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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 10, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 10, 2011Popular ReleasesCODE Framework: 4.0.11110.0: Various minor fixes and tweaks.Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.2: What's NewRelated Work Items Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many useful types such as ViewModel, CommandSubject, ListSubject, DictionarySubject, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T> and others. Various interactive labs that illustrate the runtime behavior of the extensio...Composite C1 CMS: Composite C1 3.0 RC2 (3.0.4331.234): This is currently a Release Candidate. Upgrade guidelines and "what's new" are pending.Player Framework by Microsoft: HTML5 Player Framework 1.0: Additional DownloadsHTML5 Player Framework Examples - This is a set of examples showing how to setup and initialize the HTML5 Player Framework. This includes examples of how to use the Player Framework with both the HTML5 video tag and Silverlight player. Note: Be sure to unblock the zip file before using. Note: In order to test Silverlight fallback in the included sample app, you need to run the html and xap files over http (e.g. over localhost). Silverlight Players - Visit the Silverlig...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.6 - Final release - 64Bit: What’s New in 4.8.6 (Final release)A few minor issues have been fixed What’s New in 4.8.5 (Beta release)Assign projection tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projection dialects. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projections database converted to SQLite format. (Sergei Leschinsky) Basic code for database support - will be developed further (ShapefileDataClient class, IDataProvider interface). (Sergei Leschinsky) 'Export shapefile to database' tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Made the GEOS library static. geos.dl...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.2.2011.1107、XCoder v4.5.2011.1108: v8.2.2011.1107 ?IEntityOperate.Create?Entity.CreateInstance??????forEdit，????????(FindByKeyForEdit)???，???false ??????Entity.CreateInstance，????forEdit，???????????????????? v8.2.2011.1103 ??MS????，??MaxMin??（????????）、NotIn??（????）、?Top??（??NotIn）、RowNumber??（?????） v8.2.2011.1101 SqlServer?????????DataPath，?????????????????????? Oracle?????????DllPath，????OCI??，???????????ORACLE_HOME?? Oracle?????XCode.Oracle.IsUseOwner，???????????Ow...Facebook C# SDK: v5.3.2: This is a RTW release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead of legacy rest api. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ (experimental) added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 (binaries not distributed in codeplex nor nuget.org, will need to manually build from Facebook-Net45.sln) added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added ne...Delete Inactive TS Ports: List and delete the Inactive TS Ports: UPDATEAdded support for windows 2003 servers and removed some null reference errors when the registry key was not present List and delete the Inactive TS Ports - The InactiveTSPortList.EXE accepts command line arguments The InactiveTSPortList.Standalone.WithoutPrompt.exe runs as a standalone exe without the need for any command line arguments.Ribbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Editor (0.1.2207.267): BUG FIXES: - Cannot add multiple JavaScript and Url under Actions - Cannot add <Or> node under <OrGroup> - Adding a rule under <Or> node put the new rule node at the wrong placeDNN Quick Form: DNN Quick Form 1.0.0: Initial Release for DNN Quick Form Requires DotNetNuke 6.1ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.60.0: Added almost full support for auto filters (missing custom date filters). See examples Filter Values, Custom Filters Fixed issues 7016, 7391, 7388, 7389, 7198, 7196, 7194, 7186, 7067, 7115, 7144Microsoft Research Boogie: Nightly builds: This download category contains automatically released nightly builds, reflecting the current state of Boogie's development. We try to make sure each nightly build passes the test suite. If you suspect that was not the case, please try the previous nightly build to see if that really is the problem. Also, please see the installation instructions.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.0: Major design changes to the control in order to achieve better scalability and extensibility for the new features comming with GoogleMaps API. GoogleMap control switched to GoogleMaps API v3 and .NET 4.0. GoogleMap control is 100% ScriptControl now, it requires ScriptManager to be registered on the pages where and before it is used. Markers, polylines, polygons and directions were implemented as ExtenderControl, instead of being inner properties of GoogleMap control. Better perfomance. Better...SubExtractor: Release 1020: Feature: added "baseline double quotes" character to selector box Feature: added option to save SRT files as ANSI (instead of previous UTF-8 only) Feature: made "Save Sup files to Source directory" apply to both Sup and Idx source files. Fix: removed SDH text (...) or [...] that is split over 2 lines Fix: better decision-making in when to prefix a line with a '-' because SDH was removedAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6.1: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6.1?? ??.hlv...Track Folder Changes: Track Folder Changes 1.1: Fixed exception when right-clicking the root nodeKinect Toolbox: Kinect Toolbox v1.1.0.2: This version adds support for the Kinect for Windows SDK beta 2.Kinect Mouse Cursor: Kinect Mouse Cursor 1.1: Updated for Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 Beta 2!Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit: Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit 1.1: Updated for Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 Beta 2!Media Companion: MC 3.421b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) TV Show Resolutions... Fix to show the season-specials.tbn when selecting an episode from season 00. Before, MC would try & load season00.tbn Fix for issue #197 - new show added by 'Manually Add Path' not being picked up. Also made non-visible the same thing in Root Folders...New ProjectsAlgoritmoGeneticoVB: Proyecto para la cátedra de Inteligencia Artificial de la UCSEAudio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch & Shift is a simple audio tool intended to be useful for musicians who wants to slow down or change the pitch of the music. This software takes advantage of Bass audio library technology, wich is multi platform and x64 compatible.Betz: Start with financial binary bet system first... But hope to have a gaming platform in the end. Cheers!Composite Data Service Framework: The Composite Data Service Framework is a toolkit that extends the functionality of the WCF Data Services APIs by allowing a set of OData Services from distinct data sources to be aggregated into a single Data Service, with client-side APIs to help with common tasks.Crayons Static Version: GIS vector-based spatial data overlay processing is much more complex than raster data processing. The GIS data files can be huge and their overlay processing is computationally intensive. CrmXpress SmartSoapLogger for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SmartSoapLogger autoamtes the process of generating SOAP messages as well as JavaScript functions to use them. All you do is write C# code and click on a button[You have few options as well]to get SOAP messages as well as the Script. Custom File Generators: This project includes Visual Studio Custom Tools that aid in development of Silverlight, Windows Phone, and WPF applications or any MVVM project for that matter. The custom tool creates properties from backing fields that have a specific attribute. The properties are then used in binding and raise their changed event.eDay - Verbräuche: Dieses Programm ermöglicht die Erfassung der monatlichen Verbräuche von Strom, Gas und Wasser. Sie stellt die Werte tabellarisch dar und zeigt sie zusätzlich in einer Statistik.Godfather: An application for administration of sponsorship agencies developed by the .NET Open Space User Group of Vienna Austria in the process of a charity coding event on Nov. 26, 2011.Greek News: Instantly get the latest headlines from multiple Greek news sources in news, sports, technology and opinions with one click onto your Windows Phone. Uses RSS feeds. Sources are customizable from settings page. Based on news.codeplex.com.HMAC MD5: This is a simple implementation of the MD5 cryptographic hashing algorithm and HMAC-MD5. This class consists of fully transparent C# code, suitable for use in .NET, Silverlight and WP7 applications.KonMvc-?? .NET 3.5???????MVC??: ????C#?????MVC??, ????: 1.??APP ????????, 2,?GLOBAL??????? write???(???) ?????????????? 3.???????? MVC???????? ,??????? ??: ???? ,??????????? ????? ????CACHE?????????????Mini Proxy - a light-weight local proxy: a light-weight proxy written in C# (around 200 lines in total), it allows intercept HTTP traffic and hook custom code. Its initial scenario is to capture Http headers sent from a HttpWebRequest object. Limitations: Http 1.0 proxy Range header not forwardedMultimodal User Interface Builder: This project integrates several tools, frameworks and components in order to provide a graphical environment for the development of multimodal user interfaces. The Multimodal User Interface Builder provides development guidance based on mutimodal design patterns research.Om MVC: This is a simple hello world MVC project.Phone Net Tools: A collection of tools to overcome certain limitations of networking on the Windows Phone platform, in particular regarding DNS.Ps3RemoteSleep: A workaround to place the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) Blu-ray Remote Control in sleep/sniff mode using the integrated Microsoft Bluetooth stack. For use with EventGhost/XBMC Windows 7 32/64 compatible. Simple CQRS Sample: A simple sample for a CQRS designet application. Includes: - RavenDB for Event- and ReadModel-Sorce - MessageBus based on Reactive Framework Rx - Razor MVC3 WebUI - Some more stuffSoftware Lab SDK: A collection of code helping in developmentSolution Import for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Solution Import for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 makes it easier for developers and customizers of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to import a solution Zip file or a extracted solution folder to the server in one single operation.Team Badass: Class projectWCF step by step guide: This is an WCF step by step guide that explains how to make Web hosting and Self-hosting of services, and how to consume the services. It is intended for beginners. It's developed in C#When Pigs Fly: Flying PigsWindows Phone Wi-Fi Sensor JangKengPong: Windows Phone 7.5's Wi-Fi socket multicast group communication and Sensor sample application. This project includes Group Communication on LAN and Simple Gesture Recognition library.WPF Turn-based Strategy Wargame: This is a project to create a turn-based strategy game using the Windows Presentation Foundation. The technological foundations of the software allow new game maps to be easily stipulated in XAML, theoretically enabling support for multiple games.

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• How to set Grub to automatically load Xen kernel

  - by Cerin

  How do you configure Grub to automatically use the Xen kernel under Ubuntu 11.10? No matter what I do, it loads the first menuentry. The only way I can get it to load Xen is to manually select the kernel, which I can't do if I have to reboot the server remotely, or there's a power failure and the machine automatically boots up when power's restored, etc. It's driving me nuts. In my /boot/grub/grub.cfg, the Xen kernel is at index 4 (i.e. it's the 5th menuentry). So I've tried: Setting GRUB_DEFAULT=4, and running sudo update-grub Setting GRUB_DEFAULT=saved and GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true, and running sudo update-grub Setting GRUB_DEFAULT="Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.1-amd64 and Linux 3.0.0-16-server", and running sudo update-grub None of these work. It continues to load the first menuentry, which is "Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-16-server". Below is my current /boot/grub/grub.cfg. What am I doing wrong? # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.1-amd64 and Linux 3.0.0-16-server" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus } insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en_US insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=2 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### if [ ${recordfail} != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "$linux_gfx_mode" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-16-server' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail set gfxpayload=$linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-16-server root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-16-server } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-16-server (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-16-server ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-16-server root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-16-server } submenu "Previous Linux versions" { menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-server' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail set gfxpayload=$linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-server root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-12-server } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-12-server (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-12-server ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-server root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-12-server } } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### submenu "Xen 4.1-amd64" { menuentry 'Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.1-amd64 and Linux 3.0.0-16-server' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os --class xen { insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac echo 'Loading Xen 4.1-amd64 ...' multiboot /boot/xen-4.1-amd64.gz placeholder echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-16-server ...' module /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-16-server placeholder root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' module /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-16-server } menuentry 'Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.1-amd64 and Linux 3.0.0-16-server (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os --class xen { insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac echo 'Loading Xen 4.1-amd64 ...' multiboot /boot/xen-4.1-amd64.gz placeholder echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-16-server ...' module /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-16-server placeholder root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro single echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' module /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-16-server } menuentry 'Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.1-amd64 and Linux 3.0.0-12-server' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os --class xen { insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac echo 'Loading Xen 4.1-amd64 ...' multiboot /boot/xen-4.1-amd64.gz placeholder echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-12-server ...' module /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-server placeholder root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' module /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-12-server } menuentry 'Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.1-amd64 and Linux 3.0.0-12-server (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os --class xen { insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac echo 'Loading Xen 4.1-amd64 ...' multiboot /boot/xen-4.1-amd64.gz placeholder echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-12-server ...' module /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-12-server placeholder root=UUID=d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac ro single echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' module /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-12-server } } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod raid insmod mdraid1x insmod part_msdos insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(mduuid/be73165bc31d6f5cd00d05036c7b964f)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root d72bad3f-9ed7-44b9-b3d1-d7af9f62a8ac linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ###

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• Community Outreach - Where Should I Go

  - by Roger Brinkley

  A few days ago I was talking to person new to community development and they asked me what guidelines I used to determine the worthiness of a particular event. After our conversation was over I thought about it a little bit more and figured out there are three ways to determine if any event (be it conference, blog, podcast or other social medias) is worth doing: Transferability, Multiplication, and Impact. Transferability - Is what I have to say useful to the people that are going to hear it. For instance, consider a company that has product offering that can connect up using a number of languages like Scala, Grovey or Java. Sending a Scala expert to talk about Scala and the product is not transferable to a Java User Group, but a Java expert doing the same talk with a Java slant is. Similarly, talking about JavaFX to any Java User Group meeting in Brazil was pretty much a wasted effort until it was open sourced. Once it was open sourced it was well received. You can also look at transferability in relation to the subject matter that you're dealing with. How transferable is a presentation that I create. Can I, or a technical writer on the staff, turn it into some technical document. Could it be converted into some type of screen cast. If we have a regular podcast can we make a reference to the document, catch the high points or turn it into a interview. Is there a way of using this in the sales group. In other words is the document purely one dimensional or can it be re-purposed in other forms. Multiplication - On every trip I'm looking for 2 to 5 solid connections that I can make with developers. These are long term connections, because I know that once that relationship is established it will lead to another 2 - 5 from that connection and within a couple of years were talking about some 100 connections from just one developer. For instance, when I was working on JavaHelp in 2000 I hired a science teacher with a programming background. We've developed a very tight relationship over the year though we rarely see each other more than once a year. But at this JavaOne, one of his employees came up to me and said, "Richard (Rick Hard in Czech) told me to tell you that he couldn't make it to JavaOne this year but if I saw you to tell you hi". Another example is from my Mobile & Embedded days in Brasil. On our very first FISL trip about 5 years ago there were two university students that had created a project called "Marge". Marge was a Bluetooth framework that made connecting bluetooth devices easier. I invited them to a "Sun" dinner that evening. Originally they were planning on leaving that afternoon, but they changed their plans recognizing the opportunity. Their eyes were as big a saucers when they realized the level of engineers at the meeting. They went home started a JUG in Florianoplis that we've visited more than a couple of times. One of them went to work for Brazilian government lab like Berkley Labs, MIT Lab, John Hopkins Applied Physicas Labs or Lincoln Labs in the US. That presented us with an opportunity to show Embedded Java as a possibility for some of the work they were doing there. Impact - The final criteria is how life changing is what I'm going to say be to the individuals I'm reaching. A t-shirt is just a token, but when I reach down and tug at their developer hearts then I know I've succeeded. I'll never forget one time we flew all night to reach Joan Pasoa in Northern Brazil. We arrived at 2am went immediately to our hotel only to be woken up at 6 am to travel 2 hours by car to the presentation hall. When we arrived we were totally exhausted. Outside the facility there were 500 people lined up to hear 6 speakers for the day. That itself was uplifting.  I delivered one of my favorite talks on "I have passion". It was a talk on golf and embedded java development, "Find your passion". When we finished a couple of first year students came up to me and said how much my talk had inspired them. FISL is another great example. I had been about 4 years in a row. FISL is a very young group of developers so capturing their attention is important. Several of the students will come back 2 or 3 years later and ask me questions about research or jobs. And then there's Louis. Louis is one my favorite Brazilians. I can only describe him as a big Brazilian teddy bear. I see him every year at FISL. He works primarily in Java EE but he's attended every single one of my talks over the last 4 years. I can't tell you why, but he always greets me and gives me a hug. For some reason I've had a real impact. And of course when it comes to impact you don't just measure a presentation but every single interaction you have at an event. It's the hall way conversations, the booth conversations, but more importantly it's the conversations at dinner tables or in the cars when you're getting transported to an event. There's a good story that illustrates this. Last year in the spring I was traveling to Goiânia in Brazil. I've been there many times and leaders there no me well. One young man has picked me up at the airport on more than one occasion. We were going out to dinner one evening and he brought his girl friend along. One thing let to another and I eventually asked him, in front of her, "Why haven't you asked her to marry you?" There were all kinds of excuses and she just looked at him and smiled. When I came back in December for JavaOne he came and sought me. "I just want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said, and I asked her to marry me. We're getting married next Spring." Sometimes just one presentation is all it takes to make an impact. Other times it takes years. Some impacts are directly related to the company and some are more personal in nature. It doesn't matter which it is because it's having the impact that matters.

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• RIF PRD: Presentation syntax issues

  - by Charles Young

  Over Christmas I got to play a bit with the W3C RIF PRD and came across a few issues which I thought I would record for posterity. Specifically, I was working on a grammar for the presentation syntax using a GLR grammar parser tool (I was using the current CTP of ‘M’ (MGrammer) and Intellipad – I do so hope the MS guys don’t kill off M and Intellipad now they have dropped the other parts of SQL Server Modelling). I realise that the presentation syntax is non-normative and that any issues with it do not therefore compromise the standard. However, presentation syntax is useful in its own right, and it would be great to iron out any issues in a future revision of the standard. The main issues are actually not to do with the grammar at all, but rather with the ‘running example’ in the RIF PRD recommendation. I started with the code provided in Example 9.1. There are several discrepancies when compared with the EBNF rules documented in the standard. Broadly the problems can be categorised as follows: ·      Parenthesis mismatch – the wrong number of parentheses are used in various places. For example, in GoldRule, the RHS of the rule (the ‘Then’) is nested in the LHS (‘the If’). In NewCustomerAndWidgetRule, the RHS is orphaned from the LHS. Together with additional incorrect parenthesis, this leads to orphanage of UnknownStatusRule from the entire Document. ·      Invalid use of parenthesis in ‘Forall’ constructs. Parenthesis should not be used to enclose formulae. Removal of the invalid parenthesis gave me a feeling of inconsistency when comparing formulae in Forall to formulae in If. The use of parenthesis is not actually inconsistent in these two context, but in an If construct it ‘feels’ as if you are enclosing formulae in parenthesis in a LISP-like fashion. In reality, the parenthesis is simply being used to group subordinate syntax elements. The fact that an If construct can contain only a single formula as an immediate child adds to this feeling of inconsistency. ·      Invalid representation of compact URIs (CURIEs) in the context of Frame productions. In several places the URIs are not qualified with a namespace prefix (‘ex1:’). This conflicts with the definition of CURIEs in the RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 document. Here are the productions: CURIE          ::= PNAME_LN                  | PNAME_NS PNAME_LN       ::= PNAME_NS PN_LOCAL PNAME_NS       ::= PN_PREFIX? ':' PN_LOCAL       ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? PN_CHARS       ::= PN_CHARS_U                  | '-' | [0-9] | #x00B7                  | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040] PN_CHARS_U     ::= PN_CHARS_BASE                  | '_' PN_CHARS_BASE ::= [A-Z] | [a-z] | [#x00C0-#x00D6] | [#x00D8-#x00F6]                  | [#x00F8-#x02FF] | [#x0370-#x037D] | [#x037F-#x1FFF]                  | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF]                  | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD]                  | [#x10000-#xEFFFF] PN_PREFIX      ::= PN_CHARS_BASE ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? The more I look at CURIEs, the more my head hurts! The RIF specification allows prefixes and colons without local names, which surprised me. However, the CURIE Syntax 1.0 working group note specifically states that this form is supported…and then promptly provides a syntactic definition that seems to preclude it! However, on (much) deeper inspection, it appears that ‘ex1:’ (for example) is allowed, but would really represent a ‘fragment’ of the ‘reference’, rather than a prefix! Ouch! This is so completely ambiguous that it surely calls into question the whole CURIE specification.   In any case, RIF does not allow local names without a prefix. ·      Missing ‘External’ specifiers for built-in functions and predicates.  The EBNF specification enforces this for terms within frames, but does not appear to enforce (what I believe is) the correct use of External on built-in predicates. In any case, the running example only specifies ‘External’ once on the predicate in UnknownStatusRule. External() is required in several other places. ·      The List used on the LHS of UnknownStatusRule is comma-delimited. This is not supported by the EBNF definition. Similarly, the argument list of pred:list-contains is illegally comma-delimited. ·      Unnecessary use of conjunction around a single formula in DiscountRule. This is strictly legal in the EBNF, but redundant.   All the above issues concern the presentation syntax used in the running example. There are a few minor issues with the grammar itself. Note that Michael Kiefer stated in his paper “Rule Interchange Format: The Framework” that: “The presentation syntax of RIF … is an abstract syntax and, as such, it omits certain details that might be important for unambiguous parsing.” ·      The grammar cannot differentiate unambiguously between strategies and priorities on groups. A processor is forced to resolve this by detecting the use of IRIs and integers. This could easily be fixed in the grammar.   ·      The grammar cannot unambiguously parse the ‘->’ operator in frames. Specifically, ‘-’ characters are allowed in PN_LOCAL names and hence a parser cannot determine if ‘status->’ is (‘status’ ‘->’) or (‘status-’ ‘>’).   One way to fix this is to amend the PN_LOCAL production as follows: PN_LOCAL ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* ((PN_CHARS)-('-')))? However, unilaterally changing the definition of this production, which is defined in the SPARQL Query Language for RDF specification, makes me uncomfortable. ·      I assume that the presentation syntax is case-sensitive. I couldn’t find this stated anywhere in the documentation, but function/predicate names do appear to be documented as being case-sensitive. ·      The EBNF does not specify whitespace handling. A couple of productions (RULE and ACTION_BLOCK) are crafted to enforce the use of whitespace. This is not necessary. It seems inconsistent with the rest of the specification and can cause parsing issues. In addition, the Const production exhibits whitespaces issues. The intention may have been to disallow the use of whitespace around ‘^^’, but any direct implementation of the EBNF will probably allow whitespace between ‘^^’ and the SYMSPACE. Of course, I am being a little nit-picking about all this. On the whole, the EBNF translated very smoothly and directly to ‘M’ (MGrammar) and proved to be fairly complete. I have encountered far worse issues when translating other EBNF specifications into usable grammars.   I can’t imagine there would be any difficulty in implementing the same grammar in Antlr, COCO/R, gppg, XText, Bison, etc. A general observation, which repeats a point made above, is that the use of parenthesis in the presentation syntax can feel inconsistent and un-intuitive.   It isn’t actually inconsistent, but I think the presentation syntax could be improved by adopting braces, rather than parenthesis, to delimit subordinate syntax elements in a similar way to so many programming languages. The familiarity of braces would communicate the structure of the syntax more clearly to people like me.  If braces were adopted, parentheses could be retained around ‘var (frame | ‘new()’) constructs in action blocks. This use of parenthesis feels very LISP-like, and I think that this is my issue. It’s as if the presentation syntax represents the deformed love-child of LISP and C. In some places (specifically, action blocks), parenthesis is used in a LISP-like fashion. In other places it is used like braces in C. I find this quite confusing. Here is a corrected version of the running example (Example 9.1) in compliant presentation syntax: Document(    Prefix( ex1 <http://example.com/2009/prd2> )    (* ex1:CheckoutRuleset *)  Group rif:forwardChaining (     (* ex1:GoldRule *)    Group 10 (      Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer                                     ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"])        (Forall ?shoppingCart such that ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart]           (If Exists ?value (And(?shoppingCart[ex1:value->?value]                                  External(pred:numeric-greater-than-or-equal(?value 2000))))            Then Do(Modify(?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"])))))      (* ex1:DiscountRule *)    Group (      Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer        (If Or( ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"]                ?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"])         Then Do ((?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart-> ?s])                  (?v ?s[ex1:value->?v])                  Modify(?s [ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply (?v 0.95))]))))      (* ex1:NewCustomerAndWidgetRule *)    Group (      Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer                                     ?customer[ex1:status->"New"] )        (If Exists ?shoppingCart ?item                   (And(?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart]                        ?shoppingCart[ex1:containsItem->?item]                        ?item # ex1:Widget ) )         Then Do( (?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?s])                  (?val ?s[ex1:value->?val])                  (?voucher ?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher])                  Retract(?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher])                  Retract(?voucher)                  Modify(?s[ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply(?val 0.90))]))))      (* ex1:UnknownStatusRule *)    Group (      Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer        (If Not(Exists ?status                       (And(?customer[ex1:status->?status]                            External(pred:list-contains(List("New" "Bronze" "Silver" "Gold") ?status)) )))         Then Do( Execute(act:print(External(func:concat("New customer: " ?customer))))                  Assert(?customer[ex1:status->"New"]))))  ) )   I hope that helps someone out there :-)

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 23, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 23, 2012Popular ReleasesWPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.5: Version: 2.5.0.5 (Milestone 5): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete WAF: Add IsInDesignMode property to the WafConfiguration class. WAF: Introduce the IModuleController interface. WAF: Add ...Windows 8 Metro RSS Reader: Metro RSS Reader.v7: Updated for Windows 8 Release Preview Changed background and foreground colors Used VariableSizeGrid layout to wrap blog posts with images Sort items with Images first, text-only last Enabled Caching to improve navigation between frames This is the release package of the source code The package includes x64, x86 releases. Installation Instructions http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23484650/RssReaderMetro/Screenshots/AppPackage.JPG Select x64 or x86 folder from the package http://dl.dropbox.com...Confuser: Confuser 1.9: Change log: * Stable output (i.e. given the same seed & input assemblies, you'll get the same output assemblies) + Generate debug symbols, now it is possible to debug the output under a debugger! (Of course without enabling anti debug) + Generating obfuscation database, most of the obfuscation data in stored in it. + Two tools utilizing the obfuscation database (Database viewer & Stack trace decoder) * Change the protection scheme -----Please read Bug Report before you report a bug-----XDA ROM HUB: XDA ROM HUB v0.8.2: From now on, the downloads will be in 7z format, much less to download. Organized folders, some users didn't find the program at all. Added installer. Auto scroll in log view.XDesigner.Development: First release: First releaseBlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.5: 2012.06.22 Ver5.6.5 　(1) FTP??????? EPSV ??　EPRT　???????DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.01: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.01 Changes in 06.00.01 Icons are shown in module action buttons (workaraound to core issue with IconAPI) Fix to Token2XSL Editor, changing List type raised exception MakeTumbnail and ShowXml handlers had been missing in install package Updated help texts for better understanding of filter statement, token support in email subject and css style Major changes for fnL 6.0: DNN 6 Form Patterns including modal PopUps and Tabs http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Po...MVVM Light Toolkit: V4RTM (binaries only) including Windows 8 RP: This package contains all the latest DLLs for MVVM Light V4 RTM. It includes the DLLs for Windows 8 Release Preview. An updated Nuget package is also available at http://nuget.org/packages/MvvmLightLibs An installer with binaries, snippets and templates will follow ASAP.Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0: - Some changes to Layout and CSS - Changed version number to 1.0.0.0 - Solved Cache and Session items handler error in IIS 7 - Created the Modules, Plugins and Widgets Areas - Replaced CKEditor with TinyMCE - Created the System Info page - Minor changesAcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v3.11.7: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ...NShader - HLSL - GLSL - CG - Shader Syntax Highlighter AddIn for Visual Studio: NShader 1.3 - VS2010 + VS2012: This is a small maintenance release to support new VS2012 as well as VS2010. This release is also fixing the issue The "Comment Selection" include the first line after the selection If the new NShader version doesn't highlight your shader, you can try to: Remove the registry entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\FontAndColors\Cache Remove all lines using "fx" or "hlsl" in file C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Micr...Xenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0: System Requirements OS Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Server Internet Information Service 7.0 or above .NET Framework .NET Framework 4.0 WCF Activation feature HTTP Activation Non-HTTP Activation for net.pipe/net.tcp WCF bindings ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC 3.0 Database Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Additional Deployment Configuration Started Windows Process Activation service Start...CrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.1: Added screenshot support that takes screenshot of user's desktop on application crash and provides option to include screenshot with crash report. Added Windows version in crash reports. Added email field and exception type field in crash report dialog. Added exception type in crash reports. Added screenshot tab that shows crash screenshot.CTI Text Encryption: CTI Text Encryption 3.0: Fix a bug - The application will occasionally freeze during encryption or decryption process.MFCMAPI: June 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1034 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5.1: Release Notes The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5.1 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes and minor updates. Recent additions include project templates for iOS and MacOS. The MonoDevelop.MonoGame AddIn also works on Linux. We have removed the dependency on the thirdparty GamePad library to allow MonoGame to be included in the debian/ubuntu repositories. There have been a major bug fix to ensure textures are disposed of correctly as well as some ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.1 Community EditionMain new features:major performance optimizations Office 2010 and Basic authentication support new main page and enhanced demo experience The new 6.1 release is a true milestone in the history of Sense/Net ECMS. In the past few months we mostly concentrated on performance optimizations and implemented low-level features for improved scalability and robustness. We have tested the system in high availability setup under high load by conducting a benchmark duri...????: ????2.0.2: 1、???????????。 2、DJ???????10?，?????????10?。 3、??.NET 4.5(Windows 8)????????????。 4、???????????。 5、??????????????。 6、???Windows 8????。 7、?????2.0.1???????????????。 8、??DJ?????????。Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 5 Preview 1 (6.17.2012): Azure Storage Explorer verison 5 is in development, and Preview 1 provides an early look at the new user interface and some of the new features. Here's what's new in v5 Preview 1: New UI, similar to the new Windows Azure HTML5 portal Support for configuring and viewing storage account logging Support for configuring and viewing storage account monitoring Uses the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK libraries Bug fixes????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 2: 6?20????? ?? - FrindesInActive???????json?????????，???????????。??。 6?19????? ?? - ???????????????，???????0?????????。 ?? - ???Entity?????Suggestion??????????????JSON????????。 ?? - ???OAuth?Request??????AccessToken???SourceKey????QueryString?????????。 6?17????? ??? - .net 4.0 SDK??Dynamic??????????????????API?? ??? - ?Utility?????????API??????DateTime???ParseUTCDate ?? - ?????????????Json.net???，???SDK????Json.net?????。 ?? - ???Client??????API???GetCommand?PostCommand，??????????????...New ProjectsAuditMVC: This project is for Shanghai Educational Committee.Autopoco Contrib: this a contribute to autopoco projectBit Food: summary to be createdC-Breeze: This project aims to create a compiler capable of compiling the full grammar set of C.ContosoCookbook Lab in Windows 8 camp: For everyoneDemo_ASP.NET: ssdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdFluTe: FluTe is an advanced alternative to the string.Format method, written using F# and C#. It allows you to define Template objects using a fluent interface.IFV Releases: hey.. Welcome To IFV Code Files.. here We Upload old Source codes For IDM Patch...Innovacall MVC Framework and Starter Kits: Empty MVC 3.2 project with common Framework and multiple layers. The project is open but not ready. LetUsTalk: To Establish Connection With Different Web AppMEF Container and Azure: Example of loading files from Azure Storage into DirectoryCatalog for consumption via MEF.Nana C++ Library: Nana C++ Library takes aim at easy-to-use and portable library, it provides a GUI framework and threads for easy programming with modern C++ methods.NBU Library: MVC3 application providing university library services to users, students and professors, and interface for the librarians to process the requests.Platform OS: Platform OS is a new operating system being developed by LeveL X. (LeveLX.org)SampleTFSProfject: My first Project using TFSSilverlight DateSelector: DateSelector Custom Control. Silverlight custom control where dates can be selected. It's easy to use and user friendly. SPMegaMenu: Purpose: Create an implementation of a JQuery Mega Menu Derive menu content from SharePoint lists NOT rely on installed feature. (Created entirely client-sideSuCasa Application: This is the Su Casa education and iministry application. This is for grades and outreach.Task Card Creator 2012: Small tool for printing task cards used for a Scrum board. Your Scrum board will be looking impressive. For Team Foundation Server 2012.Test_Project: Lucky0504 Test_ProjectThe Fugitive: The FugitiveTopcoder problems: Nothing to write down here at now.tweetc - A windows command line twitter client: Review/Send tweets all from the comfort of the command line.Windows Phone 7 Contact Synchroniztion: Its a Web Application App for Windows Phone 7 to provide contact sharing mechanism over any network.WMemoryProfiler: WMemoryProfiler is a managed memory profiling API to aid integration testing of managed components. It does support .Net 2.0 up to 4.5 (x86,x64).WordSync: WordSync is a simplistic, user-friendly document editor that will keep your documents in sync using Google Drive or Dropbox and still edit them offline.Xydan fantasy game project: This project is meant to be a garage project creating a unique game.YSTrade: YS Trade System??????: dbFM??Windows????????????????。??????、?????????，??????????。????????：http://www.win7soft.com/justplus/dbfm ????bug???： ??：justplus@ahu.edu.cn justplus@163.com

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 07, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 07, 2012Popular ReleasesHigLabo: HigLabo_20120706: Breaking change Now HigLabo.Mail require reference to HigLabo.Net. ProtocolType change name to HttpProtocolType in HigLabo.Net project. AsyncCallErrorEventArgs change name to AsyncHttpCallErrorEventArgs. Delete command class in Pop3,Smtp that may not used. Other change Add HigLabo.Net.Ftp project.(Not complete) Create SocketClient that can easily communicate to server by Socket object.ecBlog: ecBlog 0.2: ecBlog alpha realaseTaskScheduler ASP.NET: Release 3 - 1.2.0.0: Release 3 - Version 1.2.0.0 That version was altered only the library: In TaskScheduler was added new properties: UseBackgroundThreads Enables the use of separate threads for each task. StoreThreadsInPool Manager enables to store in the Pool threads that are performing the tasks. OnStopSchedulerAutoCancelThreads Scheduler allows aborting threads when it is stopped. false if the scheduler is not aborted the threads that are running. AutoDeletedExecutedTasks Allows Manager Delete Task afte...DotNetNuke Persian Packages: ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? 6.2.0: *????? ???? ??? ?? ???? 6.2.0 ? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ????? *????? ????? ????? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??????? ??????? - ???? *?????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ???? ????? ? ?? ??? ?? ???? ???? ?? *????? ????? ????? ????? ????? / ??????? ???? ?? ???? ??? ??? - ???? *???? ???? ???? ????? ? ??????? ??? ??? ??? ?? ???? *????? ????? ???????? ??? ? ??????? ?? ?? ?????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? - ???? *????? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ?? ?? ???????? ????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? *???? ?...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.6 (RS 7.0, 6.1.1): xunitcontrib release 0.6 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.0 (EAP build 82) and 6.1, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) Copies of the plugin that support previous verions of ReSharper can be downloaded from this release. The plan is to support the latest revisions of the last two paid-for major versions of ReSharper (namely 7.0 and 6.1) Also note that all builds work against ALL VERSIONS...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.0 Beta: Whats newuComponents in the core Multi-Node Tree Picker, Multiple Textstring, Slider and XPath Lists Easier Lucene searching built in IFile providers for easier file handling Updated 3rd party libraries Applications / Trees moved out of the database SQL Azure support added Various bug fixes Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to...CODE Framework: 4.0.20704.0: See CODE Framework (.NET) Change Log for changes in this version.?????????? - ????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2012-07-04: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ???OneCode??????，??????????10????Microsoft OneCode Sample，????4?Windows Base Sample，2?XML Sample?4?ASP.NET Sample。???????????。 ????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 Windows Base Sample CSCheckOSBitness VBCheckOSBitness CSCheckOSVersion VBCheckOSVersion XML Sample CSXPath VBXPath ASP.NET Sample CSASPNETDataPager VBASPNET...xUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net 1.9.1: xUnit.net release 1.9.1Build #1600 Important note for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. Important note for VS2012 users: The VS2012 runner is in the Visual Studio Gallery now, and should be installed via Tools | Extension Manager from insi...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...IronPython: 2.7.3: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release of IronPython 2.7.3. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498, 62475, and 74478 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. The incompatibility with IronRuby has been resolved, and they can once again be installed side-by-side. The biggest improvements in IronPython 2.7.3 are: the...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.6: 2012.07.03 Ver5.6.6 (1) ???????????ftp://?????????、????LIST?????Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (v1.0.68.441): Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the Quickstart for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. 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To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.51: http://download.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=nvlmaker&DownloadId=371510 ????：http://115.com/file/beoef05k#THE-NVL-Maker-ver3.51-sim.7z ????：http://www.mediafire.com/file/6tqdwj9jr6eb9qj/THENVLMakerver3.51tra.7z ======================================== ???? ======================================== 3.51 beta ???： ·?????????????????????? ·?????????，?????????0，?????????????????????? ·??????????????????????????? ·?????????????TJS????（EXP??） ·??4:3???，???????????????，??????????? ·?????????...????: ????2.0.3: 1、???????????。 2、????????。 3、????????????。 4、bug??，????。New ProjectsCode Bits: Set of useful code blocks that can be included in your code. Includes NuGet support.Critr: A personal project that takes formatted Excel show logs, parses them and uploads them to small local database for analytics.kb.net: An Open Source Knowledge Base based on SQL Server Express 2012 and .Net 4.0LyncServerExtension: L’objectif de ce projet est l’ajout de la fonctionnalité de délégation patron/secrétaire à Microsoft Lync Server 2010. MVC Web Api 4 Flot: MVC4 Web Api Service Layers for the Flot project on http://code.google.com/p/flot. Until now implemented only the GET method.ostests: testif is web and mobile assessment software. Create interactive tests easily and share them with your colleagues, employees and friends.Pegasus Attack: Pegasus Attack will be a simple shmup style game in the style of Truxton Basic features Multiple levels (text document written, just stores location of enemies) Basic enemies with basic AI (hard-coded, or from a text document) Various bullet types Title screen / Help screen / Control window / In-game game-states / two playable Characters Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy Basic effects (explosion animation) Items (powerups, guns, ...)proLearningEnglish: Apps RDF to build a software for learning English. Users are teachers and pupils in grades 6.Pusher .Net Client: This is a .Net client for Pusher (http://www.pusher.com) allowing .Net clients such as WinForms and Console applications to receive websocket messages.RadEditor Lite for AJAX: RadEditor Lite for AJAX modified from the open source Telerik Free Tool: RadEditor Lite for MOSS 2010. RconLibrary: Battlefield 3 RCON communication library.SharePoint Notes: Simple visual webpart to show list items as notes. Easy to modify, and not really complex.Software Manager: Software Manager is a software package that will help with distribution and licensing of programs that are developed with VB.NET or C#.StoreFramework: this project is a test framework about the codefirst and pocoTwitterRt - Tweet from Windows Metro Apps: Add the ability to tweet from your Metro style (WinRT) application. Binaries at nuget.org/packages/TwitterRt. Discussion at w8isms.blogspot.com.YucadagBlog: e

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 08, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 08, 2012Popular ReleasesBlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.7: 2012.07.08 Ver5.6.7 (1) ????????????????「?????　Request.Receve()」?????????? (2) Web???????????FlMML customized: FlMML customized ??: FlMML customized ????。 ??、ＰＣＭ??????????、??????。ecBlog: ecBlog 0.2: ecBlog alpha realaseTaskScheduler ASP.NET: Release 3 - 1.2.0.0: Release 3 - Version 1.2.0.0 That version was altered only the library: In TaskScheduler was added new properties: UseBackgroundThreads Enables the use of separate threads for each task. StoreThreadsInPool Manager enables to store in the Pool threads that are performing the tasks. OnStopSchedulerAutoCancelThreads Scheduler allows aborting threads when it is stopped. false if the scheduler is not aborted the threads that are running. AutoDeletedExecutedTasks Allows Manager Delete Task afte...DotNetNuke Persian Packages: ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? 6.2.0: *????? ???? ??? ?? ???? 6.2.0 ? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ????? *????? ????? ????? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??????? ??????? - ???? *?????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ???? ????? ? ?? ??? ?? ???? ???? ?? *????? ????? ????? ????? ????? / ??????? ???? ?? ???? ??? ??? - ???? *???? ???? ???? ????? ? ??????? ??? ??? ??? ?? ???? *????? ????? ???????? ??? ? ??????? ?? ?? ?????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? - ???? *????? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ?? ?? ???????? ????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? *???? ?...testtom07052012git02: r1: r1Cypher Bot: Cypher Bot 4.1: Cypher Bot is the most advanced encryption tool on the planet.... and now it actually works. That's right we fixed the bugs! For a full program summary go to the Home Page or visit www.iRareMedia.com So what's new? We've pretty much fixed all the bugs, but here's a run down if you wanna know exactly what's different: Fixed Installation / Setup Error, where an error message would display: "No Internet Connection, Try Again Later" Fixed File Encryption / Decryption error where the file exten...Coding4Fun Kinect Service: Coding4Fun Kinect Service v1.5: Requires Kinect for Windows SDK v1.5 Minor bug fixes + Kinect for Windows SDK v1.5 Aligning version with the Kinect for Windows SDK requiredtedplay: tedplay 1.1: tedplay 1.1 source and Win32 binary is out now. Changes are: SID card support Commodore 64 PSID music format support optimized FIR filter global hotkeys for skipping tracks (Windows only) module properties window (Windows only) mutable noise channel via GUI button (Windows only) disable SID card from the menu (Windows only) bugfixes PSID tunes are played on the C64 clock frequency but in a Commodore plus/4 virtual machine. The purpose is not to have yet another SID player, but t...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.6 (RS 7.0, 6.1.1): xunitcontrib release 0.6 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.0 (EAP build 82) and 6.1, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) Copies of the plugin that support previous verions of ReSharper can be downloaded from this release. The plan is to support the latest revisions of the last two paid-for major versions of ReSharper (namely 7.0 and 6.1) Also note that all builds work against ALL VERSIONS...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.0 Beta: Whats newuComponents in the core Multi-Node Tree Picker, Multiple Textstring, Slider and XPath Lists Easier Lucene searching built in IFile providers for easier file handling Updated 3rd party libraries Applications / Trees moved out of the database SQL Azure support added Various bug fixes Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to...CODE Framework: 4.0.20704.0: See CODE Framework (.NET) Change Log for changes in this version.xUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net 1.9.1: xUnit.net release 1.9.1Build #1600 Important note for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. Important note for VS2012 users: The VS2012 runner is in the Visual Studio Gallery now, and should be installed via Tools | Extension Manager from insi...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...IronPython: 2.7.3: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release of IronPython 2.7.3. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498, 62475, and 74478 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. The incompatibility with IronRuby has been resolved, and they can once again be installed side-by-side. The biggest improvements in IronPython 2.7.3 are: the...Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (v1.0.68.441): Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the Quickstart for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsNew ProjectsAdventures of Adventure Land: Adventures of Adventure Land is a new text based adventure. You will be able to level up, fight challenging enemies, use magical spells, and simply adventure.AdventureWorks Silverlight samples: AdventureWorks Silverlight samplesAFS.Collab.Duplex: my duplexarmmychan: ????????C# - WPF - .Net - MSSQL - Open Source Restaurant POS System: A C# .Net / WPF / MSSQL Restaurant Point of Sale (POS) Software that is PCI-DSS 2.0 Compliant running stable in many restaurants / integrated with MercuryPay.dcview: dcinside.com? ??? ? ?? ?? ??? ???? ???.DotNetNuke Contact Form: simple yet effective DotNetNuke contact formISBNdb.com Helper Library: A .net helper library that encapsulates all the functionality of the API at www.isbndb.com in .NET CLR objects.JPO Class Register: Simple class register.NACHA C# Class with WPF Test App: Do you need to generate a NACHA PPD file? This is great starting point for you! Actually, it's a great, almost finished, point for you! More info below.NotificationsWidget In ASP MVC: SummaryPayPal Manager: I decided to make a basic (for now) desktop client for PayPal to get better at WebRequests in VB.NET. I will be adding much more such as sending payments, etc.Pomodoro Timer Count Down App: Pomodoro count down timer Application Features ------------------------------- Pomodoro Mode Count down timer mode Start stop pause Notification Powershell HTML Highlight: Powershell html syntax highlightingProject F10_P1: F10 p1Razor-sharp your skills: This project will have details about the C# 2.0 C# 3.0 C# 4.0 C# 5.0 Salaria: Bienvenue sur notre projet "Salaria".SharePoint 2010 - Unlock SP Files: Unlock any file in SharePoint or get lock information of a SharePoint file.( Compatible with office 365) ""The file "" is locked for exclusive use by""SharePoint 2010 Metro Masterpage: This project will give you a full metro masterpage for sharepoint 2010SharePoint Cache Refresh Framework: This project's aim is build a small and easy to use framework for SharePoint developers to be able to control cached objects across servers in a SharePoint FarmTFSProjectTest: A test project.uhimania test project: testUpgrade SPSolution: This is a Sharepoint 2010 Management Shell cmdlet, which upgrades a sharepoint solution and installs/activates any new features added in the package.Video Frame Explorer: Video Frame Explorer allows you to make thumbnails (caps, previews) of video files. It supports of practically any videos-formats (even MP4, MKV, MOV if you havWML: WML

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• DTracing TCP congestion control

  - by user12820842

  In a previous post, I showed how we can use DTrace to probe TCP receive and send window events. TCP receive and send windows are in effect both about flow-controlling how much data can be received - the receive window reflects how much data the local TCP is prepared to receive, while the send window simply reflects the size of the receive window of the peer TCP. Both then represent flow control as imposed by the receiver. However, consider that without the sender imposing flow control, and a slow link to a peer, TCP will simply fill up it's window with sent segments. Dealing with multiple TCP implementations filling their peer TCP's receive windows in this manner, busy intermediate routers may drop some of these segments, leading to timeout and retransmission, which may again lead to drops. This is termed congestion, and TCP has multiple congestion control strategies. We can see that in this example, we need to have some way of adjusting how much data we send depending on how quickly we receive acknowledgement - if we get ACKs quickly, we can safely send more segments, but if acknowledgements come slowly, we should proceed with more caution. More generally, we need to implement flow control on the send side also. Slow Start and Congestion Avoidance From RFC2581, let's examine the relevant variables: "The congestion window (cwnd) is a sender-side limit on the amount of data the sender can transmit into the network before receiving an acknowledgment (ACK). Another state variable, the slow start threshold (ssthresh), is used to determine whether the slow start or congestion avoidance algorithm is used to control data transmission" Slow start is used to probe the network's ability to handle transmission bursts both when a connection is first created and when retransmission timers fire. The latter case is important, as the fact that we have effectively lost TCP data acts as a motivator for re-probing how much data the network can handle from the sending TCP. The congestion window (cwnd) is initialized to a relatively small value, generally a low multiple of the sending maximum segment size. When slow start kicks in, we will only send that number of bytes before waiting for acknowledgement. When acknowledgements are received, the congestion window is increased in size until cwnd reaches the slow start threshold ssthresh value. For most congestion control algorithms the window increases exponentially under slow start, assuming we receive acknowledgements. We send 1 segment, receive an ACK, increase the cwnd by 1 MSS to 2*MSS, send 2 segments, receive 2 ACKs, increase the cwnd by 2*MSS to 4*MSS, send 4 segments etc. When the congestion window exceeds the slow start threshold, congestion avoidance is used instead of slow start. During congestion avoidance, the congestion window is generally updated by one MSS for each round-trip-time as opposed to each ACK, and so cwnd growth is linear instead of exponential (we may receive multiple ACKs within a single RTT). This continues until congestion is detected. If a retransmit timer fires, congestion is assumed and the ssthresh value is reset. It is reset to a fraction of the number of bytes outstanding (unacknowledged) in the network. At the same time the congestion window is reset to a single max segment size. Thus, we initiate slow start until we start receiving acknowledgements again, at which point we can eventually flip over to congestion avoidance when cwnd ssthresh. Congestion control algorithms differ most in how they handle the other indication of congestion - duplicate ACKs. A duplicate ACK is a strong indication that data has been lost, since they often come from a receiver explicitly asking for a retransmission. In some cases, a duplicate ACK may be generated at the receiver as a result of packets arriving out-of-order, so it is sensible to wait for multiple duplicate ACKs before assuming packet loss rather than out-of-order delivery. This is termed fast retransmit (i.e. retransmit without waiting for the retransmission timer to expire). Note that on Oracle Solaris 11, the congestion control method used can be customized. See here for more details. In general, 3 or more duplicate ACKs indicate packet loss and should trigger fast retransmit . It's best not to revert to slow start in this case, as the fact that the receiver knew it was missing data suggests it has received data with a higher sequence number, so we know traffic is still flowing. Falling back to slow start would be excessive therefore, so fast recovery is used instead. Observing slow start and congestion avoidance The following script counts TCP segments sent when under slow start (cwnd ssthresh). #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s #pragma D option quiet tcp:::connect-request / start[args[1]-cs_cid] == 0/ { start[args[1]-cs_cid] = 1; } tcp:::send / start[args[1]-cs_cid] == 1 && args[3]-tcps_cwnd tcps_cwnd_ssthresh / { @c["Slow start", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = count(); } tcp:::send / start[args[1]-cs_cid] == 1 && args[3]-tcps_cwnd args[3]-tcps_cwnd_ssthresh / { @c["Congestion avoidance", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = count(); } As we can see the script only works on connections initiated since it is started (using the start[] associative array with the connection ID as index to set whether it's a new connection (start[cid] = 1). From there we simply differentiate send events where cwnd ssthresh (congestion avoidance). Here's the output taken when I accessed a YouTube video (where rport is 80) and from an FTP session where I put a large file onto a remote system. # dtrace -s tcp_slow_start.d ^C ALGORITHM RADDR RPORT #SEG Slow start 10.153.125.222 20 6 Slow start 138.3.237.7 80 14 Slow start 10.153.125.222 21 18 Congestion avoidance 10.153.125.222 20 1164 We see that in the case of the YouTube video, slow start was exclusively used. Most of the segments we sent in that case were likely ACKs. Compare this case - where 14 segments were sent using slow start - to the FTP case, where only 6 segments were sent before we switched to congestion avoidance for 1164 segments. In the case of the FTP session, the FTP data on port 20 was predominantly sent with congestion avoidance in operation, while the FTP session relied exclusively on slow start. For the default congestion control algorithm - "newreno" - on Solaris 11, slow start will increase the cwnd by 1 MSS for every acknowledgement received, and by 1 MSS for each RTT in congestion avoidance mode. Different pluggable congestion control algorithms operate slightly differently. For example "highspeed" will update the slow start cwnd by the number of bytes ACKed rather than the MSS. And to finish, here's a neat oneliner to visually display the distribution of congestion window values for all TCP connections to a given remote port using a quantization. In this example, only port 80 is in use and we see the majority of cwnd values for that port are in the 4096-8191 range. # dtrace -n 'tcp:::send { @q[args[4]-tcp_dport] = quantize(args[3]-tcps_cwnd); }' dtrace: description 'tcp:::send ' matched 10 probes ^C 80 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count -1 | 0 0 |@@@@@@ 5 1 | 0 2 | 0 4 | 0 8 | 0 16 | 0 32 | 0 64 | 0 128 | 0 256 | 0 512 | 0 1024 | 0 2048 |@@@@@@@@@ 8 4096 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 23 8192 | 0

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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• D2K to OA Framework Transition

  - by PRajkumar

  What is the difference between D2K form and OA Framework? It is a very innocent but important question for someone that desires to make transition from D2K to OA Framework. I hope you have already read and implemented OA Framework Getting Started. I will re-visit my own experience of implementing HelloWorld program in "OA Framework". When I implemented HelloWorld a year ago, I had no clue as to what I was doing & why I was doing those steps. I merely copied the steps from Oracle Tutorial without understanding them. Hence in this blog, I will try to explain in simple manner the meaning of OA Framework HelloWorld Program and compare the steps to D2K form [where possible]. To keep things simple, only basics will be discussed. Following key Steps were needed for HelloWorld Step 1 Create a new Workspace and a new Project as dictated by Oracle's tutorial. When defining project, you will specify a default package, which in this case was oracle.apps.ak.hello This means the following: - ak is the short name of the Application in Oracle           [means fnd_applications.short_name] hello is the name of your project Step 2 Next, you will create a OA Page within hello project Think OA Page as the fmx file itself in D2K. I am saying so because this page gets attached to the form function. This page will be created within hello project, hence the package name oracle.apps.ak.hello.webui Note the webui, it is a convention to have page in webui, means this page represents the Web User Interface You will assign the default AM [OAApplicationModule]. Think of AM "Connection Manager" and "Transaction State Manager" for your page          I can't co-relate this to anything in D2k, as there is no concept of Connection Pooling and that D2k is not stateless. Reason being that as soon as you kick off a D2K Form, it connects to a single session of Oracle and sticks to that single Oracle database session. So is not the case in OAF, hence AM is needed. Step 3 You create Region within the Page. ·         Region is what will store your fields. Text input fields will be of type messageTextInput. Think of Canvas in D2K. You can have nested regions. Stacked Canvas in D2K comes the closest to this component of OA Framework Step 4 Add a button to one of the nested regions The itemStyle should be submitButton, in case you want the page to be submitted when this button is clicked There is no WHEN-BUTTON-PRESSED trigger in OAF. In Framework, you will add a controller java code to handle events like Form Submit button clicks. JDeveloper generates the default code for you. Primarily two functions [should I call methods] will be created processRequest [for UI Rendering Handling] and processFormRequest          Think of processRequest as WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE, though processRequest is very restrictive. Note What is the difference between processRequest and processFormRequest? These two methods are available in the Default Controller class that gets created. processFormRequest This method is commonly used to react/respond to the event that has taken place, for example click of a button. Some examples are if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Cancel") != null) (Do your processing for Cancellation/ Rollback) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Submit") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Update") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) In the above three examples, you could be calling oapagecontext.forwardImmediately to re-direct the page navigation to some other page if needed. processRequest In this method, usually page rendering related code is written. Effectively, each GUI component is a bean that gets initialised during processRequest. Those who are familiar with D2K forms, something like pre-query may be written in this method. Step 5 In the controller to access the value in field "HelloName" the command is String userContent = pageContext.getParameter("HelloName"); In D2k, we used :block.field. In OAFramework, at submission of page, all the field values get passed into to OAPageContext object. Use getParameter to access the field value To set the value of the field, use OAMessageTextInputBean field HelloName = (OAMessageTextInputBean)webBean.findChildRecursive("HelloName"); fieldHelloName.setText(pageContext,"Setting the default value" ); Note when setting field value in controller: Note 1. Do not set the value in processFormRequest Note 2. If the field comes from View Object, then do not use setText in controller Note 3. For control fields [that are not based on View Objects], you can use setText to assign values in processRequest method Lets take some notes to expand beyond the HelloWorld Project Note 1 In D2K-forms we sort of created a Window, attached to Canvas, and then fields within that Canvas. However in OA Framework, think of Page being fmx/Window, think of Region being a Canvas, and fields being within Regions. This is not a formal/accurate understanding of analogy between D2k and Framework, but is close to being logical. Note 2 In D2k, your Forms fmb file was compiled to fmx. It was fmx file that was deployed on mid-tier. In case of OAF, your OA Page is nothing but a XML file. We call this MDS [meta data]. Whatever name you give to "Page" in OAF, an XML file of the same name gets created. This xml file must then be loaded into database by using XML Importer command. Note 3 Apart from MDS XML file, almost everything else is merely deployed to your mid-tier. Usually this is underneath $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/../.. All java files will go underneath java top/oracle/apps/../.. etc. Note 4 When building tutorial, ignore the steps for setting "Attribute Sets". These are not mandatory. Oracle might just have developed their tutorials without including these. Think of these like Visual Attributes of D2K forms Note 5 Controller is where you will write any java code in OA Framework. You can create a Controller per Page or have a different Controller for each of the Regions with the same Page. Note 6 In the method processFormRequest of the Controller, you can access the values of the page by using notation pageContext.getParameter("<fieldname here>"). This method processFormRequest is executed when the OAF Screen/Page is submitted by click of a button. Note 7 Inside the controller, all the Database Related interactions for example interaction with View Objects happen via Application Module. But why so? Because Application Module Manages the transaction state of the Application. OAApplicationModuleImpl oaapplicationmoduleimpl = OAApplicationModuleImpl)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean); OADBTransaction oadbtransaction = OADBTransaction)oaapplicationmoduleimpl.getDBTransaction(); Note 8 In D2K, we have control block or a block based on database view. Similarly, in OA Framework, if the field does not have view Object attached, then it is like a control field. Hence in HelloWorld example, field HelloName is a control field [in D2K terminology]. A view Object can either be based on a view/table, synonym or on a SQL statement. Note 9 I wish to access the fields in multi record block that is based on view Object. Can I do this in Controller? Sure you can. To traverse through those records, do the below ·         Get the reference to the View Object using (OAViewObject)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean).findViewObject("VO Name Here") ·         Loop through the records in View Objects using count returned from oaviewobject.getFetchedRowCount() ·         For each record, fetch the value of the fields within the loop as oracle.jbo.Row row = oaviewobject.getRowAtRangeIndex(loop index here); (String)row.getAttribute("Column name of VO here ");

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• OIM 11g : Multi-thread approach for writing custom scheduled job

  - by Saravanan V S

  In this post I have shared my experience of designing and developing an OIM schedule job that uses multi threaded approach for updating data in OIM using APIs.  I have used thread pool (in particular fixed thread pool) pattern in developing the OIM schedule job. The thread pooling pattern has noted advantages compared to thread per task approach. I have listed few of the advantage here ·         Threads are reused ·         Creation and tear-down cost of thread is reduced ·         Task execution latency is reduced ·         Improved performance ·         Controlled and efficient management of memory and resources used by threads More about java thread pool http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/pools.html The following diagram depicts the high-level architectural diagram of the schedule job that process input from a flat file to update OIM process form data using fixed thread pool approach    The custom scheduled job shared in this post is developed to meet following requirement 1)      Need to process a CSV extract that contains identity, account identifying key and list of data to be updated on an existing OIM resource account. 2)      CSV file can contain data for multiple resources configured in OIM 3)      List of attribute to update and mapping between CSV column to OIM fields may vary between resources The following are three Java class developed for this requirement (I have given only prototype of the code that explains how to use thread pools in schedule task) CustomScheduler.java - Implementation of TaskSupport class that reads and passes the parameters configured on the schedule job to Thread Executor class. package com.oracle.oim.scheduler; import java.util.HashMap; import com.oracle.oim.bo.MultiThreadDataRecon; import oracle.iam.scheduler.vo.TaskSupport; public class CustomScheduler extends TaskSupport {      public void execute(HashMap options) throws Exception {             /*  Read Schedule Job Parameters */             String param1 = (String) options.get(“Parameter1”);             .             int noOfThread = (int) options.get(“No of Threads”);             .             String paramn = (int) options.get(“ParamterN”); /* Provide all the required input configured on schedule job to Thread Pool Executor implementation class like 1) Name of the file, 2) Delimiter 3) Header Row Numer 4) Line Escape character 5) Config and resource map lookup 6) No the thread to create */ new MultiThreadDataRecon(all_required_parameters, noOfThreads).reconcile();       }       public HashMap getAttributes() { return null; }       public void setAttributes() {       } } MultiThreadDataRecon.java – Helper class that reads data from input file, initialize the thread executor and builds the task queue. package com.oracle.oim.bo; import <required file IO classes>; import  <required java.util classes>; import  <required OIM API classes>; import <csv reader api>; public class MultiThreadDataRecon {  private int noOfThreads;  private ExecutorService threadExecutor = null;  public MetaDataRecon(<required params>, int noOfThreads)  {       //Store parameters locally       .       .       this.noOfThread = noOfThread;  }        /**        *  Initialize         */  private void init() throws Exception {       try {             // Initialize CSV file reader API objects             // Initialize OIM API objects             /* Initialize Fixed Thread Pool Executor class if no of threads                 configured is more than 1 */             if (noOfThreads > 1) {                   threadExecutor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(noOfThreads);             } else {                   threadExecutor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();             }             /* Initialize TaskProcess clas s which will be executing task                 from the Queue */                TaskProcessor.initializeConfig(params);       } catch (***Exception e) {                   // TO DO       }  }       /**        *  Method to reconcile data from CSV to OIM        */ public void reconcile() throws Exception {        try {             init();             while(<csv file has line>){                   processRow(line);             }             /* Initiate thread shutdown */             threadExecutor.shutdown();             while (!threadExecutor.isTerminated()) {                 // Wait for all task to complete.             }            } catch (Exception e) {                   // TO DO            } finally {                   try {                         //Close all the file handles                   } catch (IOException e) {                         //TO DO                   }             }       }       /**        * Method to process         */       private void processRow(String row) {             // Create task processor instance with the row data              // Following code push the task to work queue and wait for next                available thread to execute             threadExecutor.execute(new TaskProcessor(rowData));       } } TaskProcessor.java – Implementation of “Runnable” interface that executes the required business logic to update data in OIM. package com.oracle.oim.bo; import <required APIs> class TaskProcessor implements Runnable {       //Initialize required member variables       /**        * Constructor        */       public TaskProcessor(<row data>) {             // Initialize and parse csv row       }       /*       *  Method to initialize required object for task execution       */       public static void initializeConfig(<params>) {             // Process param and initialize the required configs and object       }           /*        * (non-Javadoc)        *         * @see java.lang.Runnable#run()        */            public void run() {             if (<is csv data valid>){                   processData();             }       }  /**   * Process the the received CSV input   */  private void processData() {     try{       //Find the user in OIM using the identity matching key value from CSV       // Find the account to be update from user’s account based on account identifying key on CSV       // Update the account with data from CSV       }catch(***Exception e){           //TO DO       }   } }

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• SQL Server Developer Tools &ndash; Codename Juneau vs. Red-Gate SQL Source Control

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control?  Read on to find out. At the PASS Community Summit a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the previously code-named Juneau software would be released under the name of SQL Server Developer Tools with the release of SQL Server 2012.  This replacement for Database Projects in Visual Studio (also known in a former life as Data Dude) has some great new features.  I won’t attempt to describe them all here, but I will applaud Microsoft for making major improvements.  One of my favorite changes is the way database elements are broken down.  Previously every little thing was in its own file.  For example, indexes were each in their own file.  I always hated that.  Now, SSDT uses a pattern similar to Red-Gate’s and puts the indexes and keys into the same file as the overall table definition. Of course there are really cool features to keep your database model in sync with the actual source scripts, and the rename refactoring feature is now touted as being more than just a search and replace, but rather a “semantic-aware” search and replace.  Funny, it reminds me of SQL Prompt’s Smart Rename feature.  But I’m not writing this just to criticize Microsoft and argue that they are late to the party with this feature set.  Instead, I do see it as a viable alternative for folks who want all of their source code to be version controlled, but there are a couple of key trade-offs that you need to know about when you choose which tool set to use. First, the basics Both tool sets integrate with a wide variety of source control systems including the most popular: Subversion, GIT, Vault, and Team Foundation Server.  Both tools have integrated functionality to produce objects to upgrade your target database when you are ready (DACPACs in SSDT, integration with SQL Compare for SQL Source Control).  If you regularly live in Visual Studio or the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) then SSDT will likely be comfortable for you.  Like BIDS, SSDT is a Visual Studio Project Type that comes with SQL Server, and if you don’t already have Visual Studio installed, it will install the shell for you.  If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed, then it will just add this as an available project type.  On the other hand, if you regularly live in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) then you will really enjoy the SQL Source Control integration from within SSMS.  Both tool sets store their database model in script files.  In SSDT, these are on your file system like other source files; in SQL Source Control, these are stored in the folder structure in your source control system, and you can always GET them to your file system if you want to browse them directly. For me, the key differentiating factors are 1) a single, unified check-in, and 2) migration scripts.  How you value those two features will likely make your decision for you. Unified Check-In If you do a continuous-integration (CI) style of development that triggers an automated build with unit testing on every check-in of source code, and you use Visual Studio for the rest of your development, then you will want to really consider SSDT.  Because it is just another project in Visual Studio, it can be added to your existing Solution, and you can then do a complete, or unified single check-in of all changes whether they are application or database changes.  This is simply not possible with SQL Source Control because it is in a different development tool (SSMS instead of Visual Studio) and there is no way to do one unified check-in between the two.  You CAN do really fast back-to-back check-ins, but there is the possibility that the automated build that is triggered from the first check-in will cause your unit tests to fail and the CI tool to report that you broke the build.  Of course, the automated build that is triggered from the second check-in which contains the “other half” of your changes should pass and so the amount of time that the build was broken may be very, very short, but if that is very, very important to you, then SQL Source Control just won’t work; you’ll have to use SSDT. Refactoring and Migrations If you work on a mature system, or on a not-so-mature but also not-so-well-designed system, where you want to refactor the database schema as you go along, but you can’t have data suddenly disappearing from your target system, then you’ll probably want to go with SQL Source Control.  As I wrote previously, there are a number of changes which you can make to your database that the comparison tools (both from Microsoft and Red Gate) simply cannot handle without the possibility (or probability) of data loss.  Currently, SSDT only offers you the ability to inject PRE and POST custom deployment scripts.  There is no way to insert your own script in the middle to override the default behavior of the tool.  In version 3.0 of SQL Source Control (Early Access version now available) you have that ability to create your own custom migration script to take the place of the commands that the tool would have done, and ensure the preservation of your data.  Or, even if the default tool behavior would have worked, but you simply know a better way then you can take control and do things your way instead of theirs. You Decide In the environment I work in, our automated builds are not triggered off of check-ins, but off of the clock (currently once per night) and so there is no point at which the automated build and unit tests will be triggered without having both sides of the development effort already checked-in.  Therefore having a unified check-in, while handy, is not critical for us.  As for migration scripts, these are critically important to us.  We do a lot of new development on systems that have already been in production for years, and it is not uncommon for us to need to do a refactoring of the database.  Because of the maturity of the existing system, that often involves data migrations or other additional SQL tasks that the comparison tools just can’t detect on their own.  Therefore, the ability to create a custom migration script to override the tool’s default behavior is very important to us.  And so, you can see why we will continue to use Red Gate SQL Source Control for the foreseeable future.

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• Azure Task Scheduling Options

  - by charlie.mott

  Currently, the Azure PaaS does not offer a distributed\resilient task scheduling service.  If you do want to host a task scheduling product\solution off-premise (and ideally use Azure), what are your options? PaaS Option 1: Worker Roles Use a worker role to schedule and execute actions at specific time periods.  There are a few frameworks available to assist with this: http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com https://github.com/Lokad/lokad-cloud/wiki/TaskScheduler http://blog.smarx.com/posts/building-a-task-scheduler-in-windows-azure - This addresses a slightly different set of requirements. It’s a more dynamic approach for queuing up tasks, but not repeatable tasks (e.g. daily). I found the Azure Toolkit option the most simple to implement.  Step 1 : Create a domain entity implementing IJob for each job to schedule.  In this sample, I asynchronously call a WCF service method. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole.Jobs 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit; 4: using ScheduledTasksService; 5: 6: public class UploadEmployeesJob : IJob 7: { 8: public void Run() 9: { 10: // Call Tasks Service 11: var client = new ScheduledTasksServiceClient("BasicHttpBinding_IScheduledTasksService"); 12: client.UploadEmployees(); 13: client.Close(); 14: } 15: } 16: } Step 2 : In the worker role run method, add the jobs to the toolkit engine. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit.Engine; 4: using Jobs; 5:   6: public class WorkerRole : WorkerRoleEntryPoint 7: { 8: public override void Run() 9: { 10: var engine = new CloudEngine(); 11:   12: // Add Scheduled Jobs (using CronJob syntax - see http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference). 13:   14: // 1. Upload Employee job - 8.00 PM every weekday (Mon-Fri) 15: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<UploadEmployeesJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 20 * * 1-5"; }); 16: // 2. Purge Data job - 10 AM every Saturday 17: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<PurgeDataJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 10 * * 6"; }); 18: // 3. Process Exceptions job - Every 5 minutes 19: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<ProcessExceptionsJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "*/5 * * * *"; }); 20:   21: engine.Run(); 22: base.Run(); 23: } 24: } 25: } Pros Cons Azure Toolkit option is simple to implement. For the AzureToolkit option, you are limited to a single worker role.  Otherwise, the jobs will be executed multiple times, once for each worker role instance.   Paying for a continuously running worker role, even if it just processes a single job once a week.  If you only have a few scheduled tasks to run calling asynchronous services hosted in different web roles, an extra small worker role likely to be sufficient.  However, for an extra small worker role this still costs $14.40/month (03/09/2012). Option 2: Use Scheduled Task on Azure Web Role calling a console app Setup a Windows Scheduled Task on the Azure Web Role. This calls a console application that calls the WCF service methods that run the task actions. This design is described here: http://www.ronaldwidha.net/2011/02/23/cron-job-on-azure-using-scheduled-task-on-a-web-role-to-replace-azure-worker-role-for-background-job/ http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/index.php/2011/07/windows-azure-task-scheduler/ http://devlicio.us/blogs/vinull/archive/2011/10/23/moving-to-azure-worker-roles-for-nothing-and-tasks-for-free.aspx Pros Cons Fairly easy to implement. Supportability - I RDC’ed onto the Azure server and stopped the scheduled task. I then rebooted the machine and the task was re-started. I also tried deleting the task and rebooting, the same thing occurred. The only way to permanently guarantee that a task is disabled is to do a fresh deployment. I think this is a major supportability concern.   Saleability - multiple instances would trigger multiple tasks. You can only have one instance for the scheduled task web role. The guidance implements setup of the scheduled task as part of a web role instance. But if you have more than one instance in a web role, the task will be triggered multiple times for each scheduled action (once per machine). Workaround: If we wanted to use scheduled tasks for another client with a saleable WCF service, then we could include the console & tasks scripts in a separate web role (e.g. a empty WCF service with no real purpose to it). SaaS Option 3: Azure Marketplace I thought that someone might be offering this type of service via the Azure marketplace. At the point of writing this blog post, I did not find anyone doing so. https://datamarket.azure.com/ Pros Cons   Nobody currently offers this on the Azure Marketplace. Option 4: Online Job Scheduling Service Provider There are plenty of online providers that offer this type of service on a pay-as-you-go approach.  Some of these are free for small usage.   Many of these providers are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcron Pros Cons No bespoke development for scheduler. Reliance on third party. IaaS Option 5: Setup Scheduling Software on Azure IaaS VM’s One of job scheduling software offerings could be installed and configured on Azure VM’s.  A list of software options is listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software Pros Cons Enterprise distributed\resilient task scheduling service VM Setup and maintenance   Software Licence Costs Option 6: VM Gallery A the time of writing this blog post, I did not spot a VM in the gallery that included pre-installation of any of the above software options. Pros Cons   No current VM template. Summary For my current project that had a small handful of tasks to schedule with a limited project budget I chose option 1 (a worker role using the Azure Toolkit to schedule tasks).  If I was building an enterprise scale solution for the future, options 4 and 5 are currently worthy of consideration. Hopefully, Microsoft will include tasks scheduling in the future as part of their PaaS offerings.

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• Google and Bing Map APIs Compared

  - by SGWellens

  At one of the local golf courses I frequent, there is an open grass field next to the course. It is about eight acres in size and mowed regularly. It is permissible to hit golf balls there—you bring and shag our own balls. My golf colleagues and I spend hours there practicing, chatting and in general just wasting time. One of the guys brings Ginger, the amazing, incredible, wonder dog. Ginger is a Portuguese Pointer. She chases squirrels, begs for snacks and supervises us closely to make sure we don't misbehave.     Anyway, I decided to make a dedicated web page to measure distances on the field in yards using online mapping services. I started with Google maps and then did the same application with Bing maps. It is a good way to become familiar with the APIs. Here are images of the final two maps: Google:  Bing:   To start with online mapping services, you need to visit the respective websites and get a developers key. I pared the code down to the minimum to make it easier to compare the APIs. Google maps required this CSS (or it wouldn't work): <style type="text/css">     html     {         height: 100%;     }       body     {         height: 100%;         margin: 0;         padding: 0;     } Here is how the map scripts are included. Google requires the developer Key when loading the JavaScript, Bing requires it when the map object is created: Google: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=XXXXXXX&libraries=geometry&sensor=false" > </script> Bing: <script  type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"> </script> Note: I use jQuery to manipulate the DOM elements which may be overkill, but I may add more stuff to this application and I didn't want to have to add it later. Plus, I really like jQuery. Here is how the maps are created: Common Code (the same for both Google and Bing Maps):     <script type="text/javascript">         var gTheMap;         var gMarker1;         var gMarker2;           $(document).ready(DocLoaded);           function DocLoaded()         {             // golf course coordinates             var StartLat = 44.924254;             var StartLng = -93.366859;               // what element to display the map in             var mapdiv = $("#map_div")[0];   Google:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new google.maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE             });           // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Bing:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new  Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 credentials: 'Asbsa_hzfHl69XF3wxBd_WbW0dLNTRUH3ZHQG9qcV5EFRLuWEaOP1hjWdZ0A0P17',                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.aerial             });             // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Note: In the Bing documentation, mapTypeId: was missing from the list of options even though the sample code included it. Note: When creating the Bing map, use the developer Key for the credentials property. I immediately place two markers/pins on the map which is simpler that creating them on the fly with mouse clicks (as I first tried). The markers/pins are draggable and I capture the DragEnd event to calculate and display the distance in yards and draw a line when the user finishes dragging. Here is the code to place a marker: Google: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new google.maps.Marker(         {             position: location,             map: gTheMap,             draggable: true         });     marker.addListener('dragend', DragEnd);     return marker; }   Bing: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(location,     {         draggable : true     });     Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(marker, 'dragend', DragEnd);     gTheMap.entities.push(marker);     return marker; } Here is the code than runs when the user stops dragging a marker: Google: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Event) {     var meters = google.maps.geometry.spherical.computeDistanceBetween(marker1.position, marker2.position);     var yards = meters * 1.0936133;     $("#message").text(yards.toFixed(1) + ' yards');    // draw a line connecting the points     var Endpoints = [marker1.position, marker2.position];       if (gLine == null)     {         gLine = new google.maps.Polyline({             path: Endpoints,             strokeColor: "#FFFF00",             strokeOpacity: 1.0,             strokeWeight: 2,             map: gTheMap         });     }     else        gLine.setPath(Endpoints); } Bing: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Args) {    var Distance =  CalculateDistance(marker1._location, marker2._location);      $("#message").text(Distance.toFixed(1) + ' yards');       // draw a line connecting the points    var Endpoints = [marker1._location, marker2._location];           if (gLine == null)    {        gLine = new Microsoft.Maps.Polyline(Endpoints,            {                strokeColor: new Microsoft.Maps.Color(0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0),  // aRGB                strokeThickness : 2            });          gTheMap.entities.push(gLine);    }    else        gLine.setLocations(Endpoints);  }   Note: I couldn't find a function to calculate the distance between points in the Bing API, so I wrote my own (CalculateDistance). If you want to see the source for it, you can pick it off the web page. Note: I was able to verify the accuracy of the measurements by using the golf hole next to the field. I put a pin/marker on the center of the green, and then by zooming in, I was able to see the 150 markers on the fairway and put the other pin/marker on one of them. Final Notes: All in all, the APIs are very similar. Both made it easy to accomplish a lot with a minimum amount of code. In one aerial view, there are leaves on the tree, in the other, the trees are bare. I don't know which service has the newer data. Here are links to working pages: Bing Map Demo Google Map Demo I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens   CodeProject

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• What's up with LDoms: Part 5 - A few Words about Consoles

  - by Stefan Hinker

  Back again to look at a detail of LDom configuration that is often forgotten - the virtual console server. Remember, LDoms are SPARC systems.  As such, each guest will have it's own OBP running.  And to connect to that OBP, the administrator will need a console connection.  Since it's OBP, and not some x86 BIOS, this console will be very serial in nature ;-)  It's really very much like in the good old days, where we had a terminal concentrator where all those serial cables ended up in.  Just like with other components in LDoms, the virtualized solution looks very similar. Every LDom guest requires exactly one console connection.  Envision this similar to the RS-232 port on older SPARC systems.  The LDom framework provides one or more console services that provide access to these connections.  This would be the virtual equivalent of a network terminal server (NTS), where all those serial cables are plugged in.  In the physical world, we'd have a list somewhere, that would tell us which TCP-Port of the NTS was connected to which server.  "ldm list" does just that: root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 0.4% 27d 8h 22m jupiter bound ------ 5002 20 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.5% 55d 14h 10m venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 40m pluto inactive ------ 4 4G The column marked "CONS" tells us, where to reach the console of each domain. In the case of the primary domain, this is actually a (more) physical connection - it's the console connection of the physical system, which is either reachable via the ILOM of that system, or directly via the serial console port on the chassis. All the other guests are reachable through the console service which we created during the inital setup of the system.  Note that pluto does not have a port assigned.  This is because pluto is not yet bound.  (Binding can be viewed very much as the assembly of computer parts - CPU, Memory, disks, network adapters and a serial console cable are all put together when binding the domain.)  Unless we set the port number explicitly, LDoms Manager will do this on a first come, first serve basis.  For just a few domains, this is fine.  For larger deployments, it might be a good idea to assign these port numbers manually using the "ldm set-vcons" command.  However, there is even better magic associated with virtual consoles. You can group several domains into one console group, reachable through one TCP port of the console service.  This can be useful when several groups of administrators are to be given access to different domains, or for other grouping reasons.  Here's an example: root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console jupiter root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind jupiter root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 6.1% 27d 8h 24m jupiter bound ------ 5002 200 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 12m pluto bound ------ 5002 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 42m root@sun # telnet localhost 5002 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:l DOMAIN ID DOMAIN NAME DOMAIN STATE 2 jupiter online 3 pluto online sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:npluto Connecting to console "pluto" in group "planets" .... Press ~? for control options .. What I did here was add the two domains pluto and jupiter to a new console group called "planets" on the service "console" running in the primary domain.  Simply using a group name will create such a group, if it doesn't already exist.  By default, each domain has its own group, using the domain name as the group name.  The group will be available on port 5002, chosen by LDoms Manager because I didn't specify it.  If I connect to that console group, I will now first be prompted to choose the domain I want to connect to from a little menu. Finally, here's an example how to assign port numbers explicitly: root@sun # ldm set-vcons port=5044 group=pluto service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 3.8% 27d 8h 54m jupiter active -t---- 5002 200 8G 0.5% 30m mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 43m pluto bound ------ 5044 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.4% 56d 1h 13m With this, pluto would always be reachable on port 5044 in its own exclusive console group, no matter in which order other domains are bound. Now, you might be wondering why we always have to mention the console service name, "console" in all the examples here.  The simple answer is because there could be more than one such console service.  For all "normal" use, a single console service is absolutely sufficient.  But the system is flexible enough to allow more than that single one, should you need them.  In fact, you could even configure such a console service on a domain other than the primary (or control domain), which would make that domain a real console server.  I actually have a customer who does just that - they want to separate console access from the control domain functionality.  But this is definately a rather sophisticated setup. Something I don't want to go into in this post is access control.  vntsd, which is the daemon providing all these console services, is fully RBAC-aware, and you can configure authorizations for individual users to connect to console groups or individual domain's consoles.  If you can't wait until I get around to security, check out the man page of vntsd. Further reading: The Admin Guide is rather reserved on this subject.  I do recommend to check out the Reference Manual. The manpage for vntsd will discuss all the control sequences as well as the grouping and authorizations mentioned here.

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• Introduction to Human Workflow 11g

  - by agiovannetti

  Human Workflow is a component of SOA Suite just like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, etc. The Human Workflow component allows you to incorporate human intervention in a business process. You can use Human Workflow to create a business process that requires a manager to approve purchase orders greater than $10,000; or a business process that handles article reviews in which a group of reviewers need to vote/approve an article before it gets published. Human Workflow can handle the task assignment and routing as well as the generation of notifications to the participants. There are three common patterns or usages of Human Workflow: 1) Approval Scenarios: manage documents and other transactional data through approval chains . For example: approve expense report, vacation approval, hiring approval, etc. 2) Reviews by multiple users or groups: group collaboration and review of documents or proposals. For example, processing a sales quote which is subject to review by multiple people. 3) Case Management: workflows around work management or case management. For example, processing a service request. This could be routed to various people who all need to modify the task. It may also incorporate ad hoc routing which is unknown at design time. SOA 11g Human Workflow includes the following features: Assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups. Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task. Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a Worklist application. Organization, filtering, prioritization and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks. Reports, reassignments, load balancing and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks. Human Workflow Architecture The Human Workflow component is divided into 3 modules: the service interface, the task definition and the client interface module. The Service Interface handles the interaction with BPEL and other components. The Client Interface handles the presentation of task data through clients like the Worklist application, portals and notification channels. The task definition module is in charge of managing the lifecycle of a task. Who should get the task assigned? What should happen next with the task? When must the task be completed? Should the task be escalated?, etc Stages and Participants When you create a Human Task you need to specify how the task is assigned and routed. The first step is to define the stages and participants. A stage is just a logical group. A participant can be a user, a group of users or an application role. The participants indicate the type of assignment and routing that will be performed. Stages can be sequential or in parallel. You can combine them to create any usage you require. See diagram below: Assignment and Routing There are different ways a task can be assigned and routed: Single Approver: task is assigned to a single user, group or role. For example, a vacation request is assigned to a manager. If the manager approves or rejects the request, the employee is notified with the decision. If the task is assigned to a group then once one of managers acts on it, the task is completed. Parallel : task is assigned to a set of people that must work in parallel. This is commonly used for voting. For example, a task gets approved once 50% of the participants approve it. You can also set it up to be a unanimous vote. Serial : participants must work in sequence. The most common scenario for this is management chain escalation. FYI (For Your Information) : task is assigned to participants who can view it, add comments and attachments, but can not modify or complete the task. Task Actions The following is the list of actions that can be performed on a task: Claim : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, then the task must be claimed first to be able to act on it. Escalate : if the participant is not able to complete a task, he/she can escalate it. The task is reassigned to his/her manager (up one level in a hierarchy). Pushback : the task is sent back to the previous assignee. Reassign :if the participant is a manager, he/she can delegate a task to his/her reports. Release : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, it can be released if the user who claimed the task cannot complete the task. Any of the other assignees can claim and complete the task. Request Information and Submit Information : use when the participant needs to supply more information or to request more information from the task creator or any of the previous assignees. Suspend and Resume :if a task is not relevant, it can be suspended. A suspension is indefinite. It does not expire until Resume is used to resume working on the task. Withdraw : if the creator of a task does not want to continue with it, for example, he wants to cancel a vacation request, he can withdraw the task. The business process determines what happens next. Renew : if a task is about to expire, the participant can renew it. The task expiration date is extended one week. Notifications Human Workflow provides a mechanism for sending notifications to participants to alert them of changes on a task. Notifications can be sent via email, telephone voice message, instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS). Notifications can be sent when the task status changes to any of the following: Assigned/renewed/delegated/reassigned/escalated Completed Error Expired Request Info Resume Suspended Added/Updated comments and/or attachments Updated Outcome Withdraw Other Actions (e.g. acquiring a task) Here is an example of an email notification: Worklist Application Oracle BPM Worklist application is the default user interface included in SOA Suite. It allows users to access and act on tasks that have been assigned to them. For example, from the Worklist application, a loan agent can review loan applications or a manager can approve employee vacation requests. Through the Worklist Application users can: Perform authorized actions on tasks, acquire and check out shared tasks, define personal to-do tasks and define subtasks. Filter tasks view based on various criteria. Work with standard work queues, such as high priority tasks, tasks due soon and so on. Work queues allow users to create a custom view to group a subset of tasks in the worklist, for example, high priority tasks, tasks due in 24 hours, expense approval tasks and more. Define custom work queues. Gain proxy access to part of another user's tasks. Define custom vacation rules and delegation rules. Enable group owners to define task dispatching rules for shared tasks. Collect a complete workflow history and audit trail. Use digital signatures for tasks. Run reports like Unattended tasks, Tasks productivity, etc. Here is a screenshoot of what the Worklist Application looks like. On the right hand side you can see the tasks that have been assigned to the user and the task's detail. References Introduction to SOA Suite 11g Human Workflow Webcast Note 1452937.2 Human Workflow Information Center Using the Human Workflow Service Component 11.1.1.6 Human Workflow Samples Human Workflow APIs Java Docs

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• Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain – Part 3

  - by sxkumar

  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation such as cloud will increase agility and efficiency of an organization if process re-engineering is part of the plan.  I have also stressed on the key enterprise requirements such as “broad and deep solutions, “running your mission critical applications” and “automated and integrated set of capabilities”. Let me walk you through some key cloud attributes such as “elasticity” and “self-service” and what they mean for an enterprise class cloud. I will also talk about how we at Oracle have taken a very enterprise centric view to developing cloud solutions and how our products have been specifically engineered to address enterprise cloud needs. Cloud Elasticity and Enterprise Applications Requirements Easy and quick scalability for a short-period of time is the signature of cloud based solutions. It is this elasticity that allows you to dynamically redistribute your resources according to business priorities, helps increase your overall resource utilization, and reduces operational costs by allowing you to get the most out of your existing investment. Most public clouds are offering a instant provisioning mechanism of compute power (CPU, RAM, Disk), customer pay for the instance-hours(and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. This type of “just-in-time” serving of compute resources is well known for mid-tiers “state less” servers such as web application servers and web servers that just need another machine to start and run on it but what does it really mean for an enterprise application and its underlying data? Most enterprise applications are not as quite as “state less” and justifiably so. As such, how do you take advantage of cloud elasticity and make it relevant for your enterprise apps? This is where Cloud meets Grid Computing. At Oracle, we have invested enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating enterprise grid solutions. All our technology products offer built-in elasticity via clustering and dynamic scaling. With products like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, WebLogic Clustering, and Coherence In-Memory Grid, we allow all your enterprise applications to benefit from Cloud elasticity –both vertically and horizontally - without requiring any application changes. A number of technology vendors take a rather simplistic route of starting up additional or removing unneeded VM as the "Cloud Scale-Out" solution. While this may work for stateless mid-tier servers where load balancers can handle the addition and remove of instances transparently but following a similar approach for the database tier - often called as "database sharding" - requires significant application modification and typically does not work with off the shelf packaged applications. Technologies like Oracle Database Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, etc. on the other hand bring the benefits of incremental scalability and on-demand elasticity to ANY application by providing a simplified abstraction layers where the application does not need deal with data spread over multiple database instances. Rather they just talk to a single database and the database software takes care of aggregating resources across multiple hardware components. It is the technologies like these that truly make a cloud solution relevant for enterprises.  For customers who are looking for a next generation hardware consolidation platform, our engineered systems (e.g. Exadata, Exalogic) not only provide incredible amount of performance and capacity, they also reduce the data center complexity and simplify operations. Assemble, Deploy and Manage Enterprise Applications for Cloud Products like Oracle Virtual assembly builder (OVAB) resolve the complex problem of bringing the cloud speed to complex multi-tier applications. With assemblies, you can not only provision all components of a multi-tier application and wire them together by push of a button, other aspects of application lifecycle, such as real-time application testing, scale-up/scale-down, performance and availability monitoring, etc., are also automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager.  An essential criteria for an enterprise cloud to succeed is the ability to ensure business service levels especially when business users have either full visibility on the usage cost with a “show back” or a “charge back”. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, we have created the most comprehensive cloud management solution in the industry that is capable of managing business service levels “applications-to-disk” in a enterprise private cloud – all from a single console. It is the only cloud management platform in the industry that allows you to deliver infrastructure, platform and application cloud services out of the box. Moreover, it offers integrated and complete lifecycle management of the cloud - including planning and set up, service delivery, operations management, metering and chargeback, etc .  Sounds unbelievable? Well, just watch this space for more details on how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the nerve center of Oracle Cloud! Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies.  Summary  But the intent of this blog post isn't to dwell on how great our solutions are (these are just some examples to illustrate how we at Oracle have approached this problem space). Rather it is to help you ask the right questions before you embark on your cloud journey.  So to summarize, here are the key takeaways.       It is critical that you are clear on why you are building the cloud. Successful organizations keep business benefits as the first and foremost cloud objective. On the other hand, those who approach this purely as a technology project are more likely to fail. Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years before you get started. Your long terms objectives should determine what your first step ought to be. As obvious as it may seem, more people than not make the first move without knowing where they are headed.  Don’t make the mistake of equating cloud to virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Spinning a VM on-demand will give some short term relief to your IT staff but is unlikely to solve your larger business problems. As such, even if IaaS is your first step towards a more comprehensive cloud, plan the roadmap around those higher level services before you begin. And ask your vendors on how they are going to be your partners in this journey. Capabilities like self-service access and chargeback/showback are absolutely critical if you really expect your cloud to be transformational. Your business won't see the full benefits of the cloud until it empowers them with same kind of control and transparency that they are used to while using a public cloud service.  Evaluate the benefits of integration, as opposed to blindly following the best-of-breed strategy. Integration is a huge challenge and more so in a cloud environment. There are enormous costs associated with stitching a solution out of disparate components and even more in maintaining it. Hope you found these ideas helpful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

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• How to Load Oracle Tables From Hadoop Tutorial (Part 5 - Leveraging Parallelism in OSCH)

  - by Bob Hanckel

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Using OSCH: Beyond Hello World In the previous post we discussed a “Hello World” example for OSCH focusing on the mechanics of getting a toy end-to-end example working. In this post we are going to talk about how to make it work for big data loads. We will explain how to optimize an OSCH external table for load, paying particular attention to Oracle’s DOP (degree of parallelism), the number of external table location files we use, and the number of HDFS files that make up the payload. We will provide some rules that serve as best practices when using OSCH. The assumption is that you have read the previous post and have some end to end OSCH external tables working and now you want to ramp up the size of the loads. Using OSCH External Tables for Access and Loading OSCH external tables are no different from any other Oracle external tables.  They can be used to access HDFS content using Oracle SQL: SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; or use the same SQL access to load a table in Oracle. INSERT INTO my_oracle_table SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; To speed up the load time, you will want to control the degree of parallelism (i.e. DOP) and add two SQL hints. ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL DML PARALLEL  8; ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL QUERY PARALLEL 8; INSERT /*+ append pq_distribute(my_oracle_table, none) */ INTO my_oracle_table SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; There are various ways of either hinting at what level of DOP you want to use.  The ALTER SESSION statements above force the issue assuming you (the user of the session) are allowed to assert the DOP (more on that in the next section).  Alternatively you could embed additional parallel hints directly into the INSERT and SELECT clause respectively. /*+ parallel(my_oracle_table,8) *//*+ parallel(my_hdfs_external_table,8) */ Note that the "append" hint lets you load a target table by reserving space above a given "high watermark" in storage and uses Direct Path load.  In other doesn't try to fill blocks that are already allocated and partially filled. It uses unallocated blocks.  It is an optimized way of loading a table without incurring the typical resource overhead associated with run-of-the-mill inserts.  The "pq_distribute" hint in this context unifies the INSERT and SELECT operators to make data flow during a load more efficient. Finally your target Oracle table should be defined with "NOLOGGING" and "PARALLEL" attributes.   The combination of the "NOLOGGING" and use of the "append" hint disables REDO logging, and its overhead.  The "PARALLEL" clause tells Oracle to try to use parallel execution when operating on the target table. Determine Your DOP It might feel natural to build your datasets in Hadoop, then afterwards figure out how to tune the OSCH external table definition, but you should start backwards. You should focus on Oracle database, specifically the DOP you want to use when loading (or accessing) HDFS content using external tables. The DOP in Oracle controls how many PQ slaves are launched in parallel when executing an external table. Typically the DOP is something you want to Oracle to control transparently, but for loading content from Hadoop with OSCH, it's something that you will want to control. Oracle computes the maximum DOP that can be used by an Oracle user. The maximum value that can be assigned is an integer value typically equal to the number of CPUs on your Oracle instances, times the number of cores per CPU, times the number of Oracle instances. For example, suppose you have a RAC environment with 2 Oracle instances. And suppose that each system has 2 CPUs with 32 cores. The maximum DOP would be 128 (i.e. 2*2*32). In point of fact if you are running on a production system, the maximum DOP you are allowed to use will be restricted by the Oracle DBA. This is because using a system maximum DOP can subsume all system resources on Oracle and starve anything else that is executing. Obviously on a production system where resources need to be shared 24x7, this can’t be allowed to happen. The use cases for being able to run OSCH with a maximum DOP are when you have exclusive access to all the resources on an Oracle system. This can be in situations when your are first seeding tables in a new Oracle database, or there is a time where normal activity in the production database can be safely taken off-line for a few hours to free up resources for a big incremental load. Using OSCH on high end machines (specifically Oracle Exadata and Oracle BDA cabled with Infiniband), this mode of operation can load up to 15TB per hour. The bottom line is that you should first figure out what DOP you will be allowed to run with by talking to the DBAs who manage the production system. You then use that number to derive the number of location files, and (optionally) the number of HDFS data files that you want to generate, assuming that is flexible. Rule 1: Find out the maximum DOP you will be allowed to use with OSCH on the target Oracle system Determining the Number of Location Files Let’s assume that the DBA told you that your maximum DOP was 8. You want the number of location files in your external table to be big enough to utilize all 8 PQ slaves, and you want them to represent equally balanced workloads. Remember location files in OSCH are metadata lists of HDFS files and are created using OSCH’s External Table tool. They also represent the workload size given to an individual Oracle PQ slave (i.e. a PQ slave is given one location file to process at a time, and only it will process the contents of the location file.) Rule 2: The size of the workload of a single location file (and the PQ slave that processes it) is the sum of the content size of the HDFS files it lists For example, if a location file lists 5 HDFS files which are each 100GB in size, the workload size for that location file is 500GB. The number of location files that you generate is something you control by providing a number as input to OSCH’s External Table tool. Rule 3: The number of location files chosen should be a small multiple of the DOP Each location file represents one workload for one PQ slave. So the goal is to keep all slaves busy and try to give them equivalent workloads. Obviously if you run with a DOP of 8 but have 5 location files, only five PQ slaves will have something to do and the other three will have nothing to do and will quietly exit. If you run with 9 location files, then the PQ slaves will pick up the first 8 location files, and assuming they have equal work loads, will finish up about the same time. But the first PQ slave to finish its job will then be rescheduled to process the ninth location file, potentially doubling the end to end processing time. So for this DOP using 8, 16, or 32 location files would be a good idea. Determining the Number of HDFS Files Let’s start with the next rule and then explain it: Rule 4: The number of HDFS files should try to be a multiple of the number of location files and try to be relatively the same size In our running example, the DOP is 8. This means that the number of location files should be a small multiple of 8. Remember that each location file represents a list of unique HDFS files to load, and that the sum of the files listed in each location file is a workload for one Oracle PQ slave. The OSCH External Table tool will look in an HDFS directory for a set of HDFS files to load.  It will generate N number of location files (where N is the value you gave to the tool). It will then try to divvy up the HDFS files and do its best to make sure the workload across location files is as balanced as possible. (The tool uses a greedy algorithm that grabs the biggest HDFS file and delegates it to a particular location file. It then looks for the next biggest file and puts in some other location file, and so on). The tools ability to balance is reduced if HDFS file sizes are grossly out of balance or are too few. For example suppose my DOP is 8 and the number of location files is 8. Suppose I have only 8 HDFS files, where one file is 900GB and the others are 100GB. When the tool tries to balance the load it will be forced to put the singleton 900GB into one location file, and put each of the 100GB files in the 7 remaining location files. The load balance skew is 9 to 1. One PQ slave will be working overtime, while the slacker PQ slaves are off enjoying happy hour. If however the total payload (1600 GB) were broken up into smaller HDFS files, the OSCH External Table tool would have an easier time generating a list where each workload for each location file is relatively the same.  Applying Rule 4 above to our DOP of 8, we could divide the workload into160 files that were approximately 10 GB in size.  For this scenario the OSCH External Table tool would populate each location file with 20 HDFS file references, and all location files would have similar workloads (approximately 200GB per location file.) As a rule, when the OSCH External Table tool has to deal with more and smaller files it will be able to create more balanced loads. How small should HDFS files get? Not so small that the HDFS open and close file overhead starts having a substantial impact. For our performance test system (Exadata/BDA with Infiniband), I compared three OSCH loads of 1 TiB. One load had 128 HDFS files living in 64 location files where each HDFS file was about 8GB. I then did the same load with 12800 files where each HDFS file was about 80MB size. The end to end load time was virtually the same. However when I got ridiculously small (i.e. 128000 files at about 8MB per file), it started to make an impact and slow down the load time. What happens if you break rules 3 or 4 above? Nothing draconian, everything will still function. You just won’t be taking full advantage of the generous DOP that was allocated to you by your friendly DBA. The key point of the rules articulated above is this: if you know that HDFS content is ultimately going to be loaded into Oracle using OSCH, it makes sense to chop them up into the right number of files roughly the same size, derived from the DOP that you expect to use for loading. Next Steps So far we have talked about OLH and OSCH as alternative models for loading. That’s not quite the whole story. They can be used together in a way that provides for more efficient OSCH loads and allows one to be more flexible about scheduling on a Hadoop cluster and an Oracle Database to perform load operations. The next lesson will talk about Oracle Data Pump files generated by OLH, and loaded using OSCH. It will also outline the pros and cons of using various load methods.  This will be followed up with a final tutorial lesson focusing on how to optimize OLH and OSCH for use on Oracle's engineered systems: specifically Exadata and the BDA. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;}

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• Google and Bing Map APIs Compared

  - by SGWellens

  At one of the local golf courses I frequent, there is an open grass field next to the course. It is about eight acres in size and mowed regularly. It is permissible to hit golf balls there—you bring and shag our own balls. My golf colleagues and I spend hours there practicing, chatting and in general just wasting time. One of the guys brings Ginger, the amazing, incredible, wonder dog. Ginger is a Hungarian Vizlas (or Hungarian pointer). She chases squirrels, begs for snacks and supervises us closely to make sure we don't misbehave. Anyway, I decided to make a dedicated web page to measure distances on the field in yards using online mapping services. I started with Google maps and then did the same application with Bing maps. It is a good way to become familiar with the APIs. Here are images of the final two maps: Google:  Bing:   To start with online mapping services, you need to visit the respective websites and get a developers key. I pared the code down to the minimum to make it easier to compare the APIs. Google maps required this CSS (or it wouldn't work): <style type="text/css">     html     {         height: 100%;     }       body     {         height: 100%;         margin: 0;         padding: 0;     } Here is how the map scripts are included. Google requires the developer Key when loading the JavaScript, Bing requires it when the map object is created: Google: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=XXXXXXX&libraries=geometry&sensor=false" > </script> Bing: <script  type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"> </script> Note: I use jQuery to manipulate the DOM elements which may be overkill, but I may add more stuff to this application and I didn't want to have to add it later. Plus, I really like jQuery. Here is how the maps are created: Common Code (the same for both Google and Bing Maps):     <script type="text/javascript">         var gTheMap;         var gMarker1;         var gMarker2;           $(document).ready(DocLoaded);           function DocLoaded()         {             // golf course coordinates             var StartLat = 44.924254;             var StartLng = -93.366859;               // what element to display the map in             var mapdiv = $("#map_div")[0];   Google:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new google.maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE             });           // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Bing:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new  Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 credentials: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.aerial             });           // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Note: In the Bing documentation, mapTypeId: was missing from the list of options even though the sample code included it. Note: When creating the Bing map, use the developer Key for the credentials property. I immediately place two markers/pins on the map which is simpler that creating them on the fly with mouse clicks (as I first tried). The markers/pins are draggable and I capture the DragEnd event to calculate and display the distance in yards and draw a line when the user finishes dragging. Here is the code to place a marker: Google: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new google.maps.Marker(         {             position: location,             map: gTheMap,             draggable: true         });     marker.addListener('dragend', DragEnd);     return marker; } Bing: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(location,     {         draggable : true     });     Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(marker, 'dragend', DragEnd);     gTheMap.entities.push(marker);     return marker; } Here is the code than runs when the user stops dragging a marker: Google: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Event) {     var meters = google.maps.geometry.spherical.computeDistanceBetween(marker1.position, marker2.position);     var yards = meters * 1.0936133;     $("#message").text(yards.toFixed(1) + ' yards');    // draw a line connecting the points     var Endpoints = [marker1.position, marker2.position];       if (gLine == null)     {         gLine = new google.maps.Polyline({             path: Endpoints,             strokeColor: "#FFFF00",             strokeOpacity: 1.0,             strokeWeight: 2,             map: gTheMap         });     }     else        gLine.setPath(Endpoints); } Bing: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Args) {    var Distance =  CalculateDistance(marker1._location, marker2._location);      $("#message").text(Distance.toFixed(1) + ' yards');       // draw a line connecting the points    var Endpoints = [marker1._location, marker2._location];           if (gLine == null)    {        gLine = new Microsoft.Maps.Polyline(Endpoints,            {                strokeColor: new Microsoft.Maps.Color(0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0),  // aRGB                strokeThickness : 2            });          gTheMap.entities.push(gLine);    }    else        gLine.setLocations(Endpoints);  }  Note: I couldn't find a function to calculate the distance between points in the Bing API, so I wrote my own (CalculateDistance). If you want to see the source for it, you can pick it off the web page. Note: I was able to verify the accuracy of the measurements by using the golf hole next to the field. I put a pin/marker on the center of the green, and then by zooming in, I was able to see the 150 markers on the fairway and put the other pin/marker on one of them. Final Notes: All in all, the APIs are very similar. Both made it easy to accomplish a lot with a minimum amount of code. In one aerial view, there are leaves on the tree, in the other, the trees are bare. I don't know which service has the newer data. Here are links to working pages: Bing Map Demo Google Map Demo I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens   CodeProject

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• FOUR questions to ask if you are implementing DATABASE-AS-A-SERVICE

  - by Sudip Datta

  During my ongoing tenure at Oracle, I have met all types of DBAs. Happy DBAs, unhappy DBAs, proud DBAs, risk-loving DBAs, cautious DBAs. These days, as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) becomes more mainstream, I find some complacent DBAs who are basking in their achievement of having implemented DBaaS. Some others, however, are not that happy. They grudgingly complain that they did not have much of a say in the implementation, they simply had to follow what their cloud architects (mostly infrastructure admins) offered them. In most cases it would be a database wrapped inside a VM that would be labeled as “Database as a Service”. In other cases, it would be existing brute-force automation simply exposed in a portal. As much as I think that there is more to DBaaS than those approaches and often get tempted to propose Enterprise Manager 12c, I try to be objective. Neither do I want to dampen the spirit of the happy ones, nor do I want to stoke the pain of the unhappy ones. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t deny vanilla automation could be useful. I like virtualization too for what it has helped us accomplish in terms of resource management, but we need to scrutinize its merit on a case-by-case basis and apply it meaningfully. For DBAs who either claim to have implemented DBaaS or are planning to do so, I simply want to provide four key questions to ponder about: 1. Does it make life easier for your end users? Database-as-a-Service can have several types of end users. Junior DBAs, QA Engineers, Developers- each having their own skillset. The objective of DBaaS is to make their life simple, so that they can focus on their core responsibilities without having to worry about additional stuff. For example, if you are a Developer using Oracle Application Express (APEX), you want to deal with schema, objects and PL/SQL code and not with datafiles or listener configuration. If you are a QA Engineer needing database copies for functional testing, you do not want to deal with underlying operating system patching and compliance issues. The question to ask, therefore, is, whether DBaaS makes life easier for those users. It is often convenient to give them VM shells to deal with a la Amazon EC2 IaaS, but is that what they really want? Is it a productive use of a developer's time if he needs to apply RPM errata to his Linux operating system. Asking him to keep the underlying operating system current is like making a guest responsible for a restaurant's decor. 2. Does it make life easier for your administrators? Cloud, in general, is supposed to free administrators from attending to mundane tasks like provisioning services for every single end user request. It is supposed to enable a readily consumable platform and enforce standardization in the process. For example, if a Service Catalog exposes DBaaS of specific database versions and configurations, it, by its very nature, enforces certain discipline and standardization within the IT environment. What if, instead of specific database configurations, cloud allowed each end user to create databases of their liking resulting in hundreds of version and patch levels and thousands of individual databases. Therefore the right question to ask is whether the unwanted consequence of DBaaS is OS and database sprawl. And if so, who is responsible for tracking them, backing them up, administering them? Studies have shown that these administrative overheads increase exponentially with new targets, and it could result in a management nightmare. That leads us to our next question. 3. Does it satisfy your Security Officers and Compliance Auditors? Compliance Auditors need to know who did what and when. They also want the cloud platform to be secure, so that end users have little freedom in tampering with it. Dealing with VM sprawl is not the easiest of challenges, let alone dealing with them as they keep getting reconfigured and moved around. This leads to the proverbial needle in the haystack problem, and all it needs is one needle to cause a serious compliance issue in the enterprise. Bottomline is, flexibility and agility should not come at the expense of compliance and it is very important to get the balance right. Can we have security and isolation without creating compliance challenges? Instead of a ‘one size fits all approach’ i.e. OS level isolation, can we think smartly about database isolation or schema based isolation? This is where the appropriate resource modeling needs to be applied. The usual systems management vendors out there with heterogeneous common-denominator approach have compromised on these semantics. If you follow Enterprise Manager’s DBaaS solution, you will see that we have considered different models, not precluding virtualization, for different customer use cases. The judgment to use virtual assemblies versus databases on physical RAC versus Schema-as-a-Service in a single database, should be governed by the need of the applications and not by putting compliance considerations in the backburner. 4. Does it satisfy your CIO? Finally, does it satisfy your higher ups? As the sponsor of cloud initiative, the CIO is expected to lead an IT transformation project, not merely a run-of-the-mill IT operations. Simply virtualizing server resources and delivering them through self-service is a good start, but hardly transformational. CIOs may appreciate the instant benefit from server consolidation, but studies have revealed that the ROI from consolidation would flatten out at 20-25%. The question would be: what next? As we go higher up in the stack, the need to virtualize, segregate and optimize shifts to those layers that are more palpable to the business users. As Sushil Kumar noted in his blog post, " the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment." Business users could not care less about infrastructure consolidation or virtualization - they care about business agility and service level assurance. Last but not the least, lot of CIOs get miffed if we ask them to throw away their existing hardware investments for implementing DBaaS. In Oracle, we always emphasize on freedom of choosing a platform; hence Enterprise Manager’s DBaaS solution is platform neutral. It can work on any Operating System (that the agent is certified on) Oracle’s hardware as well as 3rd party hardware. As a parting note, I urge you to remember these 4 questions. Remember that your satisfaction as an implementer lies in the satisfaction of others.

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• Beyond Cloud Technology, Enabling A More Agile and Responsive Organization

  - by sxkumar

  This is the second part of the blog “Clouds, Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain”. In the first part,  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative, I will describe in this section how it requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. People: Most IT organizations have a fairly complex organizational structure. There are different groups, managing different pieces of the puzzle, and yet, they don't always work together. Provisioning a new application therefore may require a request to float endlessly through system administrators, DBAs and middleware admin worlds – resulting in long delays and constant finger pointing.  Cloud users expect end-to-end automation - which requires these silos to be greatly simplified, if not completely eliminated.  Most customers I talk to acknowledge this problem but are quick to admit that such a transformation is hard. As hard as it may be, I am afraid that the status quo is no longer an option. Sticking to an organizational structure that was created ages back will not only impede cloud adoption,  it also risks making the IT skills increasingly irrelevant in a world that is rapidly moving towards converged applications and infrastructure.   Process: Most IT organizations today operate with a mindset that they must fully "control" access to any and all types of IT services. This in turn leads to people clinging on to outdated manual approval processes .  While requiring approvals for scarce resources makes sense, insisting that every single request must be manually approved defeats the very purpose of cloud. Not only this causes delays, thereby at least partially negating the agility benefits, it also results in gross inefficiency. In a cloud environment, self-service access should be governed by policies, quotas that the administrators can define upfront . For a cloud initiative to be successful, IT organizations MUST be ready to empower users by giving them real control rather than insisting on brokering every single interaction between users and the cloud resources. Technology: From a technology perspective, cloud is about consolidation, standardization and automation. A consolidated and standardized infrastructure helps increase utilization and reduces cost. Additionally, it  enables a much higher degree of automation - thereby providing users the required agility while minimizing operational costs.  Obviously, automation is the key to cloud. Unfortunately it hasn’t received as much attention within enterprises as it should have.  Many organizations are just now waking up to the criticality of automation and it still often gets relegated to back burner in favor of other "high priority" projects. However, it is important to understand that without the right type and level of automation, cloud will remain a distant dream for most enterprises. This in turn makes the choice of the cloud management software extremely critical.  For a cloud management software to be effective in an enterprise environment, it must meet the following qualifications: Broad and Deep Solution It should offer a broad and deep solution to enable the kind of broad-based transformation we are talking about.  Its footprint must cover physical and virtual systems, as well as infrastructure, database and application tiers. Too many enterprises choose to equate cloud with virtualization. While virtualization is a critical component of a cloud solution, it is just a component and not the whole solution. Similarly, too many people tend to equate cloud with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). While it is perfectly reasonable to treat IaaS as a starting point, it is important to realize that it is just the first stepping stone - and on its own it can only provide limited business benefits. It is actually the higher level services, such as (application) platform and business applications, that will bring about a more meaningful transformation to your enterprise. Run and Manage Efficiently Your Mission Critical Applications It should not only be able to run your mission critical applications, it should do so better than before.  For enterprises, applications and data are the critical business assets  As such, if you are building a cloud platform that cannot run your ERP application, it isn't truly a "enterprise cloud".  Also, be wary of  vendors who try to sell you the idea that your applications must be written in a certain way to be able to run on the cloud. That is nothing but a bogus, self-serving argument. For the cloud to be meaningful to enterprises, it should adopt to your applications - and not the other way around.  Automated, Integrated Set of Cloud Management Capabilities At the root of many of the problems plaguing enterprise IT today is complexity. A complex maze of tools and technology, coupled with archaic  processes, results in an environment which is inflexible, inefficient and simply too hard to manage. Management tool consolidation, therefore, is key to the success of your cloud as tool proliferation adds to complexity, encourages compartmentalization and defeats the very purpose that you are building the cloud for. Decision makers ought to be extra cautious about vendors trying to sell them a "suite" of disparate and loosely integrated products as a cloud solution.  An effective enterprise cloud management solution needs to provide a tightly integrated set of capabilities for all aspects of cloud lifecycle management. A simple question to ask: will your environment be more or less complex after you implement your cloud? More often than not, the answer will surprise you.  At Oracle, we have understood these challenges and have been working hard to create cloud solutions that are relevant and meaningful for enterprises.  And we have been doing it for much longer than you may think. Oracle was one of the very first enterprise software companies to make our products available on the Amazon Cloud. As far back as in 2007, we created new cloud solutions such as Cloud Database Backup that are helping customers like Amazon save millions every year.  Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies. I will dedicated the third and final part of the blog “Clouds, Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain” to Oracle Cloud Technologies Building Blocks and how they mapped into our vision of Enterprise Cloud. Stay Tuned.

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• HAProxy error: Some configuration options require full privileges, so global.uid cannot be changed

  - by Athena Wisdom

  After adding the line to /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg as part of creating a transparent proxy, source 0.0.0.0 usesrc clientip restarting haproxy starts giving an error ~# service haproxy reload * Reloading haproxy haproxy [ALERT] 230/153724 (1140) : [/usr/sbin/haproxy.main()] Some configuration options require full privileges, so global.uid cannot be changed. I'm already running service haproxy reload as root. What else do we have to do? Thank you!

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• Alternative ways of setting environment variables through PuTTy?

  - by A T

  Connecting via SSH to a SPARC server but am unable to set environmental variables through the usual PuTTy way, which gives me this error: Server refused to set environment variables I also noticed that export and set techniques don't work from the prompt; the only which works is: $ PATH=/everyones_passwords_in_plain_text/:$PATH How do I automatically run that line on every connect to this server?

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• Mysterious dbboon folder with proxy.php file on my godaddy account

  - by Paul

  When doing some web maintenance today, I noticed a strange new folder on my GoDaddy hosting account at the root level named "dbboon", with a single file inside, called proxy.php. It's code is listed below, and seems to be some sort of proxy function. I was kind of troubled because I didn't put it there. I googled all this to learn more, but didn't find anything, except for the proxy file happened to be also stored at pastebin.com: http://pastebin.com/PQsSPbCr I called GoDaddy and they confirmed that it belonged to them, said it was put there by their advanced hosting group for testing purposes but didn't have any more information. I thought this was all really weird: why would they put something in my folder without giving me a heads-up, and why would they need to do something like this? anybody know anything about this? <?php $version = '1.2'; if(isset($_GET['dbboon_version'])) { echo '{"version":"' . $version . '"}'; exit; } function dbboon_parseHeaders($subject) { global $version; $subject = trim($subject); $parsed = Array(); $len = strlen($subject); $position = $field = 0; $position = strpos($subject, "\r\n") + 2; while(isset($subject[$position])) { $nextC = strpos($subject, ':', $position); $fieldName = substr($subject, $position, ($nextC-$position)); $position += strlen($fieldName) + 1; $fieldValue = NULL; while(1) { $nextCrlf = strpos($subject, "\r\n", $position - 1); if(FALSE === $nextCrlf) { $t = substr($subject, $position); $position = $len; } else { $t = substr($subject, $position, $nextCrlf-$position); $position += strlen($t) + 2; } $fieldValue .= $t; if(!isset($subject[$position]) || (' ' != $subject[$position] && "\t" != $subject[$position])) { break; } } $parsed[strtolower($fieldName)] = trim($fieldValue); if($position > $len) { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":4,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; } } return $parsed; } if(!function_exists('http_build_query')) { function http_build_query($data, $prefix = '', $sep = '', $key = '') { $ret = Array(); foreach((array) $data as $k => $v) { if(is_int($k) && NULL != $prefix) { $k = urlencode($prefix . $k); } if(!empty($key) || $key === 0) { $k = $key . '[' . urlencode($k) . ']'; } if(is_array($v) || is_object($v)) { array_push($ret, http_build_query($v, '', $sep, $k)); } else { array_push($ret, $k . '=' . urlencode($v)); } } if(empty($sep)) { $sep = '&'; } return implode($sep, $ret); } } $host = 'dbexternalsubscriber.secureserver.net'; $get = http_build_query($_GET); $post = http_build_query($_POST); $url = $get ? "?$get" : ''; $fp = fsockopen($host, 80, $errno, $errstr); if($fp) { $payload = "POST /embed/$url HTTP/1.1\r\n"; $payload .= "Host: $host\r\n"; $payload .= "Content-Length: " . strlen($post) . "\r\n"; $payload .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n"; $payload .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n"; $payload .= $post; fwrite($fp, $payload); $httpCode = NULL; $response = NULL; $timeout = time() + 15; do { while($line = fgets($fp)) { $response .= $line; if(!trim($line)) { break; } } } while($timeout > time() && NULL === $response); $headers = dbboon_parseHeaders($response); if(isset($headers['transfer-encoding']) && 'chunked' === $headers['transfer-encoding']) { do { $cSize = $read = hexdec(trim(fgets($fp))); while($read > 0) { $buff = fread($fp, $read); $read -= strlen($buff); $response .= $buff; } $response .= fgets($fp); } while($cSize > 0); } else { preg_match('/Content-Length:\s([0-9]+)\r\n/msi', $response, $match); if(!isset($match[1])) { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":3,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; } else { while($match[1] > 0) { $buff = fread($fp, $match[1]); $match[1] -= strlen($buff); $response .= $buff; } } } fclose($fp); if(!$pos = strpos($response, "\r\n\r\n")) { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":2,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; } echo substr($response, $pos + 4); } else { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":1,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; }

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• Converting .wav (CCITT A-Law format) to .mp3 using LAME

  - by iar

  I would like to convert wav files to mp3 using the lame encoder (lame.exe). The wav files are recorded along the following specifications: Bit Rate: 64kbps Audio sample size: 8 bit Channels: 1 (mono) Audio sample rate: 8 kHz Audio format: CCITT A-Law If I try to convert such a wav file using lame, I get the following error message: Unsupported data format: 0x0006 Could anyone provide me with a command line string using lame.exe that will enable me to convert these kind of wav files?

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