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• How to prevent Google Toolbar being installed in Portable Firefox?

  - by HyperHacker

  Recently, the campus computers installed Google Toolbar in Firefox. Now, I have no use for this toolbar, so I don't want it there. For that and other reasons, I installed Portable Firefox on a USB stick and use that instead. Somehow, when I log into one of these machines and start Portable Firefox, guess what? "Thank you for installing Google Toolbar." No! I don't want some IT guy choosing what extensions to install on my personal Firefox on my USB stick. I can uninstall it but next time I log in, it comes right back. I suppose PF is for some reason reading things from the local disk, or there's some kind of background process installing it? How do I prevent extensions being installed without my consent?

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• How do I get my 192.168.* Linux server accessible via http://hostname/?

  - by rfrankel

  (Sorry if this question isn't worded well and/or is duplicate. I'm not a networking guy and I'm probably not using the right terms...this also makes it hard to see if this has already been answered.) I'm running a CentOS server in VirtualBox, Windows host, and I can see access Apache-hosted pages at http://192.168.1.109/ from machines on my LAN. But what I'd like is for people to be able to type http://hostname/ ...both because it's easier and primarily because I'm not sure that local IP is static. I'm not really sure how to proceed - could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

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• What is the best CPU I could get for my old setup?

  - by cmbrnt

  On my current not-so-good desktop computer, I'm currently running an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550-CPU, and I'm thinking of buying a newer one now that these must be cheap on E-bay and the like. Being a software guy, I'd be grateful for any help in identifying what CPUs that would fit my motherboard so I don't buy a processor which won't work with my computer. It might not be worth it however, since the SATA2-drive is currently what's bottlenecking my system, but I'm still curious about what could be done except for buying an SSD-drive. I'm providing screenshots of CPU-Z running, to help with the identification. My CPU- and motherboard info: http://i.imgur.com/YdO8x.png

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• So confused by these CPU Specs can someone please help me out? THanks!

  - by Kevin

  Intel® Core™ i7-640M (2.8~3.46GHz, 35W) w/4MB Cache - 2 Cores, 4 Threads - 2.5 GT/s SO i'm buying a new laptop, which i have not done in 6 years. So i am not familiar with any of these cpu specs. It was the highest option for intel for this laptop. So i am assuming it is somewhat fast. But i'd like to learn what these specs mean. Any help would be greatly appreciated. i am not really a computer guy but would love to learn about what I am buying. Thanks!

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• Unreadable sectors reported by smartd, is it serious?

  - by stribika

  I have a RAID 5 array of 4 disks. In the last 2 days I began to see these messages in the log: Jun 13 23:01:05 localhost smartd[4537]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Jun 13 23:01:05 localhost smartd[4537]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors If I have 2 faulty disks then the array should not show all disks OK: md0 : active raid1 sdd1[3] sdb1[1] sdc1[2] sda1[0] 64128 blocks [4/4] [UUUU] Strangely there are no other problems just the log messages. I am worried because sda is new and I previously had problems with sdb. (Completely died but the guy who sold it to me fixed it somehow.) Am I in danger of losing data? What should I do now?

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• Ubuntu 10.4 No internet

  - by Keeper780

  I have Ubuntu 10.4 dual booted with Windows Vista on a work Lenovo R61 laptop. The home and work wireless connection were working fine. I lost all internet connection at work. The IT guy clearly knew nothing about Linux. Since he 'fixed' it get nothing, no wlan signal the Network manager icon was gone, no internet. I still have the live disc and if I run from the live disc the connections are there and everything works perfectly. How do I restore the internet easily on my laptop. I have been using Linux for 3 Years but I am still a bit of a newbie, this is the first major problem I've had in three years. It's driving me nuts. Thanks

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• Networking conflict - What is the most common default computer name for Windows?

  - by John

  I recently had to change the name of my computer to log onto a public wi-fi spot, because a computer with my name was already logged on. (I asked a guy there what to do after it said there was already a computer named "(omitted)" logged on.) I've never been at a wifi spot you had to log into before. I didn't even notice what the computer's name was before. My question is what are the most common default computer names. I'm curious. How often does this sort of problem happen? (For some reason my previous post was closed as off topic - so now I included the reason I'm asking. If it's still considered off topic (networking conflicts) I'll take it elsewhere, but the other forums I know of (ehow.com, answers.yahoo.com) are full of people that couldn't begin to answer a question like this.) Thanks.

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• Networking conflict - What is the most common default computer name for Windows?

  - by John

  I recently had to change the name of my computer to log onto a public wi-fi spot, because a computer with my name was already logged on. (I asked a guy there what to do after it said there was already a computer named "(omitted)" logged on.) I've never been at a wifi spot you had to log into before. I didn't even notice what the computer's name was before. My question is what are the most common default computer names. I'm curious. How often does this sort of problem happen? (For some reason my previous post was closed as off topic - so now I included the reason I'm asking. If it's still considered off topic (networking conflicts) I'll take it elsewhere, but the other forums I know of (ehow.com, answers.yahoo.com) are full of people that couldn't begin to answer a question like this.) Thanks.

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• Understanding IUSR_<machine> account

  - by liho1eye

  Namely how is setting read/write permission for this account different from giving read/write access in the IIS (Windows 2003, so it should be IIS6 if I am not mistaken). Here is the issue: It looks like we had a security sweep and as a part of that IUSR account lost write access everywhere. A whole bunch of legacy ASP sites didn't like that at all... My very surfacish understanding is that it is enough to deny write access in the IIS console to protect a website from someone just dropping random files into it, and IUSR access only has effect on the application scripts running server side, and thus can be safely given write access back. edit: The applications in question obviously require write access to their own web folders, otherwise this wouldn't be an issue at all. Question is how to configure IIS/application to both satisfy security and make them work. My first instinct was to change account which is used to run the app pool. However that is already set to NETWORK_SERVICE, and that guy already has full access to folders in question.

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• Running Debian as a Virtual Machine Host

  - by Tone

  I have a need to run a linux server to host subversion, bugzilla over Apache and also act as a file and print server. I also have a need to host Windows Server 2008 virtual machines for development purposes (I'm a .NET guy). The machine I have is a dual core AMD 2.5 Ghz w/2GB RAM. So here are my questions: 1) Should I run Debian (or some other distro) as the base AND create a Debian VM to host subversion, bugzilla and be my file/print server? or is it ok to use Debian as both my VM host and for those other reasons? 2) VMWare has a free server edition, Virtual Box also is another free option. Which one of these is better suited for what I need to do? Are there any other free (or inexpensive) alternatives out there? 3) Will I need a GUI with Debian in order to manage my VMs? 4) Can I run VMs without a GUI to conserve system resources?

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• Windows Media Player 11 fails to authenticate with proxy (ISA)

  - by Ed Manet

  We have some users who need to use a 3rd party site that embeds Windows Media Player streaming video into a web page. Our users go through an ISA proxy server to connect to the Internet. The browser has no problems accessing the site through the proxy. When Media Player loads, we get prompted for network credentials, but the authentication fails. If we set up Internet Explorer 8 to not use the proxy, Media Player has no problem. Media Player is configured to use the RTSP/TCP and HTTP protocols, but not the RTSP/UDP protocol. Is this necessary? Is there a registry key I can use to enable it? Is this more of a proxy server issue? The proxy guy says it's a desktop issue.

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• Motherboard dual gfx power question

  - by user33931

  1st, I am software guy. I do not do hardware. So I know to you hardware geeks, this is a dumb question. I just inherited a box with a ASUS P5GZ-MX mother board. I have attempted to install two nVidia PCI video cards. I put a 750w power supply in the system to be sure I have enough power. With no extra video cards, the 3.3 v shows normal. When I put one card in, the 3.3 goes to 3.5-3.6 and flashes red (over voltage) about 30% of the time. When I put the 2nd card in, it goes to 3.73 v and stays red all the time. Any Ideas why the voltage goes up when I add cards instead of going down? More Importantly, is this dangerous to the system?

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• Prevent history deletion on Google Chrome

  - by ProstheticHead

  One of the guys I'm in charge of hasn't been pulling his weight. His productivity and quality of workmanship are way down and his computer's been getting malware infections lately. You can see where this is going. I'm generally an easy going guy (and I don't want any trouble but I still have to address this issue). Is there a way to disable browser history deletion on Chrome? I'm hoping this alone will be enough of a deterrent to put things right.

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• We have a Solaris 9 server running Oracle 10G and have been getting memory consumption errors for a few weeks now

  - by another_netadmin

  We recently upgraded our Enterprise application and everything worked ok until one weekend when we did a server reboot, ever since then we have run into memory errors. The server has 4GB of physical memory installed and the kernel parameters are set to the following (/etc/system). I'm not an Oracle guy so I'm not sure where to start looking but any informaiton is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. There are two databases running on this server, one is a production database and the other is a pre-production database. [root@bandb /]# cat /etc/system | grep seminfo set semsys:seminfo_semmni=100 set semsys:seminfo_semmns=2048 set semsys:seminfo_semmsl=400 set semsys:seminfo_semopm=100 set semsys:seminfo_semvmx=32767 [root@bandb /]# cat /etc/system | grep shminfo set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=4294967295 set shmsys:shminfo_shmmin=1 set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni=100 set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg=10 [root@bandb /]#

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• What is the equivalent of domain admin on Sharepoint 2010?

  - by user54266

  I have to support Sharepoint on a daily basis but do not have the equivalent of domain access so I'm constantly having to ask the guy in charge of Sharepoint to add me to a new security group to complete my task. Rather than having to bug him all the time (he is only somewhat technical) it would be easier to simply have the equivalent of domain admin access for Sharepoint (I'm a sys admin and have domain admin access already but this doesn't seem to carry over to FOSS). What is the equivalent of domain admin access on Sharepoint 2010? Thanks in advance.

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• Most simple way to do holiday calculation?

  - by brainfrog

  I want to make a little free calendar program to help me and others calculate how much time we have got left in a project. I mean real working time, not just time. Time in a raw form is not saying much. Typically when my boss tells me that I have time until 05-05-2011 it doesn't tell me really how much time I have to do my job. You know...so many things stop me from work: A) beeing at home, not at work (so called "free time" or "spare time"). That is in my case I work exactly 8 hours a day and then the cleaning ladies throw me out of the office with their incredible loud industrial vacuum cleaners every evening (my boss accepts that as an excuse to go home in time, regularly). B) weekends, or more precisely saturdays and sundays C) official holiday rescuing me from having to go to work. what I want to do is make a little utility which tells me how many working hours I really have in a given time period. The first two things A and B are pretty easy to implement. But the last thing C scares my pants off. Holidays. OOOHHH man. You know what that means. Chaos. Pure chaos. The huge question is: HOW TO CALCULATE HOLIDAYS?! Since I want my program to be useful for anyone anywhere in the world, I can't just hardcode all holidays for my little town. So which options do I have? I) I could hand-craft downloadable lists of holidays. Users search them within the application and download them from an webserver. Or I ship all of them in the package. But I would get very, very old if I tried that by myself for every country, state and town. II) I make an initial data sheet with holidays for my town, and don't care about the rest. However, I make that sheet with an how-to public, so that everyone who feels like beeing very nice can provide holiday data for his country / region / whatever. Those are made public on a webserver and everyone can get the data packages he/she needs for the app. III) ? I care a lot about usability. I don't want to make an ugly linux hack style hard to use app that only computer freaks can use. So you need to tell me more about holiday science. I was never really clever at this. I assume every single country in the world has it's own set of holidays. In every country there may be several states. For example the US has some, and Germany has also some states. Holidays vary from state to state. But I know from an good programmer he told me never assume anything. So the questions about holiday science are: Which categories do I need to make holiday-data-packs searchable? A guy from India should find quickly his holiday data pack, and a guy from Sillicon Valley should find his pack as equally fast. It makes most sense to me to filter for COUNTRY STATE WHATEVER. Like a drill-down-search. Did I miss something? What would be the best data format to hold holiday information? A holiday has a start and end date and a name. That should be enough. Would I put all this stuff in thousands of XML files? How would you go about this? Any hint / help is highly welcome! Thanks to everyone!

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• How do I explain this to potential employers?

  - by ReferencelessBob

  Backstory: TL;DR: I've gained a lot of experience working for 5 years at one startup company, but it eventually failed. The company is gone and the owner MIA. When I left sixth-form college I didn't want to start a degree straight away, so when I met this guy who knew a guy who was setting up a publishing company and needed a 'Techie' I thought why not. It was a very small operation, he sent mailings to schools, waited for orders to start arriving, then ordered a short run of the textbooks to be printed, stuck them in an envelope posted them out. I was initially going to help him set up a computerized system for recording orders and payments, printing labels, really basic stuff and I threw it together in Access in a couple of weeks. He also wanted to start taking orders online, so I set up a website and a paypal business account. While I was doing this, I was also helping to do the day-to-day running of things, taking phone orders, posting products, banking cheques, ordering textbooks, designing mailings, filing end of year accounts, hiring extra staff, putting stamps on envelopes. I learned so much about things I didn't even know I needed to learn about. Things were pretty good, when I started we sold about £10,000 worth of textbooks and by my 4th year there we sold £250,000 worth of text books. Things were looking good, but we had a problem. Our best selling product had peaked and sales started to fall sharply, we introduced add on products through the website to boost sales which helped for a while, but we had simply saturated the market. Our plan was to enter the US with our star product and follow the same, slightly modified, plan as before. We setup a 1-866 number and had the calls forwarded to our UK offices. We contracted a fulfillment company, shipped over a few thousand textbooks, had a mailing printed and mailed, then sat by the phones and waited. Needless to say, it didn't work. We tried a few other things, at home and in the US, but nothing helped. We expanded in the good times, moving into bigger offices, taking on staff to do administrative and dispatch work, but now cashflow was becoming a problem and things got tougher. We did the only thing we could and scaled things right back, the offices went, the admin staff went, I stopped taking a wage and started working from home. Nothing helped. The business was wound up about about 2 years ago. In the end it turned out that the owner had built up considerable debt at the start of business and had not paid them off during good years, which left him in a difficult position when cashflow had started to dry up. I haven't been able to contact the owner since I found out. It took me a while to get back on my feet after that, but I'm now at University and doing a Computer Science degree. How do I show the experience I have without having to get into all the gory details of what happened?

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• multi divs centered

  - by user1319385

  I have 2 divs with 3 divs inside them, all 2 wrapped around one big div. I try and center it and its not working. Here is my code: <div stye="margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; width: 1210px;"> <div id="left" style=" float:left; width: 606px; height: 506px;"> <div style="top:0px; float:left; width:300px; border: 2px solid #FF0; height:502px; text-align:center; font-family: Myriad Pro, Arial, sans-serif; color:#FFF;"><h1>A picture of a cool guy wearing our shirt will go in here.</h1></div> <div style="top:0px; float:left; width:300px; border: 2px solid #FF0; border-left:0px; height:200px; text-align:center; font-family: Myriad Pro, Arial, sans-serif; color:#FFF;"><h1>A product image will go in here.</h1></div> <div style="top:0px; float:left; width:300px; border: 2px solid #FF0;border-top:0px; border-left:0px; height:300px; text-align:center; font-family: Myriad Pro, Arial, sans-serif; color:#FFF;"><h1>A tight product image will go in here.</h1></div> </div> <div id="left" style="float:left; width: 604px; height: 506px;"> <div style="top:0px; float:right; width:300px; border: 2px solid #FF0; border-left:0px; height:502px; text-align:center; font-family: Myriad Pro, Arial, sans-serif; color:#FFF;"><h1>A picture of a cool guy wearing our shirt will go in here.</h1></div> <div style="top:0px; float:left; width:300px; border: 2px solid #FF0; border-left:0px; height:200px; text-align:center; font-family: Myriad Pro, Arial, sans-serif; color:#FFF;"><h1>A product image will go in here.</h1></div> <div style="top:0px; float:left; width:300px; border: 2px solid #FF0;border-top:0px; border-left:0px; height:300px; text-align:center; font-family: Myriad Pro, Arial, sans-serif; color:#FFF;"><h1>A tight product image will go in here.</h1></div> </div> </div>

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• Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup

  - by constant

  Solaris 11 is here! And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter go to eleven. Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure: Getting Started/Overview A lot of people speculated that the official launch of Solaris 11 would be on 11/11 (whatever way you want to turn it), but it actually happened two days earlier. Larry Wake himself offers 11 Reasons Why Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Isn't Being Released on 11/11/11. Then, Larry goes on with a summary: Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS gives you a short and sweet rundown of what the major new features of Solaris 11 are. Jeff Victor has his own list of What's New in Oracle Solaris 11. A popular Solaris 11 meme is to write a blog post about 11 favourite features: Jim Laurent's 11 Reasons to Love Solaris 11, Darren Moffat's 11 Favourite Solaris 11 Features, Mike Gerdt's 11 of My Favourite Things! are just three examples of "11 Favourite Things..." type blog posts, I'm sure many more will follow... More official overview content for Solaris 11 is available from the Oracle Tech Network Solaris 11 Portal. Also, check out Rick Ramsey's blog post Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators on the OTN Blog and his secret 5 Commands That Make Solaris Administration Easier post from the OTN Garage. (Automatic) Installation and the Image Packaging System (IPS) The brand new Image Packaging System (IPS) and the Automatic Installer (IPS), together with numerous other install/packaging/boot/patching features are among the most significant improvements in Solaris 11. But before installing, you may wonder whether Solaris 11 will support your particular set of hardware devices. Again, the OTN Garage comes to the rescue with Rick Ramsey's post How to Find Out Which Devices Are Supported By Solaris 11. Included is a useful guide to all the first steps to get your Solaris 11 system up and running. Tim Foster had a whole handful of blog posts lined up for the launch, teaching you everything you need to know about IPS but didn't dare to ask: The IPS System Repository, IPS Self-assembly - Part 1: Overlays and Part 2: Multiple Packages Delivering Configuration. Watch out for more IPS posts from Tim! If installing packages or upgrading your system from the net makes you uneasy, then you're not alone: Jim Laurent will tech you how Building a Solaris 11 Repository Without Network Connection will make your life easier. Many of you have already peeked into the future by installing Solaris 11 Express. If you're now wondering whether you can upgrade or whether a fresh install is necessary, then check out Alan Hargreaves's post Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11. The trick is in upgrading your pkg(1M) first. Networking One of the first things to do after installing Solaris 11 (or any operating system for that matter), is to set it up for networking. Solaris 11 comes with the brand new "Network Auto-Magic" feature which can figure out everything by itself. For those cases where you want to exercise a little more control, Solaris 11 left a few people scratching their heads. Fortunately, Tschokko wrote up this cool blog post: Solaris 11 manual IPv4 & IPv6 configuration right after the launch ceremony. Thanks, Tschokko! And Milek points out a long awaited networking feature in Solaris 11 called Solaris 11 - hostmodel, which I know for a fact that many customers have looked forward to: How to "bind" a Solaris 11 system to a specific gateway for specific IP address it is using. Steffen Weiberle teaches us how to tune the Solaris 11 networking stack the proper way: ipadm(1M). No more fiddling with ndd(1M)! Check out his tutorial on Solaris 11 Network Tunables. And if you want to get even deeper into the networking stack, there's nothing better than DTrace. Alan Maguire teaches you in: DTracing TCP Congestion Control how to probe deeply into the Solaris 11 TCP/IP stack, the TCP congestion control part in particular. Don't miss his other DTrace and TCP related blog posts! DTrace And there we are: DTrace, the king of all observability tools. Long time DTrace veteran and co-author of The DTrace book*, Brendan Gregg blogged about Solaris 11 DTrace syscall provider changes. BTW, after you install Solaris 11, check out the DTrace toolkit which is installed by default in /usr/dtrace/DTT. It is chock full of handy DTrace scripts, many of which contributed by Brendan himself! Security Another big theme in Solaris 11, and one that is crucial for the success of any operating system in the Cloud is Security. Here are some notable posts in this category: Darren Moffat starts by showing us how to completely get rid of root: Completely Disabling Root Logins on Solaris 11. With no root user, there's one major entry point less to worry about. But that's only the start. In Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS, Darren shows us how to double the security of your services: First by locking them into the new Immutable Zones feature, then by encrypting their data using the new ZFS encryption feature. And if you're still missing sudo from your Linux days, Darren again has a solution: Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo". If you're wondering how much compute power all this encryption will cost you, you're in luck: The Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine will make sure you'll use your Intel's embedded crypto support to its fullest. And if you own a brand new SPARC T4 machine you're even luckier: It comes with its own SPARC T4 OpenSSL Engine. Dan Anderson's posts show how there really is now excuse not to encrypt any more... Developers Solaris 11 has a lot to offer to developers as well. Ali Bahrami has a series of blog posts that cover diverse developer topics: elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility, Using Stub Objects and The Stub Proto: Not Just For Stub Objects Anymore to name a few. BTW, if you're a developer and want to shape the future of Solaris 11, then Vijay Tatkar has a hint for you: Oracle (Sun Systems Group) is hiring! Desktop and Graphics Yes, Solaris 11 is a 100% server OS, but it can also offer a decent desktop environment, especially if you are a developer. Alan Coopersmith starts by discussing S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system, then Calum Benson shows us around What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop. Even accessibility is a first-class citizen in the Solaris 11 user interface. Peter Korn celebrates: Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Performance Gone are the days of "Slowaris", when Solaris was among the few OSes that "did the right thing" while others cut corners just to win benchmarks. Today, Solaris continues doing the right thing, and it delivers the right performance at the same time. Need proof? Check out Brian's BestPerf blog with continuous updates from the benchmarking lab, including Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11! Send Me More Solaris 11 Launch Articles! These are just a few of the more interesting blog articles that came out around the Solaris 11 launch, I'm sure there are many more! Feel free to post a comment below if you find a particularly interesting blog post that hasn't been listed so far and share your enthusiasm for Solaris 11! *Affiliate link: Buy cool stuff and support this blog at no extra cost. We both win! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup'; var flattr_dsc = '<strong>Solaris 11 is here!</strong>And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven">go to eleven</a>.Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure:'; var flattr_tag = 'blogging,digest,Oracle,Solaris,solaris,solaris 11'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2011/11/solaris-11-launch-blog-carnival-roundup'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• How Hard Can It Be?

  - by David Totzke

  I mean seriously.  Let’s imagine for a moment that by some stroke of luck or genius or cosmic accident that you come to be the owner of sex.com.  You’d think you had won the lottery.  That would be like having a license to print money.  I mean really.  Sex is the most searched term on the entire Internet.  Even without any SEO you’d think that your site would show up on the first page of results on Google. You would think that; and you’d be wrong.  At least in the case of the current owners of that domain name anyways.  The details can be found here but suffice it to say that Escom LLC has managed to fuck it up.  They’ve been forced into bankruptcy by their creditors.  Something doesn’t smell quite right with the whole thing.  Some guy named Mike Mann (please God, don’t let it be this Mike Mann) is an investor in all three creditors.  WTF? Seriously.  How hard can it be? Dave Just because I can…

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• Token based Authentication for WCF HTTP/REST Services: Authorization

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In the previous post I showed how token based authentication can be implemented for WCF HTTP based services. Authentication is the process of finding out who the user is – this includes anonymous users. Then it is up to the service to decide under which circumstances the client has access to the service as a whole or individual operations. This is called authorization. By default – my framework does not allow anonymous users and will deny access right in the service authorization manager. You can however turn anonymous access on – that means technically, that instead of denying access, an anonymous principal is placed on Thread.CurrentPrincipal. You can flip that switch in the configuration class that you can pass into the service host/factory. var configuration = new WebTokenWebServiceHostConfiguration {     AllowAnonymousAccess = true }; But this is not enough, in addition you also need to decorate the individual operations to allow anonymous access as well, e.g.: [AllowAnonymousAccess] public string GetInfo() {     ... } Inside these operations you might have an authenticated or an anonymous principal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal, and it is up to your code to decide what to do. Side note: Being a security guy, I like this opt-in approach to anonymous access much better that all those opt-out approaches out there (like the Authorize attribute – or this.). Claims-based Authorization Since there is a ClaimsPrincipal available, you can use the standard WIF claims authorization manager infrastructure – either declaratively via ClaimsPrincipalPermission or programmatically (see also here). [ClaimsPrincipalPermission(SecurityAction.Demand,     Resource = "Claims",     Operation = "View")] public ViewClaims GetClientIdentity() {     return new ServiceLogic().GetClaims(); }   In addition you can also turn off per-request authorization (see here for background) via the config and just use the “domain specific” instrumentation. While the code is not 100% done – you can download the current solution here. HTH (Wanna learn more about federation, WIF, claims, tokens etc.? Click here.)

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• Don’t be a dinosaur. Use Calendar Tree!

  - by jamiet

  If one spends long enough in my company one will likely eventually have to listen to me bark on about subscribable calendars. I was banging on about them way back in 2009, I’ve cajoled SQLBits into providing one, provided one myself for the World Cup, and opined that they could be transformative for the delivery of BI. I believe subscribable calendars can change the world but have never been good at elucidating why I thought so, for that reason I always direct people to read a blog by Scott Adams (yes, the guy who draws Dilbert) entitled Calendar as Filter. In that blog post Scott writes: I think the family calendar is the organizing principle into which all external information should flow. I want the kids' school schedules for sports and plays and even lunch choices to automatically flow into the home calendar. Everything you do has a time dimension. If you are looking for a new home, the open houses are on certain dates, and certain houses that fit your needs are open at certain times. If you are shopping for some particular good, you often need to know the store hours. Your calendar needs to know your shopping list and preferences so it can suggest good times to do certain things I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life. You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information that is wrong. Once the calendar becomes the organizing paradigm and filter, it won't seem as if there is so much. I wholly agree and hence was delighted to discover (via the Hanselminutes podcast) that Scott has a startup called CalendarTree.com whose raison d’etre is to solve this very problem. What better way to describe a Scott Adams startup than with a Scott Adams comic: I implore you to check out Calendar Tree and make the world a tiny bit better by using it to share any information that has a time dimension to it. Don’t be a dinosaur, use Calendar tree! @Jamiet

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• Who IS Brian Solis?

  - by Michael Snow

  Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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• Favorite Programmer Quotes…

  - by SGWellens

    "A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing." — Emo Philips   "There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't. " – Unknown.   "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." — Donald Knuth   "I should have become a doctor; then I could bury my mistakes." — Unknown   "Code softly and carry a large backup thumb drive." — Me   "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." — Martin Golding   "DDE…the protocol from hell"— Charles Petzold   "Just because a thing is new don't mean that it's better" — Will Rogers   "The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless." — Bram Cohen   "A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." — Doug Linder   "The early bird may get the worm but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese." — Unknown   I hope someone finds this amusing. Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Architecting Data Warehouse – Niraj Bhatt

  - by pinaldave

  Niraj Bhatt works as an Enterprise Architect for a Fortune 500 company and has an innate passion for building / studying software systems. He is a top rated speaker at various technical forums including Tech·Ed, MCT Summit, Developer Summit, and Virtual Tech Days, among others. Having run a successful startup for four years Niraj enjoys working on – IT innovations that can impact an enterprise bottom line, streamlining IT budgets through IT consolidation, architecture and integration of systems, performance tuning, and review of enterprise applications. He has received Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET, Connected Systems and most recently on Windows Azure. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography, cooking and financial statements though not necessarily in that order. He is also a manager/speaker at BDOTNET, Asia’s largest .NET user group. Here is the guest post by Niraj Bhatt. As data in your applications grows it’s the database that usually becomes a bottleneck. It’s hard to scale a relational DB and the preferred approach for large scale applications is to create separate databases for writes and reads. These databases are referred as transactional database and reporting database. Though there are tools / techniques which can allow you to create snapshot of your transactional database for reporting purpose, sometimes they don’t quite fit the reporting requirements of an enterprise. These requirements typically are data analytics, effective schema (for an Information worker to self-service herself), historical data, better performance (flat data, no joins) etc. This is where a need for data warehouse or an OLAP system arises. A Key point to remember is a data warehouse is mostly a relational database. It’s built on top of same concepts like Tables, Rows, Columns, Primary keys, Foreign Keys, etc. Before we talk about how data warehouses are typically structured let’s understand key components that can create a data flow between OLTP systems and OLAP systems. There are 3 major areas to it: a) OLTP system should be capable of tracking its changes as all these changes should go back to data warehouse for historical recording. For e.g. if an OLTP transaction moves a customer from silver to gold category, OLTP system needs to ensure that this change is tracked and send to data warehouse for reporting purpose. A report in context could be how many customers divided by geographies moved from sliver to gold category. In data warehouse terminology this process is called Change Data Capture. There are quite a few systems that leverage database triggers to move these changes to corresponding tracking tables. There are also out of box features provided by some databases e.g. SQL Server 2008 offers Change Data Capture and Change Tracking for addressing such requirements. b) After we make the OLTP system capable of tracking its changes we need to provision a batch process that can run periodically and takes these changes from OLTP system and dump them into data warehouse. There are many tools out there that can help you fill this gap – SQL Server Integration Services happens to be one of them. c) So we have an OLTP system that knows how to track its changes, we have jobs that run periodically to move these changes to warehouse. The question though remains is how warehouse will record these changes? This structural change in data warehouse arena is often covered under something called Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD). While we will talk about dimensions in a while, SCD can be applied to pure relational tables too. SCD enables a database structure to capture historical data. This would create multiple records for a given entity in relational database and data warehouses prefer having their own primary key, often known as surrogate key. As I mentioned a data warehouse is just a relational database but industry often attributes a specific schema style to data warehouses. These styles are Star Schema or Snowflake Schema. The motivation behind these styles is to create a flat database structure (as opposed to normalized one), which is easy to understand / use, easy to query and easy to slice / dice. Star schema is a database structure made up of dimensions and facts. Facts are generally the numbers (sales, quantity, etc.) that you want to slice and dice. Fact tables have these numbers and have references (foreign keys) to set of tables that provide context around those facts. E.g. if you have recorded 10,000 USD as sales that number would go in a sales fact table and could have foreign keys attached to it that refers to the sales agent responsible for sale and to time table which contains the dates between which that sale was made. These agent and time tables are called dimensions which provide context to the numbers stored in fact tables. This schema structure of fact being at center surrounded by dimensions is called Star schema. A similar structure with difference of dimension tables being normalized is called a Snowflake schema. This relational structure of facts and dimensions serves as an input for another analysis structure called Cube. Though physically Cube is a special structure supported by commercial databases like SQL Server Analysis Services, logically it’s a multidimensional structure where dimensions define the sides of cube and facts define the content. Facts are often called as Measures inside a cube. Dimensions often tend to form a hierarchy. E.g. Product may be broken into categories and categories in turn to individual items. Category and Items are often referred as Levels and their constituents as Members with their overall structure called as Hierarchy. Measures are rolled up as per dimensional hierarchy. These rolled up measures are called Aggregates. Now this may seem like an overwhelming vocabulary to deal with but don’t worry it will sink in as you start working with Cubes and others. Let’s see few other terms that we would run into while talking about data warehouses. ODS or an Operational Data Store is a frequently misused term. There would be few users in your organization that want to report on most current data and can’t afford to miss a single transaction for their report. Then there is another set of users that typically don’t care how current the data is. Mostly senior level executives who are interesting in trending, mining, forecasting, strategizing, etc. don’t care for that one specific transaction. This is where an ODS can come in handy. ODS can use the same star schema and the OLAP cubes we saw earlier. The only difference is that the data inside an ODS would be short lived, i.e. for few months and ODS would sync with OLTP system every few minutes. Data warehouse can periodically sync with ODS either daily or weekly depending on business drivers. Data marts are another frequently talked about topic in data warehousing. They are subject-specific data warehouse. Data warehouses that try to span over an enterprise are normally too big to scope, build, manage, track, etc. Hence they are often scaled down to something called Data mart that supports a specific segment of business like sales, marketing, or support. Data marts too, are often designed using star schema model discussed earlier. Industry is divided when it comes to use of data marts. Some experts prefer having data marts along with a central data warehouse. Data warehouse here acts as information staging and distribution hub with spokes being data marts connected via data feeds serving summarized data. Others eliminate the need for a centralized data warehouse citing that most users want to report on detailed data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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