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Flash flooding forces brief evacuations in Poudre Canyon
Residents of Falls Creek Drive can return
LARIMER COUNTY, Colo. - The Larimer County Sheriff's Office ordered evacuations in Poudre Canyon but then said residents could return to their homes.
At 6:45 p.m., the sheriff's office tweeted, "All residents on Falls Creek Drive need to evacuate due to flooding of the Poudre River. Residents need to leave West on Hwy 14, to Stove Prairie Rd down into Masonville, as there is a mudslide blocking Rist Canyon Rd as well. Please do not dial 911 unless you have an emergency."
A half-hour later, the sheriff's office tweeted this message: "All residents on Falls Creek Dr can return to their homes. Highway 14 has been re-opened as well."
The notices for Falls Creek Road were sent to 41 contacts, the sheriff's office said.


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Receiving care at a NAPBC-accredited center ensures that a patient will have access to:
For more information about the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, visit their Web site
Mid-Columbia Medical Center has been accredited by the Joint Commission, a private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting quality healthcare services. This voluntary accreditation signifies that the hospital's efforts to provide highest-quality healthcare have received professional and national recognition through stringent evaluation and consultation from the Joint Commission.
For nearly 15 years, Mid-Columbia Medical Center has been affiliated with the Planetree Alliance, a group of innovative hospitals and healthcare institutions who are dedicated to implementing innovative programs to personalize, humanize and demystify the healthcare experience for patients and their families. Mid-Columbia was the first Alliance affiliate to adopt and embrace, hospital-wide, Planetree's philosophy of patient-centered care. Considered an exemplary model of Planetree, Mid-Columbia is one of the few affiliates to have incorporated all nine components of the Planetree vision into its facility.
Mid-Columbia Medical Center has been recognized for its outstanding commitment to performance excellence and has received the Oregon Quality Award, which is based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The award is given to industry leaders who have achieved outstanding performance evaluations in leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resources, process management and organizational outcomes.
Celilo has received the highest-possible rating by the independent organization that surveys and evaluates cancer centers nationwide, The Commission on Cancer (CoC) of the American College of Surgeons. In 2013 Celilo received accreditation "with commendation."
Celilo's overall approval rating indicates that, after a thorough examination of 36 standards of care and reporting, a CoC surveyor found zero deficiencies. Approval with commendation is an even loftier citation that means Celilo staff also eclipsed CoC standards in each of nine additional measurements.
Mid-Columbia Medical Center was named as one of seven Oregon companies to demonstrate outstanding commitment to families and community. The Families in Good Company Award is a reflection of Mid-Columbia's dedication to helping employees manage work and family demands, with such benefits as flexible work schedules, job sharing, telecommuting and compressed work weeks, on-site child care and wellness programs.
Driving Directions ›
Your Name:
Your Email:
Your Online Wellness Connection
myMCMC provides you 24/7 access to your personal health information online and the ability to easily connect with your care providers. We invite you to utilize this secure online tool so you can enjoy the benefits of taking charge of your wellness care.
With myMCMC you will be able to do the following:
Our team of highly-qualified Certified Athletic Trainers (ATC), physical therapists, and strength coaches are excited to present a fun, educational and dynamic 6-week strength, speed, and agility camp. We focus on enhancing athletic performance and reducing the risk of common sports injuries.
Each camp is individually tailored towards specific populations of athletes and is designed to help improve the performance of athletes of all skill and experience levels. Whether you are just going out for a sport, or a four year letterman, we look forward to helping you enhance your performance.
The Planetree Health Resource Center in partnership with The Dalles-Wasco County Public Library is offering a free summer enrichment program for children ages 3-6, 10:30am-11am, Tuesdays in June starting on the 9th.
Each week a different story will focus on attitudes and habits to keep kids healthy. Special guests will be on hand to lead a fun activity to reinforce the lessons learned from the story. Join us at The Dalles-Wasco County Public Library for stories, sharing, learning, fun and activities.

subset: commoncrawl


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Porthgwarra to Pordenack Point
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Coordinates: 50°02′40″N 5°41′12″W / 50.0444°N 5.6866°W
Porthgwarra to Pordenack Point is a coastal Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in west Cornwall, England, noted for its biological characteristics.[1]
The 158-hectare (390-acre) site, notified in 1977, is located on the western coast of Cornwall, 2.5 miles (4 km) south of Land's End. It starts in the south at the settlement of Porthgwarra and continues north along the coast of the last sections of the English Channel to Pordenack Point in the north. The South West Coast Path runs through the SSSI.[2][3]
- ^ "Porthgwarra to Pordenack Point" (PDF). Natural England. 1986. Retrieved 8 December 2011.
- ^ "Porthgwarra to Pordenack Point map". Natural England. Retrieved 8 December 2011.
- ^ Ordnance Survey: Landranger map sheet 203 Land's End ISBN 978-0-319-23148-7
|This Cornwall article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
|This article about a Site of Special Scientific Interest in England is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.


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May Madness is ON for this year! The flag drops NOW on this Rockin Car Show & Parade! This really cool legacy event in downtown San Rafael will be held this year on Saturday, May 2nd.
The Larkspur Flower & Food Festival has been postponed for a year so the Larkspur Community Association can regroup and raise funds. We expect this wonderful community event will return in 2016, better then ever.
An exciting new event is in the works for downtown San Rafael, promoting the programs and services of Renaissance Marin. It is currently under development for this August. The Entrepreneur Faire will bring together Entrepreneurs and the DIY culture on many levels. This Street Festival will feature everything from individuals to small businesses showing off their inventions and achievements. Stand by for more on this.
A strong movement is a foot to bring back the Marin Art Festival at Lagoon Park in June of 2016. Stay tuned for upcoming news and information over the next couple of months.
PHONE 415.383.3470 FAX 415.383.7020 EMAIL firstname.lastname@example.com
OFFICE 142 East Blithedale, Mill Valley, CA 94941 POST P.O. Box 315, Mill Valley, CA 94942
©Team PRO Event, 2014. All rights reserved.


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On View: A Morning Snow--Hudson River
Assured, slashing strokes of a heavily loaded brush capture the effects of morning light reflected from freshly fallen snow. This view of th...
Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
Hiroshige's 118 woodblock landscape and genre scenes of mid-nineteenth-century Tokyo, is one of the greatest achievements of Japanese art.
On View: Traveling Desk (Escritorio)
A number of Spanish American towns became well-known manufacturing centers specializing in escritorios and related desk types. Among the mos...
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Wednesday: 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Thursday: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.
Friday–Sunday: 11 a.m.–6 p.m.


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Motherfuck black land I brought Harlem back
from A$AP Rocky – Angels Lyrics on Genius
Blackland is what Purrp calls his hood. Rocky says fuck that shit because he brought Harlem back. Harlem's music scene has been relatively dry and A$AP Rocky caused a tsunami. .
To help improve the quality of the lyrics, visit A$AP Rocky – Angels Lyrics and leave a suggestion at the bottom of the page


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Trip from Mississauga benefits from radio advice
Mapquest suggests my daily commute from Mississauga to One Yonge would take 40 km and 33 minutes. In reality, it took me 37.5 km, 73 minutes and a different route.
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Thanks to a 680 News traffic alert on the morning of the test commute, I avoided the morning's major havoc on the 401 — closed between Mavis Rd. and Hurontario St. for a tractor-trailer rollover.
I resorted to an alternate route from my home in Meadowvale, in northern Mississauga, to my desk at One Yonge. During rush hour, the 401, 427 and QEW combination gets me to work in under an hour.
At 7:45 a.m. sharp, I hit Erin Mills Parkway, at Britannia Rd., and gleefully travelled through four traffic lights without having to step on my brakes. The traffic was smooth through Dundas St., Mavis Rd. and the Queensway.
But alarms went off when I spotted an orange construction sign on the Queensway at 8:15. Two minutes later, it was followed by a flashing sign near Cawthra Rd. warning motorists to expect delays.
False alarm: No road construction was in sight this rainy day.
However, familiar dread crept in as I crossed the Toronto/Mississauga border near Dixie Rd. at 8:20, where the traffic thickened.
A driver in a silver Cadillac ahead of me, near the East Mall, was busy putting makeup on her face rather than heed the traffic; annoyingly, she was driving even slower than a nearby tractor-trailer, holding up traffic.
At 8:25, I was on the Horner Ave. ramp onto the Gardiner Expressway, feeling daunted by the sea of traffic. Should I have continued on the parallel Lakeshore instead?
Then I found myself stuck behind a rusty minivan, its driver clearly enjoying the views along the expressway and apparently under the impression he owned the roadway. He was keeping a huge distance from the vehicle ahead, a gap big enough for six cars.
The traffic remained snarled all the way past the Humber River, Jameson St. and Spadina Ave. before I exited at the Yonge St. ramp at 8:54, plunging straight into merging traffic at Bay St.
I finally arrived at the One Yonge parking lot at 8:58. My odometer clocked the trip at 37.5 km.
I was relieved to see the early-bird $15 parking sign still up; the attendant said that, two minutes later, I would have had to pay an extra $5.
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Eugene Sanders is always a busy man.
This time of the year, however, every minute is scheduled.
It is August 6 and classes begin for the Sandusky School District in 12 days.
Sanders is the superintendent of Sandusky City School District. On Wednesday I worked as a Superintendent alongside Sanders for my "On The Job" series.
I meet up with him at 10 a.m. in his office at the school board building.
We were scheduled to go into our first meeting in a few minutes. It was to be the first of three back to back meetings.
Before we could leave the office a couple of men with a local company were at the door. They wanted to talk to Sanders about providing a service of fingerprinting students. They said they had an appointment. They were, however, not on the schedule. Sanders apologized and explained to the men he was going into meetings. He left them with his assistant to reschedule the meeting.
Throughout his days a lot of people will want a few minutes with Sanders.
We walked into our meeting with seven young adults and Brooke Austin, the districts web communications assistant. Austin is helping the team plan for the "Blue Streak Pride 5K Run/Walk", taking place Oct. 4.
The group has a goal of 2,000 participants, made up ideally of 1,000 current students and 1,000 residents.
Gathered around a large table the kids and Sanders talked about ways to recruit people and students to the race. They moved on to discussing manning the mile markers with volunteers from the student council who would provide water and assistance to the runners.
As I watched it became obvious Sanders and the young adults had a respect for and good relationship with one another. He challenges these kids and they rise to the occasion.
They showed me a video they made in the school promoting the race. It was a good video, my only suggestion was to film a couple segments in iconic Sandusky locations. I would like to see them film by the namesake Blue Streak coaster in Cedar Point a challenge to residents to come out and show support for the community they live in by participating in the 5K.
I then officially launched, or made active, the website so people can register for the "Blue Streak Pride 5K Run/Walk" event.
I can push a button, that was easy but Sanders wants me to participate in the 5K. I am defiantly going to have to walk it.
Sanders was the very first one to register, proudly representing the class of 1976.
"One down, two more to go," Sanders said as we headed to our next meeting.
The next meeting on Sanders agenda was about Blue Streak University, a new program that offers a potentially cost free way for high school students to get college credit and possible an associate's degree with their high school diploma.
We sat down with key administrators from Bowling Green State University, including BGSU Firelands Dean William K. Balzer and Executive Associate Dean Andrew Kurtz, and Sandusky City Schools.
Everyone talked about options for the structure of the program, including an on-line option. Part of the program could include about six weeks overseas participating in a study abroad. It was obvious they are looking to break the mold in terms of student experience.
Sanders, Balzer and Kurtz are going to be meeting a lot in these next couple months.
That meeting over, we immediately walked down the hall to another room that was already filled with school principals and department supervisors.
Sanders and I were about to hear how ready the schools are for students to arrive.
Principals and staff in the schools had schedules in place and seemed to be ready. The maintenance department said they are receiving about 20 to 25 work orders a day and will have to prioritize them. The school will be ready but some minor items may not get done until after school starts.
School transportation routes will be finalized Friday, Aug. 15, two days after the Sandusky School District Open House.
It was a productive morning. He liked what he heard. School staff is about 95 percent ready for the year, he said.
Sanders grabbed a slice of pizza as we left the meeting. That will be his lunch.
Next stop Ebenezer Church to speak to a group of kids.
In the lobby was a family. Their little son held a goodie bag in his hand. They had just registered him for school.
"Hi little man. Are you going to go to school?," Sanders asked.
The little boy was shy, his big eyes looking up at Sanders.
The family responded for him that he will be in kindergarten.
"What school are you going to?," I asked.
The family hopes Venice Heights elementary.
They realize the man in front of them is Dr. Eugene Sanders.
Their eyes light up in recognition and they shake his hand.
Sanders talks with them for a moment before he starts to walk down the street.
He had to get to Ebenezer Church, students are waiting to hear him speak.
Just one more stop in a busy day.


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The supervisor said she achieved that goal by holding six financial workshops throughout the town in the summer months, bringing the information to residents' back yards, as well as showcasing the town's financial troubles and what officials were doing to remedy the situation.
The supervisor also talked about the Thursday, Dec. 11, ice storm that left much of the Capital District paralyzed with power outages and required massive cleanup efforts.
"I was so impressed by the level of response," the supervisor said of all of the town departments working together to help residents who suffered from days-long outages.
"It takes a collaborative effort to make this work," she said.
Mahan spoke of "bureaucratic obstacles," in particular the notoriously slow planning and development process in the town.
Since taking office, Mahan said she had installed a position for the first town-designated engineers, in the hope that they would speed up the process. So far, Mahan said, that effort is working, and the town-designated engineers will begin their first project to build a high-end grocery store called Fresh Market on the corner of routes 9 and 155, or Watervliet-Shaker Road.
Mahan said her hope is that the addition of the engineers can "significantly reduce the timeframe of the process from start to finish from what once took between one and two years to less than one.
[I hope] Colonie will continue to be regarded as a business-friendly community."
As for the future, Mahan said, she is working on installing a small business advisory council, made up of business owners and chamber members throughout the town, to help strengthen the town's economy and work to achieve optimal success in the town.
Mahan concluded her speech with a quote from Walter E. Cole:
"We must look for the opportunity in every difficulty instead of being paralyzed at the thought of the difficulty in every opportunity."
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Urbex FeaturesI have only started doing Urban Exploration over the last few months. I love the feeling of finding these abandoned buildings and being able to walk through them and imagining what it was like when people still worked/lived in them.
I have decided to feature a few shots that I have seen over the last couple of days as a starter, as I hope to do more in the not so distant future. So check these shots out, favourite them, comment on them and do what you can to help support.
I few shots may belong to one photographer, I just wanted to point out some of these great photos. The next feature will be more aimed more towards the photographer.
Thanks, hope you enjoy and if you have anything you wish for me to look at, please do not hesitate.


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Bead Tutorial
For bead lover
You have the best beading tutorials, ever! Thank you!!!
That is so lovely! I love how elegant it looks.
Thank you so much! This bracelet is beautiful!
it's sooooo lovely.
thank you for sharing
as always, very pretty and super clear step-by-step tutorial, thank you! ♥
I hope I can make it someday ^^
Beautiful design! Found it featured on allfreejewelrymaking.com, loved the name, and clicked to see what it is and you picked beautiful beads too. Thanks for the project.
Beautiful bracelet! Thank you for such a clear tutorial!
WOW, Beautiful is an understatement. This is gorgeous. The steps are so easy to fellow. I can't wait to get started. Thanks
i LOVE THIS, WANTING TO TRY, SO SCARED I MESS IT UP. THANKS FOR A WONDERFUL PAGE


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Learn more about Lego Star Wars Decoration Kit:
Manufacturer: Costume SuperCenter
Mfg Part#: BB102097
Sku: 249109629
See more in Large Decorating Items
|Our Lego Star Wars Decoration Kit is a great way to add colorful and festive decorations to your party. You'll receive a banner, a centerpiece, confetti, a set of hanging decorations, balloons, and curling ribbon to keep the balloons tied down. You'll receive 20 balloons, ten in red and ten in blue. The hanging decorations and centerpiece feature cascading metallic stars. The rainbow star confetti can add a great accent to the cake or present table as well. Lastly, the Happy Birthday banner features images of Lego Star Wars characters like Yoda, Darth Vader, and Luke.


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Previous Episode | Next Episode
The Witching HourThe Witching Hour (1963) - The New Casper Cartoon Show Cartoon Episode Guide
This page has been viewed 18 times this month, and 655 times total.
- The New Casper Cartoon Show Cartoon Episode GuideEpisode GuideTelevisionSeriesCartoon
- Traditional Animation
- Paramount Cartoon Studios
- Animation Studio: Famous Studios
- Distributed by: Harvey Funnies, Inc.
- Cartoon Characters: Casper, Wendy.
- Directed By Seymour Kneitel.
- Produced By Leon Harvey, Robert Harvey, Alfred Harvey.
- Animated By Chuck Harriton.
- Music: Winston Sharples.
- First Aired about 1963.
- Originally Aired on ABC-TV (USA).
- Running Time: 7 minutes.
- Color
Cartoon Summary:
When Casper and Wendy visit a haunted house, the clock strikes 12 and the furniture all turns into witches.
Cartoon Production Information:
Low-budget, made-for-TV cartoons, which were combined with the theatrical Casper cartoons for... (more)
Watch Cartoon Video:
You can watch this episode today on your computer. Just click below to start viewing "The Witching Hour" online now.
Submit Additional Information:
Do you have anything to add to this page? Have we made any mistakes... or do you have any additional information about The Witching Hour? If so, we would love to hear from you. Please send us a quick note with your additions or corrections to this page, and we will make the corrections as soon as possible!
Cartoon Comments:
Do you love The Witching Hour, or do you think it is the worst cartoon ever? Let us know what you think! Surely you have an opinion... so share what you think. Take a minute and post your own comments about this cartoon here.


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Pythian Group
Disable Lock Escalation in SQL Server
If a lot of rows or pages are locked, the SQL Server escalates to a table-level lock, to save resources. Each single lock takes approx. 100 bytes. So if you have many locks it takes a lot of resources to manage them. (There is a great blog about lock escalation, if you want some more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2006/05/17/lock-escalation.aspx)
Until SQL Server 2008, there was no way to change the lock escalation for a single table. You could deactivate the escalation for the server by using the Trace Flags:
- 1211 - Disables Lock Escalation completely – allows to use 60% of the allocated memory – if 60% of memory is used and more locking is needed you will get an out-of-memory error.
- 1224 - Disables Lock Escalation until the memory threshold of 40% allocated memory is reached – after that Lock Escalation is enabled.
But that was in most cases not a good choice and caused a lot of performance problems. In SQL-Server 2008 and above there is a new table option (ALTER-TABLE) that can be used to change the default Lock-Escalation. This helps you if you have a table where you want to disable the escalation or if the table is partitioned.
On a partitioned table activating the AUTO Option can improve concurrency, by escalating the locks to the partition-level and not to the table-level.
ALTER TABLE – table option:
- AUTO (should be considered if you have a partitioned table)
- If tables is partitioned – the locks will be escalated to the partition-level
- If table is not partitioned – the locks will be escalated to the table-level
- Default behavior
- Locks are escalated to the table-level
- Lock escalation to the table-level is deactivated in most cases
- In some necessary cases it's allowed to escalate to the table-level
This is a cool feature, that are many developers are not aware of.
Thanks for Reading!
OakTable World at IOUG COLLABORATE15
Update history:
5-Apr: WIT panel added, Alex removed, Gwen and Pete schedule shifted.
11-Apr: Gwen and Pete swapped sessions.
13-Apr: Jonathan off lightning talks.
Guess what? OakTable World at IOUG C15 is happening again! Last year, we had awesome sessions and wonderful attendees. The sessions were so successful, in fact, that we needed a bigger room this year (there were other reasons too, but hey we can fit more people now!).
What: OakTable World C15
When: Wednesday, April 15, 2015, 8:00am – 5:30pm
Where: Mandalay Ballroom K
I really hope that, if you are reading this, you are planning to attend COLLABORATE 15 – IOUG Forum at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Vegas from April 12-16. If you haven't yet planned your trip, this might just help you make the call. You know you want to be there!
OakTable Network will be holding its highly anticipated OakTable World during COLLABORATE 15! As always, IOUG was able to provide a room for us to use for the whole day (and boy what a big room it is!). The agenda is determined by the OakTable speakers, who choose topics they are passionate about. And if history is any indicator, these are also the topics you really want to hear about.
For those of you who aren't familiar with OakTable World, Mogens Nørgaard started it as an underground event during Oracle OpenWorld—somewhere between 2007 and 2009. After several successful years and increasing popularity, the event became known as OakTable World during OOW12 and OOW13. Last year, we hosted OTWC14 at IOUG COLLABORATE 14 in Vegas. Needless to say, it was a success. So…Vegas here we come again!
Thank you to all the great companies who have sponsored this event over the years—you know who you are. This year, the usual suspects have pitched in to make it happen again—Pythian, Enkitec and Delphix. Once again, we will be printing unique t-shirts with cool graphics and awesome sponsors' logos. Be part of history!
The OTW sessions are (mostly) aligned with conference sessions, except we start a tad later (you will appreciate it) and we've shifted a few sessions by 15 minutes to pack in as many as possible. Don't worry, though, we don't run anything during lunch or afternoon nap. :)
The current schedule is below, but check back regularly as it may change due to random events.Time Presenter Title 8:10-8:15 someone authorized Opening Notes 8:15-9:00 Tim Gorman Augmenting SQL Monitor 9:15-10:15 guest session Women in Technology Panel 10:30-11:10 Pete Sharman Knowledge Sharing – Why Do It? 11:15-12:00 Gwen Shapira Kafka for DBAs – Because Inquiring Minds Need to Know 14:00-15:00 see below Lightning Talks! 15:15-16:15 Cary Millsap The Go/No-Go Matrix for Thinking Clearly About Testing 16:30-17:30 Jared Still Knowledge Builds Intuition
Lightning Talks are 10-minute presentations done in a rapid-fire fashion. They are always a huge success—you've got to be there! They may be technical, motivational, or inspirational, but regardless they are always cool speeches. The sequence of the talks may change, but everything will be presented within the hour.Presenter Lightning Talk Kyle Hailey What is DevOps Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman SQLT in AWR Warehouse Alex Gorbachev #100miles Pete Sharman SnapClones++ Jonah H. Harris Performing MongoDB-Compatible NoSQL on Top of Oracle SQL
The OakTable Network folks and other great people will be hanging around, so make sure you drop by! This is an awesome place to grow your network. Remember that the presenters determine the agenda. Our passion to share and educate is what drives us. Come join us.
Vegas, here we come!
Pillars of Powershell #2: Commanding
This is the second blog post as a continuance in the series on the Pillars of PowerShell. In the initial blog post we went over the various interfaces that can be used to work with PowerShell. In this blog post we are going to start out by going through a few terms you might find when you start reading up on PowerShell. Otherwise, I will go over three of the cmdlets you will find can be used to discover and get documentation on the cmdlets available to you in PowerShell.Pillar 2: Commanding
The following are a few terms I will use throughout this series, and ones you might find referenced in any reading material, which I wanted to introduce so we start out on the same page:
- Session
When you open PowerShell.exe or PowerShell_ISE.exe it will create a session for you, essentially a blank slate for you to build and create. You can think of this as a query window within the SQL Server Management Studio.
- Cmdlets
Pronounced "command-lets", these are the bread and butter of PowerShell that allow you to do things from getting information or manipulating it. Microsoft has coined the format of Verb-Noun for the cmdlets and it has pretty much stuck. Each version of PowerShell as it is released comes with additional cmdlets, and then product teams like SQL Server and Active Directory are also releasing cmdlets to allow you to interact with them through PowerShell. Each time you open a session with PowerShell there are a set of core cmdlets that are automatically loaded for you.
- Module
A module is basically just a set of cmdlets that can be added within your session of PowerShell. When you load a module into your session, the commands are then made available to you. If you close that session and open a new one, you will then have to reload that module to access the commands again.
- Objects
PowerShell is based on .NET, this is what is behind the scenes more or less, thus with .NET being an object oriented language PowerShell treats the data that is returned as objects. So, if I use a cmdlet to return the processes running on a machine, each process that it returns is as an object.
- The Pipeline
This is named after the symbol used to connect cmdlets together, "|" (vertical bar on your keyboard). You can think of this like a train, each train car represents a set of objects and each car you pass it through can do something to each object until you reach the end.
- PowerShell Profile
This is basically the ability to customize your PowerShell session each time you open or start PowerShell. You can do things such as pre-load modules, create custom bits of PowerShell code for reuse or easy access, and many other things. I would compare this to your profile in Windows that keeps up with things like the icons or applications you have pinned to the taskbar or the default browser.
Now I want to take you through a few core cmdlets that are used most commonly to discover what is available in the current version of PowerShell or the module you might be working with in it. I tend to use these commands almost every time I open PowerShell. I do not try to memorize everything, especially when I can look it up so quickly in PowerShell.Get-Command
This cmdlet does exactly what you think it does, gets a list of commands that are available in your current PowerShell session. You can use the parameters of this cmdlet to filter the list down to what interest you, say all the "get" cmdlets:
Get-Command -Verb Get -CommandType CmdletGet-Help
Now you might be wondering where the documentation is for all of the cmdlets you saw using Get-Command? Where is the Books Online equivalent to what you get with SQL Server? Well unlike SQL Server you can actually get the documentation via the cmdlet Get-Help. This cmdlet can return the information to you or you can use a parameter to open it up in the browser, if it is available. So for example one of the best things to look up documentation on initially is the Get-Help cmdlet itself:
The output of this command is good to read through but the main items I want to pull out are three particular parameters:
- Online: This will take you to the TechNet page of the documentation for the cmdlet. This may not work with every cmdlet you come across but if Microsoft owns it there should be something.
- Examples: This is going to provide a few examples and descriptions of how you can use the cmdlet and the more common parameters.
- Full: This will show you pretty much what document is online. This just keeps you in PowerShell instead of view it in the browser.
So let me try bringing up the examples of the Get-Help cmdlet itself:
Get-Help Get-Help -Examples
If you are using Windows 7 OS or higher, you may receive something similar to this screenshot. This is something that was added in PowerShell version 3.0, the cmdlet Update-Help. This cmdlet is used to actually update the help files on a computer as needed. In the event Microsoft updates the help files, or the online TechNet page, you can use this to download a current version of it. Microsoft has moved to this method in place of trying to do the updates locally with cumulative updates or service packs. It does require Internet access to execute the cmdlet. If your machine is not on the Internet you can download them from Microsoft's download center. In order to fix the above message I just need to issue the command: Update-Help.
You should see a progress bar as shown below while it is running through updating all the files (which that progress bar is actually done using PowerShell):
I ended up getting two errors for certain modules and this is because I am not running the cmdlet with elevated privileges. If you open PowerShell.exe with the "Run As Administrator" option and then execute the cmdlet again it will be able to update all help files without error.
Now if you run the previous command again you should see the actual examples, although if you notice it can be annoying to try and scroll back up to read all that information. A tidbit I did not know about right away was that there is a parameter in Get-Help that opens up a separate window, which makes it easier to read called, "-ShowWindow". It is basically the "-Full" output but with the option to filter out sections that do not interest you.
Get-Help Get-Help -ShowWindow
You actually can use Get-Help to search for cmdlets as well. I tend to do this more than trying to use Get-Command just because it is a bit quicker. You can just issue something like this to find all the "Get" cmdlets:
Get-Help get*
One more thing about the help system in PowerShell, it also includes things called "about files" that are basically concept topics that go deeper into certain areas. They offer a wealth of information and you can also get to these online. Something for you to try on your own to see what is available is just issue this command:
Get-Help about*Get-Member
This cmdlet is a little gem that you will use more than anything. If you pipe any cmdlet (or one-liner) to Get-Member it will provide you a list of the properties or methods available to you for the object(s) passed. This cmdlet also includes a filter of "-MemberType" that I can use to only return the properties available to me. The properties are those that we can "select" to return as output or pass to other cmdlets down the pipe.
Get-Command | Get-Member -MemberType PropertyOut-GridView
I am only going to touch on this cmdlet. It can be used to output objects into a table like view, that also offers some filtering attributes too. There are a few different Out-* cmdlets that are available to you for outputting information to various destinations. You can find these using the Get-Command or Get-Help cmdlets. To use Out-GridView on a Windows Server OS you will have to add the PowerShell ISE feature. You will get an error stating as much if you do not.
Get-Command | Out-GridViewSummary
The three cmdlets Get-Command, Get-Help, and Get-Member that I spoke on above are ones I think you should become very familiar with and explore them deeply. Once you master using these it will provide you the ability to find out anything and everything about a cmdlet or module that you are trying to use. When you start working with various modules such as Azure or SQL Server PowerShell (SQLPS) these cmdlets are quite useful in discovering what is available.
Pillars of PowerShell #1: Interacting
PowerShell is a tool that if adopted can be used to help automate and standardize processes in your Windows and SQL Server environment (among other things). This blog series is intended to show you some of the basics (not all of them) that will get you up and running with PowerShell. I say not all of them, because there are areas in PowerShell that you can go pretty deep in, just like SQL Server. I want to just give you the initial tools to get you on your way to discovering the awesomeness within PowerShell. I decided to go with a Greek theme, and just break this series up into pillars. In this first blog post I just wanted to show you the tools that are available to allow you to interact with PowerShell itself.Pillar 1: Interacting
Interacting with PowerShell is most commonly issuing commands directly on the command line interface (CLI), the step above that would be building out a script that contains multiple commands. The first two options are available "out-of-the-box" on a Windows machine that has PowerShell installed. After this, you have a few third party options available to you that I will point out.
- PowerShell.exe
This is the command prompt (or console as some may call it) that most folks will spend their day-to-day life entering what are referred to as "one-liners". This is the CLI for PowerShell. You can access this in Windows by going through the Start Menu, or just type it into the Run prompt.
- PowerShell_ISE.exe
This is the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment and is included in PowerShell 2.0 and up. This tool gives you the ability to have a script editor and CLI in one place. You can find out more about this tool and the various features that come with each version here. You can access this similar to the same way you would PowerShell.exe. In Windows Server 2008 R2 and above though this it is a Windows Feature that has to be added or activated before you can use it.
- Visual Studio (VS) 2013 Community Edition + PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio 2013
VS 2013 Community is the free version of Visual Studio that includes the equivalent functionality of Visual Studio Professional Edition. Microsoft opened up the door for many things when they did this, the main one being that you can now develop PowerShell scripts along side your C# or other .NET projects. Adam Driscoll (PowerShell MVP) developed and released an add-on specifically for VS 2013 Community that you can get from GitHub, here.
- Third party ISE/Editors
The following are the main players in the third party offerings for PowerShell ISE or script editors. I have tried all of them before, but since they only exist on the machine you install them on I tend to stick with what is in Windows. They have their place and if you begin to develop PowerShell heavily (e.g. full project solutions) they can be very useful in the management of your scripts:
- Dell's PowerGUI (formerly a Quest product) – Free
- Idera's PowerShell Plus – Free
- Sapien's PowerShell Studio – Paid, offers the ability to package your scripts into an executable among other things.
This was a fairly short post that just started out with showing you what your options are to start working and interacting with PowerShell. PowerShell is a fun tool to work with and discover new things that it can do for you. In this series I will typically stick with using the CLI (PowerShell.exe) for examples.
One more thing to point out is the versions of PowerShell currently released (as of this blog post) are 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. The basic commands I am going to go over will work in any version, but where specific nuances exist between each version I will try to point out if needed.
PowerShell Script to Manipulate SQL Server Backup Files
I use Ola Hallengren's famous backup solution to back up my SQL Server databases. The destination for full backups is a directory on local disk; let's say D:\SQLBackup\
If you are familiar with Ola's backup scripts, you know the full path for backup file looks something like:
Where InstanceName is a placeholder for the name of the SQL server instance, similarly, DatabaseName is for the Database Name.Problem
Depending upon my retention period settings, I may have multiple copies of full backup files under the said directory. The directory structure is complicated too (backup file for each database is under two parent folders). I want to copy the latest backup file (only) for each database to a UNC share and rename the backup file scrubbing everything but the database name.
Let's say the UNC path is \\RemoteServer\UNCBackup. The end result would have the latest full backup file for all the databases copied over to \\RemoteServer\UNCBackup with files containing their respective database names only.Solution
I wrote a PowerShell script to achieve the solution. This script can be run from a PowerShell console or PowerShell ISE. The more convenient way would be to use PS subsystems and schedule a SQL Server agent job to run this PowerShell script. As always, please run this on a test system first and use at your own risk. You may want to tweak the script depending upon your requirement.
Script Name: CopyLatestBackupandRename.ps1
Author : Prashant Kumar
Date : March 29th, 2015
Description: The script is useful for those using Ola Hallengren's backup solution.
This script takes SQL Server full backup parent folder as an input,
a remote UNC path as another input and copies the latest backup file
for each database, renames the backup file to the remote UNC path.
This Sample Code is provided for the purpose of illustration only and is not
intended to be used in a production environment. THIS SAMPLE CODE AND ANY
#Clear screen
#Specify Parent folder where Full backup files are originally being taken
$SourcePath = 'D:\SQLBackup\InstanceName'
#Specify UNC path ot network share where backup files has to be copied
$UNCpath = '\\RemoteServer\UNCBackup'
#Browse thru subfolders (identical to database names) inside $SourcePath
$SubDirs = dir $SourcePath -Recurse | Where-Object {$_.PSIsContainer} | ForEach-Object -Process {$_.FullName}
#Browse through each sub-drorectory inside parent folder
ForEach ($Dirs in $SubDirs)
#List recent file (only one) within sub-directories
$RecentFile = dir $Dirs | Where-Object {!$_.PSIsContainer} | Sort-Object {$_.LastWriteTime} -Descending | Select-Object -First 1
#Perform operation on each file (listed above) one-by-one
ForEach ($File in $RecentFile)
$FilePath = $File.DirectoryName
$FileName = $File.Name
$PathToCopy=($filepath -replace [regex]::Escape($SourcePath), $UNCpath)+'\'
#Forecfully create the desired directory structure at destination if one doesn't exist
New-Item -ItemType Dir -Path $PathToCopy -Force
#Copy the backup file
Copy-Item $FileToCopy $PathToCopy
#Trim the date time from the copied file name, store in a variable
$DestinationFile = $PathToCopy+$FileName
$RenamedFile = ($DestinationFile.substring(0,$DestinationFile.length-20))+'.bak'
#Rename the copied file
Rename-Item $DestinationFile $RenamedFile
SQL Server 2012 SP2 Cummulative Update 5
Hey folks,
Microsoft released the 5th Cummulative Update for SQL Server 2012 SP2. This update package contains fixes for 27 different issues, distributed as follows:
One very important issue that was fixed on this CU release was KB3038943 – Error 4360 when you restore the backup of secondary replica to another server in AlwaysOn Availability Groups.
If you use SQL Server 2012 SP2 Always On and you offload your log backups to the secondary node it is recommended that you apply this patch!
The full Cummulative Update release and the download links can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3037255/en-us
Log Buffer #416, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
This log buffer edition sprouts from the beauty, glamour and intelligence of various blog posts from Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.
Oracle Exadata Performance: Latest Improvements and Less Known Features
Exadata Storage Index Min/Max Optimization
Oracle system V shared memory indicated deleted
12c Parallel Execution New Features: Concurrent UNION ALL
Why does index monitoring makes Connor's scratch his head and charges off to google so many times.
SQL Server:
Learn how to begin unit testing with tSQLt and SQL Server.
'Temporal' tables contain facts that are valid for a period of time. When they are used for financial information they have to be very well constrained to prevent errors getting in and causing incorrect reporting.
As big data application success stories (and failures) have appeared in the news and technical publications, several myths have emerged about big data. This article explores a few of the more significant myths, and how they may negatively affect your own big data implementation.
When effective end dates don't align properly with effective start dates for subsequent rows, what are you to do?
In order to automate the delivery of an application together with its database, you probably just need the extra database tools that allow you to continue with your current source control system and release management system by integrating the database into it.
Ronald Bradford on SQL, ANSI Standards, PostgreSQL and MySQL.
How to Manage the World's Top Open Source Databases: ClusterControl 1.2.9 Features Webinar Replay
A few interesting findings on MariaDB and MySQL scalability, multi-table OLTP RO
MariaDB: The Differences, Expectations, and Future
How to Tell If It's MySQL Swapping
Pythian at Collaborate 15
Make sure you check out Pythian's speakers at Collaborate 15. Stop by booth #1118 for a chance meet some of Pythian's top Oracle experts, talk shop, and ask questions. This many Oracle experts in one place only happens once a year, have a look at our list of presenters, we think you'll agree.
Click here to view a PDF of our presenters
Pythian's Collaborate 15 Presenters | April 12 – 16 | Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, Las Vegas
Christo Kutrovsky | ATCG Senior Consultant | Oracle ACE
Maximize Exadata Performance with Parallel Queries
Wed. April 15 | 10:45 AM – 11:45 AM | Room Banyan D
Thu. April 16 | 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM | Room Banyan D
Deiby Gomez Robles | Database Consultant | Oracle ACE
Oracle Indexes: From the Concept to Internals
Tue. April 14 | 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM | Room Palm C
Marc Fielding | ATCG Principal Consultant | Oracle Certified Expert
Ensuring 24/7 Availability with Oracle Database Application Continuity
Mon. April 13 | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Room Palm D
Using Oracle Multi-tenant to Efficiently Manage Development and Test Databases
Tue. April 14 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Room Palm C
Maris Elsins | Oracle Application DBA | Oracle ACE
Mining the AWR: Alternative Methods for Identification of the Top SQLs in Your Database
Tue. April 14 | 3:15 PM – 4:15 PM | Room Palm B
Ins and Outs of Concurrent Processing Configuration in Oracle e-Business Suite
Wed. April 15 | 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM | Room Breakers B
DB12c: All You Need to Know About the Resource Manager
Thu. April 16 | 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM | Room Palm A
Alex Gorbachev | CTO | Oracle ACE Director
Using Hadoop for Real-time BI Queries
Tue, April 14 | 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM | Room Jasmine E
Using Oracle Multi-tenant to Efficiently Manage Development and Test Databases
Tue, April 14 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Room Palm C
Anomaly Detection for Database Monitoring
Thu, April 16 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Room Palm B
Subhajit Das Chaudhuri | Team Manager
Deep Dive: Integration of Oracle Applications R12 with OAM 11g, OID 11g , Microsoft AD and WNA
Tue, April 14 | 3:15 PM – 4:15 PM | Room Breakers D
Simon Pane | ATCG Senior Consultant | Oracle Certified Expert
Oracle Service Name Resolution – Getting Rid of the TNSNAMES.ORA File!
Wed, April 15 | 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM | Room Palm C
René Antunez | Team Manager | Oracle ACE
Architecting Your Own DBaaS in a Private Cloud with EM12c
Mon. April 13 | 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM | Room Reef F
Wait, Before We Get the Project Underway, What Do You Think Database as a Service Is…
Mon, Apr 13 | 03:15 PM – 04:15 PM | Room Reef F
My First 100 days with a MySQL DBMS
Tue, Apr 14 | 09:45 AM – 10:45 AM | Room Palm A
Gleb Otochkin | ATCG Senior Consultant | Oracle Certified Expert
Wed. April 15 | 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM | Room Reef F
Patching Exadata: Pitfalls and Surprises
Wed. April 15 | 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM | Room Banyan D
Tue. April 14 | 12:15 PM – 12:45 PM | Room Banyan C
Michael Abbey | Team Manager, Principal Consultants | Oracle ACE
Working with Colleagues in Distant Time Zones
Mon, April 13 | 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM | Room North Convention, South Pacific J
Manage Referential Integrity Before It Manages You
Tue, April 14 | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Room Palm C
Nothing to BLOG About – Think Again
Wed, April 15 | 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM | Room North Convention, South Pacific J
Do It Right; Do It Once. A Roadmap to Maintenance Windows
Thu, April 16 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Room North Convention, South Pacific J
Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Q&A Webinar
Today I will be debating Oracle 12c's In-Memory option with Maria Colgan of Oracle (aka optimizer lady, now In-Memory lady).
This will be in a debate form with lots of Q&A from the audience. Come ask the questions you always wanted to ask.
Link to register and attend:
Starts at 12:00pm EDT.
Free Apache Cassandra Training Event in Cambridge, MA March 23
I'll be speaking, along with DataStax and Microsoft representatives at Cassandra Essentials Day this coming Monday (March 23) in Cambridge. MA. This free training event will cover the basics of Apache Cassandra and show you how to try it out quickly, easily, and free of charge on the Azure cloud. Expect to learn about the unique aspects of Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise and to dive into real-world use cases.
Space is limited, so register online to reserve a spot.
My Co-op Experience at Pythian
Unlike most other engineering physics students at Carleton who prefer to remain within the limits of engineering, I had chosen to apply for a software developer co-op position at Pythian in 2014. For those of you who do not know much about the engineering physics program (I get that a lot and so I will save you the trip to Google and tell you), this is how Stanford University describes their engineering physics program: "Engineering Physics prepares students to apply physics to tackle 21st century engineering challenges and to apply engineering to address 21st century questions in physics." As you can imagine, very little to do with software development. You might ask, then why apply to Pythian?
Programming is changing the way our world functions. Look at the finance sectors: companies rely on complicated algorithms to determine where they should be investing their resources which in turn determines the course of growth for the company. In science and technology, algorithms help us make sense of huge amounts of unstructured data which would otherwise take us years to process, and help us understand and solve many or our 21st century problems. Clearly, learning how to write these algorithms or code cannot be a bad idea, rather, one that will be invaluable. A wise or a not so wise man once said, (you will know what I mean if you have seen the movie iRobot): "If you cannot solve a problem, make a program that can." In a way, maybe I intend to apply physics to tackle all of 21st century problems by writing programs. (That totally made sense in my head).
Whatever it might be, my interest in programming or my mission to somehow tie physics, engineering, and programming together, I found myself looking forward to an interview with Pythian. I remember having to call in for a Skype interview. While waiting for my interviewers to join the call, I remember thinking about all the horror co-op stories I had heard: How you will be given piles of books to read over your work term (you might have guessed from this blog so far, not much of a reader, this one. If I hit 500 words, first round's on me!). Furthermore, horror stories of how students are usually labeled as a co-op and given no meaningful work at all.
Just as I was drifting away in my thoughts, my interviewers joined the call. And much to my surprise they were not the traditional hiring managers in their formal dresses making you feel like just another interviewee in a long list of interviewees. Instead they were warm and friendly people who were genuinely interested in what I could offer to the company as a co-op student. The programming languages I knew, which one was my favourite, the kind of programs I had written, and more. They clearly stated the kind of work I could expect as a co-op student, which was exactly the same kind of work that the team was going to be doing. And most importantly, my interviewers seemed to be enjoying the kind of work they do and the place they work at.
So, when I was offered the co-op position at Pythian. I knew I had to say yes!
My pleasant experience with Pythian has continued ever since. The most enjoyable aspect of my work has been the fact that I am involved in a lot of the team projects which means I am always learning something new and gaining more knowledge each day, after each project. I feel that in an industry like this, the best way to learn is by experience and exposure. At Pythian that is exactly what I am getting.
And if those are not good enough reasons to enjoy working for this company, I also have the privilege of working with some extremely experienced and knowledgeable people in the web development industry. Bill Gates had once suggested that he wants to hire the smartest people at Microsoft and surround himself with them. This would create an environment where everyone would learn from each other and excel in their work. And I agree with that. Well now if you are the next Bill Gates, go ahead, create your multibillion dollar company and hire the best of the best and immerse yourself in the presence of all that knowledge and intelligence. But I feel I have found myself a great alternative, a poor man approach, a student budget approach or whatever you want to call it, take full advantage of working with some really talented people and learn as much as you can.
Today, five months into my yearlong placement with Pythian, I could not be more sure and proud of becoming a part of this exciting company, becoming a Pythianite. And I feel my time spent in this company has put me well in course to complete my goal of tying physics, engineering and programming together.
Log Buffer #415, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
This Log Buffer Edition covers the Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL with a keen look on the novel ideas.
The case was to roll forward a physical standby with an RMAN SCN incremental backup taken from primary.
Oracle Database 12c: Smart upgrade
This blog covers how to specify query parameters using the REST Service Editor.
Production workloads blend Cloud and On-Premise Capabilities
ALTER DATABASE BEGIN BACKUP and ALTER DATABASE END BACKUP
SQL Server:
Mail Fails with SQLCMD Error
How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong
Using the ROLLUP, CUBE, and GROUPING SETS Operators
The Right and Wrong of T-SQL DML TRIGGERs (SQL Spackle)
How converting extensive, repetitive code to a data-driven approach resolved a maintenance headache and helped identify bugs
Distributing innodb tables made simpler!
Choosing a good sharding key in MongoDB (and MySQL)
Update a grails project from version 2.3.8 to version 2.4.4
MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.12.0 has been released
If table is partitioned it makes it easy to maintain. Table has grown so huge and the backups are just keep running long then probably you need to think of archival or purge.
Using strace to debug application errors in linux
strace is a very useful tool which traces system calls and signals for a running process. This helps a lot while debugging application level performance issues and bugs. Aim of this post is to demonstrate the power of strace in pinning down an application bug.
I came across an issue in which nagios was sending the following alerts for a RHEL6 system.***** Nagios ***** Notification Type: PROBLEM Service: NTP Host: xxxxx Address: xx.xx.xx.xx State: UNKNOWN Date/Time: Tue Feb 17 10:08:36 EST 2015 Additional Info: cant create socket connection
On manually executing the nagios plugin on the affected system, we can see that the command is not running correctly.# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_ntp_time -H localhost -w 1 -c 2
can't create socket connection
I ran strace on the command. This would create a file /tmp/strace.out with strace output.# strace -xvtto /tmp/strace.out /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_ntp_time -H localhost -w 1 -c 2
Following are the options which I passed.-x Print all non-ASCII strings in hexadecimal string format.
-v Print unabbreviated versions of environment, stat, termios, etc. calls. These structures
are very common in calls and so the default behavior displays a reasonable subset of struc?
ture members. Use this option to get all of the gory details.
-tt If given twice, the time printed will include the microseconds.
-o filename Write the trace output to the file filename rather than to stderr. Use filename.pid if -ff
is used. If the argument begins with `|' or with `!' then the rest of the argument is
treated as a command and all output is piped to it. This is convenient for piping the
debugging output to a program without affecting the redirections of executed programs.
Time stamps displayed with -tt option is not very useful in this example, but it is very useful while debugging application performance issues. -T which shows the time spend in each system call is also useful for those issues.
From strace output,10:26:11.901173 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3
10:26:11.901279 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(123), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1″)}, 16) = 0
10:26:11.901413 getsockname(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(38673), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1″)}, [16]) = 0
10:26:11.901513 close(3) = 0
10:26:11.901621 socket(PF_INET6, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3
10:26:11.901722 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(123), inet_pton(AF_INET6, "::1″, &sin6_addr), sin6_flowinfo=0, sin6_scope_id=0}, 28) = -1 ENETUNREACH (Network is unreachable) <—————-
10:26:11.901830 close(3) = 0
10:26:11.901933 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_UDP) = 3
10:26:11.902033 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(123), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1″)}, 16) = 0
10:26:11.902130 socket(PF_INET6, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_UDP) = 4
10:26:11.902238 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(123), inet_pton(AF_INET6, "::1″, &sin6_addr), sin6_flowinfo=0, sin6_scope_id=0}, 28) = -1 ENETUNREACH (Network is unreachable) <—————-
10:26:11.902355 fstat(1, {st_dev=makedev(0, 11), st_ino=3, st_mode=S_IFCHR|0620, st_nlink=1, st_uid=528, st_gid=5, st_blksize=1024, st_blocks=0, st_rdev=makedev(136, 0), st_atime=2015/02/17-10:26:11, st_mtime=2015/02/17-10:26:11, st_ctime=2015/02/17-10:16:32}) = 0
10:26:11.902490 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fc5a8752000
10:26:11.902608 write(1, "can't create socket connection", 30) = 30
Let us have a deeper look,
You can see that socket() is opening a socket with PF_INET (IP v4) domain and IPPROTO_IP (tcp) protocol. This returns file descriptor 3. Then connect() is connecting to the socket using the same file descriptor and connects to ntp port (123) in localhost. Then it calls getsockname and closes the file descriptor for the socket.10:26:11.901173 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3
10:26:11.901279 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(123), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1″)}, 16) = 0
10:26:11.901413 getsockname(3, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(38673), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1″)}, [16]) = 0
10:26:11.901513 close(3) = 0
Next it does the same but with PF_INET6 (IP v6) domain. But you can see that connect() fails with ENETUNREACH.10:26:11.901621 socket(PF_INET6, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3
10:26:11.901722 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(123), inet_pton(AF_INET6, "::1″, &sin6_addr), sin6_flowinfo=0, sin6_scope_id=0}, 28) = -1 ENETUNREACH (Network is unreachable) <—————-
10:26:11.901830 close(3)
From connect man page,ENETUNREACH
Network is unreachable.
This process is repeated with IPPROTO_UDP (udp) protocol as well.
On checking the system, I see that that only IPv4 is enabled. 'inet6 addr' line is missing.[root@pbsftp ~]# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:56:90:2E:31
inet addr:xx.xx.xx.xx Bcast:xx.xx.xx.xx Mask:xx.xx.xx.xx <——————–
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:5494691 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4014672 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:5877759230 (5.4 GiB) TX bytes:5608605924 (5.2 GiB)
IPv6 is disabled in the system using following /etc/sysctl.conf entries.net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
This behavior of nagios plugin is wrong as it should not die when one of the connect fails.
Issue is fixed in upstream patch.
Enabling IPv6 by removing following entries from /etc/sysctl.conf and running 'sysctl -p' would act as a workaround.net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
To fix the issue, the upstream patch need to be either backported manually to create an rpm or a support ticket need to be opened with the operating system vendor to backport the patch in their product release.
MySQL Sounds Like Fun
I love finding out new things about MySQL. Last week, I stumbled on a query that had the phrase "SOUNDS LIKE" in it. Sounds made-up, right? Turns out MySQL is using a known "soundex" algorithm common to most databases, and popular in use cases in geneaology.
The basic idea is that words are encoded according to their consonants. Consonants that sound similar (like M and N) are given the same code. Here's a simple example:
("soundex" and "sounds like" are different ways of doing the same thing in these queries)
MariaDB> select soundex("boom"); +-----------------+ | soundex("boom") | +-----------------+ | B500 | +-----------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("bam"); +----------------+ | soundex("bam") | +----------------+ | B500 | +----------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("bin"); +----------------+ | soundex("bin") | +----------------+ | B500 | +----------------+
This simple example isn't terribly useful, but if you were trying to find similar, but differently spelled, names across continents, it could be helpful:
MariaDB> select soundex("William"); +--------------------+ | soundex("William") | +--------------------+ | W450 | +--------------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("Walaam"); +-------------------+ | soundex("Walaam") | +-------------------+ | W450 | +-------------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("Willem"); +-------------------+ | soundex("Willem") | +-------------------+ | W450 | +-------------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("Williama"); +---------------------+ | soundex("Williama") | +---------------------+ | W450 | +---------------------+
And you could probably agree these variations match as well:
MariaDB> select soundex("Guillaume"); +----------------------+ | soundex("Guillaume") | +----------------------+ | G450 | +----------------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("Uilleam"); +--------------------+ | soundex("Uilleam") | +--------------------+ | U450 | +--------------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("Melhem"); +-------------------+ | soundex("Melhem") | +-------------------+ | M450 | +-------------------+ MariaDB> select soundex("Uilliam"); +--------------------+ | soundex("Uilliam") | +--------------------+ | U450 | +--------------------+
Well, that's pretty neat. Of course, I want to try the silliest word I can think of:
MariaDB> select soundex("supercalifragilisticexpealidocious"); +-----------------------------------------------+ | soundex("supercalifragilisticexpealidocious") | +-----------------------------------------------+ | S162416242321432 | +-----------------------------------------------+
So the algorithm doesn't stop at 3 digits; good to know.
What does the algorithm do? Luckily MySQL is open source, and so we can look in the source code:
This looks like the raw mapping. And then this is called into a function that loops through the characters in the word.
/* ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ */ /* :::::::::::::::::::::::::: */ const char *soundex_map= "01230120022455012623010202";
Note that even though it's called "sounds like" it is really simply a character mapping based on an agreement by the developers' ears which characters sounds similar. That's of course an oversimplification, and I see in the code comments the following:
/**************************************************************** * SOUNDEX ALGORITHM in C * * * * The basic Algorithm source is taken from EDN Nov. * * 14, 1985 pg. 36. *
But despite hitting up several librarians, I can't seem to get a copy of this. Someone out there has a copy sitting around, right?
As a side note, this is obviously specific to the English language. I found references to German and other languages having soundex mappings, and would be curious to see those and hear of any language-specific ways to do this.
Curiosity aside, here's a real use.
I pulled down some government climate data. Let's say the location field has some of my favorite misspellings of "Durham" in it:
MariaDB [weather]> select distinct(two), count(two) from weather.temps group by two; +--------------------------------------------+------------+ | two | count(two) | +--------------------------------------------+------------+ | NULL | 0 | | DRM | 51 | | DURHAM | 1101887 | | DURM | 71 | | NCSU | 1000000 | | RALEIGH DURHAM INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT NC US | 1096195 | | RDU AIRPORT | 1000000 | +--------------------------------------------+------------+
A "LIKE" clause won't work terribly well here.
I confirmed the misspellings would match as I expected:
MariaDB [weather]> select soundex("Durham"), soundex("Durm"), soundex("DRM"); +-------------------+-----------------+----------------+ | soundex("Durham") | soundex("Durm") | soundex("DRM") | +-------------------+-----------------+----------------+ | D650 | D650 | D650 | +-------------------+-----------------+----------------+
So instead of manually creating a query like:
MariaDB [weather]> select count(two) from weather.temps where two='DRM' or two='DURHAM' or two='DURM'; +------------+ | count(two) | +------------+ | 1102009 | +------------+
I can simply do this:
MariaDB [weather]> select count(two) from weather.temps where two sounds like 'Durham'; +------------+ | count(two) | +------------+ | 1102009 | +------------+
There are more than several ways to do string comparisons, but I enjoyed finding this one.
(Bonus points will be granted to the first person who comments that RDU is also Durham and submits a unique query to include it in the count.)
Monitoring Cassandra with Grafana and Influx DB
In this post I will explain how to set up Cassandra monitoring with influxDB and Grafana. This can also be used to connect to other monitoring systems (Graphite, Collectd, etc…) but since both influxDB and Grafana are hot topics at the moment I decided to follow the trend! I was asked why I was doing this when a tool like OpsCenter is available, but sometimes you want to have all your systems reporting to a single dashboard. And if your dashboard is Grafana and your Backend is influxDB then you will learn how to connect Cassandra to it!
– You are running a Linux system (This post is based on CentOS 7)
– You are using Cassandra 1.2+ (I'm using 2.1.3 in this case)
- Cassandra Installation
- Graphite Metrics Jar
- influxDB – http://influxdb.com/
- Grafana – http://grafana.org/
- Apache (Any webserver would do)
This one is dead easy, once you have the package install it (rpm -i, dpkg -i). Start the service:
service influxdb start
Once the service is running, go to the configuration (/opt/influxdb/shared/config.toml) and edit the file so that under [input_plugins] it looks like this:
# Configure the graphite api [input_plugins.graphite] enabled = true # address = "0.0.0.0" # If not set, is actually set to bind-address. port = 2003 database = "cassandra-metrics" # store graphite data in this database udp_enabled = true
Save the file, reload the service:
service influxdb reload
Now go to your browser localhost:8083, click connect (no credentials should be needed), and after you logged in, enter in a database name (use cassandra-metrics) and click Create (This should be your only option). Now you can click the database, and add an user to it (and make it admin). Now create another database, with name "grafana", create an admin for that database also.
Now you are done with influxDB.
Grafana is a bit more tricky, since it is needed to configure a webserver also. Let's assume apache is installed, and the home directory for www is /var/www/html.
So get the grafana package and extract it to /var/www/html. So the end result should be something like /var/www/html/grafana.
Now do the following:
cd /var/www/html/grafana cp config.sample.js config.js
Now let's configure the connection between influXDB and Grafana. Open for edit the new copied file config.js and edit it so it looks like this:
datasources: { influxdb: { type: 'influxdb', url: "http://localhost:8086/db/cassandra-metrics", username: 'admin', password: 'admin', }, grafana: { type: 'influxdb', url: "http://localhost:8086/db/grafana", username: 'admin', password: 'admin', grafanaDB: true }, },
Now redirect your browser to localhost/grafana and you will have the Grafana default dashboard.Preparing Cassandra
Now the final piece of the puzzle. Now we follow more or less the Cassandra guide that exists here, but we need to make some changes to make it more valuable (and allow multiple nodes to provide metrics).
So, first of all, put the metrics-graphite-2.2.0.jar in all the Cassandra nodes /lib directory.
Now create a yaml file with similar to the Datastax example, lets call it influx-reporting.yaml and store it on /conf directory. Now edit the file again so it looks like this:
graphite: - period: 60 timeunit: 'SECONDS' prefix: 'Node1' hosts: - host: 'localhost' port: 2003 predicate: color: "white" useQualifiedName: true patterns: - ".*"
What did we change here, first we added a prefix field, this will allow us to identify the node that is providing the metrics. It must be different for every node, otherwise the metrics will overwrite/mix with each other. Then we decided to allow all patterns (".*"), this means that Cassandra will push out all the metrics into influxDB. You can decide whether or not this is too much and just enable the metrics you want (find out more about it here).
Now edit the cassandra-env.sh so that it will read the yaml file to provide the metrics. Add the following line to the end of the file:
JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Dcassandra.metricsReporterConfigFile=influx-reporting.yaml"
If all is done correctly, you can restart the Cassandra node (or nodes, but don't do it all at the same time, 2min between each is recommended) and if the log file has the following message:
INFO [main] YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,SSS CassandraDaemon.java:353 - Trying to load metrics-reporter-config from file: inf lux-reporting.yaml INFO [main] YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS,SSS GraphiteReporterConfig.java:68 - Enabling GraphiteReporter to localhost:2003
All is good!Graphing!
Grafana is not that difficult to use, so once you start exploring a bit (And reading the documentation) you will find out doing nice graphs. This could be a long post only about graphing out, so I'm just go and post some images of the graphs I'm getting out of Grafana so that you can see how it can be powerful and help you on keeping your Cassandra Healthy.
Cassandra 101 : Understanding What Cassandra Is
As some of you may know, in my current role at Pythian, I am tackling OSDB and currently Cassandra is on my radar. So one of the things I have been trying to do is learn what Cassandra is, so in this series, I'm going to share a bit of what I have been able to learn.
According to the whitepaper "Solving Big Data Challenges for Enterprise Application Performance Management" , Cassandra is a "distributed key value store developed at Facebook. It was designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service without single point of failure allowing replication even across multiple data centers as well as for choosing between synchronous or asynchronous replication for each update."
Cassandra, in layman's terms, is a NoSQL database developed in JavaOne. One of Cassandra's many benefits is that it's an open source DB with deep developer support. It is also a fully distributed DB, meaning that there is no master DB, unlike Oracle or MySQL, so this allows this database to have no point of failure. It also touts being linearly scalable, meaning that if you have 2 nodes and a throughput of 100,000 transactions per second, and you added 2 more nodes, you would now get 200,000 transactions per second, and so forth.
Cassandra is based on 2 core technologies, Google's Big Table and Amazon's Dynamo, which Facebook uses to power their Inbox Search feature and released it as an open source project on Google Code and then incubated at Apache, and is nowadays a Top-Level-Project. Currently there exists 2 versions of Cassandra:
- Community Edition.- This is distributed under the Apache™ License
- Enterprise Edition .- This is distributed by Datastax
Since Cassandra is a distributed system, it follows the CAP Theorem, which is awesomely explained here, and it states that, in a distributed system, you can only have two out of the following three guarantees across a write/read pair:
- Consistency.- A read is guaranteed to return the most recent write for a given client.
- Availability.-A non-failing node will return a reasonable response within a reasonable amount of time (no error or timeout).
- Partition Tolerance.-The system will continue to function when network partitions occur.
Also Cassandra is a BASE (Basically Available, Soft state, Eventually consistent) type system, not an ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) type system, meaning that the system is optimistic and accepts that the database consistency will be in a state of flux, not like ACID which is pessimistic and it forces consistency at the end of every transaction.
Cassandra stores data according to the column family data model where:
- Keyspace is the container for your application data, similar to a schema in a relational database. Keyspaces are used to group column families together. Typically, a cluster has one keyspace per application.It also defines the replication strategy and data objects belong to a single keyspace
- Column Family is a set of one,two or more individual rows with a similar structure
- Row is a collection of sorted columns, it is the the smallest unit that stores related data in Cassandra, and any component of a Row can store data or metadata
- Row Key uniquely identifies a row in a column family
- Column key uniquely identifies a column value in a row
- Column value stores one value or a collection of values
- Row Key uniquely identifies a row in a column family
Also we need to understand the basic architecture of Cassandra, which has the following key structures:
- Node is one Cassandra instance and is the basic infrastructure component in Cassandra. Cassandra assigns data to nodes in the cluster, each node is assigned a part of the database based on the Row Key. Usually corresponds to a host, but not necessarily, specially in Dev or Test environments.
- Rack is a logical set of nodes
- Data Center is a logical set of Racks, a data center can be a physical data center or virtual data center. Replication is set by data center
- Cluster contains one or more data centers and is the full set of nodes which map to a single complete token ring
Hopefully this will help you understand the basic Cassandra concepts. In the next series, I will go over architecture concepts of what a Seed node is, the purpose of the Snitch and topologies, the Coordinator node, replication factors, etc
Note 1:
André Araújo, a great friend of mine and previous Pythianite, wrote about his first experience with Cassandra : My First Experience with Cassandra – Part 1
Note 2:
This post was originally published in my personal blog: rene-ace.com
Log Buffer #414, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
This Log Buffer Edition picks the sea shells from Blogs across the seas of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL and arrange them for you in this Edition. Enjoy.
12c Parallel Execution New Features: Concurrent UNION ALL
Visualizing Statspack Performance Data in SQL Developer
Optimizer statistics – Gathering Statistics and Histograms
Big Data Made Actionable with Omar TawaKol at SXSW
Mobile backend with REST services and JSON payload based on SOA Suite 12c
SQL Server:
Setting Different Colors for Connections in SSMS
Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases
This article shows a step by step tutorial to create a virtual machine in 15 min on Windows Azure.
What SQL Statements Are Currently Using The Transaction Logs?
SQL Server Random Sorted Result Set
Oracle Linux 7.1 and MySQL 5.6
MySQL Workbench 6.3.2 RC has been released
MariaDB CONNECT storage engine now offers access to JSON
Avoiding MySQL ERROR 1052 by prefixing column names in multi table queries
MySQL 5.7.6 DMR: Packages, Repos, Docker Images
- « first
- ‹ previous
- 1
- 2
- 3


text:
Gregor Rankin told a court yesterday that he landed on his right shoulder as he took part in a self-defence manoeuvre with a colleague in December 2010. The police constable had taken the role of an offender as he paired up with an inspector during the officer safety training course.
Following the accident he raised an action against Sir Stephen House, suing the Police Scotland Chief Constable for £150,000. Liability is contested in the action.
His counsel, Angela Grahame, QC, told the judge, Lady Rae, that the argument related to whether there was a breach of duty to take reasonable care.
In the action it is claimed that the techniques adopted for training officers in "the simulated combat situation" Mr Rankin was involved in at the time were unsafe.


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The Two-Way
8:45 am
Tue July 2, 2013
Top Stories: Fallen Firefighters Honored; Heat Wave Continues
By Mark Memmott
Originally published on Tue July 2, 2013 9:44 am
Good morning.
Our early headlines:
-- VIDEOS: Solemn Salutes To Fallen Firefighters In Arizona.
-- Pressure Builds On Egypt's Morsi To Compromise or Step Down.
-- Snowden Seeks Asylum In 20-Plus Nations, Gives Up On Russia.
-- Book News: Neil Gaiman Revives 'Sandman' Comic Series.
Other news:
-- Heat Wave Continues In Western U.S. (National Weather Service)
-- Accused Fort Hood Shooter Expected To Plead Not Guilty. (The Associated Press)
-- "Obama, Bush Brought Together In Africa At Embassy Bomb Memorial." (Reuters)
-- Former Rep. Bill Gray, D-Pa., Dies. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
-- "Apple's iWatch Trademark Filings Spotted In Taiwan, Mexico." (PCWorld)
Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.


text:
Recording Artist Keldamuzik to Launch New Talk Show DIVA TALK TONITE
Recording artist and TV personality Keldamuzik has launched her latest project, "Diva Talk Tonite", which is a talk show hosted by Kelda herself. The program involves a different panel of guests that hold discussions on current events which will be based on entertainment, pop culture, social issues, fashion and more. The first pilot episode has already included a vibrant panel of guests including Marisa Garcia of Chunky Girl Comics, Liliana Herrera who is an aspiring model/artist and last but not least Danyel Monique Davis of N'Spyre Entertainment.
Diva Talk Tonite also kicked off with special personal guests who were interviewed by Kelda one on one, which also included Italina Kirknis of Italina Image & Branding, writer, singer and model Serena Toxicat, as well as powerful and inspiring author Andrea "Michelle" Mills. The show also delivers hilarious, random and outlandish skits from Kelda, with the influence of Saturday Night Live and other comedy shows.
Starting from hosting reality TV series, Diva TV in the Bay Area, Keldamuzik was known as the go to outlet to get interviewed in regards to your latest product or brand. Now with Diva Talk Tonite, Kelda has taken it one step further, which is incorporating all of her talents and showcasing it on a series, which will be distributed worldwide through several TV/Online outlets. Fire Season Studios is behind the production of her series and has assisted with developing ideas to enhance the show's dialogue. The glamorous clothing that Kelda wears is also sponsored by Ahmyna Xrussell, CEO of "So Swee" and S.O.S Apparel Designs. Digz Media Group is the executive producer of the program and will keep you updated on which networks will be syndicating this series. We want to thank everyone for their time and hope that you will continue to stay with us on this journey.
About Author
- Casting Roundup: Sarah Chalke, Kim Raver Headline New Pilots
- ADVENTURE TIME Headed to the Big Screen?
- Pilot Season Roundup: Colm Feore, Daniel Stern, Dave Annable to Star in New Shows
- James Franco to Star in New Fox Comedy, WHY HIM?
- Christopher Meloni to Star in WGN America's Slave Drama UNDERGROUND
- Check Out Alex Dunphy's Full College Essay from Latest MODERN FAMILY Episode
- Photo Flash: HBO Reveals Key Art for GAME OF THRONES Season 5
- Syfy to Honor Leonard Nimoy with Special Programming This Sunday
- Grammy Winner Kelly Clarkson Exclusively Premieres New Music from New Album on MTV, VH1 & CMT First
- CONSTELLATIONS' Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson Set for THEATER TALK This Weekend


text: Two men were arrested Sunday during a warrant search in Morongo Valley. According to a Sheriff's report, deputies went to a home in the 9300 block of Navajo Trail about 7:30 a.m. Deputies heard people inside the home, but no one answered the door. When the deputies forced the door


text:
Have you heard of a fabulous product called "Washi tape"? Do you OWN some?! I might be way behind the times, but I only recently discovered these rolls of beautiful, patterny, tape-y goodness. I promptly bought about 6 rolls of it,because...who could resist? Then...they sat there. It's a tragedy that such cute rolls of patterned tape weren't being put to good use! So, my brain went to work and I discovered just ONE use that was so easy to do and so darn cute, that I just have to share.
We are going to be making some washi tape clips!
These can be made a variety of ways and can be used in so many more! Today, I'm going to show you two ways to give some clips a washi make-over in just seconds.
First, gather your supplies. I bought a package of large paper clips from the dollar store, as well as a four-pack of magnetic clips as well. I also dusted off my rolls of washi tape (bought from the amazing Pick Your Plum), as well as grabbed my exacto knife (you can also use scissors).
I will be, first, adding some washi tape to the regular paper clips. Grab a roll of washi tape and measure out about 2" of the tape (you can use more if you want the tag a little longer).
Slip the piece of washi tape through the end of the paper clip and stick the two ends together. The middle will bunch up a bit.
Now you can clip the end into a "v" shape, or just snip a diagonal. Done! Cute, right?
Now, cut a slit into a cute little card and clip a few of these on to give as a gift! These make great bookmarks, as well as embellishments for scrapbook pages.
You can also run some washi tape along the bottom of other clips to give as gifts, or hang on your fridge to hold photos or other goodies!
With how adorable the patterns are, and the wonderful adhesive quality of tape - washi tape can make quick work out of making embellishments and more!
Happy washi-ing!
Hello, my friends. It is me, again, here to share with you a super simple hand-made embellishment. I chose to make felt flowers with Papertrey Ink dies, felt, and my old, faithful Cuttlebug. I need a show of hands for how many people still (after all these years) love their Cuttlebugs! I know. Anyway, first, I will show you my layout:
See those cute little flowers on the bottom left? They could not be easier to make. Papertrey Ink felt is wool felt and it cuts like a dream as long as you use a shim of some sort (Papertrey makes one but you can also use a thin piece of chipboard) when you run the dies through your Cuttlebug (or other die cut machine).
After you cut the flowers, you just layer them (or not) and stitch a button on and voila!...you have a lovely little embellishment that adds cuteness and wonderful texture to your project. One little hint that seems to work for me is to stitch the buttons and felt flowers right through the paper so you do not need to worry about sticking felt to paper which is not always the easiest thing to do. Those little glue dots (that I treasure, by the way) don't really adhere wonderfully well to felt.
Oh, and, one important little thing before I go...
make sure you use the negative die cut because you do not want to waste even a little scrap of that wonderful felt. Well, that is all for me today so I hope you enjoy this lovely day and I hope you have fun making cute little felt embellishments all of your very own.
Good morning, good morning! It's October 12, so you better have those cameras clicking!
Looks like a beautiful day for the Take Twelve Photography Challenge. FE Warren AFB, 7:19 am
We've reached the final quarter of the challenge (!!), which means you are well on your way to a complete collection of 144 distinct moments and memories. If you're playing along with the Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit's theme challenges, you're on the hunt for pictures that reflect change today—seasonal change, personal change, change in your pocket... of course, you're always welcome to simply document your day, too! Remember, there are no rules for Take Twelve. All cameras, all approaches are welcome.
This month's Take Twelve prize sponsor is Shelley Haganman, who operates a glorious shop on Etsy called A Flair For Buttons. Glorious. Check out a little sample:
That's just page 1, folks. There are 9 pages of one-of-a-kind handmade flair buttons, and our lucky winner this month gets to pick three sets as her prize. Just think of the fun you can have with these—on Project Life, your refrigerator, Christmas gift wrapping, regular scrapbook layouts... all you have to do is share your twelve photographs with us here!
Back with some more fabulous projects from inside Amy Powers Inspired Ideas magazine. Today we are highlighting glittery and sparkly projects that you should try out!
Click on the links above for complete instructions
To see the other Amy projects we highlighted click on the links below
To see all current and past issues of Inspired Ideas, click here
Learn more from Amy at Boot Camp, registration details here.
Back with more Amy Powers projects to share and inspire. These are all kid friendly and would be great to make with your little friends.
click on the links above to get full instructions
See the fall projects shared prior here.
We hope to see you in our Boot Camp Barracks! Register here
Introducing creativity coach extraordinaire Amy Powers. She is newer to the scrapbooking world but has been a long time crafter and evangelist for creative living. She is the Creative Living coach for Boot Camp and we invite you to get to know her better. She owns, publishes, edits, basically does everything for her online magazine, Inspired Ideas. All week here on the Ella blog we are sharing projects from that have been previously published in her magazine. (some of the projects are by her others by her contributors)
Spooktactular Plant Stakes by Cari Kraft
Click on the links above for complete instructions
Don't forget that Boot Camp begins in less than two weeks! You can log in daily from October 15 to 27 for targeted daily drills that will shape you up in all four areas of scrapbooking.
See you in our Boot Camp Barracks! Register here
In no particular order, here are three behind-the-scenes peeks at the people and projects you'll enjoy in Boot Camp 2012, coming to a computer near you October 15.
Have you heard? Boot Camp is back, and it's BIGGER THAN EVER.
It's the format you know and love, with a couple of awesome differences:
1. Our four instructors are Ali Edwards on storytelling, Cathy Zielske on design, Amy Powers on creative living, and Tracey Clark from the Shutter Sisters on photography.
2. Our event will be hosted at our parent company website, Big Picture Classes, where you'll enjoy a robust gallery, message board, and a live chat with each instructor!
The fun begins in less than two weeks! You can log in daily from October 15 to 27 for targeted daily drills that will shape you up in all four areas of scrapbooking. Here's what to expect from our four amazing drill instructors:
With Ali, you'll be slowing down your scrapbook process and creating a thoughtful, meaningful page in 10 minutes a day over the course of three days. You'll love how this will help you think about your process in a new light.
With Cathy, you'll get three separate design lessons, each with tons of layout examples and a targeted drill for you to try on your own. And not to give TOO much away, but you'll get to see Cathy in her swim cap and goggles as part of the fun.
With Amy, you'll make a gorgeous celebration tree, a spider ornament, and thanksgiving spools and glittered acorns. The steps are simple, but you'll want to have the right supplies on hand, so make sure you check out your pre-assignment in the classroon.
With Tracey, you'll get three inspiring photography challenges suitable for photographers of ALL levels. Tracey will show you some of her favorite photographic techniques and challenge you to stretch your photography skills.
See you in our Boot Camp Barracks! Register here.
Hello everyone! What a difference a week makes... the sun is shining, my camera is back from the repair facility in California, and as far as I can tell my email is working just fine again. And how could the day be anything other than spectacular when I have fun pages to share with you from the Take Twelve Team?
I chose a neutral cream-based scheme for my September page vs. my ever-faithful standby kraft, and was pleasantly surprised how much color I really did manage to capture on one of the dreariest days we've had in Cheyenne all year. Trivia: Cheyenne really does have an inordinate amount of purely sunny days—236 on average per year, compared with 205 for the overall U.S. average. Rainy days kind of mess with us here in southeast Wyoming : )
You can read more about my photos here.
Monica Bradford also began with a neutral foundation for her page, but added an additional layer of depth with colorful twine accents. This thoughtfully documented Wednesday filled with ordinary chores and routines is not suprisingly an extraordinary favorite of Monica's. We've been saying it all year but it's worth saying again: slice of life photo projects like the Take Twelve photography challenge afford us the opportunity to see our lives from a different angle. Priceless.
Read all about how Monica built her page here.
Clearly Angela got the memo about neutral foundation month too! (Just kidding. We don't send memos, we use Bat-Signals.) Her design is perfect for when you have a variety of image orientations, as her journaling block anchors them all. I love the variety of photographs she included about her daily routines as a mama of small children; I've scrapbooked long enough now to know how precious these images are, because so much of our memory is framed by routines in the different phases of our lives.
Check out Angela's page more closely here.
And finally, our dear Take Twelve Team member Van's page... she deserves not just a rainbow, but a medal and a round of applause from all of us for facing down the challenge of being separated from her deployed husband and welcoming a new baby boy, Benjamin, on September 7. Ten weeks early. Who lives to tell the tale of that challenge through a scrapbook page? Van does, that's who. Never underestimate the power of pretty paper and photos, friends—or the dedication of the military community to see its members through anything life brings.
Read more about Van's incredible September here.
Don't miss our other Take Twelve Team pages this month:
and another from our Ella Friend...
And finally, please join us in congratulating lucky number #8, MajiclnOz, for winning a seat in Big Picture Boot Camp 2012, this month's prize from Big Picture Classes! This intensive training course is designed to help you prepare for the 2013 Four Experts series of workshops and is guaranteed to get you in excellent (scrapbooking) shape!
Keep working on those pages and we'll see you back here for the final quarter of the year on October 12!
Good morning! If it is a good morning, which I doubt. OK, OK, that's a little harsh on Take Twelve Day, but I've been locked out of my email for over 24 hours thanks to a "glitch" in the billion dollar Apple data center in North Carolina, my camera is undergoing mirror assembly surgery in Irvine, California, and the beautiful late summer weather went away over night and it's now cold, dreary, and raining cats and dogs. My own new dog (a six year old from the shelter who's been with us for under two weeks) is also not impressed. Well, with the cold, dreary, and rainy part. I don't think she cares about the email or camera.
But! In the spirit and momentum of the Take Twelve Photography Challenge, I will persevere with my phone camera in hand! I hope you're persevering, too. And I hope it's sunshine-y wherever you are!
To celebrate the new partnership between Ella Publishing Co. and Big Picture Classes, our lucky monthly winner is in for a treat—a seat in this year's Big Picture Boot Camp! If you aren't familiar with Boot Camp, here's a little bit of info to get you excited:
Boot Camp 2012 with four all-star coaches
Ali Edwards, Cathy Zielske, Tracey Clark, Amy Powers
Boot Camp lasts for 12 days and costs $40
Camp starts 10/15/2012
Class Description
Shape up your scrapbooking, photography, and general crafting skills with help from our four expert coaches
Here's How it Works
You'll log in daily for a 10-minute video from one of our 4 coaches followed by a 10-minute targeted exercise that's guaranteed to:
jumpstart your creativity
exercise your scrapbooking muscles
give you a concrete starting point to get something done NOW
inspire you with lasting skills and ideas you'll want to apply over and over
New to Big Picture Classes?
Learn more here.


text:
John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions
Product Description
John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) was a leading Christian witness against violence, articulating a theology from his own tradition so powerful that it compelled people from many other traditions to take notice. The war on terror, the temptations of nationalism, and the painful divisions between those who call themselves followers of Jesus signal our need to hear Yoder's voice again at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In his book Mark Thiessen Nation provides an insider's introduction to Yoder, demonstrating how a committed Mennonite could also be profoundly evangelical in his witness and broadly catholic in his Christian sensibilities. Taking us into Yoder's life and writings, Nation explores Yoder's context, his keen interest in the Anabaptist tradition, his sustained engagement with other Christians and other faiths, and his claim that pacifism is inherent to Jesus' message.
Product Information
|Format: Paperback
Number of Pages: 224
Vendor: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Publication Date: 2005
|Dimensions: 9 X 6 (inches)
Availability: Expected to ship on or about 07/29/15.
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