Ozzie.eu

Dados.gov - transparência e a reutilização da informação do sector público

Citando o próprio site, o Dados.gov é um portal que tem como função publicar e agregar a informação produzida pela Administração Pública em formatos abertos que possam ser lidos e reutilizados por qualquer cidadão. O objectivo fundamental da criação deste portal visa facilitar o acesso à informação pública, promover a transparência da Administração Pública e ajudar na criação de serviços públicos electrónicos pela sociedade civil.

Já existe uma iniciativa global de transparência e reutilização dos dados que podem ser acompanhadas no portal OPEN! Government Data. A par da iniciativa portuguesa, já existem iniciativas relevantes, previamente lançadas por outros países:

• Estados Unidos da América
• Grã-Bretanha
• Suécia

O particular interesse da iniciativa portuguesa de dados abertos, é que propõe facilitar imenso a criação de um próprio ecossistema de satélites de informação, utilizando as suas origens de dados. Nesse sentido, disponibiliza:

• Um catálogo de dados: estão disponíveis todos os conjuntos de dados partilhados por instituições da Administração Pública
• Serviços de obtenção de Datasets através de protocolos REST com XML em padrão AtomPub (OData), JSON e outros.
• Tutoriais para programadores em .NET e Java.

Existe inclusivamente um inventário das aplicações já desenvolvidas por terceiros com base nas origens de dados do Dados.gov.

Este portal vai de certeza passar a ser a vítima preferida para alguns ensaios de programação.

Deixo um vídeo elucidativo dos projetos Open Government Data:

#opendata from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

A implementação das boas práticas ITIL na Administração Pública: um estudo de caso

Há coisa de cinco anos, o Instituto onde trabalho submeteu-se a um processo de adopção do ITIL. Foi um trabalho estruturante de adopção de metodologias, criação de processos e auto-estudo, com uma prova de certificação para cada colaborador.

Numa pesquisa em nada relacionada com o tema, deparei-me com uma dissertação de mestrado, acerca desta adopção do ITIL por parte de uma entidade da Administração Pública, escrita pelo então diretor do departamento de sistemas.

Por ser um caso interessante onde a racionalização dos processos se traduz numa efetiva melhoria no serviço aos utilizadores e cidadãos, deixo aqui o endereço onde podem descarregar o documento:

A implementação das boas práticas ITIL na Administração Pública: um estudo de caso

Boas leituras!

Android: Restore FTM after clockworkMod

After a bad flash of a custom ROM, my ZTE Blade smartphone wouldn’t boot beyond the robot picture. I had no luck with restoring a previous made backup and so it was stuck.
Recovering with a stock ROM from the carrier was not an option because it involved restoring the FTM startup, which should not be necessary because ClockworkMod was working fine. So, in spite of this post’s title, I’'ll explain how to recover your Android back into a custom ROM without the need to overwrite ClockworkMod.
My personal feeling about the scenario is that something got really messed up on the system or boot partitions of the SD card. And turned out in the end I was right.
The first challenge was to how I was going to copy the .ZIP file with the custom ROM to the SD card if I was unable to boot the system. It’s a simple mount/unmount functionality on ClockworkMod:

1. Connect the phone to a computer.
2. Turn the phone on with volume down and power held.
3. In clockworkmod go to “mounts and storage” and select mount USB storage. 
4. Copy your custom ROM to the SD card.
5. Unmount USB Storage

The second challenge was to solve the boot problem and get past the darn robot screen. Since the suspects were the boot and system partitions and following a hint I got from the Web:

1. Go to “mounts and storage”
2. Format boot.
3. Format system.
4. Format data.
5. Format cache.
6. Finally format sd-ext.

To recover the phone into the custom ROM, it’s simple:

1. Go to “install zip from SD card”
2. Install the ROM you copied previously.
3. Restart your phone when it is finished.

You should be all set to go!
HTH.

ORA-01704: string literal too long

Having an Oracle database with a given table storing long strings as binary data types (BLOB/CLOB), one might need to perform manual updates on those columns:

update myTable set lobColumn='Some String Value' 
where somekey=somecriteria;

The following error might occur while performing the direct update on that column:

ORA-01704: string literal too long
Cause: The string literal is longer than 4000 characters.
Action: Use a string literal of at most 4000 characters. 
Longer values may only be entered using bind variables.

The origin of the error is that the string value passed is indeed over 4000 characters long. A simple workaround script that works like a charm is:

DECLARE
  vString myTable.lobColumn%type;
BEGIN
  vString := 'Some very long string value'
  update myTable set lobColumn=vString where somekey=somecriteria;
END;

Don't forget to replace "myTable" and "lobColumn" with your table and column.
HTH.

Your backup is from a different version of Microsoft SharePointFoundation

Given the task of migrating a Sharepoint 2010 web application, from quality assurance to the live environment, our team backed up the site using the Powershell  Cmdlet "Backup-SPSite". Afterwards, we copied the backup file to the live farm and executed the "Restore-SPSite" Cmdlet. The following error message appeared:

Restore-SPSite : Your backup is from a different version of

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and cannot be restored to a 

server running the current version. The backup file should be 

restored to a server with version '4.0.145.0' or later.

After comparing the patch level on both farms, a missing security update was identified on the live farm. Having multiple applications hosted on the farm, the update roll-out was not an option.
So one of my colleagues found that the old school "stsadm" command allows the backup and restore of Sharepoint sites without checking the build number on the farm.
The solution was to use the following commands:

1. On the Q&A server, open a command prompt and enter "cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN>"
2. Execute the following command:

3. STSADM.EXE -o backup -url http://server/site 
   -filename backup.dat

4. Copy the resulting file to the live farm.
5. On the live farm, open a command prompt and enter "cd C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN>"
6. Execute the following command:

7. STSADM.EXE -o restore -url http://server/site -filename 
   backup.dat -overwrite

8. Open the desired URL and check for your site's correct update.

HTH.

Thanks to Nelson!

Installing Sharepoint 2010 on server without Internet acess

Installing a server instance of Microsoft's Sharepoint 2010 Server, I faced the following problem: the server had no Internet access and Sharepoint's setup relies on downloading the pre-requisites from Microsoft, through the public Web.

The solution is to download the pre-requisites software and copy them to the server. Here's a list for future reference:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client


• Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0


• Windows Identity Foundation 


• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5


• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET


• Hotfix for Microsoft Windows - KB976462 (didn't need it, was already installed)

Besides the pre~requisites don't forget, if you're deploying a new server on a farm, to download and install:

Requested registry access is not allowed

Having a custom developed Web Service hosted on Windows 2008 Server, after some fine tuning on the system, the service started to respond with a SOAP fault stating "Requested registry access is not allowed".

The origin of the error was the attempt the service made to write on the Event Log.

One of the changes we had made to the application was the application pool identity. It was running on Classic mode with a given domain account and we re-configured it to run on integrated mode with the application pool identity.

To grant rights to a given user account for writing on the Event Log, you should perform the steps to edit the registry described here:

1. Find key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog"


2. Right-click and choose "Permissions".


3. Put in the desired account

The catch is that the application pool is running with the Application Pool Identity Account. This is a Windows user account called "IIS APPPOOL\AppPoolName", which is created when the Application Pool is created, where AppPoolName is the name of the Application Pool.

On the permission dialog, search the local host for the "IIS APPPOOL\AppPoolName" replacing "AppPoolName" for your custom given name.

After that, the Web service worked fine.

Chrome browser slow on corporate network

Chrome is a really good browser and one of its highlights is the speed on starting up and rendering Web pages.

Having it installed on the corporate office workstation, I noticed it was much slower and taking forever to load some really simple stuff.

After some research on Google, I found and tested successfully the following scenario:

• The proxy server is automatically configured through network policies.


• Configuring the proxy server directly, without automatic configuration, restores Chrome to its full speed.

How Google improves search algorithm

Google is the best search engine on the Web, it's an undisputable leader. The accuracy of its results is also perfect. If Google Search doesn't find something, probably it's not available, or at least not publicly.

I enjoyed the video below because it makes evident that all the search enhancements made relies on the human factor. It's people who evaluate the accuracy of search results, the effective improvements achieved with potential algorithm updates, even help identify common misspellings that should be considered.

I agree that it's a scientific process and the Google search team really are scientists in the new ideas they have and the way they put them to test with real subjects: Humans.

A technology leader showing that huge amounts of data and vast infra-structure isn't enough to lead without people to sort it out:

Visual Studio 2010: command line arguments will not be passed?

Assigned with the task of updating a console application from .NET 2.0 to 4.0 and perform some enhancements, I migrated the solution under source control, from Visual Studio 2008 to 2010.

When trying to run the solution in debug mode for a given set of command line arguments, the following message appeared:

The current project settings specify that the project will be debugged with specific security permissions. In this mode, command line arguments will not be passed to the executable. Do you want to continue debugging anyway?

Since the whole purpose was to test the arguments, I cancelled the pending debug execution. After a short research, the solution is to just disable the "ClickOnce" option.

HTH.

Could not load file or assembly Oracle.DataAccess Error

Assigned with the task of updating a .NET application to use the most recent framework (4.0) and Oracle driver (ODP.NET) I was confronted with the following error at runtime:

Could not load file or assembly Oracle.DataAccess Error

After reading Mark Williams answer on this thread, the solution was to simply to check what scenario my development machine fitted on:

1. 32-bit ODP.NET installed on 64-bit o/s


2. .NET application compiled with either "Any CPU" or "x64" set for the "Platform target"


3. The application is then deployed to the 64-bit host with the 32-bit ODP.NET installed


4. The application executes as a 64-bit application but tries to load the 32-bit ODP.NET, thus the exception

My scenario was none of the above, but an additional one:

• 64-bit ODP.NET with the "Any CPU" set for the "Platform target".

As soon as I selected "x64" for the platform target, all performed successfully:



HTH you all.

Posting SOAP request from Windows Powershell

A previous post on this blog showed how posting a SOAP request from the command line on Linux could be done.

Following the post about Invoke-Web-Request, I'll show how to achieve the same task using Windows Powershell v3 CTP 1.

The first step is to build a sample SOAP request and save it on a text file, maybe called “soap.txt”. For the sake of this example I saved it on a temporary folder "C:\Temp"

Afterwards, open a powershell command prompt window and type this in:

Invoke-WebRequest http://[your web service endpoint address] -Method Post -ContentType "text/xml" -InFile C:\Temp\soap.txt -OutFile c:\Temp\soapRes.txt

The command has the following parameters:

• method: indicating the request should be sent using HTTP POST


• content type: stating the request is an XML message


• input file: the SOAP request text file


• output file: the name and path for saving the SOAP response

After execution, the resulting SOAP response is saved on the temporary folder under the name "soapresult.txt".

Cool!

Windows Powershell V3 includes command like wget/curl

The Windows Management Framework 3.0 - Community Technology Preview (CTP) has been released by Microsoft and with it comes Powershell V3.

Included on this release of powershell comes a command I've personally been missing for ages. A command to get or just test a given URL address. The is called:
Invoke-WebRequest



A simple example of the command usage would be the get this blog's home page into a single text file:

Invoke-WebRequest http://rambletech.wordpress.com/ -OutFile c:\temp\blog.txt

Another example, more complex, would be to get this blogs RSS feed and parse it:

([xml](Invoke-WebRequest http://rambletech.wordpress.com/rss).content).rss.channel.item | Select Title, Link

To download the Windows Management Framework 3.0 CTP 1 visit this address from Microsoft.

Happy programming :)

Boot Windows 7 directly from Virtual Hard Disk image

An underrated feature from Windows 7 is its ability to boot directly from a VHD file without the need for additional virtualization software.

The advantage is evident: you can have different Windows 7 deployments on your machine without resort to virtualization software, thus using the full potential of your hardware.

Being a developer, a recurring challenge is to have a development environment setup that doesn't permanently compromise the workstation's performance. The compromise is consequence of sometimes having database and application servers, as well as different IDE all installed and running services at the same time.

Usual solution to avoid such compromise are:

• having virtual machines, dedicated to each development scope, and using them individually without installing any development software on the host. However, virtualization can have a big cost on hardware performance.


• Remote desktop to a hosted development environment instance. This limits the environment's accessibility (usually to the workplace) and is not an option for small companies.

Given this options, the VHD boot architecture seems very attractive. the downside to this option is that its only available on the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows.

To find a walk-through of common scenarios of native VHD boot, visit this technet's page.

Judging by the way things progress, it's will soon be possible to run Hyper-V on a Windows client OS system.

Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview on Virtualbox

No luck. The result:



Update: Solved my problem with the steps listed here.

Windows Server 2008: "You do not have sufficient privileges to complete this installation for all users of the machine."

On one of my current projects, migrating a Web application from Windows Server 2003 to 2008, the previous version of the code was migrated from .NET 2.0 to version 4.0. The binaries were assembled into executable setup files for automatic installation and deploy of the web app.

While trying to run the setup file the following error appeared: "You do not have sufficient privileges to complete this installation for all users of the machine."

The current user logged on was a local administrator so all privileges were adequate. After a short googling, the root cause was identified: User Access Control. It's also present on Windows Server 2008 and enforces notification before any changes are made to the system.

The solution:

1. Go to Start > Control Panel


2. Select User Accounts


3. Select User Accounts (again!)


4. Select Change User Account Control settings


5. Change the security level to never notify


6. Restart the machine

After a successful installation you can always revert the settings to the more secure ones.

LibreOffice spellcheck not working - try this

After installing LibreOffice 3.4.3, I gave a test run and scribbled something on the word processor. Immediately I noticed that the spellcheck was not working. My native language is not English, so I checked to see if the Language settings were correct. Open the "Options" window from the "Tools" menu. Selected "Language Settings > Languages". Everything was correct:



I couldn't find anything on the options manager that put spellcheck to work. Finally, inside the word processor, I selected "Tools > Languages > More Dictionaries Online":



It opened a browser window on a OpenOffice Wiki page. After searching a while, I landed on the following URL: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/dictionaries

I downloaded the extension corresponding to my desired language, a .OXT file, opened with the LibreOffice extension manager and installed it.

I restarted the Word processor and it just worked. HTH!

Offline Google Mail without using a desktop client

For some people, having offline access to their inbox is a must. Because of that, some of the goodness and productivity shortcuts made available on the Web mail clients is lost, replaced with standard applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.

For Gmail users, who use the Chrome Web browser, the use of a full desktop e-mail client is now optional.

Google has released  the Offline Google Mail application for the Chrome Web browser. Quoting the Web store's description, Gmail Offline beta is a Gmail app built to support offline access, allowing mail to be read, responded to, searched and archived without network access. After first start-up, Gmail Offline will automatically synchronize messages and queued actions anytime Chrome is running and an Internet connection is available. More than just an offline app, the streamlined user interface, based off Gmail’s popular tablet interface, provides extremely fast response time with a pure, email focused experience.

Blind ambition

This year's Imagine Cup second prize winner in Software Design was a group of students from Arizona State University.
Their project is a device to help taking notes for students with vision  disabilities.
The solution uses OneNote and is spotlighted in this inspiring short video:

Cloud Computing Data Center Architecture = Container

With the growing demand and adoption of cloud based Internet services, the computing performance of data centers has never been so demanding. This causes for the deployment unit for data centers to cease being on a server basis, or even a server farm basis, but hundreds of servers all in one container.

If the server stack of a service doesn't measure up to the performance standards required, scale with another container full of hardware.

Major players in cloud computing, Google and Microsoft are already defining their data center's architecture with this new order of greatness.

Google:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I&w=560&h=349]
Microsoft:


All with a constant concern for energy-saving and the environment.

Tomboy sync using Windows and Ubuntu

For the eclectic folks like myself, that use multiple operating systems, synchronization tasks are always a challenge. The data to be synchronized has to be supported by a multi-platform client.

If we're talking about utilities like Dropbox, it already supports synchronization clients for windows, Mac and Linux.

On this specific case, I wanted a decent note taking application that allowed me to sync between my Windows desktop at work and my Ubuntu laptop at home. A suggestion I found on the Web worked on file based software and Dropbox synchronizing those folders. That might work, but

I found the solution with Gnome's desktop notes application, Tomboy. It's simple, supports sticky notes, search contents and linking between notes. Good enough for some personal stuff.

The first step, if you don't have such an account, is to register on Canonical's Ubuntu One service. It gives you 5GB free storage to sync files, contacts and notes on all your Ubuntu machines. It's meant to support Windows OS soon enough.

The second step is to install Tomboy on the Windows machine. To install Tomboy on Windows, you need .NET framework and gtk-sharp installed before you can install Tomboy:

• Get the .NET runtime


• Get the GTK# runtime


• Get Tomboy

After installing Tomboy, start the application. It automatically sets up an icon on the system tray. Press the right mouse button on it and choose "Preferences".

Go to the "Synchronization" tab and select the "Tomboy Web" service. Ont the server insert the following address: https://one.ubuntu.com/notes/

Choose the interval between synchronizations. press "Save" and you're all done on the Windows box. For the Ubuntu machine, there is this detailed tutorial on notes configuration on the Ubuntu One wiki pages.

Distributed Transactions on Windows 2008 Systems – III

This is the final post on a series dedicated to the MSDTC configuration on a Windows Server environment.

so far we've covered these aspects:

• Post I - How MSDTC works and relevant deployment scenarios and when do I need to perform additional configuration


• Post II - Defining a port range for MSDTC so it can be managed on a firewall configuration and enabling TCP/IP transaction communications.

Recalling the scenario for this post, we assume:

• static addressing of the hosts


• no naming servers available


• packet broadcast disabled


• firewall between application hosts and database hosts

On these conditions, MSDTC will not work because it cannot translate the NetBIOS names of the participating hosts into their IP addresses. Even without naming servers, DTC might try to resolve the hosts names with a network packet broadcast, but for the sake of this example we assume it's cut off by a firewall. Usually, even ICMP (ping) is cut off.

The remaining work around is to add address and name entries to a system file called "lmhosts". The "lmhosts" file is a local text file that maps Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to NetBIOS names of remote servers with which you want to communicate. It's similar to the regular "hosts" file but the latter one concerns general network lookup, like DNS replacement. The Lmhosts file is located in the "%SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers\Etc".

So, the first step is to edit the "lmhosts" file and add entries for each of the remote hosts involved. It's done adding a tab separated pair of IP address and NetBIOS name on each line. You can add the #PRE suffix to the lines so the host loads the lookups at boot time. For instance:

10.0.132.73 remote-mssql-host-1 #PRE
10.0.132.65 remote-mssql-host-2 #PRE

Afterwards, the TCP/IP connection properties need to be edited:

• On the Windows host, open the Network and Sharing Center. Press the "Local Area Connection" link.

• Press the "Properties" button. On the new window select the "Internet Protocol Version 4" and press "Properties".

• Press the "Advanced" button and select the WINS tab. Choose to enable LMHOSTS lookup and NetBIOS over TCP/IP.

Press "OK" on all windows. Perform these steps, together with the ones mentioned on the previous posts and try your luck.

Hope this helps.

Windows 7 God Mode

If you use Windows 7, create a new folder on your Desktop and name it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}". Open it to see the numerous options it gives you: administrative tools, backup and restore options, security settings.

It's a nice feature to perform super user tasks.

Distributed Transactions on Windows 2008 Systems – II

Following the subject of this here previous post, I'll discuss here a possible configuration process for DHCP reliant networks, with firewalls between segments.

The Windows Distributed Transaction Coordinator performs its communication using RPC communication, which by default means it requires 135 port and a set of dynamic ports above 1024.

A dynamic set of ports with no well-known range is not a best practice for network security. Given that, it's not a question of just asking the firewall administrator to open the default ports. We'll first configure a port range on the DTC service of the target machines.

On one of the hosts to configure:

• open the Windows Menu > Administrative Tools > Component Services;


• Drill-down to "My Computer", then select "Properties" from the mouse context menu;

• Select the "Default Protocols" tab. There should be a "Connection Oriented TCP/IP" item; Press the "Properties" button.

• Press the "Add" button and type in a suitable range like "50000-50200". This means DTC will use RPC thru ports 50000 to 50200.

Press OK on all windows and restart the server to assure it assumes the newly configured range.

Please note that this configuration has to be done on ALL hosts participating on the distributed transaction. If a given scenario has two separate MSSQL Server hosts and two more application servers, all four machines must have the port range configured on the DTC service configuration.

This step configured the port range for MSDTC on the target hosts. The next step is to request the firewall administrator to open the following ports between the two networks:

• 135: fixed standard port for RPC


• 50000-50200: the range we configured on the example. Could be another given range.

Besides the network firewalls, each hosts own Windows firewall configuration must be edited to allow the connections thru the newly configured port range. To do this, on each host, open the "Windows Firewall with Advanced Security" utility. If hints on that are needed, there's this article on Technet.

Talking about distributed transactions over the network, it's obvious TCP/IP communications ar involved. Consequently, this channel has to be enabled on the local DTC.

1. open the Windows Menu > Administrative Tools > Component Services;


2. Drill-down to “My Computer \ Distributed Transaction Coordinator \ Local DTC”, then select “Properties” from the mouse context menu;


3. Select the “Security” tab. The following options need to be checked: Network DTC Access, Allow Remote Clients, Allow Remote Administration


4. Still on the same window, on the Transaction Manager Communication: Allow Inbound, Allow Outbound, No Authentication Required


5. Check the Enable XA Transactions, uncheck the SNA LU option if you're no using legacy systems.

Press OK on all windows. It should be all done. This scenario still relies on dynamically assigned IP addresses and windows network architecture with WINS servers.

On the next and final post of the series, I'll consider a worst case scenario:

• static addressing of the hosts


• no naming servers available


• packet broadcast disabled


• firewall between application hosts and database hosts

It should be relatively interesting since everything is configured manually and it's a not so uncommon scenario for highly secured, tightly managed networks.

Distributed Transactions on Windows 2008 Systems - I

When using distributed transactions between distinct databases, using Microsoft Windows technology, one relies on the MSDTC - Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator.

The main catch to this distributed architecture is that it works based on the hosts NetBIOS names, which is specific to the Windows operating systems and is used for network resource sharing and the like.

There are at least four relevant deployment scenarios concerning this technology:

1. Full stack on the same physical host


2. DHCP reliant network, all hosts on the same segment


3. DHCP reliant networks, with firewalls between segments


4. Static Address network with firewalls

The first scenario, full stack, isn't challenging because it assumes you have the Application Server and Databases all in the same machine. It can be imagined as the common scenario for developer machines which often have the IDE, DB Server and App Server all-in-one.

The second scenario where all hosts reside on the same network segment, usually a net mask of 255.255.255.0, requires only additional configuration if there are no WINS server available and network broadcast of packages has been disabled. Otherwise the default configuration will work fine.

Next post will discuss a configuration scenario with a firewall in between the Application Server and the Database Server.