TwinTechs

Nov. 16-18, 2008 — CEO Ben Elmore is a featured speaker at Adobe MAX teaching on “Best Practices for Developing with Flex.”

All RIA projects come in various sizes and levels of complexity which make a successful approach challenging.  This session focuses strategies for structuring teams and products that deliver successful results in variable environments.  We will discuss major pitfalls, how best to mitigate risks (through Flex Builder and outside of it), and what role architecture plays in your plans.

CEO Ben Elmore will appear at Adobe MAX discussing partner and client utilization of the new Adobe Solution Accelerators. Twin Technologies has partnered with Adobe to build out the Solution Accelerators and is the featured implementation partner for client projects.

Oct 16, 2008 — Technologies and IBM announced a strategic partnership to develop RIAs and Business Activity Management together to allow customers to operate more efficiently in real time.

How to Find What Function Is At a DLL Offset (without having debug symbols):

This applies to all applications, but this specific example comes from Adobe LiveCycle.  The PDF Generator was crashing mysteriously, producing errors in the event log:

“Faulting application pdfgen.exe, version 1.0.0.1, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.2.3790.3959, fault address 0×0002eb5a”

This is a particularly annoying kind of error when its not in an application you control, since you don’t have any idea what 0×0002eb5a means without access to a build with debugging symbols.

To find out more, here’s what you need.

First you need a debugger.  The free option of choice for many people these days is OllyDbg (download here http://www.ollydbg.de/odbg110.zip)

It’s a simple applicaiton, so just extract it to a folder someplace and run it.

Once inside, File > Open, browse to the crashing dll, in this case, c:\windows\system32\ntdll.dll

It will ask if you want LOADLL.exe to load the dll for you, say Yes.

Once inside, note the starting offset.  It will vary based on the dll and the OS, but in my case the first address was 0×78001000, which means the base is at 0×78000000 (the trailing 1000 will be the same on all systems, its the first part you care about).

So, our application is crashing at offset 0×0002eb5a.  The reason its called an ‘offset’, is because it is ‘offset from the base’, so add 0×78000000 to 0×0002eb5a = 0×7802eb5a (Windows Calculator in Hex Mode can help you with this if your base is not an easy one like ours).

Scroll the debugging window to this address.

In OllyDbg, the beginning of each function is labeled with a $ sign.   The address we scrolled to should be in the middle of a function, so scroll up the start of the function (the first $ above it) and write down its starting address.  In this case, the function starts only a few bytes earlier, at 0×0002eb4e.

Open the menu: Debug > Call DLL Export.  On this window at the top there is a drop down labeled Export:, open this and scroll down to find the offset of the function you wrote down.

This should give you the textual name.  In my case, this name was ‘RtlLengthSid’, a quick google for this reveals it is a windows system call for computing the length of a security identifier.

From this, it was an easy leap to see that something in the LiveCycle environment was working with a user account it didn’t support.  This, ultimately, was enough for us to diagnose and fix our problem (by starting WebLogic’s NodeManager as Administrator, rather than Local System, the installation’s default).

Adobe released SP1 for LiveCycle 8.2 last week, and in using it this week, we’ve run in to some issues.

The first issue is an actual bug in the installer, and has an easy workaround.

While running the LiveCycle SP1 installer, the install goes fine and all the files are copied over, but then at the last step of the install, when you select the ‘Launch Configuration Manager’ checkbox, and hit ‘Next’.

The following error appears:
‘Could not find the main class. Program will exit.’

This is the result of a bug in the installer: it assumes that you installed the JDK in the default location. (You can verify this in the patchinstalls.log file, where it writes out where it is looking).

If you installed somewhere else, or have re-configured to use an alternate JDK, you have to launch the Configuration Manager manually at this point.

You can do this with the file: …\LiveCycle 8.2\configurationManager\ConfigurationManager.bat

The second problem is more complex and still in the works.  But, if other people are seeing this error after the upgrade:

<An exception was thrown with name com.adobe.idp.dsc.pool.service.impl.ServicePoolAlreadyExistsException message:Pool for service id OutputService, major version 1 and minor version 1 already exists while invoking service OutputService and operation generatePDFOutput and no fault routes were found to be configured.>

Followed by a long series of ‘ServicePoolInstancesExhaustedException’… Stay tuned… I’ll have an update for this one soon.

While doing an upgrade for a client, from 8.0 to 8.2 of LiveCycle, we ran into a very strange problem that seems to have gone undocumented elsewhere.

Near the end of the upgrade, it hits the step: Migrate Data Essential to LiveCycle ES Operation

This loads a series of plugins, each that migrates its own pieces.

But right away, the Forms plugin dies…

[11:38] ALC-UPG-001-501: Executing [Forms] plugin …
[11:38] ALC-UPG-001-503: [Forms] plugin execution failed, error message from plugin is [While trying to lookup 'com.adobe.idp.config.remote.PreferencesSPIRemoteHome' didn't find subcontext 'com'. Resolved ''].  See LCM logs for details.

Seems that there is a classpath problem in the installer.

Engineers inside Adobe assure us that a fix is in the works… will post another update once we find out more.

We are thrilled to announce Larry Rowland has joined the Twin Technologies Board of Directors.  Larry is well known within the industry as a change agent CIO/COO who has been brought in by Fortune 100 and startups alike to create IT foundations that support rapid growth, acquisition, and global expansion.  Larry is currently the VP of Acquisition Integration at Nuance Communications.  He has held CIO/COO roles at n2N Commerce, Allaire, Macromedia, Thomson Financial Services, and Teradata over the last 25 years.

Excerpt from a tutorial I wrote for developer works ages ago that just go published

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Almost three years ago, developerWorks published “Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse,” which introduced some of the features found in the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in for Eclipse. Current at the time was V0.5. We revisit that tool in this article. Today, RDT is called Aptana RadRails and is available as a plug-in for Aptana Studio or Eclipse. This article introduces some of the plug-in’s new features.

The name of the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in and where to find the code have changed, but the basic function and licensing terms have remained essentially unchanged. If you are new to the idea of developing Ruby applications on Eclipse, start with Neal Ford’s article titled “Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse” to learn how to create Ruby files, how to customize the Ruby editor, how to set up the Debugger and run Ruby from Eclipse, as well as initiate tests from Eclipse. In this article, we expand on Ford’s article and look at:

• Code folding — Folding can be enabled for classes and methods.
• Outline view — A more-detailed look at the outline view and how you can use it.
• RI view — Use Ruby’s Interactive documentation utility from an RDT view.
• Task tags — Create tasks for configurable keywords (like TODO, FIXME) in Ruby comments.
• Ruby browser — A new feature in the RDT that allows you to easily see all Ruby resources available in a project and browse them.
• Editor improvements — Auto-complete of brackets, parentheses, and single/double quotes; and better code-assist.

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Twin Techs is a very proud sponsor for Rally4Reagan, an organization founded to raise awareness and funding to fight SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy.)  One of our own is the loving uncle to Reagan, the namesake of the foundation, and Twin Techs has now taken a stake in the fight against SMA as well.  We would encourage anyone who can to check out this beautiful little girl and her story at www.rally4reagan.com.  

The Twin Technologies team joined together over the weekend for the annual Twin Techs Team Outing.  This years event was held in New York with 22 Twin Tech’ers plus their guest/spouse attending.  We took out an entire floor of the W hotel in Manhattan.  The day started with  raucous chess games over drinks in the W’s Whiskey Bar while groups hit up 5th avenue shopping and the Midtown Comics store.  The evening brought with it two corporate suites at Shea Stadium for the Mets game as they pounded the then first place Florida Marlins 8-6.  A full bar and menu including crab legs, sushi and cured filet did not stop some Twin Tech’ers from sneaking out to the mezzanine level for hot dogs and peanuts.  A subway ride post game back to Manhattan led to closing down the Whiskey Bar and some impromptu karaoke - which has since been outlawed on all future Twin Techs events.

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