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• How to access files on a drive from an older system, mounted in a new system?

  - by David Thomas

  I've recently built a new system, after a rather large physical injury was sustained by my previous system (a precarious balance, and gravity, were not a happy mix). Surprisingly the /home drive of that system appears to have more-or-less survived the trauma. However... I decided to use a fresh drive for / (and swap) partition(s), and another fresh drive for the new /home. Now that's working, I decided to install the old /home drive (that I had assumed until now would be entirely dead and without capacity for use) into the new system to recover the files and data (so far as is possible). At this point I've run into a snag: I have no idea how to go about this (with Windows it was relatively easy, the new drive would be the latest character of the alphabet, and go from there). With 'disk utility' (System - Administration - Disk Utitlity) I've worked out which drive it is (/dev/sda) but clicking on 'mount' produces an error: 1: helper failed with: mount: according to mtab, /dev/sdb1 is already mounted on / mount failed ...if it is mounted on / I can't see it. I'm also moderately confused by the disk (device /dev/sda) being referred to as /dev/sdb1. Any and all insights would be incredibly welcome (I've already voted for: Idea #9063: New internal hard drives default automount at Brainstorm). Edited in response to Roland's request for a screenshot of disk utility: Details (so far as I know them): 40GB disk is / and swap, 1.0 TB Samsung is /home 1.0 TB Hitachi is from the old system (and was the old /home drive). Output from sudo fdisk -l pasted below: Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000bef00 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 121601 976760001 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40018599936 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00037652 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 4742 38084608 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 4742 4866 993281 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 4742 4866 993280 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e8d46 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 1 121602 976760832 83 Linux

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• I want to consolidate two sites into a third. Will my search engine rankings be penalized if I rewrite and redirect pages one by one?

  - by Patrick Kenny

  I have two Drupal sites with different content-- let's call them Apple and Orange. I recently developed a much more sophisticated third Drupal site-- let's call it Tree. For a large number of reasons, the content on Apple and Orange is useful for the users of Tree, so I want to move the content to Tree. However, much of the content is out of date. (This whole process took about five years.) To update the content, I will rewrite it one article at a time myself. Now here's my question: if I move the articles one by one (as I rewrite them) and then redirect the old articles (using a 301 redirect) on Apple/Orange to the new site on Tree, will this have a huge negative effect on my search engine rankings? Is there a good way to redirect among sites when they merge like this, or would I be better off keeping the old articles on Apple/Orange and simply linking them to the new, rewritten articles on Tree?

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• CRT as 2nd monitor goes screwy after start up?

  - by rhys

  new install of 12.04 on an old dell with a radeon ATI RV516 video card with monitor out and s-video out. During boot up all is good. Both screens operate and look fine. Then just before the desktop appears the cCRT goes purple and is covered in heavy horizontal lines, but as i said during boot up it was fine and the resolution was fine. The main monitor, an lcd, operates normally. everything else works fine, it's just the picture on the CRT that is screwed up. I used the same monitor and CRT running 11.10 which worked fine any help would be appreciated and yes i am a newbie to ubuntu here is a vid showing the completely normal screens at reboot then the purple badness when the desktop loads ?? and don't laugh at the slow machine, it's old. http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_edit?ns=1&video_id=zfuh6lBMLnc

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• Are there any good html 5 mmo design tutorials? [on hold]

  - by Dwight Spencer

  Hey all. I got a rather inspired after playing gaia online's zOMG and wanted to revive an old project idea I've had laying around for a few years now. I'm looking to work with html5 (ie canvas, svg based sprites, & WebGL) to build a graphical web based MUD/MMO. Obviously, this is a new take on an old idea and after searching google I haven't really turned up many good resources. But does anyone have any tutorials or other resources to point me in the right direction?

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• CCUserDefault, iOS/Android and game updates

  - by Luke

  My game uses cocos2d-x and will be published on iOS platform first, later on Android. I save a lot of things with CCUserDefault (scores, which level was completed, number of coins taken, etc...). But now I have a big doubt. What will happen when the game will receive its first update? CCUserDefault uses an XML file stored somewhere in the app storage space. This file is created and retained until one uninstalls the app. I am wondering what happens when the app is updated. Will the old XML file be maintained? Because if not, how should I handle app updates (updates in the sense that 2, 3 or more new level packages will be added, but the informations about the old ones, like scores, which level was finished and which not, number of coins, etc., need absolutely not to be lost)?

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• What is the politically correct way of refactoring other's code?

  - by dukeofgaming

  I'm currently working in a geographically distributed team in a big company. Everybody is just focused on today's tasks and getting things done, however this means sometimes things have to be done the quick way, and that causes problems... you know, same old, same old. I'm bumping into code with several smells such as: big functions pointless utility functions/methods (essentially just to save writing a word), overcomplicated algorithms, extremely big files that should be broken down into different files/classes (1,500+ lines), etc. What would be the best way of improving code without making other developers feel bad/wrong about any proposed improvements?

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• Winforms Release History : Q2 2010 Beta (version 2010.1.0610)

  Q2 2010 Beta New Controls: RadListControl and RadDropDownList Added brand new RadListControl and RadDropDownList controls. Their purpose is to replace the existing RadListBox and RadComboBox controls entirely in the long term. The old controls will still be supported but users are encouraged to use the new ones since they address the fundamental shortcomings of the old controls, namely the slow performance when working with large data sets, lack of a flexible extensibility API and other minor...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• JavaScript Class Patterns &ndash; In CoffeeScript

  - by Liam McLennan

  Recently I wrote about JavaScript class patterns, and in particular, my favourite class pattern that uses closure to provide encapsulation. A class to represent a person, with a name and an age, looks like this: var Person = (function() { // private variables go here var name,age; function constructor(n, a) { name = n; age = a; } constructor.prototype = { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age + " years old."; } }; return constructor; })(); var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); Today I have been experimenting with coding for node.js in CoffeeScript. One of the first things I wanted to do was to try and implement my class pattern in CoffeeScript and then see how it compared to CoffeeScript’s built-in class keyword. The above Person class, implemented in CoffeeScript, looks like this: # JavaScript style class using closure to provide private methods Person = (() -> [name,age] = [{},{}] constructor = (n, a) -> [name,age] = [n,a] null constructor.prototype = toString: () -> "name is #{name} age is #{age} years old" constructor )() I am satisfied with how this came out, but there are a few nasty bits. To declare the two private variables in javascript is as simple as var name,age; but in CoffeeScript I have to assign a value, hence [name,age] = [{},{}]. The other major issue occurred because of CoffeeScript’s implicit function returns. The last statement in any function is returned, so I had to add null to the end of the constructor to get it to work. The great thing about the technique just presented is that it provides encapsulation ie the name and age variables are not visible outside of the Person class. CoffeeScript classes do not provide encapsulation, but they do provide nicer syntax. The Person class using native CoffeeScript classes is: # CoffeeScript style class using the class keyword class CoffeePerson constructor: (@name, @age) -> toString: () -> "name is #{@name} age is #{@age} years old" felix = new CoffeePerson "Felix Hoenikker", 63 console.log felix.toString() So now I have a trade-off: nice syntax against encapsulation. I think I will experiment with both strategies in my project and see which works out better.

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• Regardig Vb.net [closed]

  - by user68999

  hi everyone i am making a project for school management and manage all the record of student so I'm using VB.net 2008 and sql server 2008. i have a problem when i enter student date of birth in text box with date&time picker in database. but i want in the search option enter the date from date&time picker and get age of all the student data in data-view grid. like student are 10 year old, 11 year old etc. so how it can possible please help..........?

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• Packages don't show up after adding ppa

  - by user32993

  I added ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/firefox-aurora/ubuntu oneiric and ppa:banshee-team/ppa/ubuntu oneiric to my software sources, then did apt-get update. However, after selecting their specific sources from the menu in Software Center, the only packages available are language packs and extensions for Banshee and firefox-aurora. I had already uninstalled Banshee and Firefox. If I try and install Banshee/Aurora with sudo apt-get it will install the old version. Searching for Banshee/Aurora in Software Center only shows the old version. I'm guessing the packages in the PPAs conflict with the packages in the main sources. How do I install the newer versions?

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• Wrong statistics in AUX_STATS$ might puzzle the optimizer

  - by Mike Dietrich

  We do recommend the creation of System Statistics for quite a long time. Since Oracle 9i the optimizer works with a CPU and IO cost based model. And in order to give the optimizer some knowledge about the IO subsystem's performance and throughput - once System Statistics are collected - they'll get stored in AUX_STATS$. For this purpose in the old Oracle 9i days some default values had been defined - and you'll still find those defaults in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 in AUX_STATS$. But these old values don't reflect the performance of modern IO systems. So it might be a good best practice post upgrade to create fresh System Statistics if you haven't done this before.  You can collect System Statistics with: exec DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS('start'); and end it later by executing: exec DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS('stop'); You could also run DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS('interval', interval=>N) instead where N is the number of minutes when statistics gathering is stopped automatically. Please make sure you'll do this on a real workload period. It won't make sense to gather these values while the database is in an idle state. You should do this ideally for several hours. It doesn't affect performance in a negative way as the values are anyway collected in V$SYSSTAT and V$SESSTAT. And in case you'd like to delete the stats and revert to the old default values you'd simply execute:exec DBMS_STATS.DELETE_SYSTEM_STATS; The tricky thing in Oracle Database 11.2 - and that's why I'm actually writing this blog post today - is bug9842771. This leads to wrong values in AUX_STATS$ for SREADTIM and MREADTIM by factor 1000 guiding the optimizer sometimes into the totally wrong directon. The workaround is to overwrite these values manually and divide them by 1000. Use the DBMS_STATS.SET_SYSTEM_STATS procedure. See this MOS Note:9842771.8 for the above bug for some further information. This issue is fixed in Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 and above. To get some background information about the statistics collected in please read this section in the Oracle Database 11.2 Performance Tuning Guide. And gathering System Statistics might have some implication if you have mixed workloads - and interacts with DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT. For more information please read section 13.4.1.2.

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• GWT: Generate more complete crawl error report

  - by Mike

  I'm a developer in charge of managing Webmasters and related issues (including correcting crawl errors) for dozens (hundreds, maybe?) of active sites and as part of my duties I create a report of every discrepancy, including all pages generating a 404 and all pages that link to those pages. Currently within Webmaster Tools I'm able to download a csv file of all pages with a 404 response, but I'm then having to manually click on every single one of those links and copy the "linked from" field to paste into my spreadsheet. This is extremely tedious and seems unnecessary; I would expect the ability to download all that data at once. I'm ultimately looking for the end result of one csv file that has every url with a 404, but also has every url that links to each one of them. Am I overlooking this functionality somewhere or does anyone have a good solution? Edit 1 (2/11/2013): Example of what the csv output looks like now: URL,Response Code,News Error,Detected,Category http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,,11/12/13,Not found Which is great, but let's say 123.php has 5 pages that link to it. Now I have to duplicate that row in my spreadsheet 4 more times, then go into Webmasters, get all the url's that link to the page, and add that data to my spreadsheet. The output I would prefer: URL,Response Code,Linked From,News Error,Detected,Category http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage1.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage2.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/123.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage3.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage1.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage2.php,,11/12/13,Not found http://www.abcdef.com/456.php,404,http://www.ghijkl.com/naughtypage3.php,,11/12/13,Not found Note the (hypothetical) addition of a "Linked From" column, as well as the fact there are only 2 unique URL's now (like before) but all of the "Linked To" pages are shown in one report. Edit 2 (2/12/2013): To clarify, my question is less about detecting and correcting 404's, but more about generating a report of what Google has listed as errors. Oftentimes, these errors aren't even valid anymore but I still need documentation to show that Google detected a problem and that problem is now fixed. Many of the "linked from" url's I find are actually outdated, cached resources. For example, I'll frequently see that the linked-from url is the sitemap, which is actually an old sitemap cached by Google that points to an old page. Neither the sitemap or old page exist, but they still appear in my crawl error reports because they are cached resources.

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• Some files not copied when moving an encrypted home to a different partition

  - by Jon Herrin

  I have "successfully" moved my encrypted home to a separate partition using the instructions here: How can i move an encrypted home directory to another partition? However, some files are not being copied over. Most notably, I have a directory in my old home that contains the themes I use. This directory and it's contents are not copied over to the new home and therefore I come up with the default theme. Permissions on the directory that was not moved are identical to the other directories in home. Another discrepancy is that my Dropbox folder came over empty and had to resync itself. My concern is what else might be missing from the copied home. At this point, I've flipped back to the old home by re-editing /etc/fstab, but I'd really like to get /home cleanly and completely off of root without having to core the system.

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• Problems with EmusicJ on Ubuntu 14.04

  - by Michael Dykes

  I am running Ubuntu 14.04 in my new machine and have a subscription to emusic (because I used it before in my Windows days because of the great selection of classical music). I have used it on my old machine (running older versions of Ubuntu) with some success but am having difficulties doing so now. I am trying to use EmusicJ but do not/cannot remember how to do so. I have downloaded the program and unzipped it and ran the following command in a terminal: ./emusic If I remember correctly, once I go to the emusic site and download my music, the EmucisJ program should open and begin downloading the music through that program but this time it is not and I have already wiped my old box in order to give it to a friend. Any help is appreciated as I would like to continue with Emusic, but if I cannot get this resolved I will likely have to cancel my subscription and find a better alternative. Thanks.

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• Welcome to my blog!

  - by Thomas Mason

  I am a 21 year old Web Developer, with over five years experience in the PHP field. Covering Javascript - jQuery & Ajax, mySQL, JSON and CSS. Out of the five years experience, three have been as a freelancer, the rest commercial work. (I have to say freelance is more comfortable whereas commercial really does get you to do things out of the box.) This blog will cover problems I come across and the solutions I came up with. Bringing ideas into reality - even if it's never been done before! Overall I hope to bring new ideas and my experience to developers old and new.

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• Dev Lop

  - by Jason Franks

  Back in the early 90s, before I was a professional geek--much less a geek with a blog--I saw this old chop socky movie. I don't remember what it was called, or who was in it... all I remember is that, in one scene, the venerable sensei tells the hero: "You must develop your nunchaku technique." This became a bit fo a catchphrase amongst my high school mates. Well folks, I am developing my technuique. This blog has been renamed and the old posts removed--I could go into my reasons for this, but that would defeat the point of the exercise. Sorry if you liked 'em. It has been a good couple of years since I wrote anything here, so I doubt that I am putting out any regular readers. Will I be posting here more often, now that I've renamed and rethemed the place? I don't know. In the meantime, check it out: Bruce Lee playign ping pong with nunchaku. --JF

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• Examples of "Lost art" on software technology/development

  - by mamcx

  With the advent of a new technology, some old ideas - despite been good - are forgotten in the process. I read a lot how some "new" thing was already present in Lisp like 60 years ago, but only recently resurface with other name or on top of another language. Now look like the new old thing is build functional, non-mutable, non-locking-thread stuff... and that make me wonder what have been "lost" in the art of development of software? What ideas are almost forgotten, waiting for resurface? One of my, I remember when I code in foxpro. The idea of have a full stack to develop database apps without impedance mismatch is something I truly miss. In the current languages, I never find another environment that match how easy was develop in fox back them. What else is missing?

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• OpenGL behaviour depending on the graphics card?

  - by Dan

  This is something that never happened to me before. I have an OpenGL code that uses GLSL shaders to texture a 3D model. The code involves a lot of GPU texture processing, blending, etc... I wanted to check how the performance of my code improves using a faster graphics card (both new and old are NVIDIA, using always the NVIDIA development drivers). But now I have found that once I run the code using the new graphics card, it behaves completely different (the final render looks wrong), probably because some blending effect is not performed correctly. I haven't really look into what has changed, but I am guessing that some OpenGL states are, by default, set different. Is this possible? Have you ever found different OpenGL/GLSL behaviour using different graphics cards? Any "fast" solution? (So far I've thought of plugging back the old one, push all OpenGL default states, and compare with the ones I initially get using the new card..)

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• wild card redirects issue giving error this webpage has a redirect loop

  - by kath

  In my website I changed or better word modified the directory name ""vehicles-cars"" to ""vehicles-cars-for-sale"" when i tryed to redirect using wild card redirect my old directory name to new directory name in my web hosting cpanel account. every time when i open pages from that directory i am getting error code this webpage has a redirect loop the website is php the problem is that that my lots of pages from old directory are indexed in googles and they are getting duplicate contents i really need some advice what to do with this problem here is .htaccess file code for redirect thanks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^adsbuz\.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.adsbuz\.com$ RewriteRule ^vehicles\-cars\/?(.*)$ "http\:\/\/adsbuz\.com\/vehicles\-cars\-for\-sale\/$1" [R=301,L]

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• Can't get into the admin console after migrating to new server

  - by Emerson

  I migrated my WordPress blog to a new server, and everything seemed to be working fine until it started giving me the error when entering the admin area: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in /home/neworder/public_html/blog/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php on line 729 The line 729 has: $protected = array( '_wp_attached_file', '_wp_attachment_metadata', '_wp_old_slug', '_wp_page_template' ); I had installed the maintenance-mode, and I have suspicions that this is what broke the forum. If I remove the plugin it then gives another error: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/neworder/public_html/blog/wp-admin/includes/post.php on line 1158 And that line has: $content .= '<p class="hide-if-no-js">' . esc_html__( 'Remove featured image' ) . '</p>'; } I tried to restore the blog file-system from the old server and also to restore the database from the old server (2x), but still it gives me the same error. The blog itself seems to be working fine: http://blog.antinovaordemmundial.com/

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• Google Webmaster Tools shows invalid data

  - by Altar

  Webmaster Tools shows 1 URL error (not found page). The report says that 5 pages are linking to a page (let's call it x) that does not exist (and because it doesn't exists it returns a soft 404). HOWEVER, I look in those 5 pages (in the source code) and none is linking to the x page. It is like Google sees an old page that was indeed pointing to x. What is the problem? How do I know if Google cached an old version for those 5 pages?

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• Moving large website to new CMS - URL changes

  - by herrherr

  Hi, I was wondering if you have any tipps on the following situation. I'm going to move a large website to a new Content Management System, here are some details on the site: online news magazine with roughly 3,000 articles domain age: 10 years online in the current form since May 2010 indexed pages: ~10.000 percent of search engine traffic: under 10% Unfortunately a custom-tailored CMS was used for the site. The performance, reliability and SEO capabilites have been really bad, so we are moving to a new and proven open source CMS. All the articles will be kept as they are, but the URL structure as well as the structure of the HTML templates will be changed. What I wanted to do now is to actually create 301 redirects for all articles from the old to the new schema, i.e: Old: www.example.com/en/html/news/detail/title-of-the-article/ New: www.example.com/category/title-of-article.html Is this a proven way to do something like this? If not, can you recommend a way that has worked for you? Thanks :)

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• Upgrade a Retro Corded Mouse with Wireless Bluetooth Connectivity

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If there’s a beloved retro mouse gathering dust in your office closet for want of wireless connectivity, this detailed tutorial will guide you through upgrading the guts to turn your corded mouse into a Bluetooth model. If you’re handy with a soldering iron and not afraid to hack apart the guts of a modern but inexpensive Bluetooth mouse, you should have no trouble digging right into this project. The end result is a modern mouse packed inside the casing of your old mouse–same old look and feel, brand new engine inside. Hit up the link below to check out the full tutorial. Retro Wireless Apple Mouse [via Lifehacker] HTG Explains: Is ReadyBoost Worth Using? HTG Explains: What The Windows Event Viewer Is and How You Can Use It HTG Explains: How Windows Uses The Task Scheduler for System Tasks

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• Paranoid management, contractor checking work [closed]

  - by user833345

  Just wanted to get some opinions and experiences on an issue I'm having at work. First, a little background. I've been working at a company for some time (past any probation periods) and rewriting a horrendous system. No tests, incomplete and broken functionality everywhere, enough copypasta to feed a small village, redundant code, more unused SQL tables than used ones and terrible performance. I've never seen such bad code, pretty much all of it is worthy of being posted on TheDailyWTF. The company has been operating for a number of years and have had a string of bad developers working on this system. I made a call on rewriting instead of refactoring since I judged it to be less work overall and decided that the result will address the requirements more appropriately, since the central requirement is to have a future-proof system for the next decade with plenty of room to scale up. Refactoring would have entailed untangling a huge ball of yarn and at the same time integrating it with a proper foundation or building a foundation from scratch. I've introduced the latest spiffy framework, unit & functional testing, CI, a bug tracker and agile workflow to the environment. I've fixed most of the performance issues of the old system (there were no indexes on any of the tables, for example). I've created an automated deployment process for the old system. The CTO has been maintaining the old system while I have been building the new one and he has been advising management that everything is being done as per best practices. However, management is hiring a contractor to come in and verify my work. In my experience, this is unprecedented. I can understand their reasoning to an extent, since they've had bad luck in the past, but can't help but feel somewhat offended at the fact that they distrust two senior developers who have been working with them for some time enough that a third party is being brought in. And it's not just me who is under watch - people's emails are constantly checked, someone had a remote desktop application installed on their computer of which I was asked to check the usage logs to try to determine if they were stealing sensitive data and there are CCTV cameras in one of the rooms. It's the first time I've decided to disable my Skype history at work. Am I right to feel indignant here? Has anyone else ever encountered such a situation? If so, how did it work out in the end? Was it worth sticking around? Should I just find another job?

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects

  - by Jeff

  This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some facilities for editing data. CoasterBuzz has a database full of amusement parks and roller coasters. The entities enjoy the relationships that you would expect, though they're further defined by "instances" of a coaster, to define one that has moved between parks as one, with different names and operational dates. And of course, there are pictures and news items, too. It's not horribly complex, except when you have to account for a name change and display just the newest name. In all previous versions, data access was straight SQL. As so much of the old code was rooted in 2003, with some changes in 2008, there wasn't much in the way of ORM frameworks going on then. Let me rephrase that, I mostly wasn't interested in ORM's. Since that time, I used a little LINQ to SQL in some projects, and a whole bunch of nHibernate while at Microsoft. Through all of that experience, I have to admit that these frameworks are often a bigger pain in the ass than not. They're great for basic crud operations, but when you start having all kinds of exotic relationships, they get difficult, and generate all kinds of weird SQL under the covers. The black box can quickly turn into a black hole. Sometimes you end up having to build all kinds of new expertise to do things "right" with a framework. Still, despite my reservations, I used the newer version of Entity Framework, with the "code first" modeling, in a science project and I really liked it. Since it's just a right-click away with NuGet, I figured I'd give it a shot here. My initial effort was spent defining the context class, which requires a bit of work because I deviate quite a bit from the conventions that EF uses, starting with table names. Then throw some partial querying of certain tables (where you'll find image data), and you're splitting tables across several objects (navigation properties). I won't go into the details, because these are all things that are well documented around the Internet, but there was a minor learning curve there. The basics of reading data using EF are fantastic. For example, a roller coaster object has a park associated with it, as well as a number of instances (if it was ever relocated), and there also might be a big banner image for it. This is stupid easy to use because it takes one line of code in your repository class, and by the time you pass it to the view, you have a rich object graph that has everything you need to display stuff. Likewise, editing simple data is also, well, simple. For this goodness, thank the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UpdateModel() method on the controllers is very elegant. Remember the old days of assigning all kinds of properties to objects in your Webforms code-behind? What a time consuming mess that used to be. Even if you're not using an ORM tool, having hydrated objects come off the wire is such a time saver. Not everything is easy, though. When you have to persist a complex graph of objects, particularly if they were composed in the user interface with all kinds of AJAX elements and list boxes, it's not just a simple matter of submitting the form. There were a few instances where I ended up going back to "old-fashioned" SQL just in the interest of time. It's not that I couldn't do what I needed with EF, it's just that the efficiency, both my own and that of the generated SQL, wasn't good. Since EF context objects expose a database connection object, you can use that to do the old school ADO.NET stuff you've done for a decade. Using various extension methods from POP Forums' data project, it was a breeze. You just have to stick to your decision, in this case. When you start messing with SQL directly, you can't go back in the same code to messing with entities because EF doesn't know what you're changing. Not really a big deal. There are a number of take-aways from using EF. The first is that you write a lot less code, which has always been a desired outcome of ORM's. The other lesson, and I particularly learned this the hard way working on the MSDN forums back in the day, is that trying to retrofit an ORM framework into an existing schema isn't fun at all. The CoasterBuzz database isn't bad, but there are design decisions I'd make differently if I were starting from scratch. Now that I have some of this stuff done, I feel like I can start to move on to the more interesting things on the backlog. There's a lot to do, but at least it's fun stuff, and not more forms that will be used infrequently.

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