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• How would you start automating my job? - Part 2

  - by Jurily

  (Followup to this question) After surviving the first wave of incoming shipments (9 hours of copy/paste), I now believe I have all the requirements. Here is the updated workflow: Monkey collects email attachments (4 Excel spreadsheets, 1 PDF) Monkey creates central database, does complex calculations (right now this is also an Excel spreadsheet) Monkey sends data to two bosses, who set the retail prices independently; first one to reply wins Monkey sends order form to our other warehouses, also Excel Monkey sends spreadsheets to VIP customers, carefully sanitized and formatted (4 different discount categories) Jurily enters the data into the accounting system. I've given up on automating this part, there's too much business logic involved, and the database is a pile of sh^W legacy My question: What technologies would you use for a quick and dirty solution? I'm mostly sold on C#, but coming from a Linux/C++ background, I'm horribly confused about my choices in Microsoft-land. For bonus points: How would you redesign the whole system from the ground up? P.S. in case you were wondering, my job title is System Administrator.

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• How would you start automating my job?

  - by Jurily

  At my new job, we sell imported stuff. In order to be able to sell said stuff, currently the following things need to happen for every incoming shipment: Invoice arrives, in the form of an email attachment, Excel spreadsheet Monkey opens invoice, copy-pastes the relevant part of three columns into the relevant parts of a spreadsheet template, where extremely complex calculations happen, like =B2*550 Monkey sends this new spreadsheet to boss (email if lucky, printer otherwise), who sets the retail price Monkey opens the reply, then proceeds to input the data into the production database using a client program that is unusable on so many levels it's not even worth detailing Monkey fires up HyperTerminal, types in "AT", disconnect Monkey sends text messages and emails to customers using another part of the horrible client program, one at a time I want to change Monkey from myself to software wherever possible. I've never written anything that interfaces with email, Excel, databases or SMS before, but I'd be more than happy to learn if it saves me from this. Here's my uneducated wishlist: Monkey asks Thunderbird (mail server perhaps?) for the attachment Monkey tells Excel to dump the spreadsheet into a more Jurily-friendly format, like CSV or something Monkey parses the output, does the complex calculations // TODO: find a way to get the boss-generated prices with minimal manual labor involved Monkey connects to the database, inserts data Monkey spams costumers Is all this feasible? If yes, where do I start reading? How would you improve it? What language/framework do you think would be ideal for this? What would you do about the boss?

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• Should I keep my ex-employer's data?

  - by Jurily

  Following my brief reign as System Monkey, I am now faced with a dilemma: I did successfully create a backup and a test VM, both on my laptop, as no computer at work had enough free disk space. I didn't delete the backup yet, as it's still the only one of its kind in the company's history. The original is running on a hard drive in continuous use since 2006. There is now only one person left at the company, who knows what a backup is, and they're unlikely to hire someone else, for reasons very closely related to my departure. Last time I tried to talk to them about the importance of backups, they thought I was threatening them. Should I keep it? Pros: I get to save people from their own stupidity (the unofficial sysadmin motto, as far as I know) I get to say "I told you so" when they come begging for help, and feel good about it I get to say nice things about myself on my next job interview Nice clean conscience Bonus rep with the appropriate deities Cons: Legal problems: even if I do help them out with it, they might just sue me for keeping it anyway, although given the circumstances I think I have a good case Legal problems: given the nature of the job and their security, if something leaks, I'm a likely target for retaliation Legal problems: whatever else I didn't think about I need more space for porn. Legal problems. What would you do?

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• How do I make a backup of a live server?

  - by Jurily

  At my new job, I have a production server with the following qualities: Windows (XP I think), ancient hardware Absolutely vital database No backups whatsoever Everyone in the company has full admin rights, the passwords are stored in a .txt on the global share No installers, except for the OS The machine itself is sitting on a wooden shelf 5 feet above the ground against an external wall with frequent truck traffic on the other side; the shelf is already bent from the constant load Hasn't been rebooted in $DEITY knows how long, my predecessor wasn't even sure if it would survive it UPS is installed, but since everything is hooked up to it, it would last 10 minutes tops No spare parts or hardware budget How do I make a full backup with minimal impact on the server? I'm not sure how close it is to a total meltdown. For all I know, plugging in a USB stick could kill the company, and of course it will be all my fault, since "it was running fine before you touched it". The ideal solution would be a VM, so I have a test environment as well (separate of course).

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• Tools for network visualization?

  - by Jurily

  Are there any? I've used NetworkView, but sadly it keeps crashing on my shiny new 7. Something similar would be greatly appreciated.

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• Is it possible to interop with Thunderbird using C#?

  - by Jurily

  Here's the latest hurdle in my ongoing quest to automate my job: All email in the company goes through 4 different email adresses, switching randomly back and forth (with a note attached in the global share: please set "keep email on server") All logic related to email is contained in a nice big Thunderbird profile, which gets copied back and forth to new machines; this includes sorting invoices into 5 different "folders", the list of VIP adresses to send notifications, and the VIP level of those customers I only need the contents of those folders (the attachments, anyway) The question: is there a way to ask Thunderbird for those attachments and lists from C#? Alternatively, can Outlook be set up to synchronize with Thunderbird? Where do I start reading? Ditching Thunderbird is not an option right now, I need to keep up with changes to the VIP list. P.S. I will set up a real email server right after Monkey saves me enough time to convince people about it.

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• Guaranteed COM object release?

  - by Jurily

  I wrote the following code under the assumption that Excel will die with Monkey: class ExcelMonkey { private static Excel.Application xl = new Excel.Application(); public static bool parse(string filename) { if (filename.Contains("foo")) { var workbook = xl.Workbooks.Open(filename); var sheet = workbook.Worksheets.get_Item(1); // do stuff return true; } return false; } } How do I make sure it does? Do I need to release workbook and sheet separately? I want to have Excel around for the lifetime of the program, it's a huge performance improvement.

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• Which Qt classes use the disk directly?

  - by Jurily

  I'm trying to write a library to separate all the disk activity out into its own thread, but the documentation doesn't really care about such things. What I want to accomplish is that aside from startup, all disk activity is asynchronous, and for that, I need to wrap every class that accesses the disk. Here's what I found so far: QtCore: QFile QTemporaryFile QDir QFileInfo QFileSystemWatcher QDirIterator QSettings QtGui: QFileDialog QFileSystemModel QDirModel (unsure) QFont (unsure) QFontDialog I'm sure there are more.

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• Algorithms for modern hardware?

  - by Jurily

  Once again, I find myself with a set of broken assumptions. The article itself is about a 10x performance gain by modifying a proven-optimal algorithm to account for virtual memory: What good is an O(log2(n)) algorithm if those operations cause page faults and slow disk operations? For most relevant datasets an O(n) or even an O(n^2) algorithm, which avoids page faults, will run circles around it. Are there more such algorithms around? Should we re-examine all those fundamental building blocks of our education? What else do I need to watch out for when writing my own?

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• Where do I handle asynchronous exceptions?

  - by Jurily

  Consider the following code: class Foo { // boring parts omitted private TcpClient socket; public void Connect(){ socket.BeginConnect(Host, Port, new AsyncCallback(cbConnect), quux); } private void cbConnect(IAsyncResult result){ // blah } } If socket throws an exception after BeginConnect returns and before cbConnect gets called, where does it pop up? Is it even allowed to throw in the background?

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• When was the NULL macro not 0?

  - by Jurily

  I vaguely remember reading about this a couple of years ago, but I can't find any reference on the net. Can you give me an example where the NULL macro didn't expand to 0?

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• How do I initialize a fixed byte array?

  - by Jurily

  I have the following struct: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 1)] struct cAuthLogonChallenge { byte cmd; byte error; fixed byte name[4]; public cAuthLogonChallenge() { cmd = 0x04; error = 0x00; name = ??? } } name is supposed to be a null-terminated ASCII string, and Visual Studio is rejecting all my ideas to interact with it. How do I set it?

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• Is there an additional runtime cost for using named parameters?

  - by Jurily

  Consider the following struct: public struct vip { string email; string name; int category; public vip(string email, int category, string name = "") { this.email = email; this.name = name; this.category = category; } } Is there a performance difference between the following two calls? var e = new vip(email: "foo", name: "bar", category: 32); var e = new vip("foo", 32, "bar"); Is there a difference if there are no optional parameters defined?

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• What's the cleanest way to do byte-level manipulation?

  - by Jurily

  I have the following C struct from the source code of a server, and many similar: // preprocessing magic: 1-byte alignment typedef struct AUTH_LOGON_CHALLENGE_C { // 4 byte header uint8 cmd; uint8 error; uint16 size; // 30 bytes uint8 gamename[4]; uint8 version1; uint8 version2; uint8 version3; uint16 build; uint8 platform[4]; uint8 os[4]; uint8 country[4]; uint32 timezone_bias; uint32 ip; uint8 I_len; // I_len bytes uint8 I[1]; } sAuthLogonChallenge_C; // usage (the actual code that will read my packets): sAuthLogonChallenge_C *ch = (sAuthLogonChallenge_C*)&buf[0]; // where buf is a raw byte array These are TCP packets, and I need to implement something that emits and reads them in C#. What's the cleanest way to do this? My current approach involves [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 1)] unsafe struct foo { ... } and a lot of fixed statements to read and write it, but it feels really clunky, and since the packet itself is not fixed length, I don't feel comfortable using it. Also, it's a lot of work. However, it does describe the data structure nicely, and the protocol may change over time, so this may be ideal for maintenance. What are my options? Would it be easier to just write it in C++ and use some .NET magic to use that?

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• Can knowing C actually hurt the code you write in higher level languages?

  - by Jurily

  The question seems settled, beaten to death even. Smart people have said smart things on the subject. To be a really good programmer, you need to know C. Or do you? I was enlightened twice this week. The first one made me realize that my assumptions don't go further than my knowledge behind them, and given the complexity of software running on my machine, that's almost non-existent. But what really drove it home was this Slashdot comment: The end result is that I notice the many naive ways in which traditional C "bare metal" programmers assume that higher level languages are implemented. They make bad "optimization" decisions in projects they influence, because they have no idea how a compiler works or how different a good runtime system may be from the naive macro-assembler model they understand. Then it hit me: C is just one more abstraction, like all others. Even the CPU itself is only an abstraction! I've just never seen it break, because I don't have the tools to measure it. I'm confused. Has my mind been mutilated beyond recovery, like Dijkstra said about BASIC? Am I living in a constant state of premature optimization? Is there hope for me, now that I realized I know nothing about anything? Is there anything to know, even? And why is it so fascinating, that everything I've written in the last five years might have been fundamentally wrong? To sum it up: is there any value in knowing more than the API docs tell me? EDIT: Made CW. Of course this also means now you must post examples of the interpreter/runtime optimizing better than we do :)

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• How do I find out if an object can be Invoke()'d?

  - by Jurily

  Consider the following class: public class Event<T> { public delegate void Handler<t>(t msg); private event Handler<T> E; public void connect(Delegate handler) { E += delegate(T msg) { object target = handler.Target; if (Invokable(target) { target.BeginInvoke(handler, new object[] { msg }); } }; } public void emit(T msg) { if ( E != null ) { E(msg); } } private static bool Invokable(object o) { // magic } } How do I implement Invokable(), and what else do I need for this code to compile?

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• What is the cost of memory access?

  - by Jurily

  We like to think that a memory access is fast and constant, but on modern architectures/OSes, that's not necessarily true. Consider the following C code: int i = 34; int *p = &i; // do something that may or may not involve i and p {...} // 3 days later: *p = 643; What is the estimated cost of this last assignment in CPU instructions, if i is in L1 cache, i is in L2 cache, i is in L3 cache, i is in RAM proper, i is paged out to an SSD disk, i is paged out to a traditional disk? Where else can i be? Of course the numbers are not absolute, but I'm only interested in orders of magnitude. I tried searching the webs, but Google did not bless me this time.

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