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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Windows Azure End to End Examples

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into practice, however, especially in the technical realm. I immediately look for examples where I can start trying out the concepts. But I often want a “real” example – not just something that represents the concept, but something that is real-world, showing some feature I could actually use. And it’s no different with the Windows Azure platform – I like finding things I can do now, and actually use. So when I started learning Windows Azure, I of course began with the Windows Azure Training Kit – which has lots of examples and labs, presentations and so on. But from there, I wanted more examples I could learn from, and eventually teach others with. I was asked if I would write a few of those up, so here are the ones I use. CodePlex CodePlex is Microsoft’s version of an “Open Source” repository. Anyone can start a project, add code, documentation and more to it and make it available to the world, free of charge, using various licenses as they wish. Microsoft also uses this location for most of the examples we publish, and sample databases for SQL Server. If you search in CodePlex for “Azure”, you’ll come back with a list of projects that folks have posted, including those of us at Microsoft. The source code and documentation are there, so you can learn using actual examples of code that will do what you need. There’s everything from a simple table query to a full project that is sort of a “Corporate Dropbox” that uses Windows Azure Storage. The advantage is that this code is immediately usable. It’s searchable, and you can often find a complete solution to meet your needs. The disadvantage is that the code is pretty specific – it may not cover a huge project like you’re looking for. Also, depending on the author(s), you might not find the documentation level you want. Link: http://azureexamples.codeplex.com/site/search?query=Azure&ac=8    Tailspin Microsoft Patterns and Practices is a group here that does an amazing job at sharing standard ways of doing IT – from operations to coding. If you’re not familiar with this resource, make sure you read up on it. Long before I joined Microsoft I used their work in my daily job – saved a ton of time. It has resources not only for Windows Azure but other Microsoft software as well. The Patterns and Practices group also publishes full books – you can buy these, but many are also online for free. There’s an end-to-end example for Windows Azure using a company called “Tailspin”, and the work covers not only the code but the design of the full solution. If you really want to understand the thought that goes into a Platform-as-a-Service solution, this is an excellent resource. The advantages are that this is a book, it’s complete, and it includes a discussion of design decisions. The disadvantage is that it’s a little over a year old – and in “Cloud” years that’s a lot. So many things have changed, improved, and have been added that you need to treat this as a resource, but not the only one. Still, highly recommended. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff728592.aspx Azure Stock Trader Sometimes you need a mix of a CodePlex-style application, and a little more detail on how it was put together. And it would be great if you could actually play with the completed application, to see how it really functions on the actual platform. That’s the Azure Stock Trader application. There’s a place where you can read about the application, and then it’s been published to Windows Azure – the production platform – and you can use it, explore, and see how it performs. I use this application all the time to demonstrate Windows Azure, or a particular part of Windows Azure. The advantage is that this is an end-to-end application, and online as well. The disadvantage is that it takes a bit of self-learning to work through.  Links: Learn it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684 Use it: https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net/

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• Who broke the build?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently sent round a list of broken builds at SSW and asked for them to be fixed or deleted if they are not being used. My colleague Peter came back with a couple of questions which I love as it tells me that at least one person reads my email I think first we need to answer a couple of other questions related to builds in general.   Why do we want the build to pass? Any developer can pick up a project and build it Standards can be enforced Constant quality is maintained Problems in code are identified early What could a failed build signify? Developers have not built and tested their code properly before checking in. Something added depends on a local resource that is not under version control or does not exist on the target computer. Developers are not writing tests to cover common problems. There are not enough tests to cover problems. Now we know why, lets answer Peters questions: Where is this list? (can we see it somehow) You can normally only see the builds listed for each project. But, you have a little application called “Build Notifications” on your computer. It is installed when you install Visual Studio 2010. Figure: Staring the build notification application on Windows 7. Once you have it open (it may disappear into your system tray) you should click “Options” and select all the projects you are involved in. This application only lists projects that have builds, so don’t worry if it is not listed. This just means you are about to setup a build, right? I just selected ALL projects that have builds. Figure: All builds are listed here In addition to seeing the list you will also get toast notification of build failure’s. How can we get more info on what broke the build? (who is interesting too, to point the finger but more important is what) The only thing worse than breaking the build, is continuing to develop on a broken build! Figure: I have highlighted the users who either are bad for braking the build, or very bad for not fixing it. To find out what is wrong with a build you need to open the build definition. You can open a web version by double clicking the build in the image above, or you can open it from “Team Explorer”. Just connect to your project and open out the “Builds” tree. Then Open the build by double clicking on it. Figure: Opening a build is easy, but double click it and then open a build run from the list. Figure: Good example, the build and tests have passed Figure: Bad example, there are 133 errors preventing POK from being built on the build server. For identifying failures see: Solution: Getting Silverlight to build on Team Build 2010 RC Solution: Testing Web Services with MSTest on Team Build Finding the problem on a partially succeeded build So, Peter asked about blame, let’s have a look and see: Figure: The build has been broken for so long I have no idea when it was broken, but everyone on this list is to blame (I am there too) The rest of the history is lost in the sands of time, there is no way to tell when the build was originally broken, or by whom, or even if it ever worked in the first place. Build should be protected by the team that uses them and the only way to do that is to have them own them. It is fine for me to go in and setup a build, but the ownership for a build should always reside with the person who broke it last. Conclusion This is an example of a pointless build. Lets be honest, if you have a system like TFS in place and builds are constantly left broken, or not added to projects then your developers don’t yet understand the value. I have found that adding a Gated Check-in helps instil that understanding of value. If you prevent them from checking in without passing that basic quality gate of “your code builds on another computer” then it makes them look more closely at why they can’t check-in. I have had builds fail because one developer had a “d” drive, but the build server did not. That is what they are there to catch.   If you want to know what builds to create and why I wrote a post on “Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?”   Technorati Tags: TFS2010,Gated Check-in,Builds,Build Failure,Broken Build

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• Slide Creation Checklist

  - by Daniel Moth

  PowerPoint is a great tool for conference (large audience) presentations, which is the context for the advice below. The #1 thing to keep in mind when you create slides (at least for conference sessions), is that they are there to help you remember what you were going to say (the flow and key messages) and for the audience to get a visual reminder of the key points. Slides are not there for the audience to read what you are going to say anyway. If they were, what is the point of you being there? Slides are not holders for complete sentences (unless you are quoting) – use Microsoft Word for that purpose either as a physical handout or as a URL link that you share with the audience. When you dry run your presentation, if you find yourself reading the bullets on your slide, you have missed the point. You have a message to deliver that can be done regardless of your slides – remember that. The focus of your audience should be on you, not the screen. Based on that premise, I have created a checklist that I go over before I start a new deck and also once I think my slides are ready. Turn AutoFit OFF. I cannot stress this enough. For each slide, explicitly pick a slide layout. In my presentations, I only use one Title Slide, Section Header per demo slide, and for the rest of my slides one of the three: Title and Content, Title Only, Blank. Most people that are newbies to PowerPoint, get whatever default layout the New Slide creates for them and then start deleting and adding placeholders to that. You can do better than that (and you'll be glad you did if you also follow item #11 below). Every slide must have an image. Remove all punctuation (e.g. periods, commas) other than exclamation points and question marks (! ?). Don't use color or other formatting (e.g. italics, bold) for text on the slide. Check your animations. Avoid animations that hide elements that were on the slide (instead use a new slide and transition). Ensure that animations that bring new elements in, bring them into white space instead of over other existing elements. A good test is to print the slide and see that it still makes sense even without the animation. Print the deck in black and white choosing the "6 slides per page" option. Can I still read each slide without losing any information? If the answer is "no", go back and fix the slides so the answer becomes "yes". Don't have more than 3 bullet levels/indents. In other words: you type some text on the slide, hit 'Enter', hit 'Tab', type some more text and repeat at most one final time that sequence. Ideally your outer bullets have only level of sub-bullets (i.e. one level of indentation beneath them). Don't have more than 3-5 outer bullets per slide. Space them evenly horizontally, e.g. with blank lines in between. Don't wrap. For each bullet on all slides check: does the text for that bullet wrap to a second line? If it does, change the wording so it doesn't. Or create a terser bullet and make the original long text a sub-bullet of that one (thus decreasing the font size, but still being consistent) and have no wrapping. Use the same consistent fonts (i.e. Font Face, Font Size etc) throughout the deck for each level of bullet. In other words, don't deviate form the PowerPoint template you chose (or that was chosen for you). Go on each slide and hit 'Reset'. 'Reset' is a button on the 'Home' tab of the ribbon or you can find the 'Reset Slide' menu when you right click on a slide on the left 'Slides' list. If your slides can survive doing that without you "fixing" things after the Reset action, you are golden! For each slide ask yourself: if I had to replace this slide with a single sentence that conveys the key message, what would that sentence be? This exercise leads you to merge slides (where the key message is split) or split a slide into many, if there were too many key messages on the slide in the first place. It can also lead you to redesign a slide so the text on it really is just explanation or evidence for the key message you are trying to convey. Get the length right. Is the length of this deck suitable for the time you have been given to present? If not, cut content! It is far better to deliver less in a relaxed, polished engaging, memorable way than to deliver in great haste more content. As a rule of thumb, multiply 2 minutes by the number of slides you have, add the time you need for each demo and check if that add to more than the time you have allotted. If it does, start cutting content – we've all been there and it has to be done. As always, rules and guidelines are there to be bent and even broken some times. Start with the above and on a slide-by-slide basis decide which rules you want to bend. That is smarter than throwing all the rules out from the start, right? Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• SQL SERVER – TechEd India 2012 – Content, Speakers and a Lots of Fun

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd is one event which every developers and IT professionals are looking forward to attend. It is opportunity of life time and no matter how many time one gets chance to engage with it, it is never enough. I still remember every single moment of every TechEd I have attended so far. We are less than 100 hours away from TechEd India 2012 event.This event is the one must attend event for every Technology Enthusiast. Fourth time in the row I am going to attend this event and I am equally excited as the first time of the event. There are going to be two very solid SQL Server track this time and I will be attending end of the end both the tracks. Here is my view on each of the 10 sessions. Each session is carefully crafted and leading exeprts from industry will present it. Day 1, March 21, 2012 T-SQL Rediscovered with SQL Server 2012 – This session is going to bring some of the lesser known enhancements that were brought with SQL Server 2012. When I learned that Jacob Sebastian is going to do this session my reaction to this is DEMO, DEMO and DEMO! Jacob spends hours and hours of his time preparing his session and this will be one of those session that I am confident will be delivered over and over through out the next many events. Catapult your data with SQL Server 2012 Integration Services – Praveen is expert story teller and one of the wizard when it is about SQL Server and business intelligence. He is surely going to mesmerize you with some interesting insights on SSIS performance too. Processing Big Data with SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop – There are three sessions on Big Data at TechEd India 2012. Stephen is going to deliver one of the session. Watching Stephen present is always joy and quite entertaining. He shares knowledge with his typical humor which captures ones attention. I wrote about what is BIG DATA in a blog post. SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolutions – I will be presenting this Session along with Vinod Kumar. READ MORE HERE. Securing with ContainedDB in SQL Server 2012 – Pranab is expert when it is about SQL Server and Security. I have seen him presenting and he is indeed very pleasant to watch. A dry subject like security, he makes it much lively. A Contained Database is a database which contains all the necessary settings and metadata, making database easily portable to another server. This database will contain all the necessary details and will not have to depend on any server where it is installed for anything. You can take this database and move it to another server without having any worries. Day 3, March 23, 2012 Peeling SQL Server like an Onion: Internals Demystified – Vinod Kumar has been writing about this extensively on his other blog post. In recent conversation he suggested that he will be creating very exclusive content for this presentation. I know Vinod for long time and have worked with him along many community activities. I am going to pay special attention to the details. I know Vinod has few give-away planned now for attending the session now only if he shares with us. Speed Up – Parallel Processes and unparalleled Performance – Performance tuning is my favorite subject. I will be discussing effect of parallelism on performance in this session. Here me out, there will be lots of quiz questions during this session and if you get the answers correct – you can win some really cool goodies – I Promise! READ MORE HERE. Keep your database available – AlwaysOn – Balmukund is like an army man. He is always ready to show and prove that he has coolest toys in terms of SQL Server and he knows how to keep them running AlwaysON. Availability groups, Listener, Clustering, Failover, Read-Only replica etc all will be demo’ed in this session. This is really heavy but very interesting content not to be missed. Lesser known facts about SQL Server Backup and Restore – Amit Banerjee – this name is known internationally for solving SQL Server problems in 140 characters. He has already blogged about this and this topic is going to be interesting. A successful restore strategy for applications is as good as their last good known backup. I have few difficult questions to ask to Amit and I am very sure that his unique style will entertain people. By the way, his one of the slide may give few in audience a funny heart attack. Top 5 reasons why you want SQL Server 2012 BI – Praveen plans to take a tour of some of the BI enhancements introduced in the new version. Business Insights with SQL Server is a critical building block and this version of SQL Server is no exception. For the matter of the fact, when I saw the demos he was going to show during this session, I felt like that I wish I can set up all of this on my machine. If you miss this session – you will miss one of the most informative session of the day. Also TechEd India 2012 has a Live streaming of some content and this can be watched here. The TechEd Team is planning to have some really good exclusive content in this channel as well. If you spot me, just do not hesitate to come by me and introduce yourself, I want to remember you! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Scripting out Contained Database Users

  - by Argenis

    Today’s blog post comes from a Twitter thread on which @SQLSoldier, @sqlstudent144 and @SQLTaiob were discussing the internals of contained database users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the concept of contained users within a SQL Server database (hit the link if you have not). In this article I’d like to show you that you can, indeed, script out contained database users and recreate them on another database, as either contained users or as good old fashioned logins/server principals as well. Why would this be useful? Well, because you would not need to know the password for the user in order to recreate it on another instance. I know there is a limited number of scenarios where this would be necessary, but nonetheless I figured I’d throw this blog post to show how it can be done. A more obscure use case: with the password hash (which I’m about to show you how to obtain) you could also crack the password using a utility like hashcat, as highlighted on this SQLServerCentral article. The Investigation SQL Server uses System Base Tables to save the password hashes of logins and contained database users. For logins it uses sys.sysxlgns, whereas for contained database users it leverages sys.sysowners. I’ll show you what I do to figure this stuff out: I create a login/contained user, and then I immediately browse the transaction log with, for example, fn_dblog. It’s pretty obvious that only two base tables touched by the operation are sys.sysxlgns, and also sys.sysprivs – the latter is used to track permissions. If I connect to the DAC on my instance, I can query for the password hash of this login I’ve just created. A few interesting things about this hash. This was taken on my laptop, and I happen to be running SQL Server 2014 RTM CU2, which is the latest public build of SQL Server 2014 as of time of writing. In 2008 R2 and prior versions (back to 2000), the password hashes would start with 0x0100. The reason why this changed is because starting with SQL Server 2012 password hashes are kept using a SHA512 algorithm, as opposed to SHA-1 (used since 2000) or Snefru (used in 6.5 and 7.0). SHA-1 is nowadays deemed unsafe and is very easy to crack. For regular SQL logins, this information is exposed through the sys.sql_logins catalog view, so there is really no need to connect to the DAC to grab an SID/password hash pair. For contained database users, there is (currently) no method of obtaining SID or password hashes without connecting to the DAC. If we create a contained database user, this is what we get from the transaction log: Note that the System Base Table used in this case is sys.sysowners. sys.sysprivs is used as well, and again this is to track permissions. To query sys.sysowners, you would have to connect to the DAC, as I mentioned previously. And this is what you would get: There are other ways to figure out what SQL Server uses under the hood to store contained database user password hashes, like looking at the execution plan for a query to sys.dm_db_uncontained_entities (Thanks, Robert Davis!) SIDs, Logins, Contained Users, and Why You Care…Or Not. One of the reasons behind the existence of Contained Users was the concept of portability of databases: it is really painful to maintain Server Principals (Logins) synced across most shared-nothing SQL Server HA/DR technologies (Mirroring, Availability Groups, and Log Shipping). Often times you would need the Security Identifier (SID) of these logins to match across instances, and that meant that you had to fetch whatever SID was assigned to the login on the principal instance so you could recreate it on a secondary. With contained users you normally wouldn’t care about SIDs, as the users are always available (and synced, as long as synchronization takes place) across instances. Now you might be presented some particular requirement that might specify that SIDs synced between logins on certain instances and contained database users on other databases. How would you go about creating a contained database user with a specific SID? The answer is that you can’t do it directly, but there’s a little trick that would allow you to do it. Create a login with a specified SID and password hash, create a user for that server principal on a partially contained database, then migrate that user to contained using the system stored procedure sp_user_migrate_to_contained, then drop the login. CREATE LOGIN <login_name> WITH PASSWORD = <password_hash> HASHED, SID = <sid> ; GO USE <partially_contained_db>; GO CREATE USER <user_name> FROM LOGIN <login_name>; GO EXEC sp_migrate_user_to_contained @username = <user_name>, @rename = N’keep_name’, @disablelogin = N‘disable_login’; GO DROP LOGIN <login_name>; GO Here’s how this skeleton would look like in action: And now I have a contained user with a specified SID and password hash. In my example above, I renamed the user after migrated it to contained so that it is, hopefully, easier to understand. Enjoy!

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• Event Logging in LINQ C# .NET

  The first thing you'll want to do before using this code is to create a table in your database called TableHistory: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableHistory] (     [TableHistoryID] [int] IDENTITY NOT NULL ,     [TableName] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL ,     [Key1] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL ,     [Key2] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key3] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key4] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key5] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key6] [varchar] (50)NULL ,     [ActionType] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Property] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [OldValue] [varchar] (8000) NULL ,     [NewValue] [varchar] (8000) NULL ,     [ActionUserName] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL ,     [ActionDateTime] [datetime] NOT NULL ) Once you have created the table, you'll need to add it to your custom LINQ class (which I will refer to as DboDataContext), thus creating the TableHistory class. Then, you'll need to add the History.cs file to your project. You'll also want to add the following code to your project to get the system date: public partial class DboDataContext{ [Function(Name = "GetDate", IsComposable = true)] public DateTime GetSystemDate() { MethodInfo mi = MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod() as MethodInfo; return (DateTime)this.ExecuteMethodCall(this, mi, new object[] { }).ReturnValue; }}private static Dictionary<type,> _cachedIL = new Dictionary<type,>();public static T CloneObjectWithIL<t>(T myObject){ Delegate myExec = null; if (!_cachedIL.TryGetValue(typeof(T), out myExec)) { // Create ILGenerator DynamicMethod dymMethod = new DynamicMethod("DoClone", typeof(T), new Type[] { typeof(T) }, true); ConstructorInfo cInfo = myObject.GetType().GetConstructor(new Type[] { }); ILGenerator generator = dymMethod.GetILGenerator(); LocalBuilder lbf = generator.DeclareLocal(typeof(T)); //lbf.SetLocalSymInfo("_temp"); generator.Emit(OpCodes.Newobj, cInfo); generator.Emit(OpCodes.Stloc_0); foreach (FieldInfo field in myObject.GetType().GetFields( System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Public | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic)) { // Load the new object on the eval stack... (currently 1 item on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldloc_0); // Load initial object (parameter) (currently 2 items on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0); // Replace value by field value (still currently 2 items on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldfld, field); // Store the value of the top on the eval stack into // the object underneath that value on the value stack. // (0 items on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Stfld, field); } // Load new constructed obj on eval stack -> 1 item on stack generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldloc_0); // Return constructed object. --> 0 items on stack generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ret); myExec = dymMethod.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func<t,>)); _cachedIL.Add(typeof(T), myExec); } return ((Func<t,>)myExec)(myObject);}I got both of the above methods off of the net somewhere (maybe even from CodeProject), but it's been long enough that I can't recall where I got them.Explanation of the History ClassThe History class records changes by creating a TableHistory record, inserting the values for the primary key for the table being modified into the Key1, Key2, ..., Key6 columns (if you have more than 6 values that make up a primary key on any table, you'll want to modify this), setting the type of change being made in the ActionType column (INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE), old value and new value if it happens to be an update action, and the date and Windows identity of the user who made the change.Let's examine what happens when a call is made to the RecordLinqInsert method:public static void RecordLinqInsert(DboDataContext dbo, IIdentity user, object obj){ TableHistory hist = NewHistoryRecord(obj); hist.ActionType = "INSERT"; hist.ActionUserName = user.Name; hist.ActionDateTime = dbo.GetSystemDate(); dbo.TableHistories.InsertOnSubmit(hist);}private static TableHistory NewHistoryRecord(object obj){ TableHistory hist = new TableHistory(); Type type = obj.GetType(); PropertyInfo[] keys; if (historyRecordExceptions.ContainsKey(type)) { keys = historyRecordExceptions[type].ToArray(); } else { keys = type.GetProperties().Where(o => AttrIsPrimaryKey(o)).ToArray(); } if (keys.Length > KeyMax) throw new HistoryException("object has more than " + KeyMax.ToString() + " keys."); for (int i = 1; i <= keys.Length; i++) { typeof(TableHistory) .GetProperty("Key" + i.ToString()) .SetValue(hist, keys[i - 1].GetValue(obj, null).ToString(), null); } hist.TableName = type.Name; return hist;}protected static bool AttrIsPrimaryKey(PropertyInfo pi){ var attrs = from attr in pi.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ColumnAttribute), true) where ((ColumnAttribute)attr).IsPrimaryKey select attr; if (attrs != null && attrs.Count() > 0) return true; else return false;}RecordLinqInsert takes as input a data context which it will use to write to the database, the user, and the LINQ object to be recorded (a single object, for instance, a Customer or Order object if you're using AdventureWorks). It then calls the NewHistoryRecord method, which uses LINQ to Objects in conjunction with the AttrIsPrimaryKey method to pull all the primary key properties, set the Key1-KeyN properties of the TableHistory object, and return the new TableHistory object. The code would be called in an application, like so: Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Joins in single-table queries

  - by Rob Farley

  Tables are only metadata. They don’t store data. I’ve written something about this before, but I want to take a viewpoint of this idea around the topic of joins, especially since it’s the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this month. Hosted this time by Sebastian Meine (@sqlity), who has a whole series on joins this month. Good for him – it’s a great topic. In that last post I discussed the fact that we write queries against tables, but that the engine turns it into a plan against indexes. My point wasn’t simply that a table is actually just a Clustered Index (or heap, which I consider just a special type of index), but that data access always happens against indexes – never tables – and we should be thinking about the indexes (specifically the non-clustered ones) when we write our queries. I described the scenario of looking up phone numbers, and how it never really occurs to us that there is a master list of phone numbers, because we think in terms of the useful non-clustered indexes that the phone companies provide us, but anyway – that’s not the point of this post. So a table is metadata. It stores information about the names of columns and their data types. Nullability, default values, constraints, triggers – these are all things that define the table, but the data isn’t stored in the table. The data that a table describes is stored in a heap or clustered index, but it goes further than this. All the useful data is going to live in non-clustered indexes. Remember this. It’s important. Stop thinking about tables, and start thinking about indexes. So let’s think about tables as indexes. This applies even in a world created by someone else, who doesn’t have the best indexes in mind for you. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain Covering Index bit – the fact that if you don’t have sufficient columns “included” in your index, your query plan will either have to do a Lookup, or else it’ll give up using your index and use one that does have everything it needs (even if that means scanning it). If you haven’t seen that before, drop me a line and I’ll run through it with you. Or go and read a post I did a long while ago about the maths involved in that decision. So – what I’m going to tell you is that a Lookup is a join. When I run SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 285; against the AdventureWorks2012 get the following plan: I’m sure you can see the join. Don’t look in the query, it’s not there. But you should be able to see the join in the plan. It’s an Inner Join, implemented by a Nested Loop. It’s pulling data in from the Index Seek, and joining that to the results of a Key Lookup. It clearly is – the QO wouldn’t call it that if it wasn’t really one. It behaves exactly like any other Nested Loop (Inner Join) operator, pulling rows from one side and putting a request in from the other. You wouldn’t have a problem accepting it as a join if the query were slightly different, such as SELECT sod.OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail as sod on sod.SalesOrderID = soh.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesPersonID = 285; Amazingly similar, of course. This one is an explicit join, the first example was just as much a join, even thought you didn’t actually ask for one. You need to consider this when you’re thinking about your queries. But it gets more interesting. Consider this query: SELECT SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276 AND CustomerID = 29522; It doesn’t look like there’s a join here either, but look at the plan. That’s not some Lookup in action – that’s a proper Merge Join. The Query Optimizer has worked out that it can get the data it needs by looking in two separate indexes and then doing a Merge Join on the data that it gets. Both indexes used are ordered by the column that’s indexed (one on SalesPersonID, one on CustomerID), and then by the CIX key SalesOrderID. Just like when you seek in the phone book to Farley, the Farleys you have are ordered by FirstName, these seek operations return the data ordered by the next field. This order is SalesOrderID, even though you didn’t explicitly put that column in the index definition. The result is two datasets that are ordered by SalesOrderID, making them very mergeable. Another example is the simple query SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276; This one prefers a Hash Match to a standard lookup even! This isn’t just ordinary index intersection, this is something else again! Just like before, we could imagine it better with two whole tables, but we shouldn’t try to distinguish between joining two tables and joining two indexes. The Query Optimizer can see (using basic maths) that it’s worth doing these particular operations using these two less-than-ideal indexes (because of course, the best indexese would be on both columns – a composite such as (SalesPersonID, CustomerID – and it would have the SalesOrderID column as part of it as the CIX key still). You need to think like this too. Not in terms of excusing single-column indexes like the ones in AdventureWorks2012, but in terms of having a picture about how you’d like your queries to run. If you start to think about what data you need, where it’s coming from, and how it’s going to be used, then you will almost certainly write better queries. …and yes, this would include when you’re dealing with regular joins across multiples, not just against joins within single table queries.

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• Why is my external USB hard drive sometimes completely inaccessible?

  - by Eliah Kagan

  I have an external USB hard drive, consisting of an 1 TB SATA drive in a Rosewill RX35-AT-SU SLV Aluminum 3.5" Silver USB 2.0 External Enclosure, plugged into my SONY VAIO VGN-NS310F laptop. It is plugged directly into the computer (not through a hub). The drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 rpm Western Digital, but I don't remember the exact model. I can remove the drive from the enclosure (again), if people think it's necessary to know that detail. The drive is formatted ext4. I mount it dynamically with udisks on my Lubuntu 11.10 system, usually automatically via PCManFM. (I have had Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine, and experienced all this same behavior with that too.) Every once in a while--once or twice a day--it becomes inaccessible, and difficult to unmount. Attempting to unmount it with sudo umount ... gives an error message saying the drive is in use and suggesting fuser and lsof to find out what is using it. Killing processes found to be using the drive with fuser and lsof is sometimes sufficient to let me unmount it, but usually isn't. Once the drive is unmounted or the machine is rebooted, the drive will not mount. Plugging in the drive and turning it on registers nothing on the computer. dmesg is unchanged. The drive's access light usually blinks vigorously, as though the drive is being accessed constantly. Then eventually, after I keep the drive off for a while (half an hour), I am able to mount it again. While the drive doesn't work on this machine for a while, it will work immediately on another machine running the same version of Ubuntu. Sometimes bringing it back over from the other machine seems to "fix" it. Sometimes it doesn't. The drive doesn't always stop being accessible while mounted, before becoming unmountable. Sometimes it works fine, I turn off the computer, I turn the computer back on, and I cannot mount the drive. Currently this is the only drive with which I have this problem, but I've had problems that I think are the same as this, with different drives, on different Ubuntu machines. This laptop has another external USB drive plugged into it regularly, which doesn't have this problem. Unplugging that drive before plugging in the "problem" drive doesn't fix the problem. I've opened the drive up and made sure the connections were tight in the past, and that didn't seem to help (any more than waiting the same amount of time that it took to open and close the drive, before attempting to remount it). Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this, what troubleshooting steps I should perform, and/or how I could fix this problem altogether? Update: I tried replacing the USB data cable (from the enclosure to the laptop), as Merlin suggested. I should've tried that long ago, since it fits the symptoms perfectly (the drive works on another machine, which would make sense because the cable would be bent at a different angle, possibly completing a circuit of frayed wires). Unfortunately, though, this did not help--I have the same problem with the new cable. I'll try to provide additional detailed information about the drive inside the enclosure, next time I'm able to get the drive working. (At the moment I don't have another machine available to attach it.) Major Update (28 June 2012) The drive seems to have deteriorated considerably. I think this is so, because I've attached it to another machine and gotten lots of errors about invalid characters, when copying files from it. I am less interested in recovering data from the drive than I am in figuring out what is wrong with it. I specifically want to figure out if the problem is the drive or the enclosure. Now, when I plug the drive into the original machine where I was having the problems, it still doesn't appear (including with sudo fdisk -l), but it is recognized by the kernel and messages are added to dmesg. Most of the message consist of errors like this, repeated many times: [ 7.707593] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled sense code [ 7.707599] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=invalid driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 7.707606] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 7.707614] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error [ 7.707621] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 [ 7.707636] end_request: critical target error, dev sdc, sector 0 [ 7.707641] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0 Here are all the lines from dmesg starting with when the drive is recognized. Please note that: I'm back to running Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine (and perhaps that's a factor in better error messages). Now that the drive has been plugged into another machine and back into this one, and also now that this machine is back to running 12.04, the drive's access light doesn't blink as I had described. Looking at the drive, it would appear as though it is working normally, with low or no access. This behavior (the errors) occurs when rebooting the machine with the drive plugged in, and also when manually plugging in the drive. A few of the messages are about /dev/sdb. That drive is working fine. The bad drive is /dev/sdc. I just didn't want to edit anything out from the middle.

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• SQL Saturday 43 in Redmond

  - by AjarnMark

  I attended my first SQLSaturday a couple of days ago, SQLSaturday #43 in Redmond (at Microsoft).  I got there really early, primarily because I forgot how fast I can get there from my home when nobody else is on the road.  On a weekday in rush hour traffic, that would have taken two hours to get there.  I gave myself 90 minutes, and actually got there in about 45.  Crazy! I made the mistake of going to the main Microsoft campus, but that’s not where the event was being held.  Instead it was in a big Microsoft conference center on the other side of the highway.  Fortunately, I had the address with me and quickly realized my mistake.  When I got back on track, I noticed that there were bright yellow signs out on the street corner that looked like they said they were for SOL Saturday, which actually was appropriate since it was the sunniest day around here in a long time. Since I was there so early, the registration was just getting setup, so I found Greg Larsen who was coordinating things and offered to help.  He put me to work with a group of people organizing the pre-printed raffle tickets and stuffing swag bags. I had never been to a SQLSaturday before this one, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect even though I have read about a few on some blogs.  It makes sense that each one will be a little bit different since they are almost completely volunteer driven, and the whole concept is still in its early stages.  I have been to the PASS Summit for the last several years, and was hoping for a smaller version of that.  Now, it’s not really fair to compare one free day of training run entirely by volunteers with a multi-day, $1,000+ event put on under the direction of a professional event management company.  But there are some parallels. At this SQLSaturday, there was no opening general session, just coffee and pastries in the common area / expo hallway and straight into the first group of sessions.  I don’t know if that was because there was no single room large enough to hold everyone, or for other reasons.  This worked out okay, but the organization guy in me would have preferred to have even a 15 minute welcome message from the organizers with a little overview of the day.  Even something as simple as, “Thanks to persons X, Y, and Z for helping put this together…Sessions will start in 20 minutes and are all in rooms down this hallway…the bathrooms are on the other side of the conference center…lunch today is pizza and we would like to thank sponsor Q for providing it.”  It doesn’t need to be much, certainly not a full-blown Keynote like at the PASS Summit, but something to use as a rallying point to pull everyone together and get the day off to an official start would be nice.  Again, there may have been logistical reasons why that was not feasible here.  I’m just putting out my thoughts for other SQLSaturday coordinators to consider. The event overall was great.  I believe that there were over 300 in attendance, and everything seemed to run smoothly.  At least from an attendee’s point of view where there was plenty of muffins in the morning and pizza in the afternoon, with plenty of pop to drink.  And hey, if you’ve got the food and drink covered, a lot of other stuff could go wrong and people will be very forgiving.  But as I said, everything appeared to run pretty smoothly, at least until Buck Woody showed up in his Oracle shirt.  Other than that, the volunteers did a great job! I was a little surprised by how few people in my own backyard that I know.  It makes sense if you really think about it, given how many companies must be using SQL Server around here.  I guess I just got spoiled coming into the PASS Summit with a few contacts that I already knew would be there.  Perhaps I have been spending too much time with too few people at the Summits and I need to step out and meet more folks.  Of course, it also is different since the Summit is the big national event and a number of the folks I know are spread out across the country, so the Summit is the only time we’re all in the same place at the same time.  I did make a few new contacts at SQLSaturday, and bumped into a couple of people that I knew (and a couple others that I only knew from Twitter, and didn’t even realize that they were here in the area). Other than the sheer entertainment value of Buck Woody’s session, the one that was probably the greatest value for me was a quick introduction to PowerShell.  I have not done anything with it yet, but I think it will be a good tool to use to implement my plans for automated database recovery testing.  I saw just enough at the session to take away some of the intimidation factor, and I am getting ready to jump in and see what I can put together in the next few weeks.  And that right there made the investment worthwhile.  So I encourage you, if you have the opportunity to go to a SQLSaturday event near you, go for it!

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• Profit's COLLABORATE 10 Session Selections

  - by Aaron Lazenby

  COLLABORATE 2010 is a mere 11 days away (thanks for the reminder @ocp_advisor). Every year I publish my a list of the sessions I think reflect some of the more interesting people/trends in enterprise IT. I should be at all of these sessions, so drop by for a chat--I'll be the guy tapping out emails on my iPad... Monday, April 19 9:15 a.m. - Keynote: Transforming Customer Value, Delivering Highest Customer Service Location: Keynote Hall I never miss Charles Phillips when he speaks--it's one of the best opportunities to get an update on Oracle product developments and strategy. And there's certainly occasion for an update: this will be Phillips' first big presentation since the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update in late January. Phillips is appearing with Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Thomas Kurian which means there should be some excellent information about how customers are using Oracle's complete software and hardware stack to address enterprise IT challenges. The session should provide some excellent context for the rest of the week's session...don't miss it. 10:45 a.m. - Oracle Fusion Applications: Functional Overview Location: South Seas FI met Basheer Khan at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver and have followed his work ever since. He's a former member of the OAUG Board of Directors, an Oracle ACE, and a charismatic enterprise IT expert. Having worked with the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, Basheer should have some fascinating insights to share about the features and interface of Oracle's Fusine Applications. This session, along with Nadia Bendjedou's "10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation Applications" (on Tuesday, April 20 8:00 a.m. in room 3662) should give attendees the update they need about Oracle's next-generation applications.   1:15p.m. - E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud Location: South Seas HI did my first full-fledged cloud computing coverage at last year's COLLABORATE show (check out my interview with Oracle's Bill Hodak), where I first learned about Amazon's EC2 offering. I've since talked with several people who have provisioned server space on Amazon's cloud with great results. So I'm looking forward to watching the audience configure an instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 on the cloud while Chuck Edwards from Blue Gecko drives. This session should take some of the mist and vapor out of the cloud conversation.2:30 p.m. - "Zero Sign-on" to EBS - Enabling 96000 Users to Login to EBS Without User Maintenance Location: South Seas HI'll be sitting tight in South Seas H for the next session on Monday where Doug Pepka, a ten-year veteran of communications giant Comcast, will be walking attendees through a massive single sign-on (SSO) project across the enterprise. I'm working on a story about SSO for the August issue of Profit, so this session has real practical value to me. Plus the proliferation of user account logins--both personal and professional--makes this a critical usability/change management issue for IT leaders planning for successful long-term IT implementations.   Tuesday 8:00 am  - Information Architecture for Men in Kilts Location: SURF AGetting to a 8:00 a.m. presentation is a tall order in Las Vegas, but presenter Billy Cripe will make it worth your effort. Not only is the title of this session great, but the content should appeal to any IT strategist looking to push the limits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Cripe is a product management director of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management at Oracle, author of Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, and a prolific blogger--he knows how information architecture is critical to and enterprise 2.0 implementation.    10:30a.m. - Oracle Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center Location: REEF FData center virtualization is still one of the best ways to reduce the cost of running enterprise IT. With the addition of Sun products, Oracle has the industry's most comprehensive virtualization portfolio. I must admit, I'm no expert in this subject. So I'm looking forward to Monica Kumar's presentation so I can get up to speed.   Wednesday 8:00 a.m. - The Art of the Steal Location: Mandalay Bay Ballroom JMany will know Frank Abagnale from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me if You Can." The one-time con man and international fugitive who swindled $2.5 million in forged checks went on to help U.S. federal officials investigate fraud cases. Now the CEO of Abagnale and Associates, he has become an invaluable source to the business world on the subject of fraud and fraud protection. With identity theft and digital fraud still on the rise, this session should be an entertaining, and sobering, education on the threats facing businesses and customers around the world. A great way to start Wednesday.1:00 p.m. - Google Wave: Will it replace e-mail as we know it today? Location: SURF EBy many assessments (my own included), Google Wave is a bit of an open collaboration failure. It may seem like an odd reason for me to be excited about this session, but I'm looking forward to the chance to revisit the technology. Also, this is a great case study in connecting free, available Internet tools to existing enterprise computing environments--an issue that IT strategists must contend with as workers spreads out and choose their own productivity tools.  

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• Memory Efficient Windows SOA Server

  - by Antony Reynolds

  Installing a Memory Efficient SOA Suite 11.1.1.6 on Windows Server Well 11.1.1.6 is now available for download so I thought I would build a Windows Server environment to run it.  I will minimize the memory footprint of the installation by putting all functionality into the Admin Server of the SOA Suite domain. Required Software 64-bit JDK SOA Suite If you want 64-bit then choose “Generic” rather than “Microsoft Windows 32bit JVM” or “Linux 32bit JVM” This has links to all the required software. If you choose “Generic” then the Repository Creation Utility link does not show, you still need this so change the platform to “Microsoft Windows 32bit JVM” or “Linux 32bit JVM” to get the software. Similarly if you need a database then you need to change the platform to get the link to XE for Windows or Linux. If possible I recommend installing a 64-bit JDK as this allows you to assign more memory to individual JVMs. Windows XE will work, but it is better if you can use a full Oracle database because of the limitations on XE that sometimes cause it to run out of space with large or multiple SOA deployments. Installation Steps The following flow chart outlines the steps required in installing and configuring SOA Suite. The steps in the diagram are explained below. 64-bit? Is a 64-bit installation required?  The Windows & Linux installers will install 32-bit versions of the Sun JDK and JRockit.  A separate JDK must be installed for 64-bit. Install 64-bit JDK The 64-bit JDK can be either Hotspot or JRockit.  You can choose either JDK 1.7 or 1.6. Install WebLogic If you are using 64-bit then install WebLogic using “java –jar wls1036_generic.jar”.  Make sure you include Coherence in the installation, the easiest way to do this is to accept the “Typical” installation. SOA Suite Required? If you are not installing SOA Suite then you can jump straight ahead and create a WebLogic domain. Install SOA Suite Run the SOA Suite installer and point it at the existing Middleware Home created for WebLogic.  Note to run the SOA installer on Windows the user must have admin privileges.  I also found that on Windows Server 2008R2 I had to start the installer from a command prompt with administrative privileges, granting it privileges when it ran caused it to ignore the jreLoc parameter. Database Available? Do you have access to a database into which you can install the SOA schema.  SOA Suite requires access to an Oracle database (it is supported on other databases but I would always use an oracle database). Install Database I use an 11gR2 Oracle database to avoid XE limitations.  Make sure that you set the database character set to be unicode (AL32UTF8).  I also disabled the new security settings because they get in the way for a developer database.  Don’t forget to check that number of processes is at least 150 and number of sessions is not set, or is set to at least 200 (in the DB init parameters). Run RCU The SOA Suite database schemas are created by running the Repository Creation Utility.  Install the “SOA and BPM Infrastructure” component to support SOA Suite.  If you keep the schema prefix as “DEV” then the config wizard is easier to complete. Run Config Wizard The Config wizard creates the domain which hosts the WebLogic server instances.  To get a minimum footprint SOA installation choose the “Oracle Enterprise Manager” and “Oracle SOA Suite for developers” products.  All other required products will be automatically selected. The “for developers” installs target the appropriate components at the AdminServer rather than creating a separate managed server to house them.  This reduces the number of JVMs required to run the system and hence the amount of memory required.  This is not suitable for anything other than a developer environment as it mixes the admin and runtime functions together in a single server.  It also takes a long time to load all the required modules, making start up a slow process. If it exists I would recommend running the config wizard found in the “oracle_common/common/bin” directory under the middleware home.  This should have access to all the templates, including SOA. If you also want to run BAM in the same JVM as everything else then you need to “Select Optional Configuration” for “Managed Servers, Clusters and Machines”. To target BAM at the AdminServer delete the “bam_server1” managed server that is created by default.  This will result in BAM being targeted at the AdminServer. Installation Issues I had a few problems when I came to test everything in my mega-JVM. Following applications were not targeted and so I needed to target them at the AdminServer: b2bui composer Healthcare UI FMW Welcome Page Application (11.1.0.0.0) How Memory Efficient is It? On a Windows 2008R2 Server running under VirtualBox I was able to bring up both the 11gR2 database and SOA/BPM/BAM in 3G memory.  I allocated a minimum 512M to the PermGen and a minimum of 1.5G for the heap.  The setting from setSOADomainEnv are shown below: set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms1536m -Xmx2048m set PORT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms1536m -Xmx2048m set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=%DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m set PORT_MEM_ARGS=%PORT_MEM_ARGS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m I arrived at these numbers by monitoring JVM memory usage in JConsole. Task Manager showed total system memory usage at 2.9G – just below the 3G I allocated to the VM. Performance is not stellar but it runs and I could run JDeveloper alongside it on my 8G laptop, so in that sense it was a result!

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• How do you use blog content?

  - by fatherjack

  Do you write a blog, have you ever thought about it? I think people fall into one of a few categories when it comes to blogs, especially blogs with technical content. Writing articles furiously - daily, twice daily and reading dozens of others. Writing the odd piece of content and read plenty of others' output. Started a blog once and its fizzled out but reading lots. Thought about starting a blog someday but never got around to it, hopping into the occasional blog when a link or a Tweet takes them there. Never thought about writing one but often catching content from them when Google (or other preferred search engine) finds content related to their search. Now I am not saying that either of these is right or wrong, nor am I saying that anyone should feel any compulsion to be in any particular category. What I would say is that you as a blog reader have the power to move blog writers from one category to another. How, you might ask? How do I have any power over a blog writer? It is very simple - feedback. If you give feedback then the blog writer knows that they are reaching an audience, if there is no response then they we are simply writing down our thoughts for what could amount to nothing more than a feeble amount of exercise and a few more key stokes towards the onset of RSI. Most blogs have a mechanism to alert the writer when there are comments, and personally speaking, if an email is received saying there has been a response to a blog article then there is a rush of enthusiasm, a moment of excitement that someone is actually reading and considering the text that was submitted and made available for the whole world to read. I am relatively new to this blog game and could be in some extended honeymoon period as I have also recently been incorporated into the Simple Talk 'stable'. I can understand that once you get to the "Dizzy Heights of Ozar" (www.brentozar.com) then getting comments and feedback might not be such a pleasure and may even be rather more of a chore but that, I guess, is the price of fame. For us mere mortals starting out blogging, getting feedback (or even at the moment for me, simply the hope of getting feedback) is what keeps it going. The hope that you will pick a topic that hasn't been done recently by Brad McGehee, Grant Fritchey,  Paul Randall, Thomas LaRock or any one of the dozen of rock star bloggers listed here or others from SQLServerPedia and so on, and then do it well enough to be found, reviewed, or <shudder> (re)tweeted to bring more visitors is what we are striving for, along with the fact that the content we might produce is something that will be of benefit to others. There is only so much point to typing content that no-one is reading and putting it on a blog. You may as well just write it in a diary. A technical blog is not like, say, a blog covering photography techniques where the way to frame and take a picture stands true whether it was written last week, last year or last century - technical content goes sour, quite quickly. There isn't much call for articles about yesterdays technology unless its something that still applies to current versions too, so some content written no more than 2 years ago isn't worth having now. The combination of a piece of content that you know is going to not last long and the fact that no-one reads it is a strong force against writing anything else. Getting feedback counters that despair and gives a value to writing something new. I would say that any feedback is good but there are obviously comments that are just so negative or otherwise badly phrased that they would hasten the demise of a blog but, in general most feedback will encourage a writer. It may not be a comment that supports or agrees with the main theme of a post but if it generates discussion or opens up a previously unexplored viewpoint it is contributing to the blog and is therefore encouraging to the writer. Even if you only say "thank you" before you leave a blog, having taken a section of script to use for yourself or having been given a few links to some content that has widened your knowledge it will be so welcome to the blog owner. Isn't it also the decent thing to do, acknowledging that you have benefited from another's efforts?

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• The Unspoken - The Why of GC Ergonomics

  - by jonthecollector

  Do you use GC ergonomics, -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, with the UseParallelGC collector? The jist of GC ergonomics for that collector is that it tries to grow or shrink the heap to meet a specified goal. The goals that you can choose are maximum pause time and/or throughput. Don't get too excited there. I'm speaking about UseParallelGC (the throughput collector) so there are definite limits to what pause goals can be achieved. When you say out loud "I don't care about pause times, give me the best throughput I can get" and then say to yourself "Well, maybe 10 seconds really is too long", then think about a pause time goal. By default there is no pause time goal and the throughput goal is high (98% of the time doing application work and 2% of the time doing GC work). You can get more details on this in my very first blog. GC ergonomics The UseG1GC has its own version of GC ergonomics, but I'll be talking only about the UseParallelGC version. If you use this option and wanted to know what it (GC ergonomics) was thinking, try -XX:AdaptiveSizePolicyOutputInterval=1 This will print out information every i-th GC (above i is 1) about what the GC ergonomics to trying to do. For example, UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 GC ergonomics tries to meet (in order) Pause time goal Throughput goal Minimum footprint The first line says that it's trying to meet the throughput goal. UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** This run has the default pause time goal (i.e., no pause time goal) so it is trying to reach a 98% throughput. The lines Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) say that we're currently spending about 16% of the time doing young GC's and about 5% of the time doing full GC's. These percentages are a decaying, weighted average (earlier contributions to the average are given less weight). The source code is available as part of the OpenJDK so you can take a look at it if you want the exact definition. GC ergonomics is trying to increase the throughput by growing the heap (so says the "attempted to grow"). The last line Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 says that the ergonomics is trying to balance the GC times between young GC's and full GC's by decreasing the tenuring threshold. During a young collection the younger objects are copied to the survivor spaces while the older objects are copied to the tenured generation. Younger and older are defined by the tenuring threshold. If the tenuring threshold hold is 4, an object that has survived fewer than 4 young collections (and has remained in the young generation by being copied to the part of the young generation called a survivor space) it is younger and copied again to a survivor space. If it has survived 4 or more young collections, it is older and gets copied to the tenured generation. A lower tenuring threshold moves objects more eagerly to the tenured generation and, conversely a higher tenuring threshold keeps copying objects between survivor spaces longer. The tenuring threshold varies dynamically with the UseParallelGC collector. That is different than our other collectors which have a static tenuring threshold. GC ergonomics tries to balance the amount of work done by the young GC's and the full GC's by varying the tenuring threshold. Want more work done in the young GC's? Keep objects longer in the survivor spaces by increasing the tenuring threshold. This is an example of the output when GC ergonomics is trying to achieve a pause time goal UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** pause time goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 20.74 (no change) Tenured generation: 31.70 (attempted to shrink) The pause goal was set at 50 millisecs and the last GC was 0.415: [Full GC (Ergonomics) [PSYoungGen: 2048K-0K(26624K)] [ParOldGen: 26095K-9711K(28992K)] 28143K-9711K(55616K), [Metaspace: 1719K-1719K(2473K/6528K)], 0.0758940 secs] [Times: user=0.28 sys=0.00, real=0.08 secs] The full collection took about 76 millisecs so GC ergonomics wants to shrink the tenured generation to reduce that pause time. The previous young GC was 0.346: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 26624K-2048K(26624K)] 40547K-22223K(56768K), 0.0136501 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.02 secs] so the pause time there was about 14 millisecs so no changes are needed. If trying to meet a pause time goal, the generations are typically shrunk. With a pause time goal in play, watch the GC overhead numbers and you will usually see the cost of setting a pause time goal (i.e., throughput goes down). If the pause goal is too low, you won't achieve your pause time goal and you will spend all your time doing GC. GC ergonomics is meant to be simple because it is meant to be used by anyone. It was not meant to be mysterious and so this output was added. If you don't like what GC ergonomics is doing, you can turn it off with -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, but be pre-warned that you have to manage the size of the generations explicitly. If UseAdaptiveSizePolicy is turned off, the heap does not grow. The size of the heap (and the generations) at the start of execution is always the size of the heap. I don't like that and tried to fix it once (with some help from an OpenJDK contributor) but it unfortunately never made it out the door. I still have hope though. Just a side note. With the default throughput goal of 98% the heap often grows to it's maximum value and stays there. Definitely reduce the throughput goal if footprint is important. Start with -XX:GCTimeRatio=4 for a more modest throughput goal (%20 of the time spent in GC). A higher value means a smaller amount of time in GC (as the throughput goal).

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• Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – RDBMS and NoSQL – Day 12 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Cloud in the Big Data Story. In this article we will understand the role of Operational Databases Supporting Big Data Story. Even though we keep on talking about Big Data architecture, it is extremely crucial to understand that Big Data system can’t just exist in the isolation of itself. There are many needs of the business can only be fully filled with the help of the operational databases. Just having a system which can analysis big data may not solve every single data problem. Real World Example Think about this way, you are using Facebook and you have just updated your information about the current relationship status. In the next few seconds the same information is also reflected in the timeline of your partner as well as a few of the immediate friends. After a while you will notice that the same information is now also available to your remote friends. Later on when someone searches for all the relationship changes with their friends your change of the relationship will also show up in the same list. Now here is the question – do you think Big Data architecture is doing every single of these changes? Do you think that the immediate reflection of your relationship changes with your family member is also because of the technology used in Big Data. Actually the answer is Facebook uses MySQL to do various updates in the timeline as well as various events we do on their homepage. It is really difficult to part from the operational databases in any real world business. Now we will see a few of the examples of the operational databases. Relational Databases (This blog post) NoSQL Databases (This blog post) Key-Value Pair Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Document Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Columnar Databases (The Day After’s post) Graph Databases (The Day After’s post) Spatial Databases (The Day After’s post) Relational Databases We have earlier discussed about the RDBMS role in the Big Data’s story in detail so we will not cover it extensively over here. Relational Database is pretty much everywhere in most of the businesses which are here for many years. The importance and existence of the relational database are always going to be there as long as there are meaningful structured data around. There are many different kinds of relational databases for example Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and many others. If you are looking for Open Source and widely accepted database, I suggest to try MySQL as that has been very popular in the last few years. I also suggest you to try out PostgreSQL as well. Besides many other essential qualities PostgreeSQL have very interesting licensing policies. PostgreSQL licenses allow modifications and distribution of the application in open or closed (source) form. One can make any modifications and can keep it private as well as well contribute to the community. I believe this one quality makes it much more interesting to use as well it will play very important role in future. Nonrelational Databases (NOSQL) We have also covered Nonrelational Dabases in earlier blog posts. NoSQL actually stands for Not Only SQL Databases. There are plenty of NoSQL databases out in the market and selecting the right one is always very challenging. Here are few of the properties which are very essential to consider when selecting the right NoSQL database for operational purpose. Data and Query Model Persistence of Data and Design Eventual Consistency Scalability Though above all of the properties are interesting to have in any NoSQL database but the one which most attracts to me is Eventual Consistency. Eventual Consistency RDBMS uses ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) as a key mechanism for ensuring the data consistency, whereas NonRelational DBMS uses BASE for the same purpose. Base stands for Basically Available, Soft state and Eventual consistency. Eventual consistency is widely deployed in distributed systems. It is a consistency model used in distributed computing which expects unexpected often. In large distributed system, there are always various nodes joining and various nodes being removed as they are often using commodity servers. This happens either intentionally or accidentally. Even though one or more nodes are down, it is expected that entire system still functions normally. Applications should be able to do various updates as well as retrieval of the data successfully without any issue. Additionally, this also means that system is expected to return the same updated data anytime from all the functioning nodes. Irrespective of when any node is joining the system, if it is marked to hold some data it should contain the same updated data eventually. As per Wikipedia - Eventual consistency is a consistency model used in distributed computing that informally guarantees that, if no new updates are made to a given data item, eventually all accesses to that item will return the last updated value. In other words -  Informally, if no additional updates are made to a given data item, all reads to that item will eventually return the same value. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various other Operational Databases supporting Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

  Production databases can get very large. This in itself is to be expected, but when a copy of the database is needed the database must be restored, requiring additional and costly storage.  For example, if you want to give each developer a full copy of your production server, you'll need n times the storage cost for your n-developer team. The same is true for any test databases that are created during the course of your project lifecycle. If you've read my previous blog posts, you'll be aware that I've been focusing on the database continuous integration theme. In my CI setup I create a "production"-equivalent database directly from its source control representation, and use this to test my upgrade scripts. Despite this being a perfectly valid and practical thing to do as part of a CI setup, it's not the exact equivalent to running the upgrade script on a copy of the actual production database. So why shouldn't I instead simply restore the most recent production backup as part of my CI process? There are two reasons why this would be impractical. 1. My CI environment isn't an exact copy of my production environment. Indeed, this would be the case in a perfect world, and it is strongly recommended as a good practice if you follow Jez Humble and David Farley's "Continuous Delivery" teachings, but in practical terms this might not always be possible, especially where storage is concerned. It may just not be possible to restore a huge production database on the environment you've been allotted. 2. It's not just about the storage requirements, it's also the time it takes to do the restore. The whole point of continuous integration is that you are alerted as early as possible whether the build (yes, the database upgrade script counts!) is broken. If I have to run an hour-long restore each time I commit a change to source control I'm just not going to get the feedback quickly enough to react. So what's the solution? Red Gate has a technology, SQL Virtual Restore, that is able to restore a database without using up additional storage. Although this sounds too good to be true, the explanation is quite simple (although I'm sure the technical implementation details under the hood are quite complex!) Instead of restoring the backup in the conventional sense, SQL Virtual Restore will effectively mount the backup using its HyperBac technology. It creates a data and log file, .vmdf, and .vldf, that becomes the delta between the .bak file and the virtual database. This means that both read and write operations are permitted on a virtual database as from SQL Server's point of view it is no different from a conventional database. Instead of doubling the storage requirements upon a restore, there is no 'duplicate' storage requirements, other than the trivially small virtual log and data files (see illustration below). The benefit is magnified the more databases you mount to the same backup file. This technique could be used to provide a large development team a full development instance of a large production database. It is also incredibly easy to set up. Once SQL Virtual Restore is installed, you simply run a conventional RESTORE command to create the virtual database. This is what I have running as part of a nightly "release test" process triggered by my CI tool. RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_virtual FROM DISK=N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction.bak' WITH MOVE N'WidgetProduction' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vmdf', MOVE N'WidgetProduction_log' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_log_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vldf', NORECOVERY, STATS=1, REPLACE GO RESTORE DATABASE mydatabase WITH RECOVERY   Note the only change from what you would do normally is the naming of the .vmdf and .vldf files. SQL Virtual Restore intercepts this by monitoring the extension and applies its magic, ensuring the 'virtual' restore happens rather than the conventional storage-heavy restore. My automated release test then applies the upgrade scripts to the virtual production database and runs some validation tests, giving me confidence that were I to run this on production for real, all would go smoothly. For illustration, here is my 8Gb production database: And its corresponding backup file: Here are the .vldf and .vmdf files, which represent the only additional used storage for the new database following the virtual restore.   The beauty of this product is its simplicity. Once it is installed, the interaction with the backup and virtual database is exactly the same as before, as the clever stuff is being done at a lower level. SQL Virtual Restore can be downloaded as a fully functional 14-day trial. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• MySQL Connect 9 Days Away – Optimizer Sessions

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  72 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Following my previous blog post focusing on InnoDB talks at MySQL Connect, let us review today the sessions focusing on the MySQL Optimizer: Saturday, 11.30 am, Room Golden Gate 6: MySQL Optimizer Overview—Olav Sanstå, Oracle The goal of MySQL optimizer is to take a SQL query as input and produce an optimal execution plan for the query. This session presents an overview of the main phases of the MySQL optimizer and the primary optimizations done to the query. These optimizations are based on a combination of logical transformations and cost-based decisions. Examples of optimization strategies the presentation covers are the main query transformations, the join optimizer, the data access selection strategies, and the range optimizer. For the cost-based optimizations, an overview of the cost model and the data used for doing the cost estimations is included. Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 6: Overview of New Optimizer Features in MySQL 5.6—Manyi Lu, Oracle Many optimizer features have been added into MySQL 5.6. This session provides an introduction to these great features. Multirange read, index condition pushdown, and batched key access will yield huge performance improvements on large data volumes. Structured explain, explain for update/delete/insert, and optimizer tracing will help users analyze and speed up queries. And last but not least, the session covers subquery optimizations in Release 5.6. Saturday, 7.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: BoF: Query Optimizations: What Is New and What Is Coming? This BoF presents common techniques for query optimization, covers what is new in MySQL 5.6, and provides a discussion forum in which attendees can tell the MySQL optimizer team which optimizations they would like to see in the future. Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 8: Query Performance Comparison of MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6—Øystein Grøvlen, Oracle MySQL Release 5.6 contains several improvements in the query optimizer that create improved performance for complex queries. This presentation looks at how MySQL 5.6 improves the performance of many of the queries in the DBT-3 benchmark. Based on the observed improvements, the presentation discusses what makes the specific queries perform better in Release 5.6. It describes the relevant new optimization techniques and gives examples of the types of queries that will benefit from these techniques. Sunday, 4.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: Powerful EXPLAIN in MySQL 5.6—Evgeny Potemkin, Oracle The EXPLAIN command of MySQL has long been a very useful tool for understanding how MySQL will execute a query. Release 5.6 of the MySQL database offers several new additions that give more-detailed information about the query plan and make it easier to understand at the same time. This presentation gives an overview of new EXPLAIN features: structured EXPLAIN in JSON format, EXPLAIN for INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE, and optimizer tracing. Examples in the session give insights into how you can take advantage of the new features. They show how these features supplement and relate to each other and to classical EXPLAIN and how and why the MySQL server chooses a particular query plan. You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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• How to write a generic service in WCF

  - by rezaxp

  In one of my recent projects I needed a generic service as a facade to handle General activities such as CRUD.Therefor I searched as Many as I could but there was no Idea on generic services so I tried to figure it out by my self.Finally,I found a way :Create a generic contract as below :[ServiceContract] public interface IEntityReadService<TEntity>         where TEntity : EntityBase, new()     {         [OperationContract(Name = "Get")]         TEntity Get(Int64 Id);         [OperationContract(Name = "GetAll")]         List<TEntity> GetAll();         [OperationContract(Name = "GetAllPaged")]         List<TEntity> GetAll(int pageSize, int currentPageIndex, ref int totalRecords);         List<TEntity> GetAll(string whereClause, string orderBy, int pageSize, int currentPageIndex, ref int totalRecords);            }then create your service class :  public class GenericService<TEntity> :IEntityReadService<TEntity> where TEntity : EntityBase, new() {#region Implementation of IEntityReadService<TEntity>         public TEntity Get(long Id)         {             return BusinessController.Get(Id);         }         public List<TEntity> GetAll()         {             try             {                 return BusinessController.GetAll().ToList();             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                                  throw;             }                      }         public List<TEntity> GetAll(int pageSize, int currentPageIndex, ref int totalRecords)         {             return                 BusinessController.GetAll(pageSize, currentPageIndex, ref totalRecords).ToList();         }         public List<TEntity> GetAll(string whereClause, string orderBy, int pageSize, int currentPageIndex, ref int totalRecords)         {             return                 BusinessController.GetAll(pageSize, currentPageIndex, ref totalRecords, whereClause, orderBy).ToList();         }         #endregion} Then, set your EndPoint configuration in this way :<endpoint address="myAddress" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="myBindingConfiguration1" contract="Contracts.IEntityReadService`1[[Entities.mySampleEntity, Entities]], Service.Contracts" />

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• Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

  And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014   Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

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• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response – Part 2

  - by Michael Stephenson

  To follow up a previous article about timeouts and how they can affect your application I have extended the sample we were using to include WCF. I will execute some test scenarios and discuss the results. The sample We begin by consuming exactly the same web service which is sitting on a remote server. This time I have created a .net 3.5 application which will consume the web service using the basichttp binding. To show you the configuration for the consumption of this web service please refer to the below diagram. You can see like before we also have the connectionManagement element in the configuration file. I have added a WCF service reference (also using the asynchronous proxy methods) and have the below code sample in the application which will asynchronously make the web service calls and handle the responses on a call back method invoked by a delegate. If you have read the previous article you will notice that the code is almost the same.   Sample 1 – WCF with Default Timeouts In this test I set about recreating the same scenario as previous where we would run the test but this time using WCF as the messaging component. For the first test I would use the default configuration settings which WCF had setup when we added a reference to the web service. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client-side trace is as follows:   The server-side trace is as follows: Some observations on the results are as follows: The timeouts happened quicker than in the previous tests because some calls were timing out before they attempted to connect to the server The first few calls that timed out did actually connect to the server and did execute successfully on the server   Test 2 – Increase Open Connection Timeout & Send Timeout In this test I wanted to increase both the send and open timeout values to try and give everything a chance to go through. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The client side trace for this test was   The server-side trace for this test was: Some observations on this test are: This test proved if the timeouts are high enough everything will just go through   Test 3 – Increase just the Send Timeout In this test we wanted to increase just the send timeout. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The below is the client side trace The below is the server side trace Some observations on this test are: In this test from both the client and server perspective everything ran through fine The open connection timeout did not seem to have any effect   Test 4 – Increase Just the Open Connection Timeout In this test I wanted to validate the change to the open connection setting by increasing just this on its own. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: In this test you can see that the open connection which relates to opening the channel timeout increase was not the thing which stopped the calls timing out It's the send of data which is timing out On the server you can see that the successful few calls were fine but there were also a few calls which hit the server but timed out on the client You can see that not all calls hit the server which was one of the problems with the WSE and ASMX options   Test 5 – Smaller Increase in Send Timeout In this test I wanted to make a smaller increase to the send timeout than previous just to prove that it was the key setting which was controlling what was timing out. The timeout values for this test are: openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:02:30"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was   The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: You can see that most of the calls got through fine On the client you can see that call 20 timed out but still hit the server and executed fine.   Summary At this point between the two articles we have quite a lot of scenarios showing the different way the timeout setting have played into our original performance issue, and now we can see how WCF could offer an improved way to handle the problem. To summarise the differences in the timeout properties for the three technology stacks: ASMX The timeout value only applies to the execution time of your request on the server. The timeout does not consider how long your code might be waiting client side to get a connection. WSE The timeout value includes both the time to obtain a connection and also the time to execute the request. A timeout will not be thrown as an error until an attempt to connect to the server is made. This means a 40 second timeout setting may not throw the error until 60 seconds when the connection to the server is made. If the connection to the server is made you should be aware that your message will be processed and you should design for this. WCF The WCF send timeout is the setting most equivalent to the settings we were looking at previously. Like WSE this setting the counter includes the time to get a connection as well as the time to execute on a server. Unlike WSE and ASMX an error will be thrown as soon as the send timeout from making your call from user code has elapsed regardless of whether we are waiting for a connection or have an open connection to the server. This may to a user appear to have better latency in getting an error response compared to WSE or ASMX.

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• Wednesday at OpenWorld: Identity Management

  - by Tanu Sood

  Divide and conquer! Yes, divide and conquer today at Oracle OpenWorld with your colleagues to make the most of all things Identity Management since there’s a lot going on. Here’ the line-up for today: Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9458: End End-User-Managed Passwords and Increase Security with Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Plus 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3008 Most customers have a broad variety of applications (internal, external, web, client server, host etc) and single sign-on systems that extend to some, but not all systems. This session will focus on how customers are using enterprise single sign-on can help extend single sign-on to virtually any application, without costly application modification while laying a foundation that will enable integration with a broader identity management platform. CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption.  Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience.  This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking Control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. EVENTS: Identity Management Customer Advisory Board 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., Four Seasons – Yerba Buena Room This invitation-only event is designed exclusively for Customer Advisory Board (CAB) members to provide product strategy and roadmap updates. Identity Management Meet & Greet Networking Event 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Meeting Session 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Cocktail Reception Yerba Buena Room, Four Seasons Hotel, 757 Market Street, San Francisco The CAB meeting will be immediately followed by an open Meet & Greet event hosted by Oracle Identity Management executives and product management team. Do take this opportunity to network with your peers and connect with the Identity Management customers. For a complete listing, refer to the Focus on Identity Management document. And as always, you can find us on @oracleidm on twitter and FaceBook. Use #oow and #idm to join in the conversation.

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• Surface and the Uphill Battle to Win Over iPad Users (Namely: Me)

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I went away this past weekend and decided to bring along the Windows 8 tablet from the Build conference last year – y’know, to give Windows 8 a try in a typical scenario. I also brought our iPad 2 along since I figured my wife would want to use that. I’d love to tell you how I found using my Windows 8 tablet but I can’t – I used the iPad exclusively the entire weekend. It was during this that I realized what Microsoft needs to do to win me over as an iPad user. As you’ll see, I’m left wondering what it is that Surface is meant to compete with: iPad and other tablets, or thin laptops like the MacBook Air or Ultrabooks. Device Size I really like the size of the iPad compared with the Build tablet. It’s not as long and the thinness/weight of the device makes it feel more like you’re holding a magazine than a computer. I’m pleased that Microsoft will be matching the thinness of the iPad with Surface, but I’m suspect as to what that actually means. The iPad’s edges slant inwards where the Surface has a thicker boxish look (similar to the iPhone 4S). So while they may have the same depth at the deepest part of both devices, I bet the iPad will come off feeling thinner. However, its not lost on me the number of external port options the Surface’s design provides over the iPad (Usb, etc.). With that said, I haven’t missed having a USB slot on my iPad. I’m not a fan of lengthening the Surface screen size to almost a full inch over the iPad, mainly because… Vertical Orientation Experience Did you notice at the announce event, in the images of the devices that have been released, and in any marketing for it, that the surface is always displayed in horizontal orientation. This is a huge beef I have with my Build tablet and why I prefer the iPad. Yes the iPad can do the wide-screenish mode, but the iPad is oriented to be vertical by nature. Don’t agree? Look at the button and camera placement – both on the shorter sides of the device. Compare that with the Surface, where the orientation for the button and camera is on the longer sides. To be fair, Blackberry and the horde of Android tablets out there haven’t gotten this either – since most monitors are widescreen nowadays tablets should be too right? Wrong. Widescreen is great for certain things, but tasks such as reading is not one of them – hence why monitor companies like Dell provide stands that allow you to flip your widescreen monitor to a vertical orientation. That Microsoft has chosen a horizontal orientation by default for Windows 8 is disappointing – hopefully hardware manufacturers will be given the option of a default vertical orientation. Fast Startup Time I like that I can turn off/turn on the iPad very quickly. Even from a true “off” mode and not just sleeping, the iPad boots up very quickly. Windows RT needs to have that same quick response. If I start finding that I’m waiting for the device to boot up for more than 30 seconds that could be a show stopper. No Heat I really hate that the Build tablet has fans that kick in to cool the procs, but its basically a slate computer and I get its part of that prototype build. For Surface, it needs to be the same type of experience as the iPad – no heat! I know Surface doesn’t have fans and uses some cool new vent system or something like that, but even then – I want to sit and read a book on my Surface without having to feel any heat coming from the device, which is the experience I have with the iPad now. What About Apps?! I am definitely not the target client when it comes to app stores. On my iPad I use: Safari Kindle Reader Twitter App Settlers of Catan TSN’s App And that’s it. So really, while its nice that some version of Office might be available, I’m not planning on utilizing a Surface for creating a PowerPoint or working on a Word document – that’s what my laptop is for. I want my tablet to be for information snacking or as an e-reader and occasionally an entertainment device. Surface vs iPad or Surface vs Air? The more that I read up on Surface, the more I wonder if it won’t be a touch-enabled MacBook Air competitor more than an iPad one. Also, I really question if Microsoft gets tablets – when one of your main selling features is a built-in physical keyboard it speaks more to a traditional laptop experience than a tablet one that’s entirely reliant on touch. Still, I really love the Windows Phone interface – way more than iOS – so I’m still very optimistic that the Metro experience on the tablet will be fantastic. I just worry that Microsoft has interpreted a tablet as a computer with a removable keyboard and a touch screen, and that’s not what tablet computing is about at all.

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• problem occur during installation of moses scripts

  - by lenny99

  we got error when compile moses-script. process of it as follows: minakshi@minakshi-Vostro-3500:~/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts$ make release # Compile the parts make all make[1]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts' # Building memscore may fail e.g. if boost is not available. # We ignore this because traditional scoring will still work and memscore isn't used by default. cd training/memscore ; \ ./configure && make \ || ( echo "WARNING: Building memscore failed."; \ echo 'training/memscore/memscore' >> ../../release-exclude ) checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking for gawk... no checking for mawk... mawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking for g++... g++ checking whether the C++ compiler works... yes checking for C++ compiler default output file name... a.out checking for suffix of executables... checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes checking whether g++ accepts -g... yes checking for style of include used by make... GNU checking dependency style of g++... gcc3 checking for gcc... gcc checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3 checking for boostlib >= 1.31.0... yes checking for cos in -lm... yes checking for gzopen in -lz... yes checking for cblas_dgemm in -lgslcblas... no checking for gsl_blas_dgemm in -lgsl... no checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... g++ -E checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /bin/grep checking for egrep... /bin/grep -E checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking for sys/types.h... yes checking for sys/stat.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for memory.h... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking n_gram.h usability... no checking n_gram.h presence... no checking for n_gram.h... no checking for size_t... yes checking for ptrdiff_t... yes configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating Makefile config.status: creating config.h config.status: config.h is unchanged config.status: executing depfiles commands make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' make all-am make[3]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/memscore' touch release-exclude # No files excluded by default pwd=`pwd`; \ for subdir in cmert-0.5 phrase-extract symal mbr lexical-reordering; do \ make -C training/$subdir || exit 1; \ echo "### Compiler $subdir"; \ cd $pwd; \ done make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/cmert-0.5' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/cmert-0.5' ### Compiler cmert-0.5 make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/phrase-extract' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/phrase-extract' ### Compiler phrase-extract make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/symal' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/symal' ### Compiler symal make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/mbr' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/mbr' ### Compiler mbr make[2]: Entering directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/lexical-reordering' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts/training/lexical-reordering' ### Compiler lexical-reordering ## All files that need compilation were compiled make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/minakshi/Desktop/monu/moses/scripts' /bin/sh: ./check-dependencies.pl: not found make: *** [release] Error 127 We don't know why this error occurs? check-dependencies.pl file existed in scripts folder ...

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• I have a problem with a AE1200 Cisco/Linksys Wireless-N USB adapter having stopped working after I ran the update manager in Ubuntu 12.04

  - by user69670

  Here is the problem, I use a Cisco/Linksys AE1200 wireless network adapter to connect my desktop to a public wifi internet connection. I use ndiswrapper to use the windows driver and it had been working fine for me untill I ran the update manager overnight a few days ago. When I woke up it was asking for the normal computer restart to implement the changes but after rebooting the computer, the wireless adapter did not work, the status light on the adapter did not light up even though ubuntu recognizes it is there and according to ndiswrapper the drivers are loaded and the hardware is present. the grep command is being a bitch for some unknown reason today so this will be long sorry Output from "lspci": 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Host Bridge (rev 01) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge 00:12.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA 00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI0) 00:13.1 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI1) 00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI2) 00:13.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI3) 00:13.4 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI4) 00:13.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB Controller (EHCI) 00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 13) 00:14.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 IDE 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge 00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200] 02:02.0 Communication controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. HSF 56k Data/Fax Modem 02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs CA0106 Soundblaster 02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) Output from "lsusb": Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 009: ID 13b1:0039 Linksys AE1200 802.11bgn Wireless Adapter [Broadcom BCM43235] Bus 003 Device 002: ID 045e:0053 Microsoft Corp. Optical Mouse Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1043:8006 iCreate Technologies Corp. Flash Disk 32-256 MB Output from "ifconfig": eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:21:b6:af:7c UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:20 Base address:0xb400 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:13232 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:13232 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1084624 (1.0 MB) TX bytes:1084624 (1.0 MB) Output from "iwconfig": lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. Output from "lsmod": Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 12617 1 nls_cp437 12751 1 vfat 17308 1 fat 55605 1 vfat uas 17828 0 usb_storage 39646 1 nls_utf8 12493 1 udf 84366 1 crc_itu_t 12627 1 udf snd_ca0106 39279 2 snd_ac97_codec 106082 1 snd_ca0106 ac97_bus 12642 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm 80845 2 snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec rfcomm 38139 0 snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25424 2 snd_ca0106,snd_seq_midi bnep 17830 2 parport_pc 32114 0 bluetooth 158438 10 rfcomm,bnep ppdev 12849 0 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 51567 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 28931 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 62064 11 snd_ca0106, snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawj9fe snd_ca0106,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device soundcore 14635 1 snd snd_page_alloc 14108 2 snd_ca0106,snd_pcm sp5100_tco 13495 0 i2c_piix4 13093 0 radeon 733693 3 ttm 65344 1 radeon drm_kms_helper 45466 1 radeon drm 197692 5 radeon,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13199 1 radeon mac_hid 13077 0 shpchp 32325 0 ati_agp 13242 0 lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp usbhid 41906 0 hid 77367 1 usbhid 8139too 23283 0 8139cp 26759 0 pata_atiixp 12999 1 Output from "sudo lshw -C network": *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:02:05.0 logical name: eth0 version: 10 serial: 00:19:21:b6:af:7c size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 10 0bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=8139too driverversion=0.9.28 duplex=half latency=64 link=no maxlatency=64 mingnt=32 multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:20 ioport:b400(size=256) memory:ff5fdc00-ff5fdcff Output from "iwlist scan": lo Interface doesn't support scanning. eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning. Output from "lsb_release -d": Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Output from "uname -mr": 3.2.0-24-generic-pae i686 Output from "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart": * Running /etc/init.d/networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces * Reconfiguring network interfaces... [ OK ]

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