviors. bjyxl: A project for practice my exchallange.BombaJob-WP: Windows Phone app for BombaJob.bg website. Available at GitHub too - https://github.com/supudo/BombaJob-WPDNN Module Creator: DNN Module Creator allows you to simply and easily create custom DotNetNuke modules directly from within the DotNetNuke CMS environment.Knuth Bit Operations: C# implementation of most of the bit operations from Volume 4A of "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth.Machine Factory: Machine Factory is a PowerShell script module, which allows you to automate VHD-based deployment and configuration of virtual and physical machines.Neolog-WP: Neolog.bg official app for Windows Phone http://www.neolog.bg/Ngi.Scada: Ngi.ScadaPaging SharePoint ListItems using listitems position: This is a console application which will display the listitems in a paged manner using the SharePoint listitems position.Pentagon-XnaGamePrototype: Pentagon is a small prototype of a Xna and F# top-down shmup, made for an exam of the Master of Game Development in the University of Verona.Sharepoint sample - using feature upgrade: Sample demonstrating the use of SharePoint feature upgrades to add a new web part to existing pages, and add a new page to existing sites.Simple Permutations: A simple static class to provide easy to use extension methods to objects of type IEnumerable<T> which can generate Permutations and Combinations.SP SIN: SP SIN (from SharePoint Script/Style INjector) solves an age-old problem for developers and administrators; how to add script and style sheet resources to ShareTEST56: A simple Testtestproject0928: dfgdfgdThe Escape: The Escape is a 3D-First-Person Game written completely in XNA(C#).TreeViewWebPartForDocLib: ?????????????Web?????。 ????????????。?????、????????????????。Tube++: The one and only youtube HD player /downloader for your PC . Windows XP/ Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Window Server 2003 / Windows server 2008 / Windows Server 2012Unique SMS: This is a Unique School Management System Project.Who Is Watching Your Site: Who Is Watching Your Site is new!WinRTTriggers: WinRT Triggers - much like Expression triggers in Silverlight, but for WinRT Windows Store applications,

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Can not print after upgrading from 12.x to 14.04

- by user318889

After upgrading from V12.04 to V14.04 I am not able to print. I am using an HP LaserJet 400 M451dn. The printer troubleshooter told me that there is no solution to the problem. This is the output of the advanced diagnositc output. (Due to limited space I cut the output!) Can anybody tell me what is going wrong. I am using the printer via USB ? Page 1 (Scheduler not running?): {'cups_connection_failure': False} Page 2 (Is local server publishing?): {'local_server_exporting_printers': False} Page 3 (Choose printer): {'cups_dest': , 'cups_instance': None, 'cups_queue': u'HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn', 'cups_queue_listed': True} Page 4 (Check printer sanity): {'cups_device_uri_scheme': u'hp', 'cups_printer_dict': {'device-uri': u'hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670', 'printer-info': u'Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 400 color M451dn', 'printer-is-shared': True, 'printer-location': u'Pinatubo', 'printer-make-and-model': u'HP LJ 300-400 color M351-M451 Postscript (recommended)', 'printer-state': 4, 'printer-state-message': u'', 'printer-state-reasons': [u'none'], 'printer-type': 8556636, 'printer-uri-supported': u'ipp://localhost:631/printers/HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn'}, 'cups_printer_remote': False, 'hplip_output': (['', '\x1b[01mHP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.14.6)\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01mDevice Information Utility ver. 5.2\x1b[0m', '', 'Copyright (c) 2001-13 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP', 'This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.', 'This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it', 'under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.', '', '', '\x1b[01mhp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670\x1b[0m', '', '\x1b[01mDevice Parameters (dynamic data):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Parameter Value(s) \x1b[0m', ' ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------', ' back-end hp ', " cups-printers ['HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn'] ", ' cups-uri hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670 ', ' dev-file ', ' device-state -1 ', ' device-uri hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670 ', ' deviceid ', ' error-state 101 ', ' host ', ' is-hp True ', ' panel 0 ', ' panel-line1 ', ' panel-line2 ', ' port 1 ', ' serial CNFF308670 ', ' status-code 5002 ', ' status-desc ', '\x1b[01m', 'Model Parameters (static data):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Parameter Value(s) \x1b[0m', ' ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------', ' align-type 0 ', ' clean-type 0 ', ' color-cal-type 0 ', ' copy-type 0 ', ' embedded-server-type 0 ', ' fax-type 0 ', ' fw-download False ', ' icon hp_color_laserjet_cp2025.png ', ' io-mfp-mode 1 ', ' io-mode 1 ', ' io-support 6 ', ' job-storage 0 ', ' linefeed-cal-type 0 ', ' model HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn ', ' model-ui HP LaserJet 400 Color m451dn ', ' model1 HP LaserJet 400 Color M451dn ', ' monitor-type 0 ', ' panel-check-type 0 ', ' pcard-type 0 ', ' plugin 0 ', ' plugin-reason 0 ', ' power-settings 0 ', ' ppd-name lj_300_400_color_m351_m451 ', ' pq-diag-type 0 ', ' r-type 0 ', ' r0-agent1-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent1-sku CE410A/CE410X ', ' r0-agent1-type 1 ', ' r0-agent2-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent2-sku CE411A ', ' r0-agent2-type 4 ', ' r0-agent3-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent3-sku CE413A ', ' r0-agent3-type 5 ', ' r0-agent4-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent4-sku CE412A ', ' r0-agent4-type 6 ', ' scan-src 0 ', ' scan-type 0 ', ' status-battery-check 0 ', ' status-dynamic-counters 0 ', ' status-type 3 ', ' support-released True ', ' support-subtype 2202411 ', ' support-type 2 ', ' support-ver 3.12.2 ', " tech-class ['Postscript'] ", " tech-subclass ['Normal'] ", ' tech-type 4 ', ' usb-pid 3882 ', ' usb-vid 1008 ', ' wifi-config 0 ', '\x1b[01m', 'Status History (most recent first):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Date/Time Code Status Description User Job ID \x1b[0m', ' -------------------- ----- ---------------------------------------- -------- --------', ' 08/21/14 00:07:25 5012 Device communication error richard 0 ', ' 08/20/14 13:42:44 500 Started a print job richard 4214 ', '', '', 'Done.', ''], ['\x1b[35;01mwarning: No display found.\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: hp-info -u/--gui requires Qt4 GUI support. Entering interactive mode.\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: Unable to communicate with device (code=12): hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: Error opening device (Device not found).\x1b[0m', ''], 0), 'is_cups_class': False, 'local_cups_queue_attributes': {'charset-configured': u'utf-8', 'charset-supported': [u'us-ascii', u'utf-8'], 'color-supported': True, 'compression-supported': [u'none', u'gzip'], 'copies-default': 1, 'copies-supported': (1, 9999), 'cups-version': u'1.7.2', 'device-uri': u'hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670', 'document-format-default': u'application/octet-stream', 'document-format-supported': [u'application/octet-stream', u'application/pdf', u'application/postscript', u'application/vnd.adobe-reader-postscript', u'application/vnd.cups-command', u'application/vnd.cups-pdf', u'application/vnd.cups-pdf-banner', u'application/vnd.cups-postscript', u'application/vnd.cups-raw', u'application/vnd.samsung-ps', u'application/x-cshell', u'application/x-csource', u'application/x-perl', u'application/x-shell', u'image/gif', u'image/jpeg', u'image/png', u'image/tiff', u'image/urf', u'image/x-bitmap', u'image/x-photocd', u'image/x-portable-anymap', u'image/x-portable-bitmap', u'image/x-portable-graymap', u'image/x-portable-pixmap', u'image/x-sgi-rgb', u'image/x-sun-raster', u'image/x-xbitmap', u'image/x-xpixmap', u'image/x-xwindowdump', u'text/css', u'text/html', u'text/plain'], 'finishings-default': 3, 'finishings-supported': [3], 'generated-natural-language-supported': [u'en-us'], 'ipp-versions-supported': [u'1.0', u'1.1', u'2.0', u'2.1'], 'ippget-event-life': 15, 'job-creation-attributes-supported': [u'copies', u'finishings', u'ipp-attribute-fidelity', u'job-hold-until', u'job-name', u'job-priority', u'job-sheets', u'media', u'media-col', u'multiple-document-handling', u'number-up', u'output-bin', u'orientation-requested', u'page-ranges', u'print-color-mode', u'print-quality', u'printer-resolution', u'sides'], 'job-hold-until-default': u'no-hold', 'job-hold-until-supported': [u'no-hold', u'indefinite', u'day-time', u'evening', u'night', u'second-shift', u'third-shift', u'weekend'], 'job-ids-supported': True, 'job-k-limit': 0, 'job-k-octets-supported': (0, 470914416), 'job-page-limit': 0, 'job-priority-default': 50, 'job-priority-supported': [100], 'job-quota-period': 0, 'job-settable-attributes-supported': [u'copies', u'finishings', u'job-hold-until', u'job-name', u'job-priority', u'media', u'media-col', u'multiple-document-handling', u'number-up', u'output-bin', u'orientation-requested', u'page-ranges', u'print-color-mode', u'print-quality', u'printer-resolution', u'sides'], 'job-sheets-default': (u'none', u'none'), 'job-sheets-supported': [u'none', u'classified', u'confidential', u'form', u'secret', u'standard', u'topsecret', u'unclassified'], 'jpeg-k-octets-supported': (0, 470914416), 'jpeg-x-dimension-supported': (0, 65535), 'jpeg-y-dimension-supported': (1, 65535), 'marker-change-time': 0, 'media-bottom-margin-supported': [423], 'media-col-default': u'(unknown IPP value tag 0x34)', 'media-col-supported': [u'media-bottom-margin', u'media-left-margin', u'media-right-margin', u'media-size', u'media-source', u'media-top-margin', u'media-type'], 'media-default': u'iso_a4_210x297mm', 'media-left-margin-supported': [423], 'media-right-margin-supported': [423],

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Solaris 11.2: Functional Deprecation

- by alanc

In Solaris 11.1, I updated the system headers to enable use of several attributes on functions, including noreturn and printf format, to give compilers and static analyzers more information about how they are used to give better warnings when building code. In Solaris 11.2, I've gone back in and added one more attribute to a number of functions in the system headers: __attribute__((__deprecated__)). This is used to warn people building software that they’re using function calls we recommend no longer be used. While in many cases the Solaris Binary Compatibility Guarantee means we won't ever remove these functions from the system libraries, we still want to discourage their use. I made passes through both the POSIX and C standards, and some of the Solaris architecture review cases to come up with an initial list which the Solaris architecture review committee accepted to start with. This set is by no means a complete list of Obsolete function interfaces, but should be a reasonable start at functions that are well documented as deprecated and seem useful to warn developers away from. More functions may be flagged in the future as they get deprecated, or if further passes are made through our existing deprecated functions to flag more of them. Header Interface Deprecated by Alternative Documented in <door.h> door_cred(3C) PSARC/2002/188 door_ucred(3C) door_cred(3C) <kvm.h> kvm_read(3KVM), kvm_write(3KVM) PSARC/1995/186 Functions on kvm_kread(3KVM) man page kvm_read(3KVM) <stdio.h> gets(3C) ISO C99 TC3 (Removed in ISO C11), POSIX:2008/XPG7/Unix08 fgets(3C) gets(3C) man page, and just about every gets(3C) reference online from the past 25 years, since the Morris worm proved bad things happen when it’s used. <unistd.h> vfork(2) PSARC/2004/760, POSIX:2001/XPG6/Unix03 (Removed in POSIX:2008/XPG7/Unix08) posix_spawn(3C) vfork(2) man page. <utmp.h> All functions from getutent(3C) man page PSARC/1999/103 utmpx functions from getutentx(3C) man page getutent(3C) man page <varargs.h> varargs.h version of va_list typedef ANSI/ISO C89 standard <stdarg.h> varargs(3EXT) <volmgt.h> All functions PSARC/2005/672 hal(5) API volmgt_check(3VOLMGT), etc. <sys/nvpair.h> nvlist_add_boolean(3NVPAIR), nvlist_lookup_boolean(3NVPAIR) PSARC/2003/587 nvlist_add_boolean_value, nvlist_lookup_boolean_value nvlist_add_boolean(3NVPAIR) & (9F), nvlist_lookup_boolean(3NVPAIR) & (9F). <sys/processor.h> gethomelgroup(3C) PSARC/2003/034 lgrp_home(3LGRP) gethomelgroup(3C) <sys/stat_impl.h> _fxstat, _xstat, _lxstat, _xmknod PSARC/2009/657 stat(2) old functions are undocumented remains of SVR3/COFF compatibility support If the above table is cut off when viewing in the blog, try viewing this standalone copy of the table. To See or Not To See To see these warnings, you will need to be building with either gcc (versions 3.4, 4.5, 4.7, & 4.8 are available in the 11.2 package repo), or with Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4 or later (which like Solaris 11.2, is currently in beta testing). For instance, take this oversimplified (and obviously buggy) implementation of the cat command: #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { char buf[80]; while (gets(buf) != NULL) puts(buf); return 0; } Compiling it with the Studio 12.4 beta compiler will produce warnings such as: % cc -V cc: Sun C 5.13 SunOS_i386 Beta 2014/03/11 % cc gets_test.c "gets_test.c", line 6: warning: "gets" is deprecated, declared in : "/usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h", line 221 The exact warning given varies by compilers, and the compilers also have a variety of flags to either raise the warnings to errors, or silence them. Of couse, the exact form of the output is Not An Interface that can be relied on for automated parsing, just shown for example. gets(3C) is actually a special case — as noted above, it is no longer part of the C Standard Library in the C11 standard, so when compiling in C11 mode (i.e. when __STDC_VERSION__ >= 201112L), the <stdio.h> header will not provide a prototype for it, causing the compiler to complain it is unknown: % gcc -std=c11 gets_test.c gets_test.c: In function ‘main’: gets_test.c:6:5: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘gets’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration] while (gets(buf) != NULL) ^ The gets(3C) function of course is still in libc, so if you ignore the error or provide your own prototype, you can still build code that calls it, you just have to acknowledge you’re taking on the risk of doing so yourself. Solaris Studio 12.4 Beta % cc gets_test.c "gets_test.c", line 6: warning: "gets" is deprecated, declared in : "/usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h", line 221 % cc -errwarn=E_DEPRECATED_ATT gets_test.c "gets_test.c", line 6: "gets" is deprecated, declared in : "/usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h", line 221 cc: acomp failed for gets_test.c This warning is silenced in the 12.4 beta by cc -erroff=E_DEPRECATED_ATT No warning is currently issued by Studio 12.3 & earler releases. gcc 3.4.3 % /usr/sfw/bin/gcc gets_test.c gets_test.c: In function `main': gets_test.c:6: warning: `gets' is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h:221) Warning is completely silenced with gcc -Wno-deprecated-declarations gcc 4.7.3 % /usr/gcc/4.7/bin/gcc gets_test.c gets_test.c: In function ‘main’: gets_test.c:6:5: warning: ‘gets’ is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h:221) [-Wdeprecated-declarations] % /usr/gcc/4.7/bin/gcc -Werror=deprecated-declarations gets_test.c gets_test.c: In function ‘main’: gets_test.c:6:5: error: ‘gets’ is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h:221) [-Werror=deprecated-declarations] cc1: some warnings being treated as errors Warning is completely silenced with gcc -Wno-deprecated-declarations gcc 4.8.2 % /usr/bin/gcc gets_test.c gets_test.c: In function ‘main’: gets_test.c:6:5: warning: ‘gets’ is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h:221) [-Wdeprecated-declarations] while (gets(buf) != NULL) ^ % /usr/bin/gcc -Werror=deprecated-declarations gets_test.c gets_test.c: In function ‘main’: gets_test.c:6:5: error: ‘gets’ is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/iso/stdio_iso.h:221) [-Werror=deprecated-declarations] while (gets(buf) != NULL) ^ cc1: some warnings being treated as errors Warning is completely silenced with gcc -Wno-deprecated-declarations

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VirtualBox appliance for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products

- by chlander

It's been quite awhile since we last blogged. This blog is written by Leif Lourie, a Curriculum Developer for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) products. For the last 8 years, Leif has worked as a Curriculum Developer for many of the telecom-oriented products that Oracle offers. He has been working in the telecom industry for about 25 years and has also worked as a software developer, project manager, and solutions architect. He is currently working on courseware for an upcoming release for one of the Service Delivery Platform products. Thanks to Leif not only for this blog, but for making the VM described in the blog available. Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director To be able to download, install and test a product within a day is many times very important for people that are doing the primary evaluation of a software product. If it takes longer, it will require a bigger effort, like a proof-of-concept project with many people involved. Of course, if the product is chosen for a more thorough test, it will probably happen anyway, but then maybe with focus on integration instead of product features. We have a long tradition of creating complex software that is easy to install and test and we have often been praised for the ease of getting our products up and running. One key for this has been that there has always been an installer for Windows, as well as for the production environments that usually are Unix and Linux. And, the windows installer has, in most cases, been released for developing and testing purposes. Lately, this has changed. Our products are very seldom released for the Windows platform, at all. And even the Linux versions are almost always released for 64-bit systems. This is creating problems for many of the people that want to try out our products, since few have access to a 64-bit Linux system of the right platform. Most of us are using a laptop with Windows or Mac OS. Some of us are using Linux or Solaris, but probably a non certified distribution for the product you want to test. My job, among other things, is to develop hands-on practices for our products. For me, it is crucial to have access to environments for installing and using our products. For this reason I have been using virtual machines for many years.I have a ready-made base system, with the necessary tools installed for all the products I create hands-on practices for. Whenever I start working on hands-on practices for a new product or a new version, I just copy the base system and start working with a clean slate. This saves me a lot of time! Now, I would like to start saving time for my favorite student: You! If you are using our products and regularly test new versions you might benefit from the virtual machine that is now available on Oracle Technology Network: The Virtual Machine for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products. This virtual machine contains an installation of the 64-bit version of Oracle Enterprise Linux, version 6. It also has Oracle Database Express Edition (XE), Oracle Java and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse installed. By using Oracle VM VirtualBox you may use Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris on your laptop. VirtualBox can be installed on top of any of these platforms and give you the ability to run virtual machines in your laptop. After downloading and starting the virtual machine you will also need to download the installation files for the product you want to test; for example Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper or Oracle Communications Online Mediation Controller. In some cases there are lessons and practices available for the products. The freely available courses are listed in Oracle Learning Library as a Collection of Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform Courses. As time goes by, we will make this list collection bigger. Also, the goal is to update the virtual machine about one to two times per year. So you will always be able to get a well maintained virtual machine for the Service Delivery Platform products from us. We Value Your Feedback If you would like to suggest improvements or report issues on any of the product documentation, curriculum, or training produced by the Oracle Communications Information Development team, you can use these channels: Email [email protected]. Post a comment on this blog. Thanks for reading!

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ASMLib

- by wcoekaer

Oracle ASMlib on Linux has been a topic of discussion a number of times since it was released way back when in 2004. There is a lot of confusion around it and certainly a lot of misinformation out there for no good reason. Let me try to give a bit of history around Oracle ASMLib. Oracle ASMLib was introduced at the time Oracle released Oracle Database 10g R1. 10gR1 introduced a very cool important new features called Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). A very simplistic description would be that this is a very sophisticated volume manager for Oracle data. Give your devices directly to the ASM instance and we manage the storage for you, clustered, highly available, redundant, performance, etc, etc... We recommend using Oracle ASM for all database deployments, single instance or clustered (RAC). The ASM instance manages the storage and every Oracle server process opens and operates on the storage devices like it would open and operate on regular datafiles or raw devices. So by default since 10gR1 up to today, we do not interact differently with ASM managed block devices than we did before with a datafile being mapped to a raw device. All of this is without ASMLib, so ignore that one for now. Standard Oracle on any platform that we support (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, ...) does it the exact same way. You start an ASM instance, it handles storage management, all the database instances use and open that storage and read/write from/to it. There are no extra pieces of software needed, including on Linux. ASM is fully functional and selfcontained without any other components. In order for the admin to provide a raw device to ASM or to the database, it has to have persistent device naming. If you booted up a server where a raw disk was named /dev/sdf and you give it to ASM (or even just creating a tablespace without asm on that device with datafile '/dev/sdf') and next time you boot up and that device is now /dev/sdg, you end up with an error. Just like you can't just change datafile names, you can't change device filenames without telling the database, or ASM. persistent device naming on Linux, especially back in those days ways to say it bluntly, a nightmare. In fact there were a number of issues (dating back to 2004) : Linux async IO wasn't pretty persistent device naming including permissions (had to be owned by oracle and the dba group) was very, very difficult to manage system resource usage in terms of open file descriptors So given the above, we tried to find a way to make this easier on the admins, in many ways, similar to why we started working on OCFS a few years earlier - how can we make life easier for the admins on Linux. A feature of Oracle ASM is the ability for third parties to write an extension using what's called ASMLib. It is possible for any third party OS or storage vendor to write a library using a specific Oracle defined interface that gets used by the ASM instance and by the database instance when available. This interface offered 2 components : Define an IO interface - allow any IO to the devices to go through ASMLib Define device discovery - implement an external way of discovering, labeling devices to provide to ASM and the Oracle database instance This is similar to a library that a number of companies have implemented over many years called libODM (Oracle Disk Manager). ODM was specified many years before we introduced ASM and allowed third party vendors to implement their own IO routines so that the database would use this library if installed and make use of the library open/read/write/close,.. routines instead of the standard OS interfaces. PolyServe back in the day used this to optimize their storage solution, Veritas used (and I believe still uses) this for their filesystem. It basically allowed, in particular, filesystem vendors to write libraries that could optimize access to their storage or filesystem.. so ASMLib was not something new, it was basically based on the same model. You have libodm for just database access, you have libasm for asm/database access. Since this library interface existed, we decided to do a reference implementation on Linux. We wrote an ASMLib for Linux that could be used on any Linux platform and other vendors could see how this worked and potentially implement their own solution. As I mentioned earlier, ASMLib and ODMLib are libraries for third party extensions. ASMLib for Linux, since it was a reference implementation implemented both interfaces, the storage discovery part and the IO part. There are 2 components : Oracle ASMLib - the userspace library with config tools (a shared object and some scripts) oracleasm.ko - a kernel module that implements the asm device for /dev/oracleasm/* The userspace library is a binary-only module since it links with and contains Oracle header files but is generic, we only have one asm library for the various Linux platforms. This library is opened by Oracle ASM and by Oracle database processes and this library interacts with the OS through the asm device (/dev/asm). It can install on Oracle Linux, on SuSE SLES, on Red Hat RHEL,.. The library itself doesn't actually care much about the OS version, the kernel module and device cares. The support tools are simple scripts that allow the admin to label devices and scan for disks and devices. This way you can say create an ASM disk label foo on, currently /dev/sdf... So if /dev/sdf disappears and next time is /dev/sdg, we just scan for the label foo and we discover it as /dev/sdg and life goes on without any worry. Also, when the database needs access to the device, we don't have to worry about file permissions or anything it will be taken care of. So it's a convenience thing. The kernel module oracleasm.ko is a Linux kernel module/device driver. It implements a device /dev/oracleasm/* and any and all IO goes through ASMLib - /dev/oracleasm. This kernel module is obviously a very specific Oracle related device driver but it was released under the GPL v2 so anyone could easily build it for their Linux distribution kernels. Advantages for using ASMLib : A good async IO interface for the database, the entire IO interface is based on an optimal ASYNC model for performance A single file descriptor per Oracle process, not one per device or datafile per process reducing # of open filehandles overhead Device scanning and labeling built-in so you do not have to worry about messing with udev or devlabel, permissions or the likes which can be very complex and error prone. Just like with OCFS and OCFS2, each kernel version (major or minor) has to get a new version of the device drivers. We started out building the oracleasm kernel module rpms for many distributions, SLES (in fact in the early days still even for this thing called United Linux) and RHEL. The driver didn't make sense to get pushed into upstream Linux because it's unique and specific to the Oracle database. As it takes a huge effort in terms of build infrastructure and QA and release management to build kernel modules for every architecture, every linux distribution and every major and minor version we worked with the vendors to get them to add this tiny kernel module to their infrastructure. (60k source code file). The folks at SuSE understood this was good for them and their customers and us and added it to SLES. So every build coming from SuSE for SLES contains the oracleasm.ko module. We weren't as successful with other vendors so for quite some time we continued to build it for RHEL and of course as we introduced Oracle Linux end of 2006 also for Oracle Linux. With Oracle Linux it became easy for us because we just added the code to our build system and as we churned out Oracle Linux kernels whether it was for a public release or for customers that needed a one off fix where they also used asmlib, we didn't have to do any extra work it was just all nicely integrated. With the introduction of Oracle Linux's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and our interest in being able to exploit ASMLib more, we started working on a very exciting project called Data Integrity. Oracle (Martin Petersen in particular) worked for many years with the T10 standards committee and storage vendors and implemented Linux kernel support for DIF/DIX, data protection in the Linux kernel, note to those that wonder, yes it's all in mainline Linux and under the GPL. This basically gave us all the features in the Linux kernel to checksum a data block, send it to the storage adapter, which can then validate that block and checksum in firmware before it sends it over the wire to the storage array, which can then do another checksum and to the actual DISK which does a final validation before writing the block to the physical media. So what was missing was the ability for a userspace application (read: Oracle RDBMS) to write a block which then has a checksum and validation all the way down to the disk. application to disk. Because we have ASMLib we had an entry into the Linux kernel and Martin added support in ASMLib (kernel driver + userspace) for this functionality. Now, this is all based on relatively current Linux kernels, the oracleasm kernel module depends on the main kernel to have support for it so we can make use of it. Thanks to UEK and us having the ability to ship a more modern, current version of the Linux kernel we were able to introduce this feature into ASMLib for Linux from Oracle. This combined with the fact that we build the asm kernel module when we build every single UEK kernel allowed us to continue improving ASMLib and provide it to our customers. So today, we (Oracle) provide Oracle ASMLib for Oracle Linux and in particular on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. We did the build/testing/delivery of ASMLib for RHEL until RHEL5 but since RHEL6 decided that it was too much effort for us to also maintain all the build and test environments for RHEL and we did not have the ability to use the latest kernel features to introduce the Data Integrity features and we didn't want to end up with multiple versions of asmlib as maintained by us. SuSE SLES still builds and comes with the oracleasm module and they do all the work and RHAT it certainly welcome to do the same. They don't have to rebuild the userspace library, it's really about the kernel module. And finally to re-iterate a few important things : Oracle ASM does not in any way require ASMLib to function completely. ASMlib is a small set of extensions, in particular to make device management easier but there are no extra features exposed through Oracle ASM with ASMLib enabled or disabled. Often customers confuse ASMLib with ASM. again, ASM exists on every Oracle supported OS and on every supported Linux OS, SLES, RHEL, OL withoutASMLib Oracle ASMLib userspace is available for OTN and the kernel module is shipped along with OL/UEK for every build and by SuSE for SLES for every of their builds ASMLib kernel module was built by us for RHEL4 and RHEL5 but we do not build it for RHEL6, nor for the OL6 RHCK kernel. Only for UEK ASMLib for Linux is/was a reference implementation for any third party vendor to be able to offer, if they want to, their own version for their own OS or storage ASMLib as provided by Oracle for Linux continues to be enhanced and evolve and for the kernel module we use UEK as the base OS kernel hope this helps.

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java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file When Deploying an Application to Weblogic Server

- by lmestre

The latest weeks we had a hard time trying to solve a deployment issue.* WebLogic Server 10.3.6* Target: WLS Cluster<21-10-2013 05:29:40 PM CLST> <Error> <Console> <BEA-240003> <Console encountered the following error weblogic.management.DeploymentException: at weblogic.servlet.internal.WarDeploymentFactory.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(WarDeploymentFactory.java:69) at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:48) at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.createComponentMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:110) at weblogic.application.internal.MBeanFactoryImpl.initializeMBeans(MBeanFactoryImpl.java:76) at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.createApplicationMBean(MBeanConverter.java:89) at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.createApplicationForAppDeployment(MBeanConverter.java:67) at weblogic.management.deploy.internal.MBeanConverter.setupNew81MBean(MBeanConverter.java:315) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.compatibilityProcessor(ActivateOperation.java:81) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.setupPrepare(AbstractOperation.java:295) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.doPrepare(ActivateOperation.java:97) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.prepare(AbstractOperation.java:217) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleDeploymentPrepare(DeploymentManager.java:747) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.prepareDeploymentList(DeploymentManager.java:1216) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handlePrepare(DeploymentManager.java:250) at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentServiceDispatcher.prepare(DeploymentServiceDispatcher.java:159) at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.doPrepareCallback(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:171) at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.access$000(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:13) at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer$1.run(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:46) at weblogic.work.SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl$WorkAdapterImpl.run(SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.java:545) at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:256) at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:221)Caused by: java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file - C:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\MyDomain\servers\MyServer\stage\myapp\myapp.war Message - error in opening zip file at weblogic.servlet.utils.WarUtils.existsInWar(WarUtils.java:87) at weblogic.servlet.utils.WarUtils.isWebServices(WarUtils.java:76) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WarDeploymentFactory.findOrCreateComponentMBeans(WarDeploymentFactory.java:61) So the first idea you have with that error is that the war file is corrupted or has incorrect privileges. We tried:1. Unzipping the war file, the file was perfect.2. Checking the size, same size as in other environments.3. Checking the ownership of the file, same as in other environments.4. Checking the permissions of the file, same as other applications.Then we accepted the file was fine, so we tried enabling some deployment debugs, but no clues.We also tried:1. Delete all contents of <MyDomain/servers/<MyServer>/tmp> a and <MyDomain/servers/<MyServer>/cache> folders, the issue persisted.2. When renaming the application the deployment was sucessful3. When targeting to the Admin Server, deployment was also working.4. Using 'Copy this application onto every target for me' didn't help either.Finally, my friend 'Test Case' solved the issue again.I saw this name in the config.xml<jdbc-system-resource> <name>myapp</name> <target></target> <descriptor-file-name>jdbc/myapp-jdbc.xml</descriptor-file-name> </jdbc-system-resource> So, it turned out that customer had created a DataSource with the same name as the application 'myapp' in the above example.By deleting the datasource and created another exact DataSource with a different name the issue was solved.At this point, Do you know Why 'java.util.zip.ZipException: Error opening file' was occurring?Because all names is WebLogic Server need to be unique.References: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13709/setup.htm"Assigning Names to WebLogic Server ResourcesMake sure that each configurable resource in your WebLogic Server environment has a unique name. Each, domain, server, machine, cluster, JDBC data source, virtual host, or other resource must have a unique name." Enjoy!

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Defaulting the HLSL Vertex and Pixel Shader Levels to Feature Level 9_1 in VS 2012

- by Michael B. McLaughlin

I love Visual Studio 2012. But this is not a post about that. This is a post about tweaking one particular parameter that I’ve found a bit annoying. Disclaimer: You will be modifying important MSBuild files. If you screw up you will break your build tools. And maybe your computer will catch fire. I’m not responsible. No warranties or guaranties of any sort. This info is provided “as is”. By default, if you add a new vertex shader or pixel shader item to a project, it will be set to build with shader profile 4.0_level_9_3. If you need 9_3 functionality, this is all well and good. But (especially for Windows Store apps) you really want to target the lowest shader profile possible so that your game will run on as many computers as possible. So it’s a good idea to default to 9_1. To do this you could add in new HLSL files via “Add->New Item->Visual C++->HLSL->______ Shader File (.hlsl)” and then edit the shader files’ properties to set them manually to use 9_1 via “Properties->HLSL Compiler->General->Shader Model”. This is fine unless you forget to do this once and then submit your game with 9_3 shaders instead of 9_1 shaders to the Windows Store or to some other game store. Then you’d wind up with either rejection or angry “this doesn’t work on my computer! ripoff!” messages. There’s another option though. In “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VC\HLSL\1033\VertexShader” (note the path might vary slightly for you if you are using a 32-bit system or have a non-ENU version of Visual Studio 2012) you will find a “VertexShader.vstemplate” file. If you open this file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad++), then inside the CustomParameters tag within the TemplateContent tag you should see a CustomParameter tag for the ShaderType, i.e.: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> On a new line, we are going to add another CustomParameter tag to the CustomParameters tag. It will look like this: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> such that we now have: <CustomParameters> <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> </CustomParameters> You can then save the file (you will need to be an Administrator or have Administrator access). Back in the 1033 directory (or whatever the number is for your language), go into the “PixelShader” directory. Edit the “PixelShader.vstemplate” file and make the same change (note that this time $ShaderType$ is “Pixel” not “Vertex”; you shouldn’t be changing that line anyway, but if you were to just copy and replace the above four lines then you will wind up creating pixel shaders that the HLSL compiler would try to compile as vertex shaders, with all sort of weird errors as a result). Once you’ve added the $ShaderModel$ line to “PixelShader.vstemplate” and have saved it, everything should be done. Since Feature Level 9_1 and 9_3 don’t support any of the other shader types, those are set to default to their appropriate minimums already (Compute and Geometry are set to “4.0” and Domain and Hull are set to “5.0”, which are their respective minimums (though not all 4.0 cards support Compute shaders; they were an optional feature added with DirectX 10.1 and only became required for DirectX 11 hardware). In case you are wondering where these magic values come from, you can find them all in the “fxc.xml” file in the “\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.CPP\v4.0\V110\1033” directory (or whatever your language number is; 1033 is ENU and various other product languages have their own respective numbers (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964664.aspx ) such that Japanese is 1041 (for example), though for all I know MSBuild tasks might be 1033 for everyone). If, like me, you installed VS 2012 to a drive other than the C:\ drive, you will find the vstemplate files in the drive to which you installed VS 2012 (D:\ in my case) but you will find the fxc.xml file on the C:\ drive. You should not edit fxc.xml. You will almost definitely break things by doing that; it’s just something you can look through to see all the other options that the FXC task takes such that you could, if needed, add further CustomParameter tags if you wanted to default to other supported options. I haven’t tried any others though so I don’t have any advice on how to set them.

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Best Practices Generating WebService Proxies for Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM)

- by asantaga

I've recently been building a REST Service wrapper for Oracle Sales Cloud and initially all was going well, however as soon as I added all of my Web Service proxies I started to get weird errors.. My project structure looks like this What I found out was if I only had the InteractionsService & OpportunityService WebService Proxies then all worked ok, but as soon as I added the LocationsService Proxy, I would start to see strange JAXB errors. Example of the error message Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Unable to create JAXBContextat com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.createJAXBContext(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:164)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.postProcess(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:94)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.RuntimeModeler.buildRuntimeModel(RuntimeModeler.java:281)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WSServiceDelegate.java:762)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WLSProvider.java:982)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.createSEIPortInfo(WSServiceDelegate.java:746)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.addSEI(WSServiceDelegate.java:737)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.getPort(WSServiceDelegate.java:361)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.internalGetPort(WLSProvider.java:934)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate$PortClientInstanceFactory.createClientInstance(WLSProvider.java:1039)...... Looking further down I see the error message is related to JAXB not being able to find an objectFactory for one of its types Caused by: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 6 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptionsThere's no ObjectFactory with an @XmlElementDecl for the element {http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/crmCommon/activities/activitiesService/}AssigneeRsrcOrgIdthis problem is related to the following location:at protected javax.xml.bind.JAXBElement com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee.assigneeRsrcOrgId at com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee This is very strange... My first thoughts are that when I generated the WebService Proxy I entered the package name as "oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.servicename" and left the generated types as blank. This way all the generated types get put into the same package hierarchy and when deployed they get merged... Sounds resaonable and appears to work but not in this case.. To resolve this I regenerate the proxy but this time setting : Package name : To the name of my package eg. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.interactionsRoot Package for Generated Types : Package where the types will be generated to, e.g. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.SalesParty.types When I ran the application now, it all works , awesome eh???? Alas no, there is a serious side effect. The problem now is that to help coding I've created a collection of helper classes , these helper classes take parameters which use some of the "generic" datatypes, like FindCriteria. e.g. This wont work any more public static FindCriteria createCustomFindCriteria(FindCriteria pFc,String pAttributes) Here lies a gremlin of a problem.. I cant use this method anymore, this is because the FindCriteria datatype is now being defined two, or more times, in the generated code for my project. If you leave the Root Package for types blank it will get generated to com.oracle.xmlns, and if you populate it then it gets generated to your custom package.. The two datatypes look the same, sound the same (and if this were a duck would sound the same), but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME... Speaking to development, they recommend you should not be entering anything in the Root Packages section, so the mystery thickens why does it work.. Well after spending sometime with some colleagues of mine in development we've identified the issue.. Alas different parts of Oracle Fusion Development have multiple schemas with the same namespace, when the WebService generator generates its classes its not seeing the other schemas properly and not generating the Object Factories correctly... Thankfully I've found a workaround Solution Overview When generating the proxies leave the Root Package for Generated Types BLANK When you have finished generating your proxies, use the JAXB tool XJC and generate Java classes for all datatypes Create a project within your JDeveloper11g workspace and import the java classes into this project Final bit.. within the project dependencies ensure that the JAXB/XJC generated classes are "FIRST" in the classpath Solution Details Generate the WebServices SOAP proxies When generating the proxies your generation dialog should look like this Ensure the "unwrap" parameters is selected, if it isn't then that's ok, it simply means when issuing a "get" you need to extract out the Element Generate the JAXB Classes using XJC XJC provides a command line switch called -wsdl, this (although is experimental/beta) , accepts a HTTP WSDL and will generate the relevant classes. You can put these into a single batch/shell script xjc -wsdl https://fusionservername:443/appCmmnCompInteractions/InteractionService?wsdlxjc -wsdl https://fusionservername443/opptyMgmtOpportunities/OpportunityService?wsdl Create Project in JDeveloper to store the XJC "generated" JAXB classes Within the project folder create a filesystem folder called "src" and copy the generated files into this folder. JDeveloper11g should then see the classes and display them, if it doesnt try clicking the "refresh" button In your main project ensure that the JDeveloper XJC project is selected as a dependancy and IMPORTANT make sure it is at the top of the list. This ensures that the classes are at the front of the classpath And voilà.. Hopefully you wont see any JAXB generation errors and you can use common datatypes interchangeably in your project, (e.g. FindCriteria etc)

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Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

- by smisner

We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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jQuery with SharePoint solutions

- by KunaalKapoor

For me jQuery is the 'Plan-B' for everything.And most of my projects include the use of jQuery for something or the other, so I decided to write a small note on what works best while using jQuery along with SharePoint.I prefer to use the jQuery JavaScript library, which is far more robust, easier to use, and allows for plugins. Follow the steps below to add jQuery to your master page. For office 365, the prefered location to add jQuery files is the "Site Asserts" library.Deployment Best PracticesThey are only as good as the context it’s being referenced. In other words, take into account your world before applying it.Script your deployment options. Folder in SPD. Use the file system. Make external references. The JQuery library is on the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network. You may even choose to publish to and from the document library. (pros and cons to this approach)Reference options when referencing the script.ScriptLink will make sure it’s loaded at the top of the page and only loaded once. You need Visual Studio or SPDContent Editor Web Part (CEWP). Drop it on the page and it’s there. Easy but dangerousCustom Actions. Great for global deployments of JQuery. Loads it on every page. It also works in Sandbox installations.Deployment Maintenance Dont’sDon’t add scripts directly to your Master Page. That’s way too much effort because the pages are hard to maintain.Don’t add scripts directly to the CEWP. Use a content link instead. That will allow for reuse. If you or someone deletes the CEWP you won’t lose code in the web partSecurity. Any scripts run with the same privileges of the current user. In other words, you can’t get in trouble.Development Best PracticesDon’t abuse the DOM. There are better options to load the DOM without hitting it 1,000 times.User other performance boosters.Try other libraries. Try some custom codeAvoid String conversionMinify your filesUse CAML to reduce number of returns rowsOnly update your JQuery library AFTER RIGOROUS REGRESSION TESTINGCRUD operations can come with some funSP Services wraps SharePoint’s web services for executionThe Bing SDK is pretty easy to use. You can add it to your page with a script, put it into a content editor web part and connect it from the address parameters in a list.Steps:1. Go to jquery.com and download the latest jQuery library to your desktop. You want to get the compressed production version, not the development version.2. Open SharePoint Designer (SPD) and connect to the root level of your site's site collection.In SPD, open the "Style Library" folder. Create a folder named "Scripts" inside of the Style Library. Drag the jQuery library JavaScript file from your desktop into the Scripts folder.In the Scripts folder, create a new JavaScript file and name it (e.g. "actions.js").3. If you are using visual studio add a folder for js, you can create a new folder at the root level or if you prefer more cleaner solutions like me, you can use the layouts folder which cleans out on deactivation/uninstall.4. Within the <head> tag of the master page, add a script reference to the jQuery library just above the content place holder named "PlaceHolderAdditonalPageHead" (and above your custom CSS references, if applicable) as follows:<script src="/Style%20Library/Scripts/{jquery library file}.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Immediately after the jQuery library reference add a script reference to your custom scripts file as follows:<script src="/Style%20Library/Scripts/actions.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Inside your script tag, you can test if jQuery is already defined and if not, then add it to the page.<script type='text/javascript'> if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') document.write('<scr'+'ipt type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.1.min.js"></sc'+'ript>');</script>For the inquisitive few... Read on if you'd like :)Why jQuery on SharePoiny is AwesomeIt’s all about that visual wow factor. You can get past that, “But it looks like SharePoint” Take a long list view and put it into JQuery with pagination, etc and you are the hero. It’s also about new controls you get with JQuery that you couldn’t do before.Why jQuery with SharePoint should be AwfulAlthough it’s fairly easy to get jQuery up and running. Copy/Paste can cause a problem. If you don’t understand what it’s doing in the Client Object Model and the Document Object Model then it will do things on your site that were completely unexpected. Many blogs will note workarounds they employed on their sites. Why it’s not working: Debugging “sucks”.You need to develop small blocks of functionality, Test it by putting in some alerts and console.log. Set breakpoints and monitor the DOM via Firebug and some IE development toolsPerformance - It happens all the time. But you should look at the tradeoffs. More time may give you more functionality.Consistency - ”But it works fine on my computer. So test on many browsers. Take into account client resourcesHarm the Farm - You need to code wisely and negatively test. Don’t be the cause of a DoS attack that’s really JQuery asking for a resource over and over and over again. So code wisely. Do negative testing. Monitor Server Resources.They also did a demo where JQuery did an endless loop to pull data from a list. It’s a poor decision but also an easy mistake. They spiked their server resources within a couple seconds and had to shut down the call before it brought it down.ConclusionJQuery is now another tool in your tool kit. You don’t have to use it. Use it where it makes sense and where it helps you get your job done.Don’t abuse it, you will pay for it laterIt will add to page bloat so take that into accountIt can slow your performance

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Introducing Oracle Multitenant

- by OracleMultitenant

0 0 1 1142 6510 Oracle Corporation 54 15 7637 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language:JA;} The First Database Designed for the Cloud Today Oracle announced the general availability (GA) of Oracle Database 12c, the first database designed for the Cloud. Oracle Multitenant, new with Oracle Database 12c, is a key component of this – a new architecture for consolidating databases and simplifying operations in the Cloud. With this, the inaugural post in the Multitenant blog, my goal is to start the conversation about Oracle Multitenant. We are very proud of this new architecture, which we view as a major advance for Oracle. Customers, partners and analysts who have had previews are very excited about its capabilities and its flexibility. This high level review of Oracle Multitenant will touch on our design considerations and how we re-architected our database for the cloud. I’ll briefly describe our new multitenant architecture and explain it’s key benefits. Finally I’ll mention some of the major use cases we see for Oracle Multitenant. Industry Trends We always start by talking to our customers about the pressures and challenges they’re facing and what trends they’re seeing in the industry. Some things don’t change. They face the same pressures and the same requirements as ever: Pressure to do more with less; be faster, leaner, cheaper, and deliver services 24/7. Big companies have achieved scale. Now they want to realize economies of scale. As ever, DBAs are faced with the challenges of patching and upgrading large numbers of databases, and provisioning new ones. Requirements are familiar: Performance, scalability, reliability and high availability are non-negotiable. They need ever more security in this threatening climate. There’s no time to stop and retool with new applications. What’s new are the trends. These are the techniques to use to respond to these pressures within the constraints of the requirements. With the advent of cloud computing and availability of massively powerful servers – even engineered systems such as Exadata – our customers want to consolidate many applications into fewer larger servers. There’s a move to standardized services – even self-service. Consolidation Consolidation is not new; companies have tried various different approaches to consolidation of databases in the cloud. One approach is to partition a powerful server between several virtual machines, one per application. A downside of this is that you have the resource and management overheads of OS and RDBMS per VM – that is, per application. Another is that you have replaced physical sprawl with virtual sprawl and virtual sprawl is still expensive to manage. In the dedicated database model, we have a single physical server supporting multiple databases, one per application. So there’s a shared OS overhead, but RDBMS process and memory overhead are replicated per application. Let's think about our traditional Oracle Database architecture. Every time we create a database, be it a production database, a development or a test database, what do we do? We create a set of files, we allocate a bunch of memory for managing the data, and we kick off a series of background processes. This is replicated for every one of the databases that we create. As more and more databases are fired up, these replicated overheads quickly consume the available server resources and this limits the number of applications we can run on any given server. In Oracle Database 11g and earlier the highest degree of consolidation could be achieved by what we call schema consolidation. In this model we have one big server with one big database. Individual applications are installed in separate schemas or table-owners. Database overheads are shared between all applications, which affords maximum consolidation. The shortcomings are that application changes are often required. There is no tenant isolation. One bad apple can spoil the whole batch. New Architecture & Benefits In Oracle Database 12c, we have a new multitenant architecture, featuring pluggable databases. This delivers all the resource utilization advantages of schema consolidation with none of the downsides. There are two parts to the term “pluggable database”: "pluggable", which is new, and "database", which is familiar. Before we get to the exciting new stuff let’s discuss what hasn’t changed. A pluggable database is a fully functional Oracle database. It’s not watered down in any way. From the perspective of an application or an end user it hasn’t changed at all. This is very important because it means that no application changes are required to adopt this new architecture. There are many thousands of applications built on Oracle databases and they are all ready to run on Oracle Multitenant. So we have these self-contained pluggable databases (PDBs), and as their name suggests, they are plugged into a multitenant container database (CDB). The CDB behaves as a single database from the operations point of view. Very much as we had with the schema consolidation model, we only have a single set of Oracle background processes and a single, shared database memory requirement. This gives us very high consolidation density, which affords maximum reduction in capital expenses (CapEx). By performing management operations at the CDB level – “managing many as one” – we can achieve great reductions in operating expenses (OpEx) as well, but we retain granular control where appropriate. Furthermore, the “pluggability” capability gives us portability and this adds a tremendous amount of agility. We can simply unplug a PDB from one CDB and plug it into another CDB, for example to move it from one SLA tier to another. I'll explore all these new capabilities in much more detail in a future posting. Use Cases We can identify a number of use cases for Oracle Multitenant. Here are a few of the major ones. 0 0 1 113 650 Oracle Corporation 5 1 762 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language:JA;} Development / Testing where individual engineers need rapid provisioning and recycling of private copies of a few "master test databases" Consolidation of disparate applications using fewer, more powerful servers Software as a Service deploying separate copies of identical applications to individual tenants Database as a Service typically self-service provisioning of databases on the private cloud Application Distribution from ISV / Installation by Customer Eliminating many typical installation steps (create schema, import seed data, import application code PL/SQL…) - just plug in a PDB! High volume data distribution literally via disk drives in envelopes distributed by truck! - distribution of things like GIS or MDM master databases …various others! Benefits Previous approaches to consolidation have involved a trade-off between reductions in Capital Expenses (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx), and they’ve usually come at the expense of agility. With Oracle Multitenant you can have your cake and eat it: Minimize CapEx More Applications per server Minimize OpEx Manage many as one Standardized procedures and services Rapid provisioning Maximize Agility Cloning for development and testing Portability through pluggability Scalability with RAC Ease of Adoption Applications run unchanged It’s a pure deployment choice. Neither the database backend nor the application needs to be changed. In future postings I’ll explore various aspects in more detail. However, if you feel compelled to devour everything you can about Oracle Multitenant this very minute, have no fear. Visit the Multitenant page on OTN and explore the various resources we have available there. Among these, Oracle Distinguished Product Manager Bryn Llewellyn has written an excellent, thorough, and exhaustively detailed White Paper about Oracle Multitenant, which is available here. Follow me I tweet @OraclePDB #OracleMultitenant

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Add SQL Azure database to Azure Web Role and persist data with entity framework code first.

- by MagnusKarlsson

In my last post I went for a warts n all approach to set up a web role on Azure. In this post I’ll describe how to add an SQL Azure database to the project. This will be described with an as minimal as possible amount of code and screen dumps. All questions are welcome in the comments area. Please don’t email since questions answered in the comments field is made available to other visitors. As an example we will add a comments section to the site we used in the previous post (Länk här). Steps: 1. Create a Comments entity and then use Scaffolding to set up controller and view, and add ConnectionString to web.config. 2. Create SQL Azure database in Management Portal and link the new database 3. Test it online! 1. Right click Models folder, choose add, choose “class…” . Name the Class Comment. 1.1 Replace the Code in the class with the following: using System.Data.Entity; namespace MvcWebRole1.Models { public class Comment { public int CommentId { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string Content { get; set; } } public class CommentsDb : DbContext { public DbSet<Comment> CommentEntries { get; set; } } } Now Entity Framework can create a database and a table named Comment. Build your project to assert there are no build errors. 1.2 Right click Controllers folder, choose add, choose “class…” . Name the Class CommentController and fill out the values as in the example below. 1.3 Click Add. Visual Studio now creates default View for CRUD operations and a Controller adhering to these and opens them. 1.3 Open Web.config and add the following connectionstring in <connectionStrings> node. <add name="CommentsDb” connectionString="data source=(LocalDB)\v11.0;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDbFileName=|DataDirectory|\CommentsDb.mdf;Initial Catalog=CommentsDb;MultipleActiveResultSets=True" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> 1.4 Save All and press F5 to start the application. 1.5 Go to http://127.0.0.1:81/Comments which will redirect you through CommentsController to the Index View which looks like this: Click Create new. In the Create-view, add name and content and press Create. 1: // 2: // POST: /Comments/Create 3: 4: [HttpPost] 5: public ActionResult Create(Comment comment) 6: { 7: if (ModelState.IsValid) 8: { 9: db.CommentEntries.Add(comment); 10: db.SaveChanges(); 11: return RedirectToAction("Index"); 12: } 13: 14: return View(comment); 15: } 16: The default View() is Index so that is the View you will come to. Looking like this: 1: // 2: // GET: /Comments/ 3: 4: public ActionResult Index() 5: { 6: return View(db.CommentEntries.ToList()); 7: } Resulting in the following screen dump(success!): 2. Now, go to the Management portal and Create a new db. 2.1 With the new database created. Click the DB icon in the left most menu. Then click the newly created database. Click DASHBOARD in the top menu. Finally click Connections strings in the right menu to get the connection string we need to add in our web.debug.config file. 2.2 Now, take a copy of the connection String earlier added to the web.config and paste in web.debug.conifg in the connectionstrings node. Replace everything within “ “ in the copied connectionstring with that you got from SQL Azure. You will have something like this: 2.3 Rebuild the application, right click the cloud project and choose “Package…” (if you haven’t set up publishing profile which we will do in our next blog post). Remember to choose the right config file, use debug for staging and release for production so your databases won’t collide. You should see something like this: 2.4 Go to Management Portal and click the Web Services menu, choose your service and click update in the bottom menu. 2.5 Link the newly created database to your application. Click the LINKED RESOURCES in the top menu and then click “Link” in the bottom menu. You should get something like this. 3. Alright then. Under the Dashboard you can find the link to your application. Click it to open it in a browser and then go to ~/Comments to try it out just the way we did locally. Success and end of this story!

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What to do after a servicing fails on TFS 2010

- by Martin Hinshelwood

What do you do if you run a couple of hotfixes against your TFS 2010 server and you start to see seem odd behaviour? A customer of mine encountered that very problem, but they could not just, or at least not easily, go back a version. You see, around the time of the TFS 2010 launch this company decided to upgrade their entire 250+ development team from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. They encountered a few problems, owing mainly to the size of their TFS deployment, and the way they were using TFS. They were not doing anything wrong, but when you have the largest deployment of TFS outside of Microsoft you tend to run into problems that most people will never encounter. We are talking half a terabyte of source control in TFS with over 80 proxy servers. Its certainly the largest deployment I have ever heard of. When they did their upgrade way back in April, they found two major flaws in the product that meant that they had to back out of the upgrade and wait for a couple of hotfixes. KB983504 – Hotfix KB983578 – Patch KB2401992 -Hotfix In the time since they got the hotfixes they have run 6 successful trial migrations, but we are not talking minutes or hours here. When you have 400+ GB of data it takes time to copy it around. It takes time to do the upgrade and it takes time to do a backup. Well, last week it was crunch time with their developers off for Christmas they had a window of opportunity to complete the upgrade. Now these guys are good, but they wanted Northwest Cadence to be available “just in case”. They did not expect any problems as they already had 6 successful trial upgrades. The problems surfaced around 20 hours in after the first set of hotfixes had been applied. The new Team Project Collection, the only thing of importance, had disappeared from the Team Foundation Server Administration console. The collection would not reattach either. It would not even list the new collection as attachable! Figure: We know there is a database there, but it does not This was a dire situation as 20+ hours to repeat would leave the customer over time with 250+ developers sitting around doing nothing. We tried everything, and then we stumbled upon the command of last resort. TFSConfig Recover /ConfigurationDB:SQLServer\InstanceName;TFS_ConfigurationDBName /CollectionDB:SQLServer\instanceName;"Collection Name" -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff407077.aspx WARNING: Never run this command! Now this command does something a little nasty. It assumes that there really should not be anything wrong and sets about fixing it. It ignores any servicing levels in the Team Project Collection database and forcibly applies the latest version of the schema. I am sure you can imagine the types of problems this may cause when the schema is updated leaving the data behind. That said, as far as we could see this collection looked good, and we were even able to find and attach the team project collection to the Configuration database. Figure: After attaching the TPC it enters a servicing mode After reattaching the team project collection we found the message “Re-Attaching”. Well, fair enough that sounds like something that may need to happen, and after checking that there was disk IO we left it to it. 14+ hours later, it was still not done so the customer raised a priority support call with MSFT and an engineer helped them out. Figure: Everything looks good, it is just offline. Tip: Did you know that these logs are not represented in the ~/Logs/* folder until they are opened once? The engineer dug around a bit and listened to our situation. He knew that we had run the dreaded “tfsconfig restore”, but was not phased. Figure: This message looks suspiciously like the wrong servicing version As it turns out, the servicing version was slightly out of sync with the schema. KB Schema Successful KB983504 341 Yes KB983578 344 sort of KB2401992 360 nope Figure: KB, Schema table with notation to its success The Schema version above represents the final end of run version for that hotfix or patch. The only way forward The problem was that the version was somewhere between 341 and 344. This is not a nice place to be in and the engineer give us the only way forward as the removal of the servicing number from the database so that the re-attach process would apply the latest schema. if his sounds a little like the “tfsconfig recover” command then you are exactly right. Figure: Sneakily changing that 3 to a 1 should do the trick Figure: Changing the status and dropping the version should do it Now that we have done that we should be able to safely reattach and enable the Team Project Collection. Figure: The TPC is now all attached and running You may think that this is the end of the story, but it is not. After a while of mulling and seeking expert advice we came to the opinion that the database was, for want of a better term, “hosed”. There could well be orphaned data in there and the likelihood that we would have problems later down the line is pretty high. We contacted the customer back and made them aware that in all likelihood the repaired database was more like a “cut and shut” than anything else, and at the first sign of trouble later down the line was likely to split in two. So with 40+ hours invested in getting this new database ready the customer threw it away and started again. What would you do? Would you take the “cut and shut” to production and hope for the best?

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From Pocket to Instapaper

- by Michael Freidgeim

Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I experienced since new Pocket was introduced- 1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped, but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2. Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that a full screen popup was implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should provide a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper. I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

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