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• When runs a product out of support?

  That is a question I get regularly from customers. Microsoft has a great site where you can find that information. Unfortunately this site is not easy to find, and a lot of people are not aware of this site. A good reason to promote it a little. So if you ever get a question on this topic, go to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/Default.aspx. At that site, you can find also the details of the policy Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy The Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy took effect in October 2002, and applies to most products currently available through retail purchase or volume licensing and most future release products. Through the policy, Microsoft will offer a minimum of: 10 years of support (5 years Mainstream Support and 5 years Extended Support) at the supported service pack level for Business and Developer products 5 years Mainstream Support at the supported service pack level for Consumer/Hardware/Multimedia products 3 years of Mainstream Support for products that are annually released (for example, Money, Encarta, Picture It!, and Streets & Trips) Phases of the Support Lifecycle Mainstream Support Mainstream Support is the first phase of the product support lifecycle. At the supported service pack level, Mainstream Support includes: Incident support (no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support charged on an hourly basis, support for warranty claims) Security update support The ability to request non-security hotfixes Please note: Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products Extended Support The Extended Support phase follows Mainstream Support for Business and Developer products. At the supported service pack level, Extended Support includes: Paid support Security update support at no additional cost Non-security related hotfix support requires a separate Extended Hotfix Support Agreement to be purchased (per-fix fees also apply) Please note: Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the Extended Support phase Extended Support is not available for Consumer, Hardware, or Multimedia products Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products Self-Help Online Support Self-Help Online Support is available throughout a product's lifecycle and for a minimum of 12 months after the product reaches the end of its support. Microsoft online Knowledge Base articles, FAQs, troubleshooting tools, and other resources, are provided to help customers resolve common issues. Please note: Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products (source: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/#tab1)

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• Sam Abraham to Speak about MVC2 at the Florida.Net Miramar .Net User Group on July 13 2010

  - by Sam Abraham

  I am scheduled to give a presentation at the Miramar .Net User Group on July 13, 2010 about MVC and the new features in MVC2. This will be similar yet will have more advanced content since the group had already had a introduction to MVC in a previous meeting. Here is the topic and speaker bio: Sam Abraham To Speak At The LI .Net User Group on June 3rd, 2010 As you might know, I lived and worked on LI, NY for 11 years before relocating to South Florida. As I will be visiting my family who still live there in the first week of June, I couldn't resist reaching out to Dan Galvez, LI  .Net User Group Leader, and asking if he needed a speaker for June's meeting. Apparently the stars were lined up right and I am now scheduled to speak at my "home" group on June 3rd, which I am pretty excited about. Here is a brief abstract of my talk and speaker bio. What's New in MVC2 We will start by briefly reviewing the basics of the Microsoft MVC Framework. Next, we will look at the new features introduced in the latest and greatest MVC2. Many new enhancements were introduced to both the MS MVC Framework and to VS2010 to improve developers' experience and reduce development time. We will be talking about new MVC2 features such as: Model Validation, Areas and Template Helpers. We will also discuss the new built-in MVC project templates that ship with VS2010. About the Speaker Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5) He currently lives in South Florida where he leads the West Palm Beach .Net User Group (www.fladotnet.com) and actively participates in various local .Net Community events as organizer and/or technical speaker. Sam is also an active committee member on various initiatives at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (www.southfloridapmi.org). Sam finds his passion in leveraging latest and greatest .Net Technologies along with proven Project Management practices and methodologies to produce high quality, cost-competitive software.  Sam can be reached through his blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/wildturtle

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• Sam's Story: It's About Life

  - by user801960

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle recently released a video illustrating how Oracle products and services impact people every day of their lives. This overview demonstrates just how many different industries rely on Oracle’s world-leading technology solutions to gather and process data, enabling them to engineer systems together in the cloud and in the data centre. The video explores how Oracle solutions are impacting the retail, automotive, pharmaceutical, medical and travel industries. Through the central character, Sam, this video highlights how cross-industry solutions like collaboration software, data processing and business intelligence platforms can improve business performance, reliability and flexibility; lower the cost and complexity of IT implementation and management; and deliver greater productivity, agility and better business intelligence. To find out more about how Oracle’s products and services can help you to deliver better results, visit www.oracle.com/retail

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• Keep Oracle VM 3 Up to Date

  - by Honglin Su

  More and more customers turn to Oracle VM 3 to virtualize their enterprise applications. Oracle VM support subscription is an integrated part of their successes. Customers enjoy the benefit of the industry-leading global support 24x7 for their server virtualization implementation, and receive access to patches, fixes, and updates via Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). For customers running Oracle systems, Oracle VM support is included in Oracle Premium Support for Systems at no extra cost, and customers receive comprehensive systems coverage that includes single point accountability for Oracle server and storage hardware; integrated software (for example, firmware); and operating system software (Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, and Oracle VM). To run a successful virtualization infrastructure, it's important to keep Oracle VM 3 environment up to date by leveraging Oracle VM support resources.  Oracle VM Server Updates: You can easily upgrade Oracle VM Server using a Yum repository. You can download the latest server patch updates from ULN. To receive notification on the software update delivered to Oracle ULN for Oracle VM, you can sign up here. For information on setting up an Oracle VM Server Yum repository and using Oracle VM Manager to perform the upgrade of Oracle VM Servers, see Updating and Upgrading Oracle VM Servers in the Oracle VM User's Guide .  Oracle VM Manager Updates: Get the download instructions at OTN, and apply latest Oracle VM Manager patch. Be sure to review the patch README before you apply the patches. Support customers have access to extremely valuable knowledge notes from My Oracle Support. They are the first to receive useful tips to help address issues in Oracle VM deployments. For example, Upgrade to Oracle VM 3.1.1 using Yum Repository may cause network configuration scripts to be renamed causing network failure after reboot (Doc ID 1464126.1) Oracle VM server reboots after network becomes unresponsive due to deep C-State power management setting (Doc ID 1440197.1) For more information about Oracle's virtualization, visit oracle.com/virtualization.

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• SQL Sharding and SQL Azure&hellip;

  - by Dave Noderer

  Herve Roggero has just published a paper that outlines patterns for scaling using SQL Azure and the Blue Syntax (he and Scott Klein’s company) sharding api. You can find the paper at: http://www.bluesyntax.net/files/EnzoFramework.pdf Herve and Scott have also just released an Apress book Pro SQL Azure. The idea of being able to split (shard) database operations automatically and control them from a web based management console is very appealing. These ideas have been talked about for a long time and implemented in thousands of very custom ways that have been costly, complicated and fragile. Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Scaling database access will become easier and move into the mainstream of application development. The main cost is using an api whenever accessing the database. The api will direct the query to the correct database(s) which may be located locally or in the cloud. It is inevitable that the api will change in the future, perhaps incorporated into a Microsoft offering. Even if this is the case, your application has now been architected to utilize these patterns and details of the actual api will be less important. Herve does a great job of laying out the concepts which every developer and architect should be familiar with!

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• My Upcoming Talk at South Florida&rsquo;s ITPalooza 2012 - NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments

  - by Sam Abraham

  I am very excited to be speaking at IT Palooza next week. As this event’s audience will span professionals working in different facets of Information Technology, I chose to speak on NuGet, an essential tool for any Microsoft Stack developer, as the topic can be of value to managers, architects, IT personnel, as well as developers. For more information on ITPalooza, please visit: http://itpalooza.e2mktg.com/ To register please visit: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=627   Below are the abstract and speaker bio: Leveraging NuGet for Open Source and Enterprise Environments NuGet is an open source package management system for .NET and Visual Studio that makes it easy to add, update, or remove external libraries in a .Net Project. In this session, we will be covering how NuGet makes open source libraries easily discoverable and usable. We will then move to demonstrate "NuGet for the Enterprise" as we setup a local library repository and configure NuGet to ensure external library versioning is consistent among project developers. Speakers: Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5, 4.0 and Silverlight 4) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) striving to leverage proven technology solutions to produce cost-effective, quality software that meets customer needs, timelines and budgets. He is currently a member of the Software Engineering Team at SISCO, the leader in maritime security solutions with customers including Princess, Carnival, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as well as the US Coast Guard. A strong believer in learning through sharing and the value of community fellowship, Sam has been actively involved in the local community as leader of the West Palm Beach Developers' Group, volunteer board member at the International Association for All IT Architects South Florida Chapter (IASA), and former volunteer at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

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• VSTO is Free But Aspose is Speed

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  I’ve taken over the completion, deployment, and maintenance of an ASP.NET Web site that generates Office documents using VSTO. VSTO’s a decent concept and works fine for small-scale scenarios like a desktop app or small intranet. However, with multiple simultaneous requests via ASP.NET, we found the Web server performance suffered badly. To spread out the server’s workload, I implemented MSMQ task queuing via a WCF Windows service.  That helped a lot. IIS didn’t drag with only one VSTO/Office instance running. But I  still found it taking too long to produce a single report. A nicely formatted VSTO Excel document was taking 45 minutes.  (The client  didn’t know any better and therefore considered 45 minutes tolerable.) On my own time, I pulled out an old copy of Aspose.Total for .NET. Within an hour, I had converted the VSTO Excel C# code to Aspose Cells code. The improvement was astonishing: Instead of the 45-minutes, the report took under a minute! I’ve pasted the client’s exact chat response after he tried the speedy Aspose version: “WWWWWOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Microsoft’s VSTO is a free product while the Aspose components cost $$$.  Certainly, it can be a tough call when budgets are tight. If you’re trying to convince the client to shell out for something more suitable for the application, get an eval version of Aspose.Total and offer a direct comparison demo. Ken Full Disclosure: Aspose (like several other component vendors) gives free copies of their suite to MVPs and other .NET influencers.

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• Robbanásszeruen no az Exadata értékesítés

  - by Fekete Zoltán

  Olvassa el a HWSW cikkét is: Úgy veszik az Exadatát mintha kötelezo lenne Az Oracle 2011-es pénzügyi évének 2. negyedévének zárásakor kiadott közleményben ezt nyilatkozta Mark Hurd, az Oracle elnöke. "Since joining Oracle I've met with and visited many customers that have expressed a high level of enthusiasm around our strategy of engineering hardware and software that works together," said Oracle President, Mark Hurd. "That enthusiasm translates into an Exadata pipeline that has now grown to nearly $2 billion. That number is a good leading indicator that customers are planning to increase their investment in Oracle technology." azaz Mark Hurdnek sok Oracle ügyfél fejezte ki magas szintu elismerését az Oracle stratégiájáért, mely az együtt tervezett és együtt múködo hardver és szoftver fejlesztését tuzte a zászlóra. Ez az ügyfél oldali elismerés vezetett oda, hogy az Exadata pipeline 2 milliárd dollárra nott. Ez a szám azt jelzi, hogy az Oracle ügyfelek terveiben növelik az Oracle technológiai befektetéseiket. Larry Ellison, az Oracle vezére a következot nyilatkozta: "Our new generation of Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC Supercluster computers deliver much better performance and much lower cost than the fastest machines from IBM and HP." azaz Az új generációs Exadata, Exalogic és SPARC Supercluster szerverek sokkal jobb teljesítményuek és lényegesen kisebb költséguek, mint az IBM vagy a HP leggyorsabb gépei. Olvassa el a HWSW cikkét is: Úgy veszik az Exadatát mintha kötelezo lenne

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• The Making of Arduino [Geek History]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  The open-source Arduino board is the heart of thousands of different DIY projects–it would be easy to think that the Arduino has always been around. The ubiquitous little hobby board, however, is but a scant six years old. At technology blog IEEESpectrum they delve into the history of the Arduino board and its quiet origins in a small Italian town. Here’s an excerpt from their lengthy write up about the the origin and history of the beloved Arduino: Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net. Released in 2005 as a modest tool for Banzi’s students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), Arduino has spawned an international do-it-yourself revolution in electronics. You can buy an Arduino board for just about US $30 or build your own from scratch: All hardware schematics and source code are available for free under public licenses. As a result, Arduino has become the most influential open-source hardware movement of its time. The little board is now the go-to gear for artists, hobbyists, students, and anyone with a gadgetry dream. More than 250 000 Arduino boards have been sold around the world—and that doesn’t include the reams of clones. “It made it possible for people do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise,” says David A. Mellis, who was a student at IDII before pursuing graduate work at the MIT Media Lab and is the lead software developer of Arduino. HTG Explains: Understanding Routers, Switches, and Network Hardware How to Use Offline Files in Windows to Cache Your Networked Files Offline How to See What Web Sites Your Computer is Secretly Connecting To

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• News about Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition

  - by Susanne Hale

  Updates come from the Documaker front on two counts: Oracle Documaker Awarded XCelent Award for Best Functionality Celent has published a NEW report entitled Document Automation Solution Vendors for Insurers 2011. In the evaluation, Oracle received the XCelent award for Functionality, which recognizes solutions as the leader in this category of the evaluation. According to Celent, “Insurers need to address issues related to the creation and handling of all sorts of documents. Key issues in document creation are complexity and volume. Today, most document automation vendors provide an array of features to cope with the complexity and volume of documents insurers need to generate.” The report ranks ten solution providers on Technology, Functionality, Market Penetration, and Services. Each profile provides detailed information about the vendor and its document automation system, the professional services and support staff it offers, product features, insurance customers and reference feedback, its technology, implementation process, and pricing.  A summary of the report is available at Celent’s web site. Documaker User Group in Wisconsin Holds First Meeting Oracle Documaker users in Wisconsin made the first Documaker User Group meeting a great success, with representation from eight companies. On April 19, over 25 attendees got together to share information, best practices, experiences and concepts related to Documaker and enterprise document automation; they were also able to share feedback with Documaker product management. One insurer shared how they publish and deliver documents to both internal and external customers as quickly and cost effectively as possible, since providing point of sale documents to the sales force in real time is crucial to obtaining and maintaining the book of business. They outlined best practices that ensure consistent development and testing strategies processes are in place to maximize performance and reliability. And, they gave an overview of the supporting applications they developed to monitor and improve performance as well as monitor and track each transaction. Wisconsin User Group meeting photos are posted on the Oracle Insurance Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/OracleInsurance. The Wisconsin User Group will meet again on October 26. If you and other Documaker customers in your area are interested in setting up a user group in your area, please contact Susanne Hale ([email protected]), (703) 927-0863.

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• You Can't Win on Price

  - by David Dorf

  This year I did the majority of my Christmas shopping from the comfort of my home office. There aren't many things in stores you can't find online these days. I find it easier to search, research, and compare products online rather than walking the mall anyway. But there's a segment of the population that likes to be in the store, touching the products. For those people, smartphones avail them some of the e-commerce features I mentioned right there in the aisles. First it was RedLaser, then TheFind, ShopSavvy and many others. But the one that should be scaring retailers is Amazon's PriceCheck application. It lets you scan the product barcode, take a picture of the product, or speak the product's name. Once the product is identified, it shows the online prices, with Amazon at the top of the list. Within 10 seconds you can order the item and Amazon Prime members get free 2-day shipping too. I don't think fashion and grocery retailers need to worry much, but I have to believe smartphones are helping Amazon win a little more of the brand-name hardgoods market. So what's a retailer to do? Best Buy has begun to put QR Codes on their shelf labels that are easily scanned by smartphones and take the consumer to a Best Buy Web page where they can get extended information about the product. The consumer is getting the additional information they want, and Best Buy avoids the price comparisons. Of course if a consumer chooses to use the Amazon PriceCheck app, then all bets are off. That's when Best Buy has to hope the in-store experience and customer service will save the sale. My point is that the internet makes information available to everyone, and smartphones make it available anywhere. Unless you want your store to be Amazon's local showroom, you need to be price-competitive but differentiate on other aspects of the shopping experience. With the cost of running a physical store, you can't win on price.

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• OTN Developer Days (Review) - San Juan, PR - April 29, 2010

  - by dana.singleterry

  A quick update on the San Juan, PR event. First off it was a great success with the Keynote audience of 200+. Mickey Ralat, Managing Director Oracle Caribbean, kicked off the event with a quick introduction followed by me delivering the Keynote Message - The Fusion Development Platform which is the first session in the regular OTN DD events that we run in North America. Following this session was a partner, SDT, basically marketing their services which covers the Oracle stack and then following was a very brief presentation on APEX. After this we broke out into the various tracks of Java, (APEX) DB SQL Developer, .NET on Oracle. After the breakout we ran the following sessions in the Java track: Developing with JDBC, UCP, and Java in Database, Rich Internet Applications in Web 2.0, Development Made Simple Without Coding: Developing Reusable Business Components. As expected with the various tracks, we ended up with 50 - 70 in the various sessions within the JAVA track and the audience was very impressed with the power of JDeveloper/ADF 11g and we got a number of questions from licensing cost to upgrading / integrating from Forms. As for the Forms questions, I fielded a number of them and for those I couldn't, I pointed them towards Grants resources which seemed to suffice. They were all, for the most part, unaware of the recent 11.1.1.3 release which occurred only a couple of days prior to the event. The indication was that they were going to download it and use it for the lab that was included on the DVD which we did not have the time for them to even start on. For those of you that attended the event, you can download the updated presentations as follows: Keynote - The Fusion Development Platform Rich Internet Applications in Web 2.0 Development Made Simple Without Coding - Developing Reusable Business Components

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• What is the economic rationale behind programmers who work on a open source project (free) instead of a commercial project (not free)?

  - by Kim Jong Woo

  I can't understand why some people dedicate so much hour into a completely open source project without closing it and yielding greater profit from it. I don't think profiting from your code is evil, I think it's a great motivator. Why do some people feel that commercial software and generating money from it is bad? There seems to be this black and white thinking that open source = good, commercial = bad. I hardly find this convincing, and often commercial companies which are supported by sales produce very good results. An open source software in the same niche can't compete against the corporation. Of course, sometimes this is completely the other way around where private companies produce inferior product compared to open source counterparts. So help me understand, why do programmers open source their code when there is commercial prospects for it? Shouldn't the rational programmer or human being make every effort to capitalize on their opportunity cost? Working on a open source project for months when you could've spent the same number of hours at commidity wage or some other monetary compensation?

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• Using Microsoft benefits to kickstart your own development

  - by douglasscott

  Working for a big company I enjoy all the Microsoft tools I can consume. I also have the infrastructure to support my development and team communication.I recently helped form a small consulting team that requires the same type of resources. That is when the realization of the true cost of Microsoft's professional development tools really hit me.Okay, I'll just bite the bullet and get what I'm used to working with to do high quality development projects.  After just a few minutes of looking at street prices and doing some quick math I began to have a realization...doing this right isn't cheap!Luckily there is help.  If you are willing to get your ducks in a row and do a little documentation  Microsoft will give you some developer manna. I went to the Bizspark site and completed the application which describes your company profile and services offer.  The approval process took about a week.  Voila, A Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN Subscription!As a start-up Office 365 can be a great solution for all your team communications.  I also enrolled in the Microsoft Cloud Essentials program as part of a business track.  Once you meet the Cloud Essentials requirements you will receive 250 Office 365 licenses! This includes Office and hosted Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint.Take advantage of what Microsoft has to offer for your start-up.  It just may surprise you and save you a lot of your start-up budget.

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• How to Create Quality Photo Prints With Free Software

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  Photoshop may be the professional standard for high quality photo prints, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay hundreds of dollars for printing software. Freeware program Google Picasa can create excellent quality photo prints that’ll only cost you a download. Picasa and other freeware graphics programs are hardly news to savvy geeks, although with a little patience, they can produce quality prints few could tell apart from thousand dollar graphics suites. Stay tuned for links to various graphics programs, and a simple how-to on getting the perfect print settings for your photos Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• 4 Top Tips from the Exceptional DBA Award judges

  - by Rebecca Amos

  There's still time to celebrate your achievements as a DBA – or those of a DBA you know – by submitting a nomination for the Exceptional DBA Awards 2011. To help you get started, here are some top tips from the judges on what they're looking for from this year's winner [hint: it's very likely you're already exceptional!]: "An Exceptional DBA must be able to communicate effectively and clearly with both technical people and the client." Steve Jones. "Exceptional DBAs are like police officers: we're here to serve and protect. Both serving and protecting are vital parts of the job, and we can't just focus on one." Brent Ozar "DBA work can be routine. Exceptional DBAs are enthusiastic about their work and are rarely bored, as there is always something new to learn and master." Brad McGehee. "Remember that cost is an important factor for your company. The ability to save your company money with a different technical solution will make you an Exceptional DBA, and can make you exceptionally well liked." Rodney Landrum. So whether you've brought a team together for a project, taken steps to protect the security of your servers, or learnt a new topic to understand an element of your job better, it's likely you’re already taking the steps that make you the Exceptional DBA the judges are looking for. To get more insider info from the judges, download your free poster of their top tips, and then get started on your entry: www.exceptionaldba.com.

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• The Other "C" in CRM

  - by Brian Dayton

  Folks who know me know that I rarely, if ever, talk politics. And I never talk politicians. Having grown up in a household with one parent leaning left and the other leaning to the right it was the best way to keep the peace. This isn't about politics. It's about "constituents" and the need to improve the services and service levels for people--at the city, county, state/province, etc. level all the way up to national governments. As a citizen and tax payer it's also important to me that these services be provided at a reasonable cost. If there's a better and more efficient way to do something then it's my hope that a public sector organization takes advantage of technology the same way private sector companies do. Social services organizations have a complex job. They provide the services that people need, from healthcare and children's assistance to helping people find jobs. But many of these organizations are still managing these processes manually or outdated, home-grown applications that could have been written up to 30 years ago. A lot has changed in technology. On the (this is as political as I'm going to get) political front, stakeholders like you and me are expecting greater transparency on where and how funds are spent. I'll admit that most of the time, when I think about CRM systems, I think about my experience as a customer of my bank, utilities company or cable operator. But now that I'm older, have children and a house--I find myself interacting more and more with agencies and services organizations. My experiences are sometimes good and sometimes not so good. Along those lines, last week's announcement of Siebel CRM 8.2 for Public Sector caught my eye. You may not work in the public sector, but you are a constituent of some--actually a lot--of public sector organizations. I don't know which CRM systems city and county utilize but I'm going to start paying closer attention.

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• Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure

  - by Josh Holmes

  This is a cool use of Azure. The city of Miami tool their “311” data around potholes, trash pickup issues, recycling issues, broken sidewalks and the like and put that data in Azure. The next step is that they leveraged Bing Maps and Silverlight to visualize those issues spread on a map of the city. The solution takes advantage of virtually unlimited storage and processing power, provides the ability to quickly address service requests and implement updates even during peak times such as hurricane season. If things change, the City can bring the solution on site or move to a physical facility, all based on  need and cost-effectiveness. As a result, residents logging on to Miami 311 can see on average 4,500 issues in progress - not represented as a ‘list', but located on a map in relation to other projects in their neighborhood .  A simple click on the map allows them to easily drill down to more and more specific details if they want. In short, they have turned what used to be represented by a meaningless list of data into useful information, and created  actionable and consumable knowledge that is relevant to the citizens of Miami. For Miami, their ‘service call to the city' becomes an interactive process they can follow - and the City has a new tool to manage and deliver outcomes. … When the city made the move to the web, they chose tools they knew and software they trust. The Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform made it easy to do, and they used both Bing mapping and Silverlight to build a user friendly front end. According to Port25 (Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft), it took two people 8 days to implement the whole system and they are going to open source their solution so that other cities can leverage it. I haven’t seen yet where and how they are going to release it but I’ll keep you posted if I find out.

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• Remastered King’s Quest Games Offer Classic Gaming on Modern Machines

  - by ETC

  If you were a fan of the King’s Quest series of adventure games from the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll be thrilled to see them remastered with enhanced graphics, polished voice acting, and more. Gaming studio AGD Interactive has been engaged in a multi-year project to remaster and freely release the classic King’s Quest games. They started with King’s Quest I in 2001, moved on to King’s Quest II, and just recently released King’s Quest III (see in the screenshot above). The gameplay for all three games is excellent and really captures the feel of the original games (with better graphics, quality voice acting, and adjustments made for modern computers). When you run the game you first get a small pre-launch console. There you can make adjusts to the game before launching it. We’d recommend you enable the pixel doubling filter. It make the game a little blockier (hey you are playing a 1980s remake!) but it fills up high resolution monitors more effectively. Hit up the link below to download King’s Quest Redux I-III free of charge for both Windows and Mac computers. King’s Quest Redux [AGD Interactive via @cbeust] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) Manage Your Favorite Social Accounts in Chrome and Iron with Seesmic E.T. II – Extinction [Fake Movie Sequel Video] Remastered King’s Quest Games Offer Classic Gaming on Modern Machines Compare Your Internet Cost and Speed to Global Averages [Infographic] Orbital Battle for Terra Wallpaper WizMouse Enables Mouse Over Scrolling on Any Window

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• Nice take on Open Source

  - by EmbeddedInsider

  I just revisited the “Micro Framework”- Microsoft’s bootable runtime, essentially an OS that allows managed code to run on small 32bit CPUs, even without Memory Management.  Things are happening http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb267253.aspx Abstract The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework is a bootable runtime module that brings the advantages of .NET programming to devices too resource-constrained to run other Microsoft embedded platforms. The benefits of developing with the .NET Micro Framework include the C# programming language, a managed execution environment, a substantial subset of the .NET libraries, and Visual Studio™ deployment and debugging. In this white paper we explain why the .NET Micro Framework is an ideal choice for embedded development and provide technical details of the platform’s Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and Common Language Runtime (CLR). “Micro Framework” is an interesting product, it is very low cost, like zero. And it is largely community controlled under the Apache License.  A partner network is building, and the application environment is .NET. I have been following this for some time, and the community open source approach seems to be working.  There are new features/packages emerging, for example an F# programming language (ARGH! I am still wresting with VB and C#). Anyway, what I found most interesting was a port to Tron.  Tron is a very popular Japanese open source intuitive.  It is a very real time, very compact kernel, and is, like the Micro Framework, ‘free as beer’.  One limit on MF was it was not real time.  But the merger with Tron may eliminate that problem.  Certainly, if I were dealing with a consumer product with quantities in the millions (like a SmartGrid device, or a toy) I would seriously consider something out of this technology pool.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-03-16

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Applications Architecture | Roy Hunter and Brian Rasmussen www.oracle.com Roy Hunter and Brian Rasmussen examine the strategies three organizations applied to modernize their application architectures. Part of the Oracle Experiences in Enterprise Architecture article series. Public Sector Architecture | Jeremy Foreman and Hamza Jahangir www.oracle.com Jeremy Foreman and Hamza Jahangir examine the strategies used by two different organizations in deploying their respective future-state architectures. Part of the Oracle Experiences in Enterprise Architecture article series. XMLA vs BAPI | Sunil S. Ranka sranka.wordpress.com Oracle ACE Sunil Ranka's brief primer on the XMLA and BAPI standards. The Java EE 6 Example - Running Galleria on WebLogic 12 - Part 3 | Markus Eisele blog.eisele.net Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele continues his series on working with Galleria. Oracle Linux Online Forum - March 27 event.on24.com Date: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 Time: 9:30 AM PT / 12:30 PM ET Hosts: Oracle Executives Edward Screven and Wim Coekaerts. Customer Presentation: How Oracle Helps Reduce Cost and Improve Performance of Database Applications at Progressive Insurance Speaker: John Dome What's New in Oracle Linux Speakers: Waseem Daher, Chris Mason, Elena Zannoni, Lenz Grimmer Get More Value from your Linux Vendor Speakers: Sergio Leunissen, Chris Mason, Monica Kumar JavaOne 2012 Call for Papers www.oracle.com Don't keep all that Java skill locked up in your overstuffed cranium. Submit your proposal for that killer paper now to share your experience at this year’s JavaOne. Running applications in the cloud are not designed for the cloud | Tom Laszewski blogs.oracle.com "The issue you face with moving client/server applications to the cloud via rehosting is 'where will the applications run?'" says Tom Laszewski. GlassFish 3.1.2 - Which Platform(s)? | The Aquarium blogs.oracle.com The Aquarium shares a list of GlassFish 3.1.2-supported operating systems and JVMs. IT Strategies from Oracle; Three Recipes for Oracle Service Bus 11g ; Stir Up Some SOA www.oracle.com Featured this week on the OTN Architect Portal, along with the latest events, product downloads, community social resources, articles on hot topics, and a whole lot more. Thought for the Day "No matter what the problem is, it's always a people problem." — Gerald M. Weinberg

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• Oracle Launches Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c at OpenWorld Japan

  - by Anand Akela

  Oracle Senior Vice President John Fowler and Oracle Vice President of Systems Management Steve Wilson unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c at Oracle OpenWorld, Tokyo Japan on April 4th morning.  Oracle Enterprise Manager combines management of servers, operating systems, virtualization solution for x86 and SPRC servers, firmware, storage, and network fabrics with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. Available at no additional cost as part of the Ops Center Anywhere Program, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c allows enterprises to accelerate mission-critical cloud deployment, unleash the power of Solaris 11 — the first cloud OS, and simplify Oracle engineered systems management. Here are some of the resources for you to learn more about the new Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c :  Press Release : Introducing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c White paper: Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c - Making Infrastructure-as-a-Service in the Enterprise a Reality Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center web page at Oracle Technology Network Join Oracle Launch Webcast : Total Cloud Control for Systems on April 12th at 9 AM PST to learn more about  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c from Oracle Senior Vice President John Fowler, Oracle Vice President of Systems Management Steve Wilson and a panel of Oracle executive. Stay connected with  Oracle Enterprise Manager   :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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• EM12c Release 4: Cloud Control to Major Tom...

  - by abulloch

  With the latest release of Enterprise Manager 12c, Release 4 (12.1.0.4) the EM development team has added new functionality to assist the EM Administrator to monitor the health of the EM infrastructure.   Taking feedback delivered from customers directly and through customer advisory boards some nice enhancements have been made to the “Manage Cloud Control” sections of the UI, commonly known in the EM community as “the MTM pages” (MTM stands for Monitor the Monitor).  This part of the EM Cloud Control UI is viewed by many as the mission control for EM Administrators. In this post we’ll highlight some of the new information that’s on display in these redesigned pages and explain how the information they present can help EM administrators identify potential bottlenecks or issues with the EM infrastructure. The first page we’ll take a look at is the newly designed Repository information page.  You can get to this from the main Setup menu, through Manage Cloud Control, then Repository.  Once this page loads you’ll see the new layout that includes 3 tabs containing more drill-down information. The Repository Tab The first tab, Repository, gives you a series of 6 panels or regions on screen that display key information that the EM Administrator needs to review from time to time to ensure that their infrastructure is in good health. Rather than go through every panel let’s call out a few and let you explore the others later yourself on your own EM site.  Firstly, we have the Repository Details panel. At a glance the EM Administrator can see the current version of the EM repository database and more critically, three important elements of information relating to availability and reliability :- Is the database in Archive Log mode ? Is the database using Flashback ? When was the last database backup taken ? In this test environment above the answers are not too worrying, however, Production environments should have at least Archivelog mode enabled, Flashback is a nice feature to enable prior to upgrades (for fast rollback) and all Production sites should have a backup.  In this case the backup information in the Control file indicates there’s been no recorded backups taken. The next region of interest to note on this page shows key information around the Repository configuration, specifically, the initialisation parameters (from the spfile). If you’re storing your EM Repository in a Cluster Database you can view the parameters on each individual instance using the Instance Name drop-down selector in the top right of the region. Additionally, you’ll note there is now a check performed on the active configuration to ensure that you’re using, at the very least, Oracle minimum recommended values.  Should the values in your EM Repository not meet these requirements it will be flagged in this table with a red X for non-compliance.  You can of-course change these values within EM by selecting the Database target and modifying the parameters in the spfile (and optionally, the run-time values if the parameter allows dynamic changes). The last region to call out on this page before moving on is the new look Repository Scheduler Job Status region. This region is an update of a similar region seen on previous releases of the MTM pages in Cloud Control but there’s some important new functionality that’s been added that customers have requested. First-up - Restarting Repository Jobs.  As you can see from the graphic, you can now optionally select a job (by selecting the row in the UI table element) and click on the Restart Job button to take care of any jobs which have stopped or stalled for any reason.  Previously this needed to be done at the command line using EMDIAG or through a PL/SQL package invocation.  You can now take care of this directly from within the UI. Next, you’ll see that a feature has been added to allow the EM administrator to customise the run-time for some of the background jobs that run in the Repository.  We heard from some customers that ensuring these jobs don’t clash with Production backups, etc is a key requirement.  This new functionality allows you to select the pencil icon to edit the schedule time for these more resource intensive background jobs and modify the schedule to avoid clashes like this. Moving onto the next tab, let’s select the Metrics tab. The Metrics Tab There’s some big changes here, this page contains new information regions that help the Administrator understand the direct impact the in-bound metric flows are having on the EM Repository.  Many customers have provided feedback that they are in the dark about the impact of adding new targets or large numbers of new hosts or new target types into EM and the impact this has on the Repository.  This page helps the EM Administrator get to grips with this.  Let’s take a quick look at two regions on this page. First-up there’s a bubble chart showing a comprehensive view of the top resource consumers of metric data, over the last 30 days, charted as the number of rows loaded against the number of collections for the metric.  The size of the bubble indicates a relative volume.  You can see from this example above that a quick glance shows that Host metrics are the largest inbound flow into the repository when measured by number of rows.  Closely following behind this though are a large number of collections for Oracle Weblogic Server and Application Deployment.  Taken together the Host Collections is around 0.7Mb of data.  The total information collection for Weblogic Server and Application Deployments is 0.38Mb and 0.37Mb respectively. If you want to get this information breakdown on the volume of data collected simply hover over the bubble in the chart and you’ll get a floating tooltip showing the information. Clicking on any bubble in the chart takes you one level deeper into a drill-down of the Metric collection. Doing this reveals the individual metric elements for these target types and again shows a representation of the relative cost - in terms of Number of Rows, Number of Collections and Storage cost of data for each Metric type. Looking at another panel on this page we can see a different view on this data. This view shows a view of the Top N metrics (the drop down allows you to select 10, 15 or 20) and sort them by volume of data.  In the case above we can see the largest metric collection (by volume) in this case (over the last 30 days) is the information about OS Registered Software on a Host target. Taken together, these two regions provide a powerful tool for the EM Administrator to understand the potential impact of any new targets that have been discovered and promoted into management by EM12c.  It’s a great tool for identifying the cause of a sudden increase in Repository storage consumption or Redo log and Archive log generation. Using the information on this page EM Administrators can take action to mitigate any load impact by deploying monitoring templates to the targets causing most load if appropriate.   The last tab we’ll look at on this page is the Schema tab. The Schema Tab Selecting this tab brings up a window onto the SYSMAN schema with a focus on Space usage in the EM Repository.  Understanding what tablespaces are growing, at what rate, is essential information for the EM Administrator to stay on top of managing space allocations for the EM Repository so that it works as efficiently as possible and performs well for the users.  Not least because ensuring storage is managed well ensures continued availability of EM for monitoring purposes. The first region to highlight here shows the trend of space usage for the tablespaces in the EM Repository over time.  You can see the upward trend here showing that storage in the EM Repository is being consumed on an upward trend over the last few days here. This is normal as this EM being used here is brand new with Agents being added daily to bring targets into monitoring.  If your Enterprise Manager configuration has reached a steady state over a period of time where the number of new inbound targets is relatively small, the metric collection settings are fairly uniform and standardised (using Templates and Template Collections) you’re likely to see a trend of space allocation that plateau’s. The table below the trend chart shows the Top 20 Tables/Indexes sorted descending by order of space consumed.  You can switch the trend view chart and corresponding detail table by choosing a different tablespace in the EM Repository using the drop-down picker on the top right of this region. The last region to highlight on this page is the region showing information about the Purge policies in effect in the EM Repository. This information is useful to illustrate to EM Administrators the default purge policies in effect for the different categories of information available in the EM Repository.  Of course, it’s also been a long requested feature to have the ability to modify these default retention periods.  You can also do this using this screen.  As there are interdependencies between some data elements you can’t modify retention policies on a feature by feature basis.  Instead, retention policies take categories of information and bundles them together in Groups.  Retention policies are modified at the Group Level.  Understanding the impact of this really deserves a blog post all on it’s own as modifying these can have a significant impact on both the EM Repository’s storage footprint and it’s performance.  For now, we’re just highlighting the features visibility on these new pages. As a user of EM12c we hope the new features you see here address some of the feedback that’s been given on these pages over the past few releases.  We’ll look out for any comments or feedback you have on these pages ! 

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• Screen shots and documentation on the cheap

  - by Kyle Burns

  Occasionally I am surprised to open up my toolbox and find a great tool that I've had for years and never noticed.  The other day I had just such an experience with Windows Server 2008.  A co-worker of mine was squinting to read to screenshots that he had taken using the "Print Screen, paste" method in WordPad and asked me if there was a better tool available at a reasonable cost.  My first instinct was to take a look at CamStudio for him, but I also knew that he had an immediate need to take some more screenshots, so I decided to check and see if the Snipping Tool found in Windows 7 is also available in Windows Server 2008.  I clicked the Start button and typed “snip” into the search bar and while the Snipping Tool did not come up, a Control Panel item labeled “Record steps to reproduce a problem” did. The application behind the Control Panel entry was “Problem Steps Recorder” (PSR.exe) and I have confirmed that it is available in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 but have not checked other platforms.  It presents a pretty minimal and intuitive interface in providing a “Start Record”, “Stop Record”, and “Add Comment” button.  The “Start Record” button shockingly starts recording and, sure enough, the “Stop Record” button stops recording.  The “Add Comment” button prompts for a comment and for you to highlight the area of the screen to which your comment is related.  Once you’re done recording, the tool outputs an MHT file packaged in a ZIP archive.  This file contains a series of screen shots depicting the user’s interactions and giving timestamps and descriptive text (such as “User left click on “Test” in “My Page – Windows Internet Explorer”) as well as the comments they made along the way and some diagnostics about the applications captured. The Problem Steps Recorder looks like a simple solution to the most common of my needs for documentation that can turn “I can’t understand how to make it do what you’re reporting” to “Oh, I see what you’re talking about and will fix it right away”.  I you’re like me and haven’t yet discovered this tool give it a whirl and see for yourself.

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• San Joaquin County, California Wins AIIM 2012 Carl E. Nelson Best Practice Award

  - by Peggy Chen

  Last month, AIIM, the global community of information professionals, announced the winners of the 2012 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Awards. And San Joaquin County, California won in the small company category for 1-100 employees. The Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award was established to recognize excellence in the area of information management. "Best practice" denotes a standard of excellence that has been achieved with an organization and refers to a process that can be quantified, adapted and repeated. Like many counties, San Joaquin County, California, was faced with huge challenges due to decreasing funds and staff, including decreased cost of building capability. It needed to streamline processes, cut costs per activity, modernize and strengthen the infrastructure, and adopt new technology and standards such as the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). The Integrated Justice Information System (IJIS) provides a Web-based system to link more than 650,000 residents, 18 agencies countywide and other law enforcement systems nationwide. The county’s modernization initiative focused on replacing its outdated warrant system, implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) to simplify integration between county law and justice systems, deploying Business Process Management (BPM), Case Management with content management, and Web technologies from Oracle. A critical part of their success has been the proper alignment of our Strategic Vision to the way the organization was enabled to plan and execute (and continues to execute) their modernization project. Congratulations to San Joaquin County!

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