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• A View from the Top – Jan Ackerman (VP APAC Recruiting)

  - by user769227

  This week, Headhunt Magazine in Singapore, took the opportunity to publish an interview with Jan Ackerman who is Vice President for Recruitment for Asia Pacific here at Oracle. The link to the online interview can be found here. Below is the interview in full that was published in Headhunt Magazine.  A View from the Top – Jan Ackerman Written by HeadHunt on August 16, 2012 · Leave a Comment By Susheela Menon Jan Ackerman is the Vice President for Recruiting in Asia Pacific and Japan at Oracle. Which particular personal trait do you attribute your professional success to? Perseverance has been the most important trait that has attributed to my professional success. Endurance and perseverance combined to win in the end has always been a great credo. I find that this trait carries through in my professional as well as my personal life. I enjoy sport fishing and find that perseverance with a great deal of patience in this hobby is critical to the overall enjoyment and success in this sporting activity. In the same way, this doggedness – steadfastness with persistence – and tenacity toward an unyielding course of action has served me well in reaching goals and thus greater success. What’s the biggest challenge you have faced in your career so far? I have to constantly keep pace with ever changing technology in my career. The industry changes rapidly and requires me to stay on top of the latest trends and advancements. Outside of work, I like to develop software as a hobby and in order to ensure that what I am developing will meet what the business needs, I have to continually innovate and stay current on the latest trends in the industry to deliver a solution that will delight the end- user. Best career advice you have ever received. Always be forthright and honest with your customers and peers; mixed with a “Can Do” attitude, a great and fulfilling career can be yours to have and hold. What makes Oracle a great place to be in? The freedom to innovate and pave new avenues of success is one of the greatest things about working here at Oracle. We are always looking to grow and improve our business for our customers and we are always adapting to present and future industry demands. This means we are always looking to change, to perform better and to do things differently. All these create a culture and spirit of innovation and success. What motivates you to be in the HR sector? I really like working with and helping people. HR is all about “the people” in the organisation, and staying focused every day on making things better for the Oracle team gives me a great deal of happiness. Describe your leadership style. I am very direct and goal- oriented. I provide ideas and guidance and then give the team all the freedom they need to reach a successful outcome. I can also be a very “roll up your sleeves” kind of manager when the task needs a bit of a push. What’s the biggest business challenge you see in your industry right now? The ability to keep pace with all the convergence in the industry and to continue to stay focused on delivering top talent to serve Oracle’s customers well. Our unique Recruiting Model has served us well in meeting these needs. We are well-placed in this goal and look forward to maintain Oracle’s leadership role in the industry.

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• Visual Studio Exceptions dialogs

  - by Daniel Moth

  Previously I covered step 1 of live debugging with start and attach. Once the debugger is attached, you want to go to step 2 of live debugging, which is to break. One way to break under the debugger is to do nothing, and just wait for an exception to occur in your code. This is true for all types of code that you debug in Visual Studio, and let's consider the following piece of C# code:3: static void Main() 4: { 5: try 6: { 7: int i = 0; 8: int r = 5 / i; 9: } 10: catch (System.DivideByZeroException) {/*gulp. sue me.*/} 11: System.Console.ReadLine(); 12: } If you run this under the debugger do you expect an exception on line 8? It is a trick question: you have to know whether I have configured the debugger to break when exceptions are thrown (first-chance exceptions) or only when they are unhandled. The place you do that is in the Exceptions dialog which is accessible from the Debug->Exceptions menu and on my installation looks like this: Note that I have checked all CLR exceptions. I could have expanded (like shown for the C++ case in my screenshot) and selected specific exceptions. To read more about this dialog, please read the corresponding Exception Handling debugging msdn topic and all its subtopics. So, for the code above, the debugger will break execution due to the thrown exception (exactly as if the try..catch was not there), so I see the following Exception Thrown dialog: Note the following: I can hit continue (or hit break and then later continue) and the program will continue fine since I have a catch handler. If this was an unhandled exception, then that is what the dialog would say (instead of first chance exception) and continuing would crash the app. That hyperlinked text ("Open Exception Settings") opens the Exceptions dialog I described further up. The coolest thing to note is the checkbox - this is new in this latest release of Visual Studio: it is a shortcut to the checkbox in the Exceptions dialog, so you don't have to open it to change this setting for this specific exception - you can toggle that option right from this dialog. Finally, if you try the code above on your system, you may observe a couple of differences from my screenshots. The first is that you may have an additional column of checkboxes in the Exceptions dialog. The second is that the last dialog I shared may look different to you. It all depends on the Debug->Options settings, and the two relevant settings are in this screenshot: The Exception assistant is what configures the look of the UI when the debugger wants to indicate exception to you, and the Just My Code setting controls the extra column in the Exception dialog. You can read more about those options on MSDN: How to break on User-Unhandled exceptions (plus Gregg’s post) and Exception Assistant. Before I leave you to go play with this stuff a bit more, please note that this level of debugging is now available for JavaScript too, and if you are looking at the Exceptions dialog and wondering what the "GPU Memory Access Exceptions" node is about, stay tuned on the C++ AMP blog ;-) Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• OpenGL/GLSL: Render to cube map?

  - by BobDole

  I'm trying to figure out how to render my scene to a cube map. I've been stuck on this for a bit and figured I would ask you guys for some help. I'm new to OpenGL and this is the first time I'm using a FBO. I currently have a working example of using a cubemap bmp file, and the samplerCube sample type in the fragment shader is attached to GL_TEXTURE1. I'm not changing the shader code at all. I'm just changing the fact that I wont be calling the function that was loading the cubemap bmp file and trying to use the below code to render to a cubemap. You can see below that I'm also attaching the texture again to GL_TEXTURE1. This is so when I set the uniform: glUniform1i(getUniLoc(myProg, "Cubemap"), 1); it can access it in my fragment shader via uniform samplerCube Cubemap. I'm calling the below function like so: cubeMapTexture = renderToCubeMap(150, GL_RGBA8, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE); Now, I realize in the draw loop below that I'm not changing the view direction to look down the +x, -x, +y, -y, +z, -z axis. I really was just wanting to see something working first before implemented that. I figured I should at least see something on my object the way the code is now. I'm not seeing anything, just straight black. I've made my background white still the object is black. I've removed lighting, and coloring to just sample the cubemap texture and still black. I'm thinking the problem might be the format types when setting my texture which is GL_RGB8, GL_RGBA but I've also tried: GL_RGBA, GL_RGBA GL_RGB, GL_RGB I thought this would be standard since we are rendering to a texture attached to a framebuffer, but I've seen different examples that use different enum values. I've also tried binding the cube map texture in every draw call that I'm wanting to use the cube map: glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, cubeMapTexture); Also, I'm not creating a depth buffer for the FBO which I saw in most examples, because I'm only wanting the color buffer for my cube map. I actually added one to see if that was the problem and still got the same results. I could of fudged that up when I tried. Any help that can point me in the right direction would be appreciated. GLuint renderToCubeMap(int size, GLenum InternalFormat, GLenum Format, GLenum Type) { // color cube map GLuint textureObject; int face; GLenum status; //glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE1); glGenTextures(1, &textureObject); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, textureObject); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameterf(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_R, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); for (face = 0; face < 6; face++) { glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X + face, 0, InternalFormat, size, size, 0, Format, Type, NULL); } // framebuffer object glGenFramebuffers(1, &fbo); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X, textureObject, 0); status = glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER); printf("%d\"\n", status); printf("%d\n", GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE); glViewport(0,0,size, size); for (face = 1; face < 6; face++) { drawSpheres(); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0,GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X + face, textureObject, 0); } //Bind 0, which means render to back buffer, as a result, fb is unbound glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); return textureObject; }

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• SQL SERVER – Introduction to LEAD and LAG – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function LEAD() and LAG(). This functions accesses data from a subsequent row (for lead) and previous row (for lag) in the same result set without the use of a self-join . It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I will attempt small example to explain you this function. Instead of creating new table, I will be using AdventureWorks sample database as most of the developer uses that for experiment. Let us fun following query. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, LEAD(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LeadValue, LAG(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LagValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Above query will give us following result. When we look at above resultset it is very clear that LEAD function gives us value which is going to come in next line and LAG function gives us value which was encountered in previous line. If we have to generate the same result without using this function we will have to use self join. In future blog post we will see the same. Let us explore this function a bit more. This function not only provide previous or next line but it can also access any line before or after using offset. Let us fun following query, where LEAD and LAG function accesses the row with offset of 2. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, LEAD(SalesOrderDetailID,2) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LeadValue, LAG(SalesOrderDetailID,2) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LagValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Above query will give us following result. You can see the LEAD and LAG functions  now have interval of  rows when they are returning results. As there is interval of two rows the first two rows in LEAD function and last two rows in LAG function will return NULL value. You can easily replace this NULL Value with any other default value by passing third parameter in LEAD and LAG function. Let us fun following query. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, LEAD(SalesOrderDetailID,2,0) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LeadValue, LAG(SalesOrderDetailID,2,0) OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LagValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Above query will give us following result, where NULL are now replaced with value 0. Just like any other analytic function we can easily partition this function as well. Let us see the use of PARTITION BY in this clause. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, LEAD(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LeadValue, LAG(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ) LagValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Above query will give us following result, where now the data is partitioned by SalesOrderID and LEAD and LAG functions are returning the appropriate result in that window. As now there are smaller partition in my query, you will see higher presence of NULL. In future blog post we will see how this functions are compared to SELF JOIN. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Merge sort versus quick sort performance

  - by Giorgio

  I have implemented merge sort and quick sort using C (GCC 4.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 running on a 4 GB RAM laptop with an Intel DUO CPU at 2GHz) and I wanted to compare the performance of the two algorithms. The prototypes of the sorting functions are: void merge_sort(const char **lines, int start, int end); void quick_sort(const char **lines, int start, int end); i.e. both take an array of pointers to strings and sort the elements with index i : start <= i <= end. I have produced some files containing random strings with length on average 4.5 characters. The test files range from 100 lines to 10000000 lines. I was a bit surprised by the results because, even though I know that merge sort has complexity O(n log(n)) while quick sort is O(n^2), I have often read that on average quick sort should be as fast as merge sort. However, my results are the following. Up to 10000 strings, both algorithms perform equally well. For 10000 strings, both require about 0.007 seconds. For 100000 strings, merge sort is slightly faster with 0.095 s against 0.121 s. For 1000000 strings merge sort takes 1.287 s against 5.233 s of quick sort. For 5000000 strings merge sort takes 7.582 s against 118.240 s of quick sort. For 10000000 strings merge sort takes 16.305 s against 1202.918 s of quick sort. So my question is: are my results as expected, meaning that quick sort is comparable in speed to merge sort for small inputs but, as the size of the input data grows, the fact that its complexity is quadratic will become evident? Here is a sketch of what I did. In the merge sort implementation, the partitioning consists in calling merge sort recursively, i.e. merge_sort(lines, start, (start + end) / 2); merge_sort(lines, 1 + (start + end) / 2, end); Merging of the two sorted sub-array is performed by reading the data from the array lines and writing it to a global temporary array of pointers (this global array is allocate only once). After each merge the pointers are copied back to the original array. So the strings are stored once but I need twice as much memory for the pointers. For quick sort, the partition function chooses the last element of the array to sort as the pivot and scans the previous elements in one loop. After it has produced a partition of the type start ... {elements <= pivot} ... pivotIndex ... {elements > pivot} ... end it calls itself recursively: quick_sort(lines, start, pivotIndex - 1); quick_sort(lines, pivotIndex + 1, end); Note that this quick sort implementation sorts the array in-place and does not require additional memory, therefore it is more memory efficient than the merge sort implementation. So my question is: is there a better way to implement quick sort that is worthwhile trying out? If I improve the quick sort implementation and perform more tests on different data sets (computing the average of the running times on different data sets) can I expect a better performance of quick sort wrt merge sort? EDIT Thank you for your answers. My implementation is in-place and is based on the pseudo-code I have found on wikipedia in Section In-place version: function partition(array, 'left', 'right', 'pivotIndex') where I choose the last element in the range to be sorted as a pivot, i.e. pivotIndex := right. I have checked the code over and over again and it seems correct to me. In order to rule out the case that I am using the wrong implementation I have uploaded the source code on github (in case you would like to take a look at it). Your answers seem to suggest that I am using the wrong test data. I will look into it and try out different test data sets. I will report as soon as I have some results.

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• Asp.net Session State Revisited

  - by karan@dotnet

  Every now and then I see doubts and queries which I believe is the most discussed topic in the .net environment - Asp.net Sessions. So what really are they, why are they needed and what does browser and .net do with it. These and some of the other questions I hope to answer with this post. Because of the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol there is always a need of state management in a web application. There are many other ways to store data but I feel Session state is amongst the most powerful one. The ASP.NET session state is a technology that lets you store server-side, user-specific data. Our web applications can then use data to process request from the user for which the session state was instantiated. So when does a session is first created? When we start a asp.net application a non-expiring cookie is created and its called as ASP.NET_SessionId. Basically there are two methods for this depending upon how you configure this setting in your config file. The session ID can be a part of cookie as discussed above(called as ASP.NET_SessionId) or it is embedded in the browser’s URL. For the latter part we have to set cookie-less session in our web.config file. These Session ID’s are 120-bit random number that is represented by 20-character string. The cookie will be alive until you close your browser. If you browse from one app to another within the same domain, then both the apps will use the same session ID to track the session state. Why reuse? so that you don’t have to create a new session ID for each request. One can abandon one particular Session by calling Session.Abandon() which will stop the page processing and clear out the session data. A subsequent page request causes a brand new session object to be instantiated. So what happened to my cookie? Well the session cookie is still there even when one Session.Abandon() is called and another session object is created. The Session.Abandon() lets you clear out your session state without waiting for session timeout. By default, this time-out is a 20-minute sliding expiration. This expiration is refreshed every time that the user makes a request to the Web site and presents the session ID cookie. The Abandon method sets a flag in the session state object that indicates that the session state should be abandoned. If your app does not have global.asax then your session cookie will be killed at the end of each page request. So you need to have a global.asax file and Session_Start() handler to make sure that the session cookie will remain intact once its issued after the first page hit. The runtime invokes global.asax’s Session_OnEnd() when you call Session.Abandon() or the session times out. The session manager stores session data in HttpCache with sliding expiration where this timeout can be configured in the <sessionState> of web.config file. When the timeout is up the HttpCache will remove the session state object. Sometimes we want particular pages not to time out as compared to other pages in our applications. We can handle this in two ways. First, we can set a timer or may be a JavaScript function that refreshes the page after fixed intervals of time. The only thing being the page being cached locally and then the request is not made to the server so to prevent that you can add this to your page: <%@ OutputCache Location="None" VaryByParam="None" %> Second approach is to move your page into its own folder and then add a web.config to that folder to control the timeout. Also not all pages in your application will need access to session state. For those pages that do not, you can indicate that session state is not needed and prevent session data from being fetched from the store in requests to these pages. You can disable the session state at page level like this:<%@ Page EnableSessionState="False" %>tbc…

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• 2D Rendering with OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android (matrices not working)

  - by TranquilMarmot

  So I'm trying to render two moving quads, each at different locations. My shaders are as simple as possible (vertices are only transformed by the modelview-projection matrix, there's only one color). Whenever I try and render something, I only end up with slivers of color! I've only done work with 3D rendering in OpenGL before so I'm having issues with 2D stuff. Here's my basic rendering loop, simplified a bit (I'm using the Matrix manipulation methods provided by android.opengl.Matrix and program is a custom class I created that just calls GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv()): Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, windowWidth, 0, windowHeight, -1, 1); program.setUniformMatrix4f("Projection", projection); At this point, I render the quads (this is repeated for each quad): Matrix.setIdentityM(modelview, 0); Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX, quadY, 0); program.setUniformMatrix4f("ModelView", modelview); quad.render(); // calls glDrawArrays and all I see is a sliver of the color each quad is! I'm at my wits end here, I've tried everything I can think of and I'm at the point where I'm screaming at my computer and tossing phones across the room. Anybody got any pointers? Am I using ortho wrong? I'm 100% sure I'm rendering everything at a Z value of 0. I tried using frustumM instead of orthoM, which made it so that I could see the quads but they would get totally skewed whenever they got moved, which makes sense if I correctly understand the way frustum works (it's more for 3D rendering, anyway). If it makes any difference, I defined my viewport with GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, windowWidth, windowHeight); Where windowWidth and windowHeight are the same values that are pased to orthoM It might be worth noting that the android.opengl.Matrix methods take in an offset as the second parameter so that multiple matrices can be shoved into one array, so that'w what the first 0 is for For reference, here's my vertex shader code: uniform mat4 ModelView; uniform mat4 Projection; attribute vec4 vPosition; void main() { mat4 mvp = Projection * ModelView; gl_Position = vPosition * mvp; } I tried swapping Projection * ModelView with ModelView * Projection but now I just get some really funky looking shapes... EDIT Okay, I finally figured it out! (Note: Since I'm new here (longtime lurker!) I can't answer my own question for a few hours, so as soon as I can I'll move this into an actual answer to the question) I changed Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, windowWidth, 0, windowHeight, -1, 1); to float ratio = windowWwidth / windowHeight; Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, ratio, 0, 1, -1, 1); I then had to scale my projection matrix to make it a lot smaller with Matrix.scaleM(projection, 0, 0.05f, 0.05f, 1.0f);. I then added an offset to the modelview translations to simulate a camera so that I could center on my action (so Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX, quadY, 0); was changed to Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX + camX, quadY + camY, 0);) Thanks for the help, all!

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• Welcome 2011

  - by WeigeltRo

  Things that happened in 2010 MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read my report of MIX10 to see why.   The dotnet Cologne 2010, the community conference organized by the .NET user group Köln and my own group Bonn-to-Code.Net became an even bigger success than I dared to dream of.   There was a huge discrepancy between the efforts by Microsoft to support .NET user groups to organize public live streaming events of the PDC keynote (the dotnet Cologne team joined forces with netug  Niederrhein to organize the PDCologne) and the actual content of the keynote. The reaction of the audience at our event was “meh” and even worse I seriously doubt we’ll ever get that number of people to such an event (which on top of that suffered from technical difficulties beyond our control).   What definitely would have deserved the public live streaming event treatment was the Silverlight Firestarter (aka “Silverlight Damage Control”) event. And maybe we would have thought about organizing something if it weren’t for the “burned earth” left by the PDC keynote. Anyway, the stuff shown at the firestarter keynote was the topic of conversations among colleagues days later (“did you see that? oh yeah, that was seriously cool”). Things that I have learned/observed/noticed in 2010 In the long run, there’s a huge difference between “It works pretty well” and “it just works and I never have to think about it”. I had to get rid of my USB graphics adapter powering the third monitor (read about it in this blog post). Various small issues (desktop icons sometimes moving their positions after a reboot for no apparent reasons, at least one game I couldn’t get run at all, all three monitors sometimes simply refusing to wake up after standby) finally made me buy a PCIe 1x graphics adapter. If you’re interested: The combination of a NVIDIA GTX 460 and a GT 220 is running in “don’t make me think” mode for a couple of months now.   PowerPoint 2010 is a seriously cool piece of software. Not only the new hardware-accelerated effects, but also features like built-in background removal and picture processing (which in many cases are simply “good enough” and save a lot of time) or the smart guides.   Outlook 2010 crashes on me a lot. I haven’t been successful in reproducing these crashes, they just happen when every couple of days on different occasions (only thing in common: I clicked something in the main window – yeah, very helpful observation)   Visual Studio 2010 reminds me of Visual Studio 2005 before SP1, which is actually not a good thing to say about a piece of software. I think it’s telling that Microsoft’s message regarding the beta of SP1 has been different from earlier service pack betas (promising an upgrade path for a beta to the RTM sounds to me like “please, please use it NOW!”).   I have a love/hate relationship with ReSharper. I don’t want to develop without it, but at the same time I can’t fail to notice that ReSharper is taking a heavy toll in terms of performance and sometimes stability. Things I’m looking forward to in 2011 Obviously, the dotnet Cologne 2011. We already have been able to score some big name sponsors (Microsoft, Intel), but we’re still looking for more sponsors. And be assured that we’ll make sure that our partners get the most out of their contribution, regardless of how big or small.   MIX11, period.    Silverlight 5 is going to be great. The only thing I’m a bit nervous about is that I still haven’t read anything official on whether C# next version’s async/await will be in it. Leaving that out would be really stupid considering the end-of-2011 release of SL5 (moving the next release way into the future).

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• Create Panoramic Photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery

  - by Matthew Guay

  Have you ever wanted to capture the view from a mountain or the full size of a building?  Here’s how you can stitch multiple shots together into the perfect panoramic picture for free with Windows Live Photo Gallery. Getting Started First, make sure you have Windows Live Photo Gallery installed (link below).  Live Photo Gallery is part of the Windows Live Essentials suite, you can select other programs to install along with it if you want. Make sure to uncheck setting your home page to MSN and setting your search provider as Bing if you don’t want them changed.   Now, make sure you have pictures that will work good for a panorama.  These need to be taken from the same spot, and the edges of the pictures need to overlap so the program can find where the pictures connect.  Here we have taken pictures inside a building with a cell phone camera. Make your Panorama Open Live Photo Gallery, and find the pictures you want to use in your panorama.  It will automatically index and display all of the photos in your Pictures folder or Library if you’re using Windows 7. If your pictures are saved elsewhere, add that folder to Photo Gallery.  Click File, Include a folder in the gallery, and select the correct folder at the prompt. Now select all of the pictures that you will use in your panorama.  You can easily do this by clicking the checkbox on each picture that appears when you hover over it.    Once all of the pictures are selected, click Make in the menu bar and select Create panoramic photo… Alternately, right-click on any of the pictures you’ve selected, and click Create panoramic photo… Live Photo Gallery will analyze your photos and compost them together to create a panorama.  The amount of time it takes will vary depending on the number of photos, size of the pictures, and computer speed. When it’s finished making the panorama, you’ll be prompted to enter a file name and save the picture. Your new panorama picture will open as soon as it’s saved.  Depending on your shots, the picture may have quite a bit of black space around the edges where each picture didn’t cover the exact same amount of area. To correct this, click Fix on the menu bar, and then select Crop Photo in the sidebar that opens. Select the center of the picture with the crop tool, and click Apply when you’ve got the selection you want. Live Photo Gallery automatically saves your picture changes, and you can revert back to the original picture if you wish. Now you’ve got a nice panoramic shot, trimmed and ready to print, share, and more. Conclusion Panoramic shots are great ways to capture your whole surroundings, whether it’s a sports stadium, mall, or a scenic mountain view.  They can also be a great way to capture more with low-resolution cameras. Link Download Windows Live Photo Gallery Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Family Fun: Share Photos with Photo Gallery and Windows Live SpacesLearning Windows 7: Manage Photos with Live Photo GalleryEasily Re-Size Photos in Windows Vista or XPInstall Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7Convert Photos to Flash for Your Website TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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• Pondering New Technology

  - by MOSSLover

  So I have been standing at the end of a fork for a year peering down a corner looking at this way and that way trying to figure out where I fit in.  I was so enthusiastic and excited about Silverlight when it came out.  It was this amazing awesome technology that had this really cool animation and webcam/multimedia piece.  I thought if I put my money on Silverlight it’s going somewhere, then HTML 5 came out and the wind shifted.  I realized times were changing. I have been working with web technologies since I was 15 years old.  Playing with html and javascript and even css back when it first came out.  In tech years 15 years is forever.  Things change so quickly and so often.  So I guess the question is where am I heading?  The answer is mobile technology.  For some reason I was resisting change and I have no idea why.  I guess I really wanted to see more than one player.  I didn’t quite feel that Microsoft was ready with Windows Phone 7.  It was a great start, but it just didn’t feel like they went all the way.  Now with Windows 8 it feels like they are at version 2.0.  It’s like hitting Silverlight 2.0 where they finally added the .Net bits.  The path is paved, but we don’t know where it’s leading.  Then we had 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 to mature the technology into what it is today (man I’m hoping they are going to roll some of the cool bits into other tech if they don’t exist). Anyway, I’m on board, but I’m not buying a Windows Tablet just yet.  I was hoping for a 7 inch screen from Apple around $300 or just above and a 7 inch screen from the MS side around the same price.  What I got was the Apple side, but nothing from Microsoft.  I was pretty disappointed with the $500 market price on the RT version.  I realized Microsoft is close, but not quite where Apple is today.  Yes the devices have Office that they are offering, but the sticker is just too much for a first generation device.  If you guys remember correctly the first generation iPad was quite expensive.  I guess for a 1st generation device $500 is pretty good. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am shifting my focus entirely away from Silverlight and more towards mobile.  I will be doing a lot of postings on iOS, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8 with SharePoint 2013.  Since I don’t have a tablet and don’t foresee myself buying one just yet it might be mostly on the phones for right now.  I want to do a bunch of testing on various devices on what needs to be done in apps on each device.  I might add a bit on porting code from one to the other.  I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and make things flow a little better for me.  In a way it’s kind of like Star Trek 6 where they talk about the Undiscovered Country.  I’m going to jump forward completely and see where I land. Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,Mobile,Windows 8,iOS

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• Speeding up procedural texture generation

  - by FalconNL

  Recently I've begun working on a game that takes place in a procedurally generated solar system. After a bit of a learning curve (having neither worked with Scala, OpenGL 2 ES or Libgdx before), I have a basic tech demo going where you spin around a single procedurally textured planet: The problem I'm running into is the performance of the texture generation. A quick overview of what I'm doing: a planet is a cube that has been deformed to a sphere. To each side, a n x n (e.g. 256 x 256) texture is applied, which are bundled in one 8n x n texture that is sent to the fragment shader. The last two spaces are not used, they're only there to make sure the width is a power of 2. The texture is currently generated on the CPU, using the updated 2012 version of the simplex noise algorithm linked to in the paper 'Simplex noise demystified'. The scene I'm using to test the algorithm contains two spheres: the planet and the background. Both use a greyscale texture consisting of six octaves of 3D simplex noise, so for example if we choose 128x128 as the texture size there are 128 x 128 x 6 x 2 x 6 = about 1.2 million calls to the noise function. The closest you will get to the planet is about what's shown in the screenshot and since the game's target resolution is 1280x720 that means I'd prefer to use 512x512 textures. Combine that with the fact the actual textures will of course be more complicated than basic noise (There will be a day and night texture, blended in the fragment shader based on sunlight, and a specular mask. I need noise for continents, terrain color variation, clouds, city lights, etc.) and we're looking at something like 512 x 512 x 6 x 3 x 15 = 70 million noise calls for the planet alone. In the final game, there will be activities when traveling between planets, so a wait of 5 or 10 seconds, possibly 20, would be acceptable since I can calculate the texture in the background while traveling, though obviously the faster the better. Getting back to our test scene, performance on my PC isn't too terrible, though still too slow considering the final result is going to be about 60 times worse: 128x128 : 0.1s 256x256 : 0.4s 512x512 : 1.7s This is after I moved all performance-critical code to Java, since trying to do so in Scala was a lot worse. Running this on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S3), however, produces a more problematic result: 128x128 : 2s 256x256 : 7s 512x512 : 29s Already far too long, and that's not even factoring in the fact that it'll be minutes instead of seconds in the final version. Clearly something needs to be done. Personally, I see a few potential avenues, though I'm not particularly keen on any of them yet: Don't precalculate the textures, but let the fragment shader calculate everything. Probably not feasible, because at one point I had the background as a fullscreen quad with a pixel shader and I got about 1 fps on my phone. Use the GPU to render the texture once, store it and use the stored texture from then on. Upside: might be faster than doing it on the CPU since the GPU is supposed to be faster at floating point calculations. Downside: effects that cannot (easily) be expressed as functions of simplex noise (e.g. gas planet vortices, moon craters, etc.) are a lot more difficult to code in GLSL than in Scala/Java. Calculate a large amount of noise textures and ship them with the application. I'd like to avoid this if at all possible. Lower the resolution. Buys me a 4x performance gain, which isn't really enough plus I lose a lot of quality. Find a faster noise algorithm. If anyone has one I'm all ears, but simplex is already supposed to be faster than perlin. Adopt a pixel art style, allowing for lower resolution textures and fewer noise octaves. While I originally envisioned the game in this style, I've come to prefer the realistic approach. I'm doing something wrong and the performance should already be one or two orders of magnitude better. If this is the case, please let me know. If anyone has any suggestions, tips, workarounds, or other comments regarding this problem I'd love to hear them.

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• GRUB 2 problem after Mac OS X update

  - by vallllll

  I have a MacBook Pro in dual boot Mac OS X / Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). When I boot it I have a rEFIt menu, and I can chose between Mac OS X and Linux. A few days ago I have updated Mac OS X from 10.7 (Lion) to 10.8 (Mountain Lion) using a .dmg image provided by my company. Since then when I select Linux in rEFIt it says: No bootable device --insert boot disk and press any key I have tried going to rEFIt partitioning tool. This is what I got: As suggested in Mac OSX Mavericks update rEFIT broken I wanted to fix the issue the same way as AndrewM, but I don't have the option "MBR table must be updated". Then I booted on Ubuntu 12.04 CD, chose repair broken system, chose root patition /dev/sda6 as this is where my Ubuntu file system is. I got a shell, but I don't really know how to repair the poblem since if it was just Windows dual boot. A GRUB update would solve the issue, but here I don't know where the GRUB 2 is installed. Here are results from Parted, and it is a bit confusing for me as the Mac partition is the one with boot: As you can see the entry 1 is an EFI system partition and is the boot partition, so I wonder if I should install GRUB there or in sda6, which is the Ubuntu filesystem. I am not sure should I work on rEFIt shell or Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I don't remember where GRUB was before update. UPDATE: using same link above I have tried RoundSparrow hilltx answer and installed rEFInd, but the result is same.... still no bootable device when I select Linux. UPDATE 2: just used alternate CD again, mounted on /dev/sda6 and the ran update-grub. It seemed to wok and started listing all my kernels. But after rebooting several times still no bootable device when I select Linux in rEFInd. UDATE 3: Have tried to boot from Ubuntu cd and select "boot from first available filesystem. I got error and dropped to grub rescue shell. I even followed the indications on this link but was unable to boot as I tried to use sdb6 but no luck UPDATE 4 as per Rob Smith request here is out put from ls -l $(find /EFI -iname "*.efi") *MACOSX -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 55048 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/drivers_x64/btrfs_x64.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 38888 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/drivers_x64/ext2_x64.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 39304 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/drivers_x64/ext4_x64.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 43432 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/drivers_x64/hfs_x64.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 38984 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/drivers_x64/iso9660_x64.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 43656 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/drivers_x64/reiserfs_x64.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 175016 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 73232 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/dbounce.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 763248 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/dhclient.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 67024 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/drawbox.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 71312 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/dumpfv.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 84848 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/dumpprot.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 472912 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/ed.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 143856 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/edit.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 1801008 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/ftp.efi -rw-r--r--@ 1 root admin 47848 29 oct 17:44 /EFI/tools/gptsync_x64.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 320560 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/hexdump.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 286384 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/hostname.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 534416 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/ifconfig.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 395344 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/loadarg.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 587408 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/ping.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 730416 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/pppd.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 561360 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/route.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 1961712 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/shell.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 750224 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/tcpipv4.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 4048 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/textmode.efi -rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 320656 7 mar 2010 /EFI/tools/which.efi *LINUX

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• Ubuntu 12.04 Bootloader failed to install

  - by Chris

  Sorry about the excessively long question, but I figured giving more information would be better. I recently bought a new desktop for myself, running Windows 7. It has two hard drives, and I wanted to install Ubuntu on a small partition on the second hard drive. I created 25GB "free space" in Windows and ran a LiveCD install. I wanted to select the install options myself but accidentally selected "Install alongside Windows 7," but it seemed to pick up the free space and installed itself there as I wanted it to. However, I was told that the bootloader installation had failed. I chose to "Cancel installation," leaving my computer unable to boot. I wiped my computer and reinstalled Windows. After that, I tried installing Ubuntu through Windows using WUBI, once using files from my LiveCD and once downloading everything again. Both times the install succeeded, but both times when I restarted and tried to load Ubuntu, it gave me an error - wubildr.mbr was corrupt or missing. I checked in Windows - it was indeed present on the C:\ drive. I went back to the LiveCD installation, this time going the custom options route. I assigned 16GB to an Ext4 journaling file system and 10GB to a swap file. I got the same bootloader error as before. Being prompted to select a different partition to install the bootloader to, I first tried the partition Ubuntu was installed on. A window came up saying that the install had succeeded, but a second window gave me the same error and choices as before. I went through every single option it gave me, including the Windows partition and the hard drives themselves (dev/sda, dev/sdb). Same result. I then chose to not install a bootloader. Windows still works fine, and I assume Ubuntu has installed but is unbootable. Knowing that my computer could potentially brick itself again - and, this time around, with a lot of data to lose and hassle to go through if I mess it up - I really don't want to do anything without some advice. So I'll ask this: a) Why did the bootloader fail to install? Can I fix the error and install Ubuntu fresh? b) Is there any way to get around the error, install the bootloader, and point it towards an existing installation of Ubuntu? c) Is there a quicker and easier solution I might have missed? EDIT: Thanks for the tip, AthloX. After testing the liveCD in Virtualbox with no installation problems, I looked around for some alternate bootloaders but had no success. I attempted another install, which installed the bootloader and Ubuntu just fine but bricked Windows 7. I wiped both hard disks clean, including some "System Reserved" partitions I hadn't noticed before, before re-installing Windows 7 on one hard drive and immediately afterwards installing Ubuntu on the other. Now the computer boots into Windows, but I can pop into the BIOS at startup to boot into Ubunbtu via it's bootloader, and I'm guessing it'll only take a bit of poking at the BIOS to swap the load order. Many thanks!

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• SQLAuthority News – Getting Ready to Learn SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  If you have read my earlier blog post you must be aware of how I am always eager to learn new things. I have signed up for three days learning course at Koenig Solutions for End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence. You may wonder why I sign up for the course on SQL Server when it seems that I know a lot about it. Well, the belief is incorrect that I know a lot. I think there are plenty of things which I have been dreaming to learn. Why am I learning SQL Server? First of all – I do not know everything and second it is always a good idea to learn more. No matter how old we get or how much we think we know – there are always details which we can learn and refresh few concepts. Learning is never ending process philosophically but it is true as well in reality. SQL Server 2012 is already released earlier this year and there are plenty of enhancements released. Recently I was going over the list of the all the new feature and enhancement and I realized that there few things about SQL Server 2008 R2 I never got a chance to have a hand’s on experience and we have entered into the era of SQL Server 2012. I feel a bit bad about it and I decided to make it a priority for me to learn all the missing experiences. Quick Action – Registration The very same day I called up my friend who owns Koenig Solution and expressed my concern and requested his help. During my early career when I was a SQL Server Trainer, we had some good synergy between us and now they are very successful offshore training company by having a physical location in Delhi,  Goa, Dahradun, Shimla, Goa and Bangalore. I quickly visited their Bangalore Center and paid my fees for learning SQL Server Business Intelligence course. Very next second I got call from my friend suggesting that I learn this course from Delhi instead of Bangalore. As per him I should travel to Delhi and learn the course how other students are learning “Away from Home”. This made sense as I stay in Bangalore and if I return home after a long day of learning, I will be not able to practice for the next day as there will be “sweet distraction” of the family. Well I opted for Delhi. What Registration Fees Included I learned from registration processes that the following were included in the fees. 3 meals every day (hearty breakfast, lunch from premium restaurants and home cooked like dinner) Airport pick up and drop Hotel Stay Internet at hotel and at learning institute Unlimited coffee and snacks at learning institute Printed Learning Material Certification Fees (if applicable) Learning material … And of course classroom training I thought registration process was over when I paid fees. Well, I was in for a very nice surprise. Registration Experience – Bliss! Within few hours I received emails from Center Manager of Delhi with all the necessary details I need to know about my learning experience. The email contained following information in detail and it blew me away. Details of the pick up from airport – driver information Details of Delhi and important information List of all the important people and emergency contact details Internet connection details Detail of the trainer and all the training details and lots of other relevant information Well so far everything looks great. Tomorrow I will reach to Delhi and I will share how things go on. Any suggestion for things to do in Delhi? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• MacGyver Moments

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment.  Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important.  However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community.  Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can.  Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around. My best moment is probably my entire home computer network.  Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose. My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300.   The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999.  Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller.  I acquired this from a previous employer for $50.  It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.  Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus.  RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access.  It is nice to sign in once and be done with it. The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop.  Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives. My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive.  I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again.  Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP. The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor.  Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago.  I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008.  Turns out I was right. Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out.  I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind.  Great product).  I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server.  The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out.  maybe in a week or two. A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together. Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg. The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans.  I buy top-of-the-line for both. I even pull and crimp my own cables. Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere.  Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks.  That helps a lot too. Of course I will tag SQLVariant.

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• How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?

  - by kanichiro.nishida

  Do you know who is accessing to which report at what time at your reporting environment ? As you delivered the BI Publisher reports to the production environment and your users start using them as part of their daily business operations you might wonder such questions. With compliance becoming an integral part of any business requirement, auditing your reporting environment is also becoming one of the most critical and hot agenda in today’s enterprise reporting deployments. Also, I believe that auditing the reporting environment is not just for the compliance, but also the way to understand how your users are using the reports and be able to improve the user reporting experience. BI Publisher have introduced Enterprise Level Auditing feature with its 11G release, with an integration of Oracle Fusion Middleware Audit Framework, which comes out of the box with the installation. Yes, this is another great example of the benefit of its tight integration with Fusion Middleware introduced with BI Publisher 11g release. What Information Can I Know about our Reporting Environment? With this new Auditing feature you can now gain the following insights. When a particular user login or logout What report is accessed by who and when and how How long does it take to process a particular report Yes, it’s all there. This is a great news for 10G users, right ? I used to be one of them working with many different IT organizations and were craving for this, but it’s here now with 11G! How Can I Access to the Auditing Information? With the Fusion Middleware Auditing Framework, BI Publisher feed such information either to a log file or to a database. If you decided to get the data into the database then, of course you know, you can use BI Publisher to report and publish, or visualize the data to gain more insights. One thing though, in order to feed the data it requires a few extra steps, which I’ll cover it later.  Regardless of whether it’s the log file or the database to store the Auditing data, first, you need to enable the Auditing feature, which is not enabled as default. So, let’s take a look at how to enable it. How to Enable Auditing Feature? Here is a quick list of the steps: Enable Auditing related properties in BI Publisher configuration file Copy component_events.xml file to Fusion Middleware Audit Framework’s location Enable Auditing Policy with Fusion Middleware Control (Enterprise Manager) Restart WebLogic Server Enable Auditing related properties in BI Publisher configuration file Open xmlp-server-config.xml file, which is located under $BI_HOME/ user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/config/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Configuration directory. Set the following three properties values to ‘true’. AUDIT_ENABLED MONITORING_ENABLED AUDIT_JPS_INTEGRATION The ‘AUDIT_JPS_INTEGRATION’ is not in the file as default, so you need to add this. Here is an example of how it looks for the xmlp-server-config.xml file after the modification. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><xmlpConfigxmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/xmlp"> <property name="SAW_SERVER" value="adc6160510"/> <property name="SAW_SESSION_TIMEOUT" value="90"/> <property name="DEBUG_LEVEL" value="exception"/> <property name="SAW_PORT" value="7001"/> <property name="SAW_PASSWORD" value=""/> <property name="SAW_PROTOCOL" value="http"/> <property name="SAW_VERSION" value="v6"/> <property name="SAW_USERNAME" value=""/> <property name="SAW_URL_SUFFIX" value="analytics/saw.dll"/> <property name="MONITORING_ENABLED" value="true"/> <property name="MONITORING_DEFAULT_HISTORY_SIZE" value="30"/> <property name="AUDIT_ENABLED" value="true"/> <property name="JSESSION_RESET_DISABLED" value="true"/> <property name="SECURITY_MODEL" value="ORACLE_AS_JPS"/> <property name="AUDIT_JPS_INTEGRATION" value="true"/> </xmlpConfig>   Copy component_events.xml file to Audit Framework’s location There is a Audit related configuration file provided by BI Publisher that needs to be copied to the Audit Framework location. 1. Go to the following directory. $BI_HOME /oracle_common/modules/oracle.iau_11.1.1/components 2. Create a directory called ‘xmlpserver’ 3. Copy component_events.xml file from /user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/config/bipublisher/repository/Admin/Audit To the newly created ‘xmlpserver’ directory. Enable Auditing Policy with Fusion Middleware Control (EM) Now you can set a level of the auditing for each BI Publisher’s auditing type by using Fusion Middleware Control (a.k.a. Enterprise Manager). 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control UI http://hostname:port/em (e.g. reporting.oracle.com:7001/em) 2. Access to Audit Policy configuration UI from the menu Under WebLogic Domain, right-click bifoundation_domain, select Security and then click Audit Policy.   3. Set Audit Level for BI Publisher. While you can select ‘Custom’ to set a customized level of Auditing for each component, I’m selecting ‘Medium’ for this exercise.   Restart WebLogic Server After all the above settings, now you need to restart the WebLogic Server instance in order to take those changes in effect. If you’re on Windows you can simply do this by selecting ‘Stop BI Servers’ and ‘Start BI Servers’ from the Start menu. If you’re on Linux then you can run ‘stopWebLogic.sh’ and ‘startWebLogic.sh’, which can be found under $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/bin Start Auditing! Now assuming that you have completed the above steps successfully, then from this point on any reporting activity should be audited and stored in the auditing log file, which can be found at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/auditlogs/xmlpserver/audit.log And here is a sample of the log file: 2011-02-18 02:25:49.928 "" "ReportRendering" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportExecution" "200" "" "/Sample Lite/Published Reporting/Reports/Balance Letter.xdo" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" "en_US" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 86608512 486989824 24517 169 - - - 2011-02-18 02:25:49.929 "steve.jobs" "ReportRequest" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportAccess" "200" "" "" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" - - - true - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2011-02-18 03:25:49.554 "" "ReportDataProcess" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportExecution" "260" "" "/Sample Lite/Published Reporting/Reports/Balance Letter.xdo" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 34980200 554033152 - 134 - - - 2011-02-18 03:25:50.282 "" "ReportRendering" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportExecution" "263" "" "/Sample Lite/Published Reporting/Reports/Balance Letter.xdo" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" "en_US" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 16158944 554033152 24517 503 - - - 2011-02-18 03:25:50.282 "steve.jobs" "ReportRequest" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000022,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "ReportAccess" "263" "" "" "pdf" "RTF Corp Styles" - - - true - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2011-02-18 03:30:00.448 "barack.obama" "UserLogin" true - "82d4bdc47b99b33c:-7e3f334f:12e365c4d9c:-8000-0000000000000406,0" - - - - "bipublisher(11.1.1)" "UserSession" "26" "" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From the above log file you can tell a user ‘steve.jobs’ was running some reports like ‘Balance Letter’ around afternoon on 2/18 and another user ‘barack.obama’ logged into the system at 3:30 on the same day. Yes, every login and log out will be recorded, and every report access will be recorded in this log file. Now, looking at this text file to understand what’s going on is pretty overwhelming. And accessing to this log file, which is located at the server’s file system where the BI Publisher/WebLogic Server are running, is another challenge in typical deployment scenarios. And that’s where the database storage option for the Auditing data  comes into a picture. I’ll talk about this tomorrow, so stay tuned!  

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• Big Data – Basics of Big Data Architecture – Day 4 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we understood how Big Data evolution happened. Today we will understand basics of the Big Data Architecture. Big Data Cycle Just like every other database related applications, bit data project have its development cycle. Though three Vs (link) for sure plays an important role in deciding the architecture of the Big Data projects. Just like every other project Big Data project also goes to similar phases of the data capturing, transforming, integrating, analyzing and building actionable reporting on the top of  the data. While the process looks almost same but due to the nature of the data the architecture is often totally different. Here are few of the question which everyone should ask before going ahead with Big Data architecture. Questions to Ask How big is your total database? What is your requirement of the reporting in terms of time – real time, semi real time or at frequent interval? How important is the data availability and what is the plan for disaster recovery? What are the plans for network and physical security of the data? What platform will be the driving force behind data and what are different service level agreements for the infrastructure? This are just basic questions but based on your application and business need you should come up with the custom list of the question to ask. As I mentioned earlier this question may look quite simple but the answer will not be simple. When we are talking about Big Data implementation there are many other important aspects which we have to consider when we decide to go for the architecture. Building Blocks of Big Data Architecture It is absolutely impossible to discuss and nail down the most optimal architecture for any Big Data Solution in a single blog post, however, we can discuss the basic building blocks of big data architecture. Here is the image which I have built to explain how the building blocks of the Big Data architecture works. Above image gives good overview of how in Big Data Architecture various components are associated with each other. In Big Data various different data sources are part of the architecture hence extract, transform and integration are one of the most essential layers of the architecture. Most of the data is stored in relational as well as non relational data marts and data warehousing solutions. As per the business need various data are processed as well converted to proper reports and visualizations for end users. Just like software the hardware is almost the most important part of the Big Data Architecture. In the big data architecture hardware infrastructure is extremely important and failure over instances as well as redundant physical infrastructure is usually implemented. NoSQL in Data Management NoSQL is a very famous buzz word and it really means Not Relational SQL or Not Only SQL. This is because in Big Data Architecture the data is in any format. It can be unstructured, relational or in any other format or from any other data source. To bring all the data together relational technology is not enough, hence new tools, architecture and other algorithms are invented which takes care of all the kind of data. This is collectively called NoSQL. Tomorrow Next four days we will answer the Buzz Words – Hadoop. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Why SQL Developer Rocks for the Advanced User Too

  - by thatjeffsmith

  While SQL Developer may be ‘perfect for Oracle beginners,’ that doesn’t preclude advanced and intermediate users from getting their fair share of toys! I’ve been working with Oracle since the 7.3.4 days, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that the WAY an ‘old timer’ uses a tool like SQL Developer is radically different than the ‘beginner.’ If you’ve been reluctant to use SQL Developer because it’s a GUI, give me a few minutes to try to convince you it’s worth a second (or third) look. 1. Help when you want it, and only when you want it One of the biggest gripes any user has with a piece of software is when said software can’t get out of it’s own way. When you’re typing in a word processor, sometimes you can do without the grammar and spelling checks, the offer to auto-complete your words, and all of the additional mark-up. This drives folks to programs like Notepad++ and vi. You can disable the code insight feature so you can type unmolested by SQL Developer’s attempt to auto-complete your object names. Now, if you happen to come across a long or hard to spell object name, you can still invoke the feature on demand using Ctrl+Spacebar Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) 2. Automatic File Tracking SQL*Minus is nice. Vi is cool. Notepad++ has a lot of features I like. But not too many editors offer automatic logging of changes to your files without having to setup a source control system. I was doing some work on my login.sql. I’m not doing anything crazy, but seeing what I had done in previous iterations was helpful. Now imagine how nice it would be to have this available for your l,000+ line scripts! Track your scripts as they change, no setup required! 3. Extend the Functionality Know SQL and XML? Wish SQL Developer did JUST a little bit more? Build your own extensions. You can have custom context menus and object pages in just a few minutes. This is an example of lazy developers writing code that write code. 4. Get Your Money’s Worth You’ve licensed Enterprise Edition. You got your Diagnostic and Tuning packs. Now start using them! Not everyone has access to Enterprise Manager, especially developers. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need help with troubleshooting and optimizing poorly performing SQL statements. ASH, AWR, Real-Time SQL Monitoring and the SQL Tuning Advisor are built into the Reports and Worksheet. Yes you could make the package calls, but that’s a whole lot of typing, and I’d rather just get to the results. 5. Profile, Debug, & Unit Testing PLSQL An Interactive Development Environment (IDE) built by the same folks that own the programming language (Hello – Oracle PLSQL!) should be complete. It should ‘hug’ the developer and empower them to churn out programs that work, run fast, and are easy to maintain. Write it, test it, debug it, and tune it. When you’re running your programs and you just want to see the data that’s returned, that shouldn’t require any special settings or workaround to make it happen either. Magic! And a whole lot more… I could go on and talk about the support for things like DataPump, RMAN, and DBMS_SCHEDULER, but you’re experts and you’re plenty busy. If you think SQL Developer is falling short somewhere, I want you to let us know about it.

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• Surface V2.0

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  It’s been quiet around here. And the reason for that is that it’s been quiet around Surface for a while. Now, a lot of people assume that when a product team isn’t making too much noise that must mean they stopped working on their product. Remember the PDC keynote in 2010? Just because they didn’t mention WPF there a lot of people had the idea that WPF was dead and abandoned for Silverlight. Of course, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The same applies to Surface. While we didn’t hear much from the team in Redmond they were busy putting together the next version of the platform. And at the CES in January the world saw what they have been up to all along: Surface V2.0 as it’s commonly known. Of course, the product is still in development. It’s not here yet, we can’t buy one yet. However, more and more information comes available and I think this is a good time to share with you what it’s all about! The biggest change from an organizational point of view is that Microsoft decided to stop producing the hardware themselves. Instead, they have formed a partnership with Samsung who will manufacture the devices. This means that you as a buyer get the benefits of a large, worldwide supplier with all the services they can offer. Not that Microsoft didn’t do that before but since Surface wasn’t a ‘big’ product it was sometimes hard to get to the right people. The new device is officially called the “Samsung SUR 40 for Microsoft Surface” which is quite a mouthful. The software that runs the device is of course still coming from Microsoft. Let’s dive into the technical specs (note: all of this is preliminary, it’s still in the Alpha phase!): Audio out HDMI / StereoRCA / SPDIF / 2 times 3.5mm audio out jack Brightness 300 CD/m2 Communications 1GB Ethernet/802.11/Bluetooth Contrast Ratio 1:1000 CPU AMD Athlon X2 245e 2.9Ghz Dual Core Display Resolution Full HD 1080p 1920x1080 / 16:9 aspect ratio GPU AMD Radeon HD 6750 1GB GDDRS HDD 320 GB / 7200 RPM HDMI In / HDMI out Yes I/O Ports 4 USB, SD Card reader Operation System Embedded Windows 7 Professional 64 bits Panel Size 40” diagonal Protection Glass Gorilla Glass RAM 4 GB DD3 Weight / with standard legs 70.0 Kg / 154 lbs Weight / standalone 39.5 Kg / 87 lbs Height (without legs) 4 inch Contact points recognized > 50 Cool Factor Extremely   Ok, the last point is not official, but I do think it needs to be there. Let’s talk software. As noted, it runs Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, which means you can run Visual Studio 2010 on it. The software is going to be developed in WPF4.0 with the additional Surface SDK 2.0. It will contain all the things you’ve seen before plus some extra’s. They have taken some steps to align it more with the Surface Toolkit which you can download today, so if you do things right your software should be portable between a WPF4.0 Windows 7 Multi-touch app and the Surface v2 environment. It still uses infrared to detect contacts, so in that respect nothing much has changed conceptually. We still can differentiate between a finger, a tag or a blob. Of course, since the new platform has a much higher resolution (compared to the 1024x768 of the first version) you might need to look at your code again. I’ve seen a lot of applications on Surface that assume the old resolution and moving that to V2 is going to be some work. To be honest: as I am under NDA I cannot disclose much about the new software besides what I have told you here, but trust me: it’s going to blow people away. Now, the biggest question for me is: when can I get one? Until we can, have a look here: Tags van Technorati: surface,samsung,WPF

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• Page output caching for dynamic web applications

  - by Mike Ellis

  I am currently working on a web application where the user steps (forward or back) through a series of pages with "Next" and "Previous" buttons, entering data until they reach a page with the "Finish" button. Until finished, all data is stored in Session state, then sent to the mainframe database via web services at the end of the process. Some of the pages display data from previous pages in order to collect additional information. These pages can never be cached because they are different for every user. For pages that don't display this dynamic data, they can be cached, but only the first time they load. After that, the data that was previously entered needs to be displayed. This requires Page_Load to fire, which means the page can't be cached at that point. A couple of weeks ago, I knew almost nothing about implementing page caching. Now I still don't know much, but I know a little bit, and here is the solution that I developed with the help of others on my team and a lot of reading and trial-and-error. We have a base page class defined from which all pages inherit. In this class I have defined a method that sets the caching settings programmatically. For pages that can be cached, they call this base page method in their Page_Load event within a if(!IsPostBack) block, which ensures that only the page itself gets cached, not the data on the page. if(!IsPostBack) {     ...     SetCacheSettings();     ... } protected void SetCacheSettings() {     Response.Cache.AddValidationCallback(new HttpCacheValidateHandler(Validate), null);     Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddHours(1));     Response.Cache.SetSlidingExpiration(true);     Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true);     Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.ServerAndNoCache); } The AddValidationCallback sets up an HttpCacheValidateHandler method called Validate which runs logic when a cached page is requested. The Validate method signature is standard for this method type. public static void Validate(HttpContext context, Object data, ref HttpValidationStatus status) {     string visited = context.Request.QueryString["v"];     if (visited != null && "1".Equals(visited))     {         status = HttpValidationStatus.IgnoreThisRequest; //force a page load     }     else     {         status = HttpValidationStatus.Valid; //load from cache     } } I am using the HttpValidationStatus values IgnoreThisRequest or Valid which forces the Page_Load event method to run or allows the page to load from cache, respectively. Which one is set depends on the value in the querystring. The value in the querystring is set up on each page in the "Next" and "Previous" button click event methods based on whether the page that the button click is taking the user to has any data on it or not. bool hasData = HasPageBeenVisited(url); if (hasData) {     url += VISITED; } Response.Redirect(url); The HasPageBeenVisited method determines whether the destination page has any data on it by checking one of its required data fields. (I won't include it here because it is very system-dependent.) VISITED is a string constant containing "?v=1" and gets appended to the url if the destination page has been visited. The reason this logic is within the "Next" and "Previous" button click event methods is because 1) the Validate method is static which doesn't allow it to access non-static data such as the data fields for a particular page, and 2) at the time at which the Validate method runs, either the data has not yet been deserialized from Session state or is not available (different AppDomain?) because anytime I accessed the Session state information from the Validate method, it was always empty.

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• Bitmask data insertions in SSDT Post-Deployment scripts

  - by jamiet

  On my current project we are using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to manage our database schema and one of the tasks we need to do often is insert data into that schema once deployed; the typical method employed to do this is to leverage Post-Deployment scripts and that is exactly what we are doing. Our requirement is a little different though, our data is split up into various buckets that we need to selectively deploy on a case-by-case basis. I was going to use a SQLCMD variable for each bucket (defaulted to some value other than “Yes”) to define whether it should be deployed or not so we could use something like this in our Post-Deployment script: IF ($(DeployBucket1Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN   :r .\Bucket1.data.sqlENDIF ($(DeployBucket2Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN   :r .\Bucket2.data.sqlENDIF ($(DeployBucket3Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN   :r .\Bucket3.data.sqlEND That works fine and is, I’m sure, a very common technique for doing this. It is however slightly ugly because we have to litter our deployment with various SQLCMD variables. My colleague James Rowland-Jones (whom I’m sure many of you know) suggested another technique – bitmasks. I won’t go into detail about how this works (James has already done that at Using a Bitmask - a practical example) but I’ll summarise by saying that you can deploy different combinations of the buckets simply by supplying a different numerical value for a single SQLCMD variable. Each bit of that value’s binary representation signifies whether a particular bucket should be deployed or not. This is better demonstrated using the following simple script (which can be easily leveraged inside your Post-Deployment scripts): /* $(DeployData) is a SQLCMD variable that would, if you were using this in SSDT, be declared in the SQLCMD variables section of your project file. It should contain a numerical value, defaulted to 0. In this example I have declared it using a :setvar statement. Test the affect of different values by changing the :setvar statement accordingly. Examples: :setvar DeployData 1 will deploy bucket 1 :setvar DeployData 2 will deploy bucket 2 :setvar DeployData 3   will deploy buckets 1 & 2 :setvar DeployData 6   will deploy buckets 2 & 3 :setvar DeployData 31  will deploy buckets 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 */ :setvar DeployData 0 DECLARE  @bitmask VARBINARY(MAX) = CONVERT(VARBINARY,$(DeployData)); IF (@bitmask & 1 = 1) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 1 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 2 = 2) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 2 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 4 = 4) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 3 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 8 = 8) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 4 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 16 = 16) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 5 insertions'; END An example of running this using DeployData=6 The binary representation of 6 is 110. The second and third significant bits of that binary number are set to 1 and hence buckets 2 and 3 are “activated”. Hope that makes sense and is useful to some of you! @Jamiet P.S. I used the awesome HTML Copy feature of Visual Studio’s Productivity Power Tools in order to format the T-SQL code above for this blog post.

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• Oracle's PeopleSoft Customer Advisory Boards Convene to Discuss Roadmap at Pleasanton Campus

  - by john.webb(at)oracle.com

  Last week we hosted all of the PeopleSoft CABs (Customer Advisory Boards) at our Pleasanton Development Center to review our detailed designs for future Feature Packs, PeopleSoft 9.2, and beyond. Over 150 customers from 79 companies attended representing a variety of industries, geographies, and company sizes. The PeopleSoft team relies heavily on this group to provide key input on our roadmap for applications as well as technology direction. A good product strategy is one part well thought out idea with many handfuls of customer validation, and very often our best ideas originate from these customer discussions. While the individual CABs have frequent interactions with our teams, it's always great to have all of them in one place and in person. Our attendance was up from last year which I attribute to two things: (1) More interest as a result of PeopleSoft 9.1 upgrade; (2) An improving economy allowing for more travel. Maybe we should index the second item meeting-to-meeting and use it as a market indicator - we'll see! We kicked off the day one session with an overview of the PeopleSoft Roadmap and I outlined our strategy around Feature Packs and PeopleSoft 9.2. Given the high adoption rate of PeopleSoft 9.1 (over 4x that of 9.0 given the same time lapse since the release date), there was a lot of interest around the 9.1 Feature Packs as a vehicle for continuous value. We provided examples of our 3 central design themes: Simplicity, Productivity, and lower TCO, including those already delivered via Feature Packs in 2010. A great example of this is the Company Directory feature in PeopleSoft HCM. The configuration capabilities and the new actionable links our CAB advised us on last Spring were made available to all customers late last year. We reviewed many more future Navigation changes that will fundamentally change the way users interact with PeopleSoft. Our old friend, the menu tree, is being relegated from center stage to a bit part, with new concepts like Activity Guides, Train Stops, Related Actions, Work Centers, Collaborative Workspaces, and Secure Enterprise Search bringing users what they need in a contextual, role based manner with fewer clicks. Paco Aubrejuan, our PeopleSoft GM, and Steve Miranda, the SVP for Fusion Applications, then discussed our plans around Oracle's Application Investment Strategy.  This included our continued investment in developing both PeopleSoft and Fusion as well as the co-existence strategy with new Fusion Apps integrating to PeopleSoft Apps. Should you want to view this presentation, a recording is available. Jeff Robbins, our lead PeopleTools Strategist, provided the roadmap for PeopleTools and discussed our continuing plan to deliver annual releases to further evolve the user experience. Numerous examples were highlighted with the Navigation techniques I mentioned previously. Jeff also provided a lot of food for thought around Lifecycle Management topics and how to remain current on releases with a  lower cost of ownership. Dennis Mesler, from Boise, was the guest speaker in this slot, who spoke about the new PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF). Regression Testing is a key cost component when product updates are applied. This new tool (which is free to all PeopleSoft customers as part of PeopleTools 8.51) provides a meta data driven approach to recording and executing test scripts. Coupled with what our Usage Monitor enables, PTF provides our customers a powerful tool to lower costs and manage product updates more efficiently and at the time of their choosing. Beyond the general session, we broke out into the individual CABs: HCM, Financials, ESA/ALM, SRM, SCM, CRM, and PeopleTools/ Technology. A day and half of very engaging discussions around our plans took place for each product pillar. More about that to follow in future posts.      We capped the first day with a reception sponsored by our partners: InfoSys, SmartERP (represented by Doris Wong), and Grey Sparling  Solutions (represented by Chris Heller and Larry Grey). Great to see these old friends actively engaged in the very busy PeopleSoft ecosystem!   Jeff Robbins previews the roadmap for PeopleTools with the PeopleSoft CAB  

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• Monitor and Control Memory Usage in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you want to know just how much memory Google Chrome and any installed extensions are using at a given moment? With just a few clicks you can see just what is going on under the hood of your browser. How Much Memory are the Extensions Using? Here is our test browser with a new tab and the Extensions Page open, five enabled extensions, and one disabled at the moment. You can access Chrome’s Task Manager using the Page Menu, going to Developer, and selecting Task manager… Or by right clicking on the Tab Bar and selecting Task manager. There is also a keyboard shortcut (Shift + Esc) available for the “keyboard ninjas”. Sitting idle as shown above here are the stats for our test browser. All of the extensions are sitting there eating memory even though some of them are not available/active for use on our new tab and Extensions Page. Not so good… If the default layout is not to your liking then you can easily modify the information that is available by right clicking and adding/removing extra columns as desired. For our example we added Shared Memory & Private Memory. Using the about:memory Page to View Memory Usage Want even more detail? Type about:memory into the Address Bar and press Enter. Note: You can also access this page by clicking on the Stats for nerds Link in the lower left corner of the Task Manager Window. Focusing on the four distinct areas you can see the exact version of Chrome that is currently installed on your system… View the Memory & Virtual Memory statistics for Chrome… Note: If you have other browsers running at the same time you can view statistics for them here too. See a list of the Processes currently running… And the Memory & Virtual Memory statistics for those processes. The Difference with the Extensions Disabled Just for fun we decided to disable all of the extension in our test browser… The Task Manager Window is looking rather empty now but the memory consumption has definitely seen an improvement. Comparing Memory Usage for Two Extensions with Similar Functions For our next step we decided to compare the memory usage for two extensions with similar functionality. This can be helpful if you are wanting to keep memory consumption trimmed down as much as possible when deciding between similar extensions. First up was Speed Dial”(see our review here). The stats for Speed Dial…quite a change from what was shown above (~3,000 – 6,000 K). Next up was Incredible StartPage (see our review here). Surprisingly both were nearly identical in the amount of memory being used. Purging Memory Perhaps you like the idea of being able to “purge” some of that excess memory consumption. With a simple command switch modification to Chrome’s shortcut(s) you can add a Purge Memory Button to the Task Manager Window as shown below.  Notice the amount of memory being consumed at the moment… Note: The tutorial for adding the command switch can be found here. One quick click and there is a noticeable drop in memory consumption. Conclusion We hope that our examples here will prove useful to you in managing the memory consumption in your own Google Chrome installation. If you have a computer with limited resources every little bit definitely helps out. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersFix for Firefox memory leak on WindowsHow to Purge Memory in Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default Browser TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs

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• IIS not starting: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ok, apparently a few people knew about this issue, but it is new to me and has caused me nearly an hour to track down today. What happened is that I’ve been working all day doing some final pre-deployment testing of several tools on my local dev machine. In the process I’ve been starting and stopping several IIS 7 Web sites. At some point I was done and just wanted to start my Default Web Site again and found this  little gem of an error message popping up: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070020) A lot of headless running around ensued after this, trying to figure out why IIS wouldn’t start. Oddly some sites started right up, others didn’t. I killed INetInfo, all worker processes, tried IISReset a million times and even rebooted – all to no avail. What gives? Skype, you evil Bastard! As it turns out the culprit is – drum roll please - Skype!  What, you may ask, does Skype have to do with IIS and Web Requests? It looks like recent versions of Skype have an option to run over Port 80 and 443 to allow running over corporate firewalls. Which is actually a nice feature that lets Skype work just about anywhere. What’s not so cool is that IIS fails to start up when another application is already using the same port that a Web site is mapped to. In the case of my dev site that’d be port 80 and Skype was hogging it. To fix this issue you can stop Skype from using port 80 and 443 which quickly fixes the problem. Or stop Skype. Duh! To permanently fix the problem in Skype find the option on the Options | Connection tab and uncheck the Use port 80/443 option: Oddly I haven’t run into this problem even though my setup hasn’t changed in quite some time. It appears that it’s bad startup timing that causes this problem to occur. Whatever the circumstance was, Skype somehow ended up starting before IIS.  If Skype is started after IIS has started it will automatically opt for other ports and not use port 80 and so there’s no problem. It’s easy to demonstrate this behavior if you’re looking for it: Stop IIS Stop Skype Start Skype and make a test call Start IIS And voila your error is ready for you! This really shouldn’t be a problem except that it would be really nice if IIS could give a more helpful error message when it can fire up a site because a port is blocked. “The process cannot access a file” is really not a very helpful error message in this scenario… I/O port / file ah what the heck it’s all the same to Windows. Right! I’ve run into this situation quite a bit with other, albeit more obvious applications like running Apache on the local machine for testing and then trying to run an IIS application. Same situation,  although it’s been a while – pre IIS 7 and I think previous versions of IIS actually gave more useful error messages for port blockages and that would be helpful. On the way to figuring this out I ran into some pretty humorous forum posts though with people ragging on why the hell you would be running IIS. Or Skype. The misinformed paranoia police out in full force so to say :-). It’ll be nice to start running IIS Express once Visual Studio 2010 SP1 gets released. Anyway, no surprise that Skype didn’t jump out at me as the culprit right away and I was left fumbling for a while until the Internet came to the rescue. I’m not the first to have found this for sure – I posted a message on Twitter and dozens of people replied they’d run into this before as well. Seems worth mentioning again though – since I’m sure to forget that this happened in a year from now when I hit that same error. Maybe I’ll even find this blog post to remind me…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7  Windows  

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• AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure

  - by jamiet

  Three days ago I tweeted this: Idea. MSFT could host read-only copies of all the [AdventureWorks] DBs up on #sqlazure for the SQL community to use. RT if agree #sqlfamily — Jamie Thomson (@jamiet) March 24, 2012 Evidently I wasn't the only one that thought this was a good idea because as you can see from the screenshot that tweet has, so far, been retweeted more than fifty times. Clearly there is a desire to see the AdventureWorks databases made available for the community to noodle around on so I am pleased to announce that as of today you can do just that - [AdventureWorks2012] now resides on SQL Azure and is available for anyone, absolutely anyone, to connect to and use* for their own means. *By use I mean "issue some SELECT statements". You don't have permission to issue INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs or EXECUTEs I'm afraid - if you want to do that then you can get the bits and host it yourself. This database is free for you to use but SQL Azure is of course not free so before I give you the credentials please lend me your ears eyes for a short while longer. AdventureWorks on Azure is being provided for the SQL Server community to use and so I am hoping that that same community will rally around to support this effort by making a voluntary donation to support the upkeep which, going on current pricing, is going to be $119.88 per year. If you would like to contribute to keep AdventureWorks on Azure up and running for that full year please donate via PayPal to [email protected]: Any amount, no matter how small, will help. If those 50+ people that retweeted me beforehand all contributed $2 then that would just about be enough to keep this up for a year. If the community contributes more that we need then there are a number of additional things that could be done: Host additional databases (Northwind anyone??) Host in more datacentres (this first one is in Western Europe) Make a charitable donation That last one, a charitable donation, is something I would really like to do. The SQL Community have proved before that they can make a significant contribution to charitable orgnisations through purchasing the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book and I harbour hopes that AdventureWorks on Azure can continue in that vein. So please, if you think AdventureWorks on Azure is something that is worth supporting please make a contribution. OK, with the prickly subject of begging for cash out of the way let me share the details that you need to connect to [AdventureWorks2012] on SQL Azure: Server mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net  Database AdventureWorks2012 User sqlfamily Password sqlf@m1ly That user sqlfamily has all the permissions required to enable you to query away to your heart's content. Here is the code that I used to set it up: CREATE USER sqlfamily FOR LOGIN sqlfamily;CREATE ROLE sqlfamilyrole;EXEC sp_addrolemember 'sqlfamilyrole','sqlfamily';GRANT VIEW DEFINITION ON Database::AdventureWorks2012 TO sqlfamilyrole;GRANT VIEW DATABASE STATE ON Database::AdventureWorks2012 TO sqlfamilyrole;GRANT SHOWPLAN TO sqlfamilyrole;EXEC sp_addrolemember 'db_datareader','sqlfamilyrole'; You can connect to the database using SQL Server Management Studio (instructions to do that are provided at Walkthrough: Connecting to SQL Azure via the SSMS) or you can use the web interface at https://mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net: Lastly, just for a bit of fun I created a table up there called [dbo].[SqlFamily] into which you can leave a small calling card. Simply execute the following SQL statement (changing the values of course): INSERT [dbo].[SqlFamily]([Name],[Message],[TwitterHandle],[BlogURI])VALUES ('Your name here','Some Message','your twitter handle (optional)','Blog URI (optional)'); [Id] is an IDENTITY field and there is a default constraint on [DT] hence there is no need to supply a value for those. Note that you only have INSERT permissions, not UPDATE or DELETE so make sure you get it right first time! Any offensive or distasteful remarks will of course be deleted :) Thank you for reading this far and have fun using AdventureWorks on Azure. I hope it proves to be useful for some of you. @jamiet AdventureWorks on Azure - Provided by the SQL Server community, for the SQL Server community!

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